Requiem for Stop Cop City

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alzoone Media get ready for anarchy in Atlanta.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
It should be clear to all Americans that we have
a very serious left wing terror threat in our country.

Speaker 3 (00:19):
State of the art, organized and well funded activists in criminals.

Speaker 4 (00:26):
On April twenty ninth, twenty twenty five, after almost exactly
four years of protests, sabotage, encampments, and organizing against the
construction of a state of the art police training facility
dubbed copp City, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center officially
opened atop of the South River Forest into Kabba County, Georgia.

(00:48):
One two three cuts.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center is open. A handshake
between Governor Brian Kemp and are relieved Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.

Speaker 5 (01:00):
Here has not been an easy journey.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
The opening of the one hundred and eighteen million dollar
complex for police, fire and E nine to one one personnel,
which includes academic, leadership and simulation centers, came after not months,
but years of public pushback.

Speaker 4 (01:20):
This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. I've
been covering the combined Defend the Atlanta Forest, Stop cop
City movement on this show since twenty twenty one. I
first traveled to Atlanta to report on the ground from
inside of the protest encampments in spring of twenty twenty two,
and I moved to Atlanta to continue covering story more

(01:43):
in depth in twenty twenty three. My coverage has tracked
the trajectory of the movement as well as my ability
as a reporter, But this will be my last piece
on the Stop Cop City movement. Every other reporter mini
series I've done on Stop Cup City was written while
the movement was still ongoing and the final outcome had

(02:04):
yet to be fully determined. Something that set the movement
in Atlanta apart was the genuine belief that this fight
was actually winnable, as opposed to the many lofty aspirations
of other anti police, anarchists or leftist struggles. I believe
that we will win and cop City will never be built.

(02:27):
Were common turns of phrase and not just repeated mindlessly
as a protest chant, but deeply believed. But now, six
months after the grand opening of Cop City, I want
to use this distance to offer a look at the
whole movement, based on interviews and conversations I've had with organizers, anarchists,
and forest defenders. Analyzing the movements rise and fall and momentum,

(02:50):
and why Atlanta is the bridge between the twenty twenty
protests during Trump's first term and the current expansion of
police surveillance, ice activity an increased state repression against quote
unquote radical left terrorists. We don't have enough time to
retread a complete, in depth play by play of the
movement's history, most of which I've already covered in previous episodes,

(03:13):
but I will attempt to break down the movement into
a series of discrete phases. After organizers learned about the
plans to build cop City in April of twenty twenty one,
the movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest first took form
with an opening attack phase throughout the entire summer of
twenty twenty one, with tree spiking and sabotage targeting construction

(03:37):
equipment on the east side of the forest, which a
movie studio was planning to develop at the time in
partnership with local government. To quote from an anonymous Atlanta
anarchist quote, early stages of the movement were very intentionally
defined by lots of sabotage and unapologetic militancy, just absolute
this is what we're doing. This is what we're about.

(03:59):
This is the goal. If you don't like it, that's cool,
but then don't be a part of this. That was
just what we were doinguote. In September twenty twenty one,
the Atlantic City Council voted to approve the land Lease
Ordinance authorizing the Atlanta Police Foundation to use hundreds of
acres of city owned land in the South River Forest
to build cop City. After this vote, electoral strategy gets

(04:21):
largely aeshewed, and soon after the next phase fully kicks
off that fall with the physical occupation of the forest
and the start of the pressure campaign's targeting subcontractors working
on the construction project. To again, quote from an anonymous
Atlanta anarchist quote, persistent encampment, occupation, lots of direct action happening,

(04:43):
lots of sabotage happening, and the cops just not knowing
what to do at all. Small incursions would get made,
but they just had not figured out what to do
about it yet. There was just kind of like free
reign unquote. For the first half of this occupation phase,
the Atlanta Police into cab sheriffs seemed to be stuck
in a form of paralysis, not knowing how to disrupt

(05:06):
the forest encampments or prevent equipment sabotage. Meanwhile, the pressure campaign,
inspired by the tactics of the animal rights group Shack,
showed early promise in getting some contractors like Reeves A
Young construction and material suppliers to drop out of the
cop City project. But after this stream of steady success
from Fall of twenty twenty one to May of twenty

(05:28):
twenty two, the police were forced to up the ante
and started conducting large scale raids in the forest to
remove force defenders and damage encampment infrastructure. Quoting an Atlanta
anarchist quote, May of twenty twenty two is the end
of the paralysis phase for the cops. We had our
first grid sweep raids where the paralysis phase is broken.

(05:50):
You're getting your multi agency large sweeps where they're really
coming in and putting in a lot of work. That
really leads up to January of twenty twenty three where
Torte got killed. Prior to the police killing of Tortigita
during a forest encampment raid on January eighteen, twenty twenty three,
the occupation phase proved highly effective in preventing pre construction,

(06:15):
but the killing and Tortighita essentially marked the end of
the continuous occupation phase. What followed was a period of
high octane intensity. Let's call this the revenge phase. Quoting
in Atlanta anarchist. You get this kind of like trading
blows with the cops repeatedly during that time, and things
are getting pretty fucking crazy, hitting their highest pitch at

(06:37):
March fifth quote. During the South River Music Festival on
March fifth, a few hundred people splintered off from the
festival and marched to the nearby Cop City construction site.
The crowd repelled police and construction equipment was set on fire.
The cops weretleated, quick swarming the area with all available
units in Atlanta, kettled the festival and eventually arrested twenty

(06:59):
three people, charging them with domestic terrorism. After the events
of March fifth, the movement entered an odd limbo phase,
with heightened tensions among the Stop Cop City coalition on
the role of direct action and sabotage within mass movement actions.
During this period, police fortified and regularly patrolled the perimeter

(07:21):
around the forest. Entry became heavily restricted Following this denial
of operating space. The forest around the slated construction site
was preemptively clear cut to both prepare for construction and
demoralize the movement. But a month later, the bail fund
and legal defense nonprofit the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, was raided

(07:42):
by police and were later charged with money laundering and
charity fraud. Just a few days after the raid, the
city Council approved a sixty seven million dollar Cop City
funding package. The next day, organizers announced a referendum campaign
to gather petition signatures to put the Cops City land
Lease Ordinance on the upcoming November ballot. Despite setbacks, there

(08:05):
was still energy going towards stopping Cop City, but it
was fragmenting in ways that it hadn't really before. There
was no clear consensus on the direction to take the movement.
Previous periods of shift in the movement were often marked
by an organized Week of Action, which was a convergence
of people from all around the country or even the world,
who traveled to Atlanta to partake in a week's worth

(08:27):
of events, actions, and protests against Cop City. The Atlanta
Police Foundation and contractors hired to build the facility the
summer of twenty twenty three saw the sixth organized Week
of Action, but it too was caught in this limbo phase,
and without the forest as an operating zone, the Week
of Action struggled to find its purpose despite the surge

(08:49):
in movement participation around the city Hall budget vote earlier
that June. The next phase was the first to be
positively determined by the police, the repression phase, which really
sets in around August of twenty twenty three with the
Rico indictment charging sixty one people with racketeering, arson, and
domestic terrorism. State repression then evolved in the form of

(09:13):
persistent surveillance of activists, house raids, and additional charges, which
leads to the current trial phase. Quote an Atlanta anarchist quote,
I think an important aspect of this phase is obviously
supporting your defendants, preparing for the potential of long term
prisoner support, and also not letting the state be the
one to close the book by doing this, because you

(09:36):
don't want to let them define the narrative of this
forever by getting to put their rubber stamp on the
end of the trial and calling it Otherwise, the movement
gets stuck in this permanent zombie phase where we're still saying,
stop cop City is this thing that's happening. When it's built,
it's built, it's right there, right like. It doesn't mean

(09:58):
that we all just go home, but it means that
you're like a veteran of this battle now and there's
new shit to do, new stuff to work on. Even
in retrospect, people have been largely hesitant to assign blame
to a specific factor in why the fight to stop
cop City fell short of achieving its stated goal. But

(10:20):
we can track a decline in momentum which allowed the
state to gain the upper hand. For nearly three years,
state repression tactics failed to disrupt the growing momentum against
the Cop City project. Forest raids, arrests, and criminal charges
made little impact. The use of terrorism charges as a
repression tactic started back in December of twenty twenty two,

(10:43):
following an encampment raid resulting in six people being charged
with domestic terrorism. This was the first time that charge
has been used in Georgia, following its adoption in twenty
seventeen in response to the whitepremacist mass shooting by Dylan Roof.
Just a month after domestic terrorism charges were first deployed.
Tortighito was killed by police in another forest raid, but

(11:05):
this tragedy only seemed to strengthen the resolve of the
movement to fight cop City, which then only grew. Similarly,
the clear cutting of the force itself wasn't enough to
demoralize the people in Atlanta. Rather, the hesitation to build
on the momentum of a widely publicized direct action like
March fifth provided this state in opening while the movement

(11:29):
was stuck in limbo. Throughout this limbo phase, the movement
was adjusting from intensified momentum and the high octane aspects
leading to March fifth. But as the energy tapered down,
the state jumped on that dip in momentum, then delta
pretty significant blow with the Rico indictment. The Rico charges

(11:49):
in August of twenty twenty three, followed by the series
of house raids in February of twenty twenty four, were
a pretty crippling one to punch that stifled the momentum
to our almost a complete standstill. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist,
A lot of people will argue their opinions about what
was the stifling thing. I think some of the more

(12:10):
electorally or mass movement. Big tent minded people would argue that,
like March fifth, takes a lot of the wind out
of the sails. I think a lot of people would
disagree with that, just because like you can build on
the momentum of a March fifth, you can build on
like a triumphant battlefield victory, it's a lot harder to

(12:30):
build on just everyone getting more charges and also people
getting their doors kicked in really early in the morning.
It's hard to build on that. Despite the Rico charges,
acts of sabotage did continue, but isolated sabotage alone wasn't
enough to propel the movement. After the referendum campaign was

(12:53):
effectively nullified by the state and fall of twenty twenty three,
there was a lack of willingness among its organizers to
engage in serious efforts to get people engaged in mass
actions or pressure campaigns targeted against elected officials. Something multiple
activists in Atlanta have mentioned to me as a contributing
factor to the eventual decline in momentum during this limbo

(13:14):
stage is a sort of failure to prefigure alternative strategies
and adapt After the forest occupation became impossible to maintain,
especially considering just how much weight people had put into
that strategy but then did not come up with a
clear next step after the police were able to suppress
that tactic by completing their ODA loops and improving their

(13:37):
own strategies. The ODA loop is a four step military
decision making model used across a large variety of professional fields,
including policing. Step one, observe, gather as much information as possible,
then orient, synthesize and information with background knowledge, decide on
the next course of action using that newly synthesized information,

(14:01):
and finally act and the results of your actions should
then send you back to step one. Failure to act
at all or too slowly often ends in defeat. To
quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, you need contingency lines right,
either things that you're willing to escalate in the current

(14:21):
line of strategy that you're doing to make it still viable,
or a complete change in strategy it can be changed
in tactics to something new and exciting. Either of those
are valid options. Doing both of them in the same
time can be extremely effective, but at the end of
the day, you have to when the cops start to
break out of paralysis. An example from any eco defense

(14:42):
or occupation, whether in Atlanta or somewhere else, when the
cops start to break out of that paralysis, you have
to escalate in some way. The occupation, the defense of it,
has to escalate in some way to prevent them from
feeling safe coming in or trying to, or the physical
space of action to change, because now they need to

(15:03):
recalibrate to oh, shit, like, not only is the occupation
less assailable than we thought because there's been a change
in tactics, but there's also a massive uptick and shit
going on everywhere else, and that significantly impedes their ability
to have an ODA loop to do battle with. You
can even look at the ice pickups that got a

(15:23):
lot of attention in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were not expecting
that many people just to show up. You can see
when the crowd starts to hit like a critical mass
of rage and getting really close to those guys that
they fucking panic. They freak out, like it's very clear
even just in the small amount of their faces and
their movements that you can see that they were panicking.

(15:48):
Similar scenes have since taken place in Chicago and Portland.
And I've seen this before with Bortac during the twenty
twenty protests in Portland. I think anyone who has watched
the Cops for Treat has seen this before. But the
more the same thing happens, the more you get used
to it, the more you experiment and find ways to

(16:08):
adapt and overcome. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, cops panic
and you can see it in the way they walk
like they weren't ready for that, and next time they
might be, which means you have to add something new,
a new spice has to get thrown in a new
flavor profile. They'll get used to pushing through crowds like
that until someone hits them at the end of the day,

(16:29):
and whether you're like confronting them on the ground or
trying to get to the neighborhoods ahead of time to
knock people's doors to get them out, Eventually cops will
start to find ways to counteract your strategy, and eventually
you will have to reshift and recalibrate the tools you
are using to orient back to Atlanta, All these instances

(16:49):
I've mentioned amount to failing to take advantage of key moments,
whether that be in the aftermath of March fifth, the
seeming impossibility of continue nude forest encampments or of the
city's blanket refusal to accept the results of the referendum.
In these moments, the police and the state were able
to determine where battle lines were drawn, and quite literally

(17:13):
so during the quote unquote block Cop City protest in
October of twenty twenty three, where police easily repelled a
protest march from even reaching the road to the Cop
City construction site, and the state continued to push their
lines forward with the joint fbiatf raids on activist houses
in February twenty twenty four, which further stifled the movement

(17:36):
and was coupled with months to years long persistent surveillance
and intimidation denoted by cops parked outside of homes of
alleged activists, mobile surveillance, and hidden cameras placed in front
of activists homes and a local community center. One of
the more frightening incidents came in May of twenty twenty four,
where a resident of one of the homes raided that

(17:58):
February woke up in the middle night to a bright
light outside the bedroom window only to find a lit
road flare catching the wooden railing of their porch steps
on fire. One of the things I've been reflecting on

(18:24):
regarding cop City is the way people talked about fear
as a tool. Frank Herbert's litany against fear was a
common refrain to overcome the fear that this state used
as a weapon. But the first time I heard fear
mentioned as an offensive measure wasn't in reference to this
state using fear. It was in early twenty twenty two

(18:44):
when I first visited the forest encampment, and the anarchists
talked about how the police were scared of entering the forest,
how delusions of Vietnam's style booby traps demonstrated that the
cups are not impervious super soldiers. Instilling fear is a
major aspect of police training. They are susceptible to emotional impulses,

(19:06):
like all of us. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote. But
while we understand our own fear, I think people often
fall into the trap of not understanding that the state
is also afraid of them. Because the state feels like
this monolithic machine, like this unassailable entity, that it is

(19:27):
not It's made up of people with flaws and emotions
who have the same corrozol response to being threatened that
you or I do. A big part of the lessons
learned from Atlanta has to be of willingness to engage
with them in a way that is personally endangering. That
is the single way out. They're human and they get scared.

(19:49):
The fear that I think had them so tight until
May of twenty twenty two was a fear that manifested
itself in a lot of paralysis. Fear is of normal
human emotion to danger. So whether you're the most hardened
swat team guy going up against the craziest eco freak
in the world, fear is a normal reaction to that.

(20:11):
But what really had them so tight was fear as
a matter of them being paralyzed by it that they
couldnot find out how to move. And once they did
find out around May of twenty twenty two, we really
start to see things change and like they were scared
enough in the woods to shoot someone to death, like
they were still afraid, we were able to instill an

(20:33):
immense amount of fear in our enemy, which is an
absolutely necessary tool if you're going to be on the
very nimble, small green team insurgency side of things. You
have to make your enemy afraid of the dark, but
also you have your defensive strategy against fear. You would
hear all the time in Atlanta, the whole let the

(20:54):
fear wash over you and through you mantra. That was
a thing that people talked about and said constantly, because
you have to find a way to move through that paralysis. Eventually,
and with the help of a multi agency task force,
the cops in Atlanta were able to move through that

(21:14):
fear and continue their actions. They were not totally paralyzed
by it. In contrast, the pseudo paralysis affecting Stop Cop
City only set in very late into the movement as
a culative result of a coordinated sequence of oppression tactics.
As the movement has been winding down and transitioning to

(21:36):
court support, something people in Atlanta have had to balance
is the urge to keep Stop Cop City in this
sort of unalive zombie state where you're still kind of
acting like it's an ongoing thing, even though the immediate
local result is pretty clearly finished. But in keeping this

(21:57):
kind of zombie version of the movement alive, it prevents
you from actually moving on and internalizing what happened here
and using that for whatever comes next, which is at
this point a burgeoning police state and right wing power block.
Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, internalizing not just in
terms of like lessons learned and things that you need

(22:19):
to learn from and skill up on to keep that
honed combative edge in Atlanta, but to think about fighting
on a larger scope than just Atlanta. As the cops
took their lessons learned here nationwide in terms of how
they're doing repression towards Palestinian liberation movements towards a lot
of the way that ICE operations are currently happening. That

(22:40):
necessitates that we also take our lessons learned here and
also go to a larger scale with them. Also, if
you never close the book yourself on this battle that
you're a part of, which people incurred a massive amount
of trauma doing at a certain point, this could just
remain like an open wound on you forever if you

(23:00):
let it. And it is probably unhelpful to keep seeing
the movement to stop cop City is doing a rally here.
Like when it's built, it's there, and now we need
to move on to other things. We need to move
on to other things that are larger than Atlanta. There's
still a police state to engage with here. You don't

(23:21):
need the container of this struggle to justify going out
and taking action against the police. And there are other
things happening in Atlanta. There's vice rates happening in Atlanta
in the north suburbs of the city. Cop City is
actively being enacted, and if people want to continue stopping it,
they'll have to actually stop what the effects are which

(23:44):
are now happening on a nationwide scale. An early irony
of the movement was that though cop City was conceived
as a training ground for police first, it became a
training ground for anarchists. As top Cup City became the
first mass movement following the twenty twenty George Floyd protests,

(24:05):
whatever happened in Atlanta would demonstrate what activists have learned
from the twenty twenty uprising, as well as influence what
future movements against police expansion might look like. Atlanta Police
Chief Darren Shecherbaum expressed as much during the Public Safety
Training Center grand opening.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
Because when Antifa put out its call for individuals to
rally here in this spot and on Peachtree Street, from
across the nation and literally the globe. We were up
against a playbook we had never seen at the Atlanta
Police Department, and we ourselves put out the call for help,
and no sheriff said no, No police chief said no.
The Georgia State Patrol, the Department Natural Resources should ste

(24:47):
by side of this department, as did the FBI and
the ATF, because we all knew that that playbook was
successful here in Atlanta, Georgia, it would find itself across
this country and public safety be stymied wherever we go.

Speaker 4 (25:02):
While Atlanta served as this training ground for anarchists, in response,
the state also used the movement to test out strategies
for the next generation of counterinsurgency tactics, well before the
cop City facility was finished being built. Now, with this
specific localized struggle at completion, both organizers and the state

(25:25):
are carrying lessons forward as Trump expands police power, deploys
National Guard, increases ICE operations, and continues repression against organizers
protesting the Palestinian genocide. To quote an Atlanta anarchist quote,
I think as a matter of reimagining the struggle that
you're a part of insurrectionary struggle is often an imaginative one.

(25:46):
And if you were part of this thing here, you
are now like a veteran of the fight in Atlanta.
This thing, like this specific thing that was defend the
Atlanta Forest. Top cop City is something to be learned
from and valued and also moved on from and to
move on from while taking lessons learned, experience gained, and

(26:08):
connections made, and following those things through to their logical conclusion.
Such that the state has as well. They have taken
lessons learned from here and followed them through to their
nationwide logical conclusions. We are necessitated to do that as well.
That doesn't mean you have given up. It just means
that there's new shit happening. It's helpful to re imagine

(26:29):
yourself not as just we're in Atlanta, we're doing stop
Coop City, to now you are engaged in a nationwide
anti fascist struggle against like a fascist police state. This
nationwide focus has always been an aspect of Stop Cop City.
One of the movements key slogans was cop City is Everywhere.

(26:52):
Organizers did speaking tours around the country to educate about
the movement and thousands of people from all around the
country and the world traveled to Atlanta to participate in
weeks of action. The physical fight top Cop City also
expanded outside of Atlanta with solidarity attacks and direct actions
as a part of the tertiary targeting campaign against subcontractors

(27:12):
and insurance companies. This nationwide drift also happened on the
side of the state, with similar police training facilities having
been proposed in dozens of other cities, and the strategies
of repression used in Atlanta have been copied on a
national level. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, now the cops

(27:33):
are spreading out, and their strategies and the strategies of repression,
both militantly on the ground and legally, and even their
propaganda and their messaging has gone outwards from here. And
so too, then must our lessons learned both in how
we prepare and engage in struggle in Atlanta, but also
how we make connections to the rest of the country.
People who came here are now back home and will

(27:55):
make connections to the people around them. The cops in
different cities, they have big conferences. They talk to each other,
they learn from each other. There's no reason that we
shouldn't be, you know, doing so with caution and security culture.
Don't have your Atlanta veteran hat on. But we have
things to learn from each other, and if you were here,

(28:16):
you've got a lot to potentially teach people. Even if
that was just like, here's how we fucking run a
kitchen where we cook for like four hundred people in
a day, or here's how we sneak around in the
middle of the night. This is a representative of the
Fire and Movement Defense at a cop City trial press
conference from September twenty twenty five.

Speaker 5 (28:38):
The horrors we predicted have come to pass. Federal agents
now stock communities from coast to coast, masked and unnamed,
snatching people from buses, farms, kitchens, and churches. Who can
argue now that we were wrong to resist the endless
expansion of police power, now that Trump commands them, now

(29:00):
that they are his police. The very people who helped
lay the groundwork now scramble to distance themselves from his orders,
his camps, his federal troop deployments. But they built the logistics,
they funded the training centers, they expanded the surveillance. Liberal
governments like Atlantis helped pave the way for the descent
of our country into autocracy.

Speaker 4 (29:24):
As Marlincrats of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund told The New Republic, quote,
what's happening in Atlanta is a vision of the future.
This is a test run of a repressive playbook that
authorities on many different levels are experimenting with to discover
what they can get away with. Let's look at some

(29:45):
examples of expanding surveillance, increasing police resources, and these strategies
for counter insertaency that are spreading in the era of
Trump two point zero. In January of this year, Georgia
Representative Marjorie Taylor Green introduced a resolution titled deeming certain
conduct of members of Antifa as domestic terrorism and designating

(30:09):
Antifa as domestic terrorist Organization, which the measure justifies by
referencing multiple instances of protesters in Atlanta being charged with
domestic terrorism. The Atlanta based surveillance company Flock Safety, gained
early notoriety for their camera towers placed around the slated
Copcity construction site in the South River Forest, which protesters

(30:33):
repeatedly toppled. Flock has grown massively the past four years,
with over eighty thousand quote unquote AI powered cameras in
forty nine states. These cameras complete over twenty billion scans
per month. Flock cameras and license plate readers have spread
all around the country and are used by all manners

(30:55):
of agencies, including ICE, as well as Texas sheriffs, who
have used the nationwide camera network to track pregnant women
seeking abortions. Border Patrol has used Atlanta's local flock camera
network to make over three thousand and two hundred searches
from January to November twenty twenty five. In April twenty
twenty five, President Trump signed an executive order titled Strengthening

(31:20):
and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement to pursue criminals and protect
innocent citizens. This order calls to quote unleash high impact
local police forces, protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly
accused and abused by state or local officials, and surge
resources to officers in needuote. It directs the Attorney General
to create a mechanism to have private sector law firms

(31:42):
provide pro bono legal events to police officers who quote
unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the
performance of their official duties to enforce the law. This
tries to make it harder for a police to be
held accountable for both civil and criminal misconduct, basically extending
qualified a mus to the criminal realm. The order also

(32:03):
calls to use federal resources to increase pay, expand training,
and strengthen legal protections for police officers, as well as
to quote seek enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers,
promote investment in the security in capacity of prisons, and
increase the investment in and collection, distribution and uniformity of

(32:24):
crime data across jurisdictions. The Attorney General is directed to
review and remove any previous accountability restrictions placed on local
or state law enforcement agencies that might unduly impede the
performance of law enforcement functions. And then finally, quote, the

(32:44):
Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with
Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate,
shall increase the provision of excess military and national security
assets in local jurisdictions to assist state and local law enforcement.
And shall determine how military and national security assets, training,

(33:04):
non lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized.
To prevent crime. As the police become further militarized, the
military prepares to do more policing. One of the executive
orders from Trump's police takeover of Washington d C contains
a section directing the Secretary of Defense to quote designate

(33:27):
an appropriate number of each state's trained National Guard members
to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization to assist federal, state,
and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances, and that quote,
a standing National Guard Quick Reaction Force shall be resourced, trained,
and available for rapid nationwide deployment. Later in October of

(33:53):
twenty twenty five, the Department of Defense sent out memos
to each state's National Guard mandating that each state have
their own Quick Reaction forces operational by January first, twenty
twenty six, with crowd control equipment and two full time
trainers by the National Guard Bureau being provided to each unit.
The units contain, on average, five hundred troops per state,

(34:16):
ordered to be ready to deploy within eight to twenty
four hours. The initial portion of the Bureau training courses
cover how to quote form squad sized riot control formations
employ a riot baton as member of a riot control
formation how to supervise a riot, slash, crowd control operation,
crowd management techniques, and domestic civil disturbance training. On September

(34:42):
twenty second, Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa as
a domestic terrorist organization. Three days later, Trump signed the
National Security Presidential Memorandum seven on Countering Domestic Terrorism and
Organized Political Violence, which calls for a new national la
enforcement strategy to quote investigate all participants of these criminal

(35:03):
and terroristic conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that
foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in
criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts unquote.
The memo orders local joint terrorism task forces to quote
investigate potential federal crimes relating to acts of recruiting or

(35:26):
radicalizing persons for the purpose of political violence, terrorism, or
conspiracy against rights, as well as investigating institutional and individual funders,
including employees of organizations which are quote responsible for, sponsor
or otherwise aid in a bet the principal actors engaging

(35:47):
in the criminal conduct unquote. As previously described, the Treasury
Secretary will work with Thetorney General to quote identify and
disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political violence,
and shall deploy investigative tools to examine financial flows and
coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit funding streams. The

(36:09):
memo also instructs the IRS to quote take action to
ensure that no tax exempt entities are directly or indirectly
financing political violence or domestic terrorism unquote, and that the
IRS shall refer organizations and their employees to the Department
of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution, quoting the memo

(36:30):
one final time, quote, Investigations shall prioritize crimes such as
the following assaulting federal officers or employees, conspiracy against rights,
conspiracy to commit offense, solicitation to commit a crime of violence,
money laundering, funding of terrorist acts, or otherwise facilitating terrorism, arson,
violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act RICO,

(36:55):
and major fraud against the United States unquote. At Trump's
White House ANTIFO roundtable meeting, Seamus Bruner, the director of
research at the Government Accountability Institute, discussed his theory of
how a network of NGOs are funding ANTIFA, and specifically
mentioned stop cop City.

Speaker 6 (37:15):
There was an event in Atlanta called stop cop City.
Over sixty rioters were charged with domestic terrorism. These groups
received money for that from both the billionaire class as
well as taxpayer money.

Speaker 4 (37:29):
So On May one, twenty twenty five, Homeland Security Investigations,
Secret Service and the acting ICE Director rated a home
in Irving, California, looking for a man who allegedly posted
flyers around Los Angeles containing the names, pictures, and phone
numbers of ICE agents, with text in Spanish reading careful

(37:49):
with these faces. In April of twenty twenty three, three
activists were arrested for allegedly posting flyers identifying a police
officer nected to the killing of Tortigita on the mailboxes
in that officer's neighborhood in Barlow County, Georgia, about forty
miles from Atlanta. The activists were charged with felony intimidation

(38:11):
and were later added to the Cop City Weako case.
To circle back to the topic of fear, the targeting
of people putting up flyers simply identifying cops or anonymous

(38:34):
ICE agents demonstrates how the state understands fear as a weapon.
That's why they did the reco charges. That's why they
do the house raids. That's why they do overt surveillance
where you're getting followed around by police. But they are
susceptible to fear as well. Through their actions, ICE demonstrates
a high level of fear. They are taking massive steps

(38:56):
to hide the identities of ICE agents on the ground
and punishing people who attempt to identify these agents. They're
complaining about being compared to Nazis and called the Gestapo.
They're referencing very dubious statistics about an increase in assaults
against officers, and they are afraid enough to shoot their
guns at unarmed people more than half a dozen times

(39:18):
in the past six months. They are scared, and as
evil and super soldiery as they may seem, they are
indeed afraid. To quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, unless
you do something to keep them afraid, eventually it will stop.
Unless you change your strategy, change course, escalate in some

(39:40):
way that shatters their ODA loop, they will break free
of their paralysis and they will find a way through
their fear. So when that starts to happen, it's time
to do something new and insane, because you have to
keep them afraid, because, like by every moral right they
should be. They should be fucking terrified to leave their homes.
And if they are too a f to leave their homes,

(40:01):
then they can't go out and do their jobs at
the end of the day. That's their odor loop right there.
The scale of fear as a tool of repression is
always exponentially larger than this scale of physical or legal repression.
It punches well above its weight. You can look at
Atlanta as a good example of this, and you can
even look at some of the arrests made in response

(40:23):
to Palestinian liberation protests. It takes black bagging six people
to paralyze six thousand because it's terrifying, because it's scary,
like it's fucked up, that's a bad thing to have
happened to you, and like, of course, people are afraid.
Fear is one of those things that if you're engaging
an anti fascist struggle, whether you're an anti fascist, whether

(40:44):
you're an anarchist or whatever, all of us have an
ethical obligation to ourselves and the people around us to
push through fear as an emotion, to find ways to
work with it, because it won't go away, and it shouldn't.
Fear can also keep you safe. But we are necessitated
by the political moment we are in to find a
way to take extensive action in spite of that unquote.

(41:07):
Twenty twenty was a lot of people's first experience with
mass protest, and some of this people then carry those
experiences into Copcity. But then for other people, Stop cop
City was their first experience. And now you have an
even younger generation of people, the Gen Alpha terrorists, who
aren't even old enough to have been involved in Atlanta.
But people are still looking at what happened in Atlanta

(41:31):
as this bridge gap between twenty twenty and twenty twenty five,
the movement to Stop Cop City as the bridge between
these two different eras of uprising and resistance against authoritarianism.
As the Copcity chapter closes, activists in Atlanta want people
to carry on what's been learned in the contents of

(41:52):
their struggle onto whatever the next volume is. Because Cop
City itself is in a sequence of events that have
happened beyond and longer than what me or anyone involved
in Cop City has been alive by generations. Cop City
is not Volume one. Cop City is volume like thirty two,
but at the same time it's also the immediate prequel

(42:15):
to the rise of a nationwide expansion of police power
and surveillance led by a wanna be right wing strong man.
Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, a big lesson learned from
Atlanta is that it is way safer to do shit
in the middle of the night than anything else. We've
had exactly one arrest made over the years, an arrest

(42:35):
that's not gone to trial. This is an alleged crime
of one midnight sabotage action. Of the dozens and dozens
and dozens of ursins that have happened, and this arrest
happened very late into the movement. Out of the dozens
and dozens of attacks that have happened, only one arrest
has been made after the fact. Another lesson learned is

(42:58):
the difficulty of day counter surveillance and how much that
requires militancy as a daily practice to again quote from
an anonymous anarchist in Atlanta quote, militant anarchism as a
daily practice understanding your adversary, not just as this thing
that you meet on the field for twenty minutes of
action and then you both go home and like call it,

(43:21):
but that they are constantly pursuing you that you are
being like hunted for sport, and you have to evade
and maneuver constantly. That security culture is a persistent thing
throughout the years, that you are going to continually keep
having to be a part of it and do so
in a very disciplined way. Unquote. A lot of the

(43:44):
success that stopcop City achieved was based on a willingness
to take an extremely militant approach to prefigurative infrastructure, which
added longevity to the combative struggle. Both were necessitated as
symbiotic elements of this same curt feature. Throughout the Cop
City struggle, organizers and activists learned that if you're not

(44:05):
always able to engage in a directly combative fight, using
militancy and discipline in their infrastructural projects the same way
they would in a combative engagement, helps prepare for what
will be necessary when things do turn combative. Quoting an
Atlanta anarchist quote, the state is this constantly churning machine,
like it is always trying to acquire new tools and

(44:27):
equipment and lessons, and we can't just sit still while
they do this and be like, okay, Well, at some
point in four to five years, a flashpoint will happen
at the place that I live, and I'll go out
there and I'll be like I was in Atlanta, So
I'll be good because I remember how to do all that.
Because if you do nothing for the next four to
five years, we're just going to be reinventing the wheel

(44:48):
over and over again, and all the like fucked up
trauma that you incurred doing that won't have been helpful
at all if you don't remember the skills learned on
the ground, because all skills atrophy and get weaker over time.
Looking back at Stop Coop City won't provide all the
answers to solve the problems facing the country today, especially

(45:12):
in light of the end result of the movement, But
it would be a mistake to overlook the ways Stop
Coop City made a legitimate impact on the resulting facility
and the political situation in Atlanta and beyond. I think
there's ways of looking at degrees of success the movement
had while still recognizing its obvious shortcomings, considering the fact

(45:33):
that there is a facility called the Atlanta Public Safety
Training Center, but a small group of activists turned a
proposed police training facility into a national political issue. Its
opening was delayed by years at at least thirty million
dollars over budget, and the current facility lacks the full

(45:54):
mock city design that it initially had, which inspired the
Cop City namesake. Moving forward, both these successes and shortcomings
will be internalized by thousands of people who traveled to
or lived in Atlanta and joined in the movement to
stop Cop City. As Trump now signs executive orders expanding
military equipment, federal training, and legal protections for police, deploys

(46:18):
the National Guard to quell civil disturbance, and targets anti fascists, anarchists,
and left wing activists or ENGOs as domestic terrorists. Quoting
an Atlanta anarchist quote, what we are seeing is the
logical conclusion of our adversaries lessons learned in Atlanta, taking
the things that they learned how to do here, the

(46:39):
skills they honed, taken to a nationwide scale. This is
the logical conclusion of that. And there's a reason that
they are doing that. And if they are doing that,
then we should also do that. Like there's logical conclusions
and escalations of the things that we learned in Atlanta,
that it would be silly for us to not try
and push the further, including expanding the physical and metaphysical

(47:04):
terrain of battle. The immediate terrain for stop Copcity was
obviously the forest and now the cop City site itself,
but there was also the rest of Atlanta and all
the other construction sites, and then all these subcontractors around
the country and everything that supplies them. This same model

(47:25):
can apply to, say, the Palestine protests. There's a network
that exists beyond Columbia University campus that extends into the
weapons manufacturing industry, which could be targeted beyond consumer boycotts,
like what we saw was shack But what we saw
in Atlanta, where boycotts were an aspect, but by far
not the most effective aspect and in fact forcefully inflicting

(47:49):
monetary damage, caused a much greater degree of hurt to
the companies involved in the Copsity project as opposed to
the infighting caused by a walluse boycott. When reframing what
the terrain of battle could entail, it is actually intimidating
to think about what the reality of stopping these things

(48:12):
might look like. And as soon as you realize that
these fights go beyond a physical building. It becomes this
love crafty and entity that exists everywhere, and it's unnerving
to contemplate what you'd be forced to do to actually
realistically confront that. Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, it's

(48:34):
important to not get trapped in the you know, we're
doing an occupation on college campus. We're just going to
keep trying to do an occupation on college campus over
and over again, and the cops really good at clearing
us up. But now maybe this time. And I think
a part of the struggle here though, for people is
when you decentralize like that, the thing that you're doing

(48:55):
starts to take on a much different vibe. It can
be everywhere versus this is the college campus where we're
doing protest. I generally think at the end of the day,
it starts to feel a little bit too much like terrorismy,
it starts to feel too much like an insurgency, and
you see the path, you see the Pandora's box start
to open up a little bit, and you back off

(49:16):
because it's scary and that this thing will kill you.
This thing will try and kill you eventually, if you
push it far enough, it will try and kill you.
And I might succeed, And like, that's just the reality
of engaging with fascism combatively as an ideology, it's the
reality of engaging with advanced capitalism. That was the reality

(49:37):
of engaging with the police state, one that is well
understood in Atlanta and in many other places that this
isn't a game. You're not gonna get anywhere, just kind
of sitting on the same college campus green over and
over again, hoping for a different result. And as we've

(49:58):
seen this year with the State Department cracking down on
pro Palestine protests, just sitting there on the college green
doesn't prevent you from being black bagged by the FEDS,
taken to a black site, and deported. To close the episode,
in September twenty twenty four, the Georgia Attorney General's Office
dropped the money laundering charges against the organizers with the

(50:20):
Atlanta Solidarity Fund, though the defendants still remained on the
Rico indictment. Almost a full year later, on September ninth,
twenty twenty five, the defense successfully argued that the State
AG's office did not have the jurisdictional authority to prosecute
the sixty one defendants under the State's Rico Statute due

(50:42):
to simple procedural error in neglecting to first ask the
governor if the AG's office could prosecute this case. Judge
Farmer found that the AG does not have the authority
to prosecute count one of the Rico indictment, the racketeering
and conspiracy charges. Without the sweeping Rico charges engulfing this
sixty one defendants, just five defendants would be left with

(51:03):
Count two of the indictment, the domestic terrorism charges, which
the AG does have authority to prosecute, and Count three,
the arson charge, though Judge Farmer indicated that that charge
could also be thrown out on a similar technicality. The
prosecution is appealing this decision, and the defense has argued
that the state domestic terrorism law violates a constitution and

(51:26):
is far too broad and should be altered or overturned.
Judge Farmer has yet to rule on this, but he's
expected to very soon. Some of these sixty one defendants
could face charges individually in Fulton, Indicab County, but that
remains to be seen. The referendum case is still under

(51:46):
appeal in federal court, and the case against Jack Mazurich
is still in pre trial. Just because the Copsity trial
is finally progressing does not mean that movement participants are
safe nowvoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchists quote, people should be very
mindful going into the trial phase that that does not
mean that they are safe. There is no statute of

(52:08):
limitations on a lot of this stuff. Like with a
lot of radical movements, You're going to have to hold
a lot of that shit forever. Rely on support structures,
rely on your community, be careful about who you talk to. Unquote.
As Stopcop City becomes history, there will be an influx
of people trying to define the legacy of the movement,

(52:28):
whether that's through podcasts, documentaries, a college dissertation, or who
knows how many books are incoming. There already has been
a true crimification of the movement in certain coverage which
grossly objectifies the life of Torti Guita, platforms police as
more objective than movement participants, and removes autonomy from key

(52:50):
subjects to reframe the entire movement around other public facing individuals.
To quote an Atlanta anarchist one final time quote, I
think a big lesson from Atlanta and this is one
that we actually still have to win at is to
not let outside forces, whether that be the state or capital,

(53:11):
define the ending. That is a scope of battle that
we are still engaged with and still have to win.
We need to close the book on it ourselves, need
to rubber stamp it ourselves. No other entity can do
that for us. It would be disastrous if they did.
Unquote this has been it could happen here, see you

(53:34):
on the other side.

Speaker 2 (53:41):
It could happen here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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I can now find sources for it could Happen here.
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Requiem for Stop Cop City