#because over half the kids in the neighborhood were dressed up as the kkk

[just-your-average-tangerine]

How do you deal with the loneliness? And I don't mean a 'do it alone' kind of way. I do things alone all the time, I have no problem with doing things alone. I mean, I have one friend (I think we're friends), and he lives in another state. My sister only likes me because I drive her places and pay for things for her and has told me that if I wasn't her brother, she'd hate me. And not even for anything I've done, just because the way I dress and the music I listen to isn't punk enough for her. I try meeting new people and making friends, but no one will talk to me, and when I try to initiate a conversation, they cut me off and ignore me. Strangers make fun of fun of me for just existing.

And now I have to move somewhere where its not even safe for me to leave the house on my own. And I have to live my parents who are "fine" with me being trans as long as they "don't have to change the way they refer" to me, in terms of name and pronouns. And they're requiring that I quit school and acting for good.

When is it just time to give up?

[alexsmitposts]

Anti-Racist Uprising Infiltrated by Extreme-Right Hooligans The city of Minneapolis is where it all began. It is where the last drop fell on the surface of a proverbial overflowing lake, causing the dam to burst, consequently starting to destroy the foundations of the empire. A death of just one single man can, under certain dreadful circumstances, put into motion the entire avalanche of events. It can smash the whole regime into pieces. It can fully rewrite history, and even change the identity of a nation. It can… although it not always does. George Floyd’s death became a spark. The city of Minneapolis is where the murder occurred, and where the ethnic minorities rose in rage. But it is also where white extreme right-wing criminals, and some even say, entire regime, perpetrated the uprising, kidnapped what could have become a true revolution and began choking legitimate rebellion by a stained duvet of nihilism and confusion. Here, we will not speculate. We will not point fingers at “deep state” or some multi-billionaire families, and to what extent they have been involved. Let others do this if they know details. But this time, I simply came to listen. And to pass to the world what I discovered first hand and what I was told. This time I simply went to Franklin Avenue and Lake Street, both in Minneapolis. I spoke to Native American people there. To those who joined forces with the African-American community during those dangerous days after May 25, 2020. To people who dared to defend their neighborhoods against brutality against white gangs, which came to loot, infiltrate, and derail the most powerful uprising in the United States in modern history. *** Bob Rice is a Native American owner of Pow Wow Grounds, a local entrepreneur, and a ‘community protection organizer.’ His legendary café is located on Franklin Avenue. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been reduced, for the time being, to a takeaway business, but even as such, it is enormously popular among the Native Americans, as well as others. At the back of the cafe is huge storage, full of food. Everyone hungry, in need of help, can simply come here and take whatever he or she needs. We grab some freshly brewed coffee from the shop and take it out to the public benches outside. Bob Rice then begins his story: “There has been police brutality for a very long time, against people of color. Not only talking about Minneapolis but in all these other places, since the 1991 Rodney King incident. Things were boiling and building up – leading to a big blow up.” “And all this discrimination did not start here; it came centuries ago from Europe.” “After the George Floyd murder, I wanted to show solidarity. Native Americans were experiencing an even higher degree of persecution than Black people. We had to stand together. I went down to the site of the murder of George Floyd, in order to support protests.” For a while, we talked about the mass media in the United States, an official and even some ‘independent one,’ and how it quickly and violently turned against the left, as well as against those who have been daring to expose endemic racism in the United States. But soon, we returned to the events that took place here, in May and June. “I noticed the presence of strange elements right from the start. I was watching guys breaking windows. At about 6 am, the morning after, I traveled down to South Minneapolis. There were piles of rocks in front of the rioters. Flash hand grenades. I kept on moving around the areas and kept on seeing rocks. I noticed the Minneapolis Umbrella Man, dressed all in black, with mask and black umbrella and black hammer smashing things – at the end being stopped by black guys. People were walking out of the store with car parts, and I thought, “why stealing those things”? These guys didn’t seem to be as part of the protest. I started moving and going away from the area, thinking that these guys would burn down stores and places soon. I even called up my insurance company the following morning to see if my policy covers civil unrest. That night they burned a lot of stores – auto stores, liquor stores, all types of businesses. I thought that if we do not do something ourselves to protect our neighborhoods, they will burn down all of our areas, too.” “From what I saw, I couldn’t tell you who these guys were, but they were not from here. So, we put up our protection zone calling out people on Facebook. We became the Headquarters of protection of Native American businesses and nonprofit organizations, as well as banks, shops, investment properties, etc. all belonging to the Native American community around here. I noticed there were Caucasian people, driving cars very slowly with no license plates, yelling racial slurs out of the windows. We formed a human shield, chain, along Franklin Avenue, to protect ourselves and our people. At a high point, about 300 people were protecting the area all night long for about eight days in a row. It had to be done, because here we had people from all over, including Wisconsin, descending on us – we had white supremacist group Proud Boys here. They arrived wearing masks. We had young white kids – 16 and 17 years old – coming from Wisconsin, looting liquor stores. We caught them. Obviously, they came out here because they thought it was an exciting thing to do. They didn’t even know where they were – this area is very dangerous with drug dealing and gang violence at night. Lucky, they got caught by us.” And the coverage? I wanted to know whether these events, in the heart of Native American neighborhoods, were described in depth by media reports. Bob Rice replied readily: There was no media reporting on these matters – mass media blamed everything on the Black Lives Matter movement. When liquor stores and tobacco shops were on fire, no police or fire trucks were around. Then the National Guard took over – using tear gas. Mr. Rice sighed, still in disbelief: Just incredible how our so-called President has done all the mess going and even made it worse! *** Robert Pilot, Native Roots Radio host, drove me for days all around the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, explaining what really took place on both Franklin Avenue and Lake Street. But before, we visited provisory, impromptu monument, where the murder of George Floyd took place. There were flowers, graffiti, works of art; there was grief, and there was solidarity. Native American people clearly supported the plight of the African-Americans. The area was safe; it was well organized. People of all races came here to pay tribute to the murdered man, and centuries of atrocious history of the United States. As we drove, Robert Pilot explained: “Native American neighborhoods armed themselves after the Floyd murder. But not only that: economic hardships ensued after the murder; food banks have come up. The Pow Wow Grounds used to be a food distribution deport but ended up becoming a food bank for anyone to donate and get what they need. Protesters were everywhere; the young generation got fed up. So different from other murders. The last straw was the murder of George Floyd. Four years earlier, in 2016, Philando Castile, an African American man, got murdered by police. He had worked in a school cafeteria. His murder was broadcast live on Facebook. It was a buildup. 10,000 people protested on 38th Street and Chicago in Minneapolis – the site of the murder of George Floyd. Combination of racial and overall frustration.” We drove by burned stores, services, gas stations. Everything was resembling a war zone, and in a way, it was. If you are there, things are extremely raw, emotional. It is not like analyzing things from a distance from the comfort of one’s home. Robert continued explaining, as we drove by block after block of the Middle East-style combat destruction: “There is a small percentage of African American people as compared to White Americans. We need allies, too. We have to support each other. Signs everywhere in my neighborhood, ‘Black Lives Matter.’” “Some young white people have woken up. They see the truth. The opinion of the masses is moving to the left; they are feeling fed up with what is happening around them and what it is that the country is doing to the world because of oil. What is interesting is that there is a protest every single day, which is something new and mind-blowing. The media is misreporting, minimizing the enormity and magnitude of protests, CNN, MSNBC, etc.” Robert Pilot is not only a radio host, but he is also a teacher: “White teachers are still teaching history; they are teaching it to black and Native American kids! Political standing of my students – a few are engaged, but definitely not all. Perhaps 10 percent of people are engaged and doing the work for 90 percent. The white guilt now and then… But many of us feel: You should stand behind us and with us but not in front of us. Revolution is happening in that sense. Everything is changing since protests are happening.” Not everyone likes the changes; definitely not everyone. The establishment is fighting back, trying to survive, in its existing, horrid form. Robert Pilot concludes: “Generally, Black and Native Americans are together, supportive of each other. It is symbolic that the Native American movement started on Franklin Avenue, where protests began in 1968. We would never burn down our own stores like grocery stores and hospitals. Why should we? But we had to mobilize and stop members of the KKK and Proud Boys type of guys.” *** We drive some 100 miles north, in order to meet Ms. Emma Needham – a young Native American activist. Emma was kind enough to bring traditional medicine from her area. We met halfway at the Sand Prairie Wildlife Management Area. Before our encounter, along the highway, we are surrounded by true ‘Americana’: endless open spaces, half-empty highways, more than 100 car-long cargo train pulled by two monstrous engines, while pushed by yet another one. We pass by St. Cloud Correctional Facility – an ancient-looking prison that bears the resemblance of some massive medieval English mansion surrounded by an elaborate system of barbed wires and watchtowers. MI734854 In one of the towns along the road, there is a big makeshift market selling posters, T-shirts, and other memorabilia, all related to the current President. It is called Trump Shop. Big banners are shouting at passing cars: “Trump, Make America Great Again,” “Trump 2020 – No More Bullshit,” and “God, Guns & Guts Made America. Let’s Keep All Three”. Emma is a storyteller, a writer. She is an intelligent, outspoken, sincere, and passionate person: “Where we were, we did not see a lot of white men with masks attacking, but what we did see were two young white kids, around 16, from Wisconsin, looting a liquor store which was run by Native Americans.” “I stayed over Friday and Saturday nights around the Indian American Cultural Center in Minneapolis. On Friday night, within half a mile to a mile in all directors, we could see and hear the riots and looting. There were gunshots, helicopters hovering all around us. But nobody came to rescue us.” “On Saturday night, we could see white people on Jeeps, waving flags, cruising around the neighborhood. “The white kids from Wisconsin were there, it appeared to me, opportunistic grabbing whatever was available.” “Majority of those who came to protest and loot were outsiders, not from the neighborhoods. It does not make sense for people in Minneapolis to burn down and loot stores they rely on.” I wanted to know whether the Native Americans and African-Americans were helping each other in that difficult hour? Emma did not hesitate: “There was big solidarity between Black people and Native American people; there was empathy.” “It has been lifelong degradation for many of us growing up poor and severely marginalized in reservations, but we had never seen anything like this, so close to what resembled a war. Those of us who were down in North Minneapolis those nights – Friday and Saturday – could not find words to describe what was happening. But we had a strong sense that what has been happening to us, Native Americans was happening to Black Americans, too – 400 years of surviving in a system of oppression. Enough is enough! Shared horrors – same for both groups!” I asked whether everything changed, and this is a new beginning for the nation? As many, Emma did not sound overly optimistic: “A black American female artist once said, ‘I love my white friends, but I don’t trust you because I know when the time comes, you need to choose your skin color. You count on the freedom and safety which you have. Whether you make that conscious decision or not, it will be there for you.’” *** On my behalf, Robert Pilot asked Brett Buckner, his fellow radio host, and an African American activist, whether he could confirm that the majority of rioters were whites and not from the community. He replied: “I would say so. Based on police reports and accounts from the community members, most of the damage was done by outsiders. Unfortunately, their actions will cause our community pain for years and even decades to come.” *** Before I finished writing this report, “Umbrella man” got ‘identified.’ On July 29, 2020, Daily Mail wrote: “Masked “Umbrella Man” who was seen smashing windows of Minneapolis AutoZone that was later burned to the ground during George Floyd protests is identified as ‘Hells Angels gang member with ties to white supremacist group’… The Star Tribune reported the 32-year-old man has links to Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood, a white supremacist gang based in Minnesota and Kentucky.” He was one of many, but the most notorious one. Looking at his photos when in action, he was bearing a striking resemblance to ‘ninja’ looking rioters – right-wing hooligans – who were unleashed in order to bring chaos to Hong Kong, people who have been supported and financed by Western governments. I know, because I work in Hong Kong, since the beginning of the riots. Coincidence? And if not: who really ‘inspired’ whom? *** Before I left Minneapolis, Robert Pilot and his wife Wendy interviewed me on their Native Roots Radio. What was supposed to be just 30 minutes appearance ended up being a one-hour event. They showed me their city and their state, sharing sincere feelings and hopes, unveiling suffering of both African American and Native American communities. This time, I traveled to the United States in order to listen. But I was also asked to talk, and so I did. During the interview, I took them to several parts of the world, where black people still suffer enormously, due to Western imperialism and corporate greed. The world where Native people of Latin America, Canada, as well as other parts of the Planet, are brutally humiliated, robbed of everything, even murdered by millions. We were complimenting each other. Our knowledge was. I am glad I came to Minnesota. I am thankful that I could witness history in the making. I am also delighted that I observed solidarity between the African American and Native American people. For centuries, both went through hell, through agony. Now, they were awakening. Minnesota is where the latest and very important chapter of American history began. But I also went to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New York City, Massachusetts. I witnessed protests, anger, despair. But there was also hope. Hope, despite tear gas and riot police, lockdowns, despite mismanaged COVID-19 and increasing poverty rates. Something was ending, something unsavory and brutal. Whether this could be considered a new beginning was still too early to tell. In Minnesota, I chose to see events through the eyes of Native Americans, people who were here ‘forever,’ to whom this land used to belong. People who were exterminated by the “new America,” by European migrants, in a genocide that claimed roughly 90% of the native lives. These were people who were robbed of their culture and their riches. I am glad; I am proud that I chose this angle. True peace, true reconciliation can only come after history as well as reality are fully understood, never through denial. Now, both African Americans and Native Americans are speaking, and the world is listening. It has to listen. At least this is already progress. These two groups are forming a powerful alliance of victims. But also, an alliance of those who are determined to make sure that history never repeats itself.

[macherstalker]

ACTUAL THINGS I've heard people say here:

"My dad is half black and he has an adopted white brother who is in the KKK. But he only hates ignorant black people. Really, he loves everyone until they're ignorant."

"I have this friend that's in a nazi group and he has jewish friends. He just doesn't like them much."

"I have no problem with my friends being racist. As long as they don't do anything around me, especially in public where I could get hurt. It's fine."

"Let me ask you a question, do you believe the sentence 'there's a difference between a black person and a (proceeds to say the N word)?'"

"See I would never call a black person I didn't know a *n word*, but like I say it around my friends a lot. They're cool with it."

"IF PEOPLE ACTUALLY KNEW WHAT THE N WORD MEANS. It means ignorant. It's not even a fucking racial slur. It's a fucking word."

"Hey guys, protect yourselves, that guy over there is a flaming homo."

"My high school was really awesome freshman and sophmore year, but junior year they brought the black kids in from the other side of town and it went downhill. Like I'm really not racist. It's true."

"Yeah as long as you stay away from the black area of town you should be good."

Actual conversation I had with this girl from school, I went over to her house after class so she could do my nails for my birthday weekend and when I got out of the car, I asked her if I could just leave my stuff in the backseat so I didn't have to carry it inside and back out, and she replied:

"Yeah you're fine. We live in a white neighborhood."

Had a guy tell me a story about how his wife dressed up AS A BLACK WOMAN for HALLOWEEN. He showed PHOTOS of it. And said "People nowadays would get offended by shit like this."

I have an amazing friend up here who is black and we went at like 9:30 at night to look at a car someone had in their yard that was for sale, and she parks and goes to get out of the car and then turns to me and says "Come with me" I ask why and she says "you're white. You make me look less suspicious."

Girl came into school once and was talking about black history month and this white girl goes "So what? When do white people get a fucking month?"

I was asking around about what beaches were nice here and was told about this one beach and at the end they say "That beach is a bit....culturally diverse. But if you're okay with that sort of thing then yeah it's nice."

I'm sure there's more but those are some of the grossest. I'm not saying there isn't racism in the south because I know that there is. But I have NEVER heard it as often and as gross as I hear it here.

I grew up in Florida and visited Georgia and Tennessee a lot throughout my life and have been to a lot of southern states. But NEVER have I seen such racism and hatred like I have while living in the midwest. I’m telling ya’ll it’s worse here than I ever saw it in the south. And they literally find nothing wrong with what they’re saying. They’re ignorant as hell up here.

[thisdaynews]

The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-massacre-that-spawned-the-alt-right/

The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right

“Death to the Klan!” On Saturday, November 3, 1979, that chant swept over Morningside Homes, a mostly black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina, as dozens of protesters—some donning blue hard hats for protection—hammered placards onto signposts and danced in the morning sun.

The American left had largely given up on communism by then, but these demonstrators were full-on Maoists. Their ranks included professionals with degrees from places like Harvard and Duke. And they were descending on Greensboro, a city where sit-ins helped launch the civil rights movement in 1960, to ignite another revolution. They danced to a guitar player singing, “Woke up this morning with my mind set to build the Party.” Their children dressed in tan military shirts and red berets. They even brought an effigy of a Klansman, dressed in a white sheet and hood, which kids from the neighborhood joined in punching.

Story Continued Below

The communists planned to begin their march at noon, moving from the housing project to a local shopping center. But just after 11:20, a caravan filled with real Klansmen and Nazis surprised them, snaking through the neighborhood’s narrow byways. As the protesters stood their ground, a man in a white T-shirt leaned out the passenger window of a canary-yellow pickup truck, and yelled, “You asked for the Klan. Now you got ‘em!” The station wagon behind him carried four Nazis. Seven more vehicles followed, carrying nearly 30 more men, including an Imperial Wizard of the Klan.

What happened next took just 88 seconds, but still reverberates 40 years later. In a confrontation where white supremacists began firing pistols, rifles and shotguns, and with television cameras rolling but police nowhere to be found, five communists were shot dead in broad daylight. Ten others were injured, some left to lie bleeding in the streets.

But that November morning became momentous for more than the grotesque video footage that still lives on the Internet: The Greensboro Massacre, as it became known, was the coming-out bloodbath for the white nationalist movement that is upending our politics today.

Before Greensboro, America’s most lurid extremistslargely operated in separate, mutually distrustful spheres. Greensboro was the place where the farthest-right groups of white supremacy learned to kill together. After November 3, 1979, it was suddenly possible to imagine Confederate flags flying alongside swastikas in Charlottesville. Or a teenager like Dylann Roof hoarding Nazi drawings as well as a Klan hood in his bedroom while he plotted mass murder.

Today, white nationalism is closer to the mainstream of American politics than ever before. The far right’s fears about “replacement” of the white race and outsider “invasions” have become standard tropes at conservative media outlets, and its anger is routinely stoked by the president of the United States. At the same time, right-wing violence is on the rise: Far-right terrorists accounted for the overwhelming majority of extremist murders in the U.S. last year, according to a January report by the Anti-Defamation League.

The seeds for this iteration of white supremacy were planted 40 years ago in Greensboro, when the white wedding of Klansmen and Nazis launched a new, pan-right extremism—a toxic brew of virulent racism, anti-government rhetoric, apocalyptic fearmongering and paramilitary tactics. And this extremism has proven more durable than anyone then could imagine.

***

Segregationists of the Greatest Generation,who fought German soldiers on the battlefields of World War II, would have thought it beyond preposterous for the Klan and Nazis to make common cause. Adolf Hitler drew inspiration from Jim Crow, but American southerners strongly supported going to war against Nazi Germany. In 1946, a list of American Nazi Party members, obtained by the U.S. Army, showed that just two percent lived in the South. Nazis were dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government, as part of their program of genocidal fascism. Through the 1950s, most neo-Confederates considered themselves patriotic Americans and had faith in the U.S. political system, even as they believed in and practiced white supremacy.

But many southern traditionalists experienced the upheavals of the next two decades as a series of betrayals. By the mid-1970s, federal courts had embraced civil rights, and civic and business leaders were dismantling legal segregation. Manufacturing, textile and tobacco jobs were vanishing. Politicians on the cosmopolitan left and corporate right were abandoning blue-collar voters. Vietnam veterans were coming home unappreciated and embittered. In addition, the FBI, after years of pursuing black nationalists, began infiltrating and undermining local Ku Klux Klans through a program, largely forgotten today, called COINTELPRO-White Hate. To be sure, only a small fraction of angry southerners turned to terror groups. But the Klan’s membership grew in the ’70s, and so did its public support. Gallup reported in 1979 that 11 percent of white Americans viewed the KKK favorably, up from just six percent in 1965. And with that rebound came something more: Those who were susceptible to recruitment were far more likely than their parents or grandparents to see the U.S. government itself as an alien force bent on destroying the white way of life.

Meanwhile,American Nazis were expanding their public presence. Some younger would-be fuhrers began trading armbands for sport coats and toning down their rhetoric in media appearances in order to seem more palatable.Other Nazi leaders, like William Pierce, head of the white separatist National Alliance, started looking for partners and muscle, hoping to turn far-right fanatics from vigilantes to insurrectionists. In 1978, Pierce publishedThe Turner Diaries, a futurist fantasy-cum-blueprint for all-out race war. In Pierce’s novel, oppressed whites join forces to create an underground organization that bombs New York and murders thousands of black and Jewish people, among many other horrific acts; the book’s protagonist ultimately flies a nuclear warhead into the Pentagon.The Turner Diarieswas a huge hit with the far right, and has influenced a wide spectrum of racists—and inspired notorious hate crimes—ever since.

It wasn’t just avowed racists who gravitated to new extremes. In the weird, unusually rootless time between Watergate and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, America’s faith in public institutions collapsed, cynicism soared and belief in a wide range of conspiracy theories and cults, from UFOs to the Unification Church, sprouted in popularity. But those rooted in racial resentment took hold in especially bitter soil. White supremacists of all stripes came to believe they faced annihilation, and they prepared to fight it on the home front. The country, in other words, was primed for a fusion of the ultra-right.

***

The story of the Greensboro Massacrereally begins with an episode that occurred in the summer of 1979, in a tiny, working-class city 60 miles to the southwest, called China Grove.

Klan leaders in North Carolina had spent the first half of the year stepping up their recruitment efforts by appealing to the heritage of white supremacy. The Federated Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, staged a historical exhibit at the Forsyth County Library—and in an early sign of what was to come, a group of Nazis showed up to ogle the items on view, surprising the media.

On July 8, the same North Carolina Klan faction tried to screenThe Birth of a Nation,the 1915 racist epic that depicts heroic figures in white hoods trying to beat back the scourge of Reconstruction at the turn of the century, at the China Grove Community Center. But before they could show the movie, more than a hundred protesters, led by communists from Durham and Greensboro, marched on the building, chanting “Death to the Klan!” and “Decease the rotten beast.” Many carried pipes and chains.

The Grand Dragon of the Federated Knights, a pot-bellied mason named Joe Grady, stood on the porch outside the building with some 20 men in robes and white-power t-shirts, rifles drawn, while members of the China Grove police force struggled to create a human buffer. Grady’s men were eager to fire on the crowd, but a policeman who walked up to him whispered that if they did, the officers trying to keep the peace were the ones who would get hurt. Grady reluctantly agreed to move into the musty bingo hall, where women and children who had been watching the approaching crowdwere hiding. Once the Klansmen retreated, a cheer rose up from the protesters, who burned a pair of Confederate flags.

Afterwards, once the crowd was gone and the screening cancelled, Grady re-emerged to face the news cameras. Grabbing a shred of burned flag, he vowed, “There will be revenge for this.” But while Grady put on a brave face for the remaining television cameras, in the eyes of his hooded peers, he had committed a cardinal sin. He had allowed himself to look weak.

By that point, the Klan’s resurgence was already triggering confrontations around the country. In Decatur, Alabama, in May 1979, more than a hundred armed Klansmen blocked a civil rights march. Later, that August, rock-throwing protesters pelted Klansmen at an anti-immigration meeting in Castro Valley, California. None of those episodes led to lethal retaliatory violence, however. China Grove was different because it got the attention of a young Nazi named Harold Covington.

Born about 20 miles east of Greensboro, Covington had attended an integrated high school in Chapel Hill, where he proudly called himself the “school fascist.” Jowly and glib, Covington traveled to South Africa where he built a minor reputation as a soldier-for-hire who’d taken up arms to defend apartheid. By the time he resettled in North Carolina and launched a losing but surprisingly well-run campaign for Raleigh city council, Covington had become an articulate, publicity-seeking ideologue, with a sideline writing campy novels—a kind of L. Ron Hubbard of the racist resistance.

With a sense of himself as a global figure, Covington regarded most Klansmen he met as boorish. The backlash to China Grove convinced him they were also in disarray.And Covington saw no one in the back-country klaverns of North Carolina capable of stepping into the void. Long before he would become a YouTube provocateur by posting white-power videos online, Covington decided to herd them into a single white-power army himself.

In a preview of 8Chan, the message-board website that would become a haven for white nationalists in the 2010s, he began bringing together various strains of supremacists, or as he put it, “normalizing relations.” His early attempts didn’t go well. The few Klan members he was able to woo were largely fabulists who made up stories to make themselves seem more violent than they really were. Deciding he needed to get a better cut, Covington organized a racist retreat on September 22 at a borrowed farm outside Louisburg, about 30 miles northeast of Raleigh, and sent word through the bars, garages and diners where “his people” hung out that they were all invited.

With the media dutifully attending what promised to be a freakshow, no detail was too small for Covington to stage-manage. Kids milled around a barbecue pit where a whole hog roasted, while parents doused a huge cross in kerosene. Nazis wore uniforms budgeted at $25 for tailored pants, $10 for boots and $2 for arm bands. The sound system alternated bluegrass tunes and “The Ride of the Valkyries.” A cute blonde in a “White Power” t-shirt sauntered with a Doberman and a rifle for photographers. In a crib, a baby wore a small shirt that read “Future Klansman.” For extra inspiration, a noose hung from a tree.

Late in the afternoon, a caravan of 20 Klansmen pulled into the farm led by a gaunt mechanic with a plunging jawline named Virgil Griffin. Griffin carried the title of Imperial Wizard of a backwoods klavern known as the Invisible Empire in Mount Holly, close to the South Carolina border. But he was also something of a joke on the national stage. His rallies, unlike Covington’s barbecue, were often threadbare affairs that dissolved into chaos. At one event, he’d been shouted down by protesters singing the theme song from “The Mickey Mouse Club,” according to an account from a community journalist, Elizabeth Wheaton, who covered radical politics around Greensboro.

If Covington looked in the mirror and saw a worldwide revolutionary, Griffin viewed himself as a backwoods patriot. After the China Grove debacle, he concluded that local Klans needed better leadership and more action, and believed he could provide both. Covington was only too happy to help feed such ambitions, elaborately making the Imperial Wizard feel like an honored guest among the other extremists—who also included the Klansmen who had peeled off from the Grady’s Federated Knights after China Grove, and a Nazi-curious crew from Winston-Salem.

The extremists nattered about where to buy guns and how to deal with the summer heat—Klan robes were sweatier than Nazi uniforms. And they found common ground.

“You take a man who fought in the Second World War, it’s hard for him to sit down in a room full of swastikas,” a Klansman told the Associated Press, which published a report about the event called “North Carolina United Racist Front Forms.” Then he added: “But people realize time is running out. We’re going to have to get together.”

***

What Virgil Griffin didn’t knowwas that one of his closest allies was keeping the cops informed about this new alliance.

Unlike the years after 9/11 when American law enforcement took its focus off white nationalism to fight Islamist terror, the 1960s and ’70s were a period of robust intelligence-gathering in the supremacist underground. One of North Carolina’s most charismatic Klansmen, a car salesman named Bob Jones who recruited 12,000 members to his state chapter, was undone by an aide whose information led to him being dragged before Congress and held in contempt. In the case of Griffin, law enforcement’s material came from a chain-smoking handyman named Eddie Dawson.

Born in New Jersey, Dawson cut an odd figure for a Southern Klansman. He spoke with a twitchy northern accent and had an uncanny resemblance to the Hollywood actor William Holden. Having drifted down to Greensboro in the early ’60s—a time when black activists were staging sit-ins at segregated lunch counters—he managed to get invited to a meeting of the Klan, and quickly established himself as an enthusiastic recruit. In one career-building episode, he took an armed joy ride through a poor black neighborhood that he peppered with rifle fire.

Dawson, however, blamed the KKK for letting him get sentenced to nine months in jail after he was convicted of assault with intent to kill for the joy ride. He was still bitter when an FBI agent approached him at a coffee shop after he got out in 1969, and offered to pay him $25 every time he told the Bureau about a Klan meeting. Dawson shook hands on the deal.

His time with the FBI ended the way most of his relationships did—unhappily. But Dawson resumed his double life a few weeks after Covington’s barbecue, when leaflets began appearing around Greensboro that announced a “Death to the Klan” march. The posters were the work of a group called the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO), which was filled with professionals who had elite-school degrees, identified as Maoists, and used revolutionary rhetoric to match. They had attempted to organize local textile workers, then tried direct action by taking part in the anti-KKK protest at China Grove. Now, they were itching for another, more visible confrontation with the Klan.

The leftists had plausible reasons for choosing to organize and demonstrate in North Carolina. At the end of the ’70s, the state ranked 49th in the U.S. in blue-collar wages and dead last in the percentage of workers who were unionized. But neither Duke educations nor medical training nor Maoist ideology prepared them to comprehend the culture of electricians, loggers or sheet-metal workers—jobs held by some of the men who would ride the caravan into Greensboro—beyond seeing them as either recruitable proletarians or irredeemable racists. The communists used language even more incendiary than the words on their flyers. On October 11, for instance, they issued a press release saying the KKK “must be physically beaten back, eradicated, exterminated, wiped off the face of the earth.” And they took exactly the wrong message from China Grove: that the Klan would be too cowardly to mount any resistance to them.

Instead, WVO’s leaflet lit a flame under Griffin and the Klan. It also alarmed the police in Greensboro. Soon, a detective who knew Dawson’s FBI past was talking with him about disrupting local meetings of communists, which made perfect sense. After all, the KKK rated communists about the same as black people. But Dawson had another angle, too: He could help the police investigate the Klan. With a highly-developed sense of grievance that often left him feeling under-appreciated and under-used, he saw a chance to become the one who was pulling the strings—both as an informant and as an instigator—as confrontations heated up.

On Saturday, October 20, when Griffin marched his Invisible Empire through the fairgrounds in Lincoln County, about 100 miles southwest of Greensboro, and told a crowd of 150 that if they cared about their children, they would “kill a hundred niggers and leave them dead in the street.” At a members-only meeting afterward, he introduced Dawson to talk about the planned WVO march. Towering over the 5-foot-6 Griffin, Dawson started out by warning that the communists were recruiting busloads of black college students to flood into Greensboro. Asked whether it would be a good idea to bring guns, he demurred. “I’m not your father,” he replied. “But if you carry a gun, you better have damned bond money.”

The vote among those in the audience was unanimous: They’d go to Greensboro to make their presence felt. The following weekend, as word spread, white supremacist groups met in at least three different locations around North Carolina and agreed to head there, too.

Dawson earned $50 by telling the Greensboro PD about the October 20 meeting. And he let them know Griffin was planning to come to town and looking for allies. But Dawson neglected to mention his own starring role, or the fact he subsequently drove around Morningside Homes in his Cadillac late at night, pasting leaflets over the “Death to the Klan!” posters. His replacements featured a dark figure hanging from a noose and the phrase, “It’s time for some old-fashioned American Justice.”

The Nazi camp, meanwhile, was getting just as frothy. At a November 1 event that Covington staged for the media in the garage of a sheet-metal worker named Roland Wayne Wood, a dozen of his recruits mugged through a made-for-TV roast of the disgraced China Grove wizard, Joe Grady.

Once the cameras departed, the united racists got down to the business of how they planned to crash the communists’ party in Greensboro. One suggested throwing eggs. Another went further, saying he had a pipe bomb that would be effective if thrown into a crowd. At 11:00 p.m., the group gathered around a television to watch themselves on the local news, only to become infuriated when a press conference held by the WVO’s members got more airtime. As the screen showed one of the march leaders calling the KKK “scum,” Jerry Paul Smith, the Klansman with the pipe bomb, took his gun and pointed it at the TV.

Police reports would later quote Wood as saying that he heard Smith mutter, “Kill the communist.”

***

On the morning of November 3,Dawson called his Greensboro Police contact to say that three dozen supremacists from around the state, including Virgil Griffin, were assembling at a house owned by one of Dawson’s Klan pals, a few miles from the Morningside Homes march site.

A little later, Dawson called again to warn that the place was chock full of firearms. But that information never made its way to the shift commander, who wrapped up a daily briefing at about 10:30 that morning by reminding his men the parade permit listed a start time of noon. The officers could get breakfast, he said, so long as they were on the route by 11:30.

As the Klansmen and Nazis made their way along Interstate 85 into Greensboro, a Greensboro Police detective spotted the caravan and called in to ask if tactical units were in place. His supervisor, showing no special concern, replied that there was still “another fourteen minutes by my watch” for breakfast.

The leftists planned to line up their crew at 11:00, then begin marching at noon. But at 11:22, a frightening transmission came over a CB radio: Klansmen were talking about closing in. Before the protesters could react, cars with Confederate-flag license plates began approaching. There were no cops in sight.

Dawson, who was leading the convoy, would later tell police and reporters that he merely wanted to put a scare into the Maoists before driving on to the spot at the shopping center where the march would end. It was Dawson who yelled, “You asked for the Klan. Now you got ’em!”

But then Griffin’s white LTD screeched and swerved, nearly hitting a marcher. The caravan came to a stop. The communists went from singing to swinging, banging their placards on the cars. Members of the convoy poured out, punching through the melee, grabbing weapons. Dawson told his driver to get the hell out of there—and since they were in the first car of the caravan, they were able to split.

The WVO had packed a few weapons, but were seriously outgunned. One of the WVO leaders, a physician named Jim Waller, lunged for a 12-gauge shotgun he’d stashed in a car, but a Klansman flew toward him before he could fire. The two rolled in the grass, fighting nose-to-nose over the weapon until others started piling on top of them and the pump mechanism snapped. Waller screamed as the pump-action crushed the bones in his shooting hand.

Amidst the chaos, other white supremacists lined up their shots. A Nazi named Jack Fowler opened the trunk of a blue Ford Fairlane and, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, handed out rifles and shotguns. David Matthews, from Griffin’s Klan, stood behind the door of a van and nailed his first target, a bookish pediatrician named Mike Nathan. Then Matthews took down an organizer named Jim Wrenn, who was crawling on his belly. Bill Sampson, a former Harvard Divinity student, tried to give Wrenn rifle cover but took two fatal shots in the heart.

Roland Wayne Wood observed Waller writhing from his crushed hand. Coolly aiming his shotgun, the Nazi delivered a blast into the physician’s right side. Matthews, the Klan member, finished the job with another blast into Waller’s back.

The convoy sped away, with Matthews’ van the last to leave the scene. Climbing aboard, Matthews let the rest of squad know: “I got three of ’em.” Moments later, police intercepted the van, but didn’t get to Morningside Homes until the shooting was over.

***

Eighty-eight seconds of gunfirein Greensboro marked the worst violence in the South since the 1960s. And for the men who shot their enemies dead, November 3, 1979, was just the beginning of a new era of notoriety and collaboration. The botched trials and political response that followed ensured that white nationalism would grow to become more dangerous than ever today.

The legal system took three whacks at the Greensboro conspirators. First, police rounded up 14 Klansmen and Nazis, and the state of North Carolina charged most of them with first-degree murder and felony riot. Prosecutors lined up eyewitnesses, videotapes, weapons and FBI ballistics analysis. But they couldn’t convince the surviving revolutionaries—who were stubbornly convinced the cops had conspired to leave them unprotected—to cooperate.

At trial, the Klansmen and Nazis wrapped themselves in the American flag and argued self-defense. “They acted like men to aid someone in distress,” Wood’s lawyer claimed. “They would not have been worthy of anyone’s respect if they had done otherwise.” He added that his client just wanted to sing, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

On November 17, 1980, an all-white jury found the Klansmen and Nazis not guilty. “Anytime you defeat communism,” said Jerry Pridmore, one of the men acquitted, “it’s a victory for America.”

The U.S. Justice Department then charged nine Klansmen and Nazis, this time including Griffin and Dawson, with conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the Greensboro victims. In April 1984, the federal jury, also all-white, refused to conclude the defendants had violated the law by acting out of racial rather than political hatred. It too delivered not-guilty verdicts across the board.

Finally, the victims filed a $48-million lawsuit against 87 defendants, including the city of Greensboro, the state of North Carolina, the Justice Department and the FBI. Wood, now on trial for the third time, felt confident enough to give a Nazi salute when sworn to testify.

In June 1985, the civil jury delivered a landmark yet twisted verdict: They found eight defendants liable for wrongful death: Dawson, five Klan and Nazi shooters, the Greensboro police detective who received advance word about the attack from Dawson and the lieutenant who was the GPD event commander at the massacre. But the jury applied that decision only in the case of Michael Nathan, the one murder victim who wasn’t a WVO member at the time of the shootings. To avoid appeals, the city of Greensboro settled for $351,000, sending a check to Nathan’s widow, who split it among the survivors.

Strike three.

The supremacists who emerged from the Greensboro trials understood they were free. Free not just to stay out of prison, or to keep burning rags and kvetching about the price of jackboots. Free to work together to stockpile weapons, terrorize neighborhoods and commit violence up to and including murder—so long as their opponents were communists.

“The Klan and Nazis felt emboldened,” says Patricia Clark, a veteran Klan watcher who served on the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which local citizens set up in the mid-2000s to investigate the massacre. “They thought they won the fight.”

By 1980, membership in Klan-Nazi fusion groups began to outnumber that of old-school Klans. And as horizons of hate broadened and merged, alliances deepened around the country. As just one example, four months after Greensboro, the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan rallied in the city of Oceanside and beat counter-protesters with baseball bats. The marchers brayed a version of “Sixteen Tons,” the old coal-mining song. Their rewritten lyrics celebrated the Greensboro killings and ended, “If the Nazis don’t get you, a Klansman will.”

The increasing unity of far-right factions was more than tactical. By transfusing ��blood and soil” into American racism, it led to what historian John Drabble called in a 2007 study “the Nazification of the Ku Klux Klan.” That was bad news for hustlers like Eddie Dawson. Dawson managed to dodge Klan retribution for informing. But he soon found it much harder to profit from playing different extremists against one another. Greensboro turned Dawson into a relic—and the hardening ideology of right-wing terror networks that followed made them harder for the FBI to penetrate.

Meanwhile, new doors swung wide open for fanatics like Frazier Glenn Miller, a Covington acolyte and former Green Beret who rode in the Greensboro caravan. Miller founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1980. And by merging Klan and Nazi symbolism while instilling paramilitary discipline in his followers, he quickly built the strongest white-power group in the state.

As an emboldened white-power movement spread, Miller connected its dots. The Greensboro veteran held public marches, harassed local black residents and amassed huge caches of explosives. In 1987, he issued a revolutionary “Declaration of War” filled with calls for assassinations. He coordinated with The Order, a violent extremist group inspired byThe Turner Diaries. And he sought allies through voluminous racist literature and eventually on the Internet, where he extolled the mass shooting by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway. Miller returned to racist murder in 2014, when he targeted a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas, and killed three people. That landed him on death row, where he sits today.

Greensboro’s aftershocks held their most important lessons for mainstream opportunists. By the end of the 1970s, southern nationalists had spent more than a decade trying to re-code their racism to make it more palatable. As master political consultant Lee Atwater put it: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights.”

Republican politicians soon realized they could go even farther. After Greensboro, it became clear that, as historian Kathleen Belew has written, extremists “increasingly used anticommunism as an alibi for racial violence.” And by targeting the far right’s dual paranoias—federal authority and socialism—GOP operatives were able to harness its nativism while hanging onto the votes of establishment conservatives.

Over the next 30 years, Republicans racked up spectacular gains in state legislative seats, governorships and U.S. Senate elections across the South by hammering cultural issues that the far right recognized as approving winks. A decade after Greensboro, establishment candidates were already posing in front of rebel flags and openly courting “white heritage” groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The GOP advanced most in counties where the Klan had been active in the ’60s, according to a 2014 study by political scientists from Notre Dame, Brandeis and Yale.

During the administration of President Barack Obama, the new generation of conservative politicians had the extremists’ backs. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report forecasting a rise in racist violence. Republicans objected so vociferously that DHS rescinded the projection and silenced its domestic terrorism unit. Mike Pompeo, then a congressman from Kansas, said it was “dangerous” to track homegrown violence.

By that point it was hard to tell who was co-opting whom on the right. Republicans were playing to the fringe without worrying where their most incitable elements might channel their anger.

And you know what happened next: Jonah turned the whale inside out. Donald Trump’s bald invocations of racial and working-class grievances made him a hero to the ultras; “MAGA” is the most common word in Twitter user profiles among members of the alt-right, according to a study by J.M Berger of the research network VOX-Pol. From Charlottesville to Pittsburgh to El Paso, right-wing attacks have surged. The latest evidence: The FBI made almost 100 arrests related to domestic terrorism by July of this year, more than in all of 2018, according to agency director Christopher Wray, who told Congress the majority of cases involved “white supremacist violence.”

In Greensboro, private citizens tried to find a way forward by empaneling a Truth & Reconciliation Commission—the first in U.S. history. But today’s political landscape, where the language and resentments of white nationalism have taken deeper root than ever, raises the question: What happens when there is no reconciliation in truth?

Twenty-six years after the massacre, Virgil Griffin surprised everyone at the Greensboro Commission by showing up and taking questions.

Asked why no Klansman was killed in the shootings, he answered: “Maybe God guided the bullets.”

Read More

[rokthespot]

A msg from our friend Abby Hertz of LustNYC

------------

I have to say something. The past two days it's been hard to watch white friends and family either a.) defend the Nazis under freedom of speech more than they disavow bigotry b.) not care or c.) clutch their pearls in disbelief that our country is still like this.

It is 1 million percent white ppl's privilege to a) march in the streets with semi-automatic weapons and not immediately be shot by cops b.) not care and c.) not have realized before now the insidious bigotry that is rampant all over our country.

I grew up in a small town in Indiana with an active KKK. I am a Jew, and my family is Jewish. I wasn't allowed in several people's homes bc I was a Jew. I was kicked out of my peer group at the local civic theater for being a Jew and yelled at, spit on, and attacked for "lying" to them about who I was/ ie not disclosing I was a Jew.

I was repeatedly forcibly checked for my horns and tail on the playground. I was called dirty, disgusting, a murderer, and kids made threats to me for being a Jew.

Our lunch table was me, my best friend that was Hispanic, the one Asian girl from China that didn't yet speak English, and the one black girl that thought we were a bunch of gross tomboys (she was a girly-girl). Nonetheless, we all sat together bc we were "other."

Kids in my neighborhood would play with me, though. I'm not sure why it was different at school than in my neighborhood. For some reason, outside of school I had the privilege that comes with my white skin. The neighborhood kids didn't apparently care I was a Jew. Not so for the one black girl. The mean ass kids never let her forget she was different and she never played with any of the kids that I saw. When I invited her, she would go back into her house without even talking to me. Looking back now, I am guessing she was not going to play with us bc it would have inevitably entailed some racist shit happening, and she knew that...so it wasn't worth it for her.

Kids are mean, right? But who did they get their ideas from? Their parents, behind closed doors, are telling them that white people, that Christians are better, that you can't trust a Jew, that Jews are dirty, that anyone of color is inferior, that they don't want the Blacks, Jews, or Hispanic kids to come over and to please only invite their other nice white friends. The kids had to get it from somewhere. Children are not born racist. Their parents make them racist.

If you haven't seen racism or bigotry before, it's because you've never had it effect you personally, or someone you care about.

I've lived in Black neighborhoods most of my adult life. Let me tell you a story from this past winter, for those of you that live in white neighborhoods.

The neighbors were all out shoveling snow after a big snowstorm and a cop car drove by with his lights on, abruptly parked, and they got out.

Within a half of a second every one of my neighbors had dropped their shovel and put their hands above their heads in the "hands up don't shoot" that all black parents must teach their black children in order to be safe. Every person, every kid, automatically did this. I didn't. I had never been in a position where I needed to learn that or do that for survival. I grabbed my cell phone and put it on video just in case. The cops walked up and down the block inspecting and then got back in their car and left. The whole 5 minutes this took place no one dared move their arms. I stood by holding my breath with my finger close to the "record" button on my phone.

Yes, white people, it is our privilege that that is not our reality.

When my roommate moved here from London, a place where cops do not carry guns, I had to explain to him that, as a black man, he could not ever reach in his pocked for his wallet/I.D. when/if a cop confronted him. I had to teach him "hands up, don't shoot." White ppl. Think if you've ever had to teach your children this. No? Recognize that is your immense privilege that cops are there to protect you, that your kids admired cops and did not fear them.

It makes me so angry that it takes a literal Nazi rally to wake white people up to racism and bigotry.

Our country is built upon an incredibly intricate and deep system of racial oppression. If you don't realize this, you are privileged to not have to realize this.

As a white-skinned "ethnic" person, that has a white face y'all will recognize and feel safer around to say your bigoted thoughts to, I've been in the position, as many Jews traditionally have, to speak up to you, turn my white face towards your white face and explain as calmly as I can what oppression looks like on a daily basis.

I know you don't "feel" racist or think you're racist, or a bigot, because you're a loving person that just wants peace.

You are able to focus on love and peace and ignore oppression because you don't have to deal with it personally and you are not faced with racism and bigotry on a daily basis.

It's impossible to put yourself in a POC's shoes.

I know you are ITCHING to say "not me" right now and prove to me that you are not racist by stating things like "I have a black friend, I have a black brother-in-law, I judge people by the content of their character" etc etc. Don't. No one wants to look at themselves in the mirror and see a racist. Even the white supremacist guy that became a poster child this week for bigotry came out and said "that's not me" and said he wanted to keep people separate but equal, and wanted his right to think white culture was superior, but that didn't make him racist. People go to great lengths doing mental gymnastics to convince themselves "I'm not a racist, but..."

Instead, LISTEN. Stop talking. Stop saying "but...." LISTEN. Don't force POC to have a conversation or educate you. It is not their responsibility to educate you. If someone spends their time, energy, and intense emotional labor on you, listen, don't interrupt, and thank them. Recognize that POC in this country have a right to be angry. You'd be fucking angry, too, if you experienced half the shit they have to deal with.

We need to start talking about race in this country.

Ignoring it, attempting to be politically correct, just buried the racism for white folks so they/we didn't have to deal with it or face it.

It's time for our country to look at itself in the mirror good and hard. It's time for white ppl to start addressing white ppl on their own bigotry.

I for sure don't have the answer as to how we move forward, but Trump cracked open the surface of racist America by giving white people permission to be bigoted again and stop being "politically correct."

This needed to happen. It needed to come to the surface for white people to address it.

I can't tell you how many times people have not known I'm Jewish and said horribly anti-Semitic things around me, only to make excuses for themselves when I tell them I'm a Jew. They 9/10 say "well, not you, you're an exception" and sometimes "oh and this other Jew I know isn't like that...you are exceptions to the rule." So. The only two Jews you actually know on a personal level aren't like that. Don't you think if you knew more Jews on a personal level, you'd find out that they're all just people, like you and your white family and friends, with their individuality?

Stop making excuses for yourself. If you want to say "not all white people" right now and argue that white people are all individuals, then remember that when you're saying "Jews are greedy cheating liars" or "blacks are inherently xyz" or "Mexicans are..." etc. Do you not think it's racist to not allow them the same privilege of individuality that you fight so hard to retain yourself when you say "not all white people"?

I also hear the unaddressed pain coming from "generic" white folk that they might not recognize from not having a culture. I think that whites losing their ethnic identities has actually hurt our society more than helped it.

Do a "heritage" project and see where your ancestors came from. Learn their stories of coming to this country, of why they had to leave their countries. Learn what cultures you come from and learn what foods, dress, dances, stories, and music comes from those cultures. No one here is a generic American. That's what is so beautiful about our country. We all come from somewhere.

Please also recognize that even if your family, like mine, came here to escape oppression, or even genocide, we came here by choice. African Americans were brought here in chains, kidnapped from their homes, and turned into property. That is entirely different, even from Jews escaping genocide. We have not come far enough in our history as a country for the after-effects of slavery to have disappeared. Not even slightly.

It is scary to write all this out and press "post." I have no idea what my friends on here will remotely think of this. But I know that engaging in conversations about race needs to happen for our country to move forward. We can't hide behind fake and forced politeness anymore. My white friends say they don't talk about race because they're too afraid. You're not doing anyone any favors by completely disengaging, imho.

Again, listen. Don't force people to engage with you. Stop saying "but." Be humble. Be as understanding as you can about other people's experiences. Don't invalidate someone else's experience because it was not your own.

Burying your head in the sand right now and retreating into your safe white communities makes you complicit in perpetuating racism.

[nofomoartworld]

Art F City: We Went to Protests: Scenes of Inauguration Resistance in Three Cities

WASHINGTON/Whitney Kimball

MEXICO CITY, NEW YORK, WASHINGTON—Over inauguration weekend, three members of the AFC fam found themselves in different cities, united by pissed-off-edness at Trump and the rise of the Right-wing. On inauguration day, Whitney Kimball navigated the surreal belly of the beast: Washington, DC. Meanwhile in Mexico, D.F. Michael Anthony Farley joined in a #J20 solidarity strike, protest, and march from the U.S. Embassy. The next day, Corinna Kirsch was among the hundreds of thousands participating in the New York City chapter of the Women’s March on Washington.

Whitney: DC on inauguration day was a weird labyrinth of barricades populated by me and untold thousands of zombie people with stupid red hats trying to find a gap into the National Mall and failed. Everything blew.

The city was barricaded off in chunks, so that you’d walk 10 blocks and then hit a bunch of soldiers and traffic police who’d make you turn around. (Same with Cleveland at the RNC last summer, where lots of us fully expected a bomb to go off). It’s an effective crowd control method because it makes it really hard for large groups of people to coordinate, but it also seems like it could go horribly wrong in an evacuation scenario.

WASHINGTON: Line for the parade? Or escape from DC? No one knows. /Whitney Kimball.

Anyway I spent the hour before the inauguration with wandering bands of people who also didn’t seem to realize that you needed a ticket to get within five miles of the Capitol Building. At the very last minute, a kind soul gave up his ticket, and I sprinted through the security checkpoints just in time to catch the speech on a jumbotron that I could just barely see over the crest of the hill. Even then a TSA agent blocked off all incomers from getting any closer, so for me, Trump’s “This is your celebration” line was a fabulously ironic closing note for the whole campaign. (Readers, if anybody has experience navigating previous inaugurations, please comment!)

So, it was a bust. BTW judging by the lines coming out of there, Trump’s claim to a million and a half attendees– about double the population of my hometown of Boston– seemed crazy. If it tells you anything, around lunchtime I was able to get in and out of a Pret-a-Manger bathroom within 15 minutes. By comparison my mom went to the Boston women’s march, had to go to the bathroom, and couldn’t even escape the square. I’ll add the caveat that the attendance numbers are a huge dispute at the moment, so he can’t sue us for libel.

In any case, this was a made-for-TV event.

WASHINGTON: one of the peaceful protests everyone ignored/Whitney Kimball

Also the “riots” were totally overblown. From what I witnessed over the course of a few hours in the afternoon, the number of media people nearly matched the number of anarchists mulling around and occasionally knocking over trash cans. The now-famous limo fire was the climax of a long, drawn out vandalism which was the main event throughout the afternoon. Eventually the boredom escalated into brick throwing and pepper spray, but the nearby tank stayed parked. All of this annoyingly overshadowed a much larger, entirely peaceful protest down the hill. The sanest conversation I had in the riot area was with a Trump supporter in his twenties whose mother had suffered under the Castro regime in Cuba and was annoyed with protesters’ comparisons to fascism. Other Trump supporters gave protesters credit for exercising their First Amendment rights.

And then there were the renegade guerilla window-smashers. A group whom DC local Kelly Rice described as “these like black ninjas”– who looked nothing like the regular protesters in rainbow-themed homemade protest apparel– allegedly ran through the streets with baseball bats and smashed storefronts like McDonald’s and Bank of America, but also non-symbolic spaces like the locally-owned breakfast place. “Who smashes the Atrium?” Rice wondered.

All in all, I dearly wish I’d had that day back. I’m hoping yours was better?

Michael: To be perfectly honest, if I had been in the United States I would’ve totally been one of the fire-setting, window-smashing kids in black. That’s part of why I am in Mexico instead. But I do kinda want a tattoo of that limousine in flames with the anarchy sign…

Whitney: Noooo! Those guys make protesters look bad. I hate McDonald’s, but a small business operator runs that franchise. And seriously, why smash a local breakfast place?

Also the kids sitting on the limo refused to offer any coherent message other than “it’s a bench now” or “it’s an insurance claim.” I’m down with limo-smashing, but for a greater good.

Michael: Eh, I’m becoming much less of a pacifist (in regard to private property) in my bitter old age. No one gave a fuck about Baltimore, especially cops killing Black kids, until they burned a stupid CVS.

Whitney: I agree that pacifism isn’t working, but I think the common enemy are the superrich, not other working class people. After spending a bunch of time with white supremacist groups over the past few months for my master’s project, I’m concluding that most people are generally okay with each other after they spend time together. We’re all getting screwed, but it’s not by the local CVS owner or the McDonald’s guy or the limo driver, it’s the corporate overlords.

But yeah, artistically, the burning limo is an A+. In life, I feel sorry for Muhammad Ashraf of Nationwide Chauffeured Services. Who knows, maybe he deserved it, but I still think a Fox News van or something would have been a better target.

Michael: CVS isn’t locally-owned at all.

Whitney: Oh shit you’re right. Ok, fuck CVS!!

MEXICO CITY: Dancing anti-Trump Socialists in Centro/Michael Anthony Farley

Michael: But we digress. Overall, things were more orderly (but still passionate!) here. Mexico City had several anti-inaugural protests on J20, most of which were centered around the American Embassy and the nearby Ángel de la Independencia monument. It’s hard to get a sense of crowd size, what with all the comings-and-goings, but I’d estimate at least 1,000 people were in the streets at any given time. A handful of American flags got burned, some protesters built a fake wall in front of the Embassy’s terrifying-future-looking security barriers, and a lesbian couple were dressed as a KKK Nazi and “Latino concentration camp” prisoner. But the mood was weirdly much more convivial, compared to Trump protests I’ve attended in the U.S., which can feel like funeral marches. After assembling in front of the Embassy, we marched about 2 ⅕ miles to the city’s historic center, where everyone from goth kids to abuelitas would lean out of balconies or storefronts and cheer.

Corinna: Sadly, I may have missed out on all that fire; I went to the Women’s March on New York City this past Saturday. It sounds like Mexico City and D.C. were the equivalent of a wet-tongue make out, while New York was one big hugging sesh.

NEW YORK/Corinna Kirsch

Here in Manhattan we had grandmothers; tykes with pink hats and cat ears; people  with their boyfriends, girlfriends, partners; very well-designed protest signs; and a guy who prepared for the march by carrying around a full box of pizza. New Yorkers know how to turn protest into a well-mannered march. I’m sure it was different for other protesters in New York, but being out on Saturday, for me, had, on one hand, the effect of lounging out in Prospect Park on a Saturday—if we were all crowded like sardines to fit into city-block-size containers, of course. The Women’s March on New York City was the family-friendly event of the weekend.

All types of New Yorkers came out in huge numbers—approximately 400,000—to express their support for progressive causes. Yes, all types of New Yorkers challenged the direction our country is taking. Yes, all types of New Yorkers cheerfully sang “Dump Trump!” in the streets, without fear. Huzzah! New Yorkers, we are the many, the proud, and a bastion for social good.

New Yorkers, keep marching, not just this once, but all the time. Here we have protesting, normalized. I’m looking forward to showing up in the streets every week if need be.

Michael: Be careful what you wish for, as far as normalization goes. At one point, while marching down Paseo de la Reforma (a major office/government skyscraper district) I ducked into a luxury mall to pee, and even though you could still hear people chanting from the mall and see countless people through the windows, no one batted a second glance in that direction. Protests are so common in this neighborhood they’re like noting the weather. I guess that’s a good thing, though. I’d love to see America’s Left turn into such a well-oiled disobedience machine. And on the street, of course, all bystanders were super supportive. 

NEW YORK: A shower of flowers, gifted to protesters awaiting the march./Corinna Kirsch

Corinna: One anecdote on the lovefest that was Manhattan this Saturday revolves around this guy. We’re at the corner of 2nd Avenue and 40-something, well above the overflow for the march start. Expecting a march, we were given a standing-room only situation. Unsure of how many blocks we had to go before being given the go-ahead to walk, with the march officials invisible, somewhere off in the distance, we moved two blocks within an hour—max. As we’re standing with the hundreds, maybe thousands of other sardines on this block, comes out this Tom Cruise in Risky Business bro, showering the protesters with his own type of support: pink flowers. We could have been in an opera, showered with single flowers, but during the performance, not after.

Great, New Yorkers who weren’t protesting support the protesters. But…would this same, flower-giving gesture have taken place during a #blacklivesmatter march? My magic eight-ball says “Doubtful.”

Michael: By that you mean, Burning-Man/Berlin-Love-Parade-Kooky-Acts-of-Kindness aren’t showered on BLM protesters? Totally true observation. But can you imagine the Leftist-think-piece-machine infighting if they were?

Corinna: Ah, good point. Whatever contention that might provoke, I wish the “caring-yet-silly” aura of the marches were mentioned more frequently.

MEXICO CITY/Michael Anthony Farley

Michael: One nice thing about the protests in Mexico: the sense of Mexicans and US Citizens being in this together. Mexico is none too happy with its own president, Enrique Peña Nieto, who recently privatized the nation’s gas supply to corporations. This, combined with Trump’s anti-Mexico rhetoric and economic policies has led to a crazy spike in prices here, as the value of the peso has slipped. It’s funny, because Peña (a neoliberal who’s seemingly pro-globalization) and Trump hate each other, but it was great to see Americans and Mexicans marching together to say “we understand, we both have shitty presidents.”

Whitney: Lol. Were there any popular slogans or pussy hats? How do Mexico City residents feel they’ll be personally affected by the Trump administration?

Also, have you been meeting a lot of ex-pats down there?

Michael: One of the bi-national protests’ slogan was “Tu generación construyó el muro, nuestra generación lo destruirá.” Your generation built the wall, our generation will destroy it.

MEXICO CITY: Mexican and American protesters in a solidarity bloc outside the US Embassy/Michael Anthony Farley

But there are so many slogans here (which rhyme better, obviously)! One of the things I love most about this city is its active Leftist political culture. There are multiple songs about general strikes in Spanish! People here protest so much they have reusable protest flags, not flimsy cardboard signs destined for the landfill.

I totally forgot that I saw this one pussy hat until I made the above GIF. I didn’t make it to the women’s march the next day, otherwise I am sure I would’ve seen more! Plenty of feminist-socialist flags at the J20 demonstrations though!

Corinna: I’m so interested in what a reusable protest flag looks like. I’m wondering if people here in the states are getting more and more used to protesting, based on the number of people I saw using cardboard signs. If you never protest, you might be more willing to spend some money on making an entirely new sign out of new materials. Maybe it has to do with recycling. Or people having plenty of Amazon Prime boxes lying around to make signs.

You don’t need a sign to be effective. As I arrived to the march, an elderly woman, who, like my own grandmother, shuffles slowly when she walks with her neck twisted toward the ground, kept up a chorus of “Dump Trump” throughout the crowd. I want to be her when I’m older. She’s my hero.

Michael: There were so many good older lady role models in our protest too! It was so inspiring to see older people march for miles holding banners about climate change and reproductive rights, next to transwomen demanding better rights for migrants, next to students with banners in solidarity with workers. Here, there seems to be a lot less of the weird, ineffectual Leftist balkanization over identity politics and specific issues than in the US. 

Mexico City/Michael Anthony Farley

But speaking of flags, my reusable “FUERA TRUMP” protest flag cost me less than the USD equivalent of $.75 thanks to Trump’s own vitriol towards Mexico, which is putting the Peso’s value in a tailspin. In answer to your question, Whitney, The majority of Mexicans are already feeling the effects of his economic isolationist policies via inflation at home. People are also resentful (or resigned) to the fact that it’s become prohibitively expensive/complicated (and likely to get much, much worse) to visit friends or family in the United States, largely thanks to our stupid visa system. I’m always embarrassed when I forget about this and invite people to visit me back in the States, especially considering the ease and warm welcome with which we can come here.

I’m actually a little disappointed about how relatively few Americans turned out for the march. Don’t get me wrong—there was a sizable contingent marching behind a “US-MX Solidarity” banner, but that crowd’s numbers were also inflated by Mexican, Canadian, and Japanese friends. Over 700,000 American citizens live in Mexico City—more than most U.S. cities, including Washington D.C., Boston, and Baltimore. When you compare the number of Americans who protested here to the numbers in those cities it’s a little disheartening. Just a few days after Trump was elected in November, thousands of people took to the streets in Baltimore, for example.

That might be because a lot of immigrants to Mexico City (myself included) come from countries with politics we’d like to escape. And escapism is so, so tempting. And to be fair, I also know a lot of non-Mexican citizens are terrified of being deported as a result of protesting, since there’s an ambiguous law about foreign agents interfering with politics, which can lead to expulsion. None of us want to get banned from Mexico, because we love it, which is a big part of why we’re so anti-wall to begin with! Legal troubles here are scary, but it’s a chance myself and dozens of other foreigners were willing to take.

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