It Could Happen Here - Antifascist Roundtable, Part 1

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

We are joined by Shane Burley, Emily Gorcenski, Daryle Lamont Jenkins, and Michael Novick to discuss their personal history in Antifascism, and their new anthology book ‘No Pasaran.’See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is the show where we talk about how everything is kind of falling apart and how we can sometimes put it back together. Joining me is my dear collaborator and friend, James Stout. Good morning, James. Good morning, Garrison. That's very kind of you. Thank you. And we got a very special episode here today. We are talking with four people who have put together a new book by AK Press called No Par Seran. We're going to have kind of a little bit of like a group discussion

about anti-fascist history and this kind of this state of anti-fascism in the past few years i know this is how i kind of got started with radical politics growing up in portland oregon you see nazis marching around in your street and you're like oh well this is obviously a problem someone should probably do something about this um and stuff has changed a lot the past the past few years i mean like the the anti-fascist movement that I kind of got into in like 2018, you know, it's very different now. And it's, I don't know, these types of things live on through like oral histories

as well as, you know, books. And I think it's really cool to have these types of conversations. So joining us today is Shane Burley, Emily Gorchinsky, Michael Novick, and Daryl Lamont-Jakins. Greetings, everyone. I'm going to hand it over to Shane, and you can kind of talk about the book, I guess. Yeah.

Thanks, Garrison. Thanks, James, for having us on, the whole crew of us. Yeah, this book was something that came out last year, but we had been working on it for about four years. I'm starting in 2018. I was drunk with Kim Kelly in New York, and we thought it'd be really great to put together something with all of our friends. And when you do with a big group of people, it takes like four or five years to pull off. But really, the idea was trying to do something that was bigger than what had been written about anti-fascism at that point, which was shockingly narrow, what people understood of as just a few movements, mostly very recent history. And so much wasn't being included in

that conversation. So the idea was, how can we build out a much bigger picture of this by including as many voices as possible? So we ended up getting a couple of dozen folks together that had different takes on it. Some talking about tech, some talking about deep history, some talking about anti-fascism in other countries, other continents. And so in general, the idea was to make it feel like a discussion between people who either know each other or should be like in some kind of comradeship with each other. So that was sort of where it came together. I think with this conversation, the way we were thinking about this is I wanted to I wanted the opportunity to talk with basically my friends about their history a little bit. And so I asked three folks that had a really long history

with doing organizing work. And so I thought it would be cool, maybe if we go through talking to them a little bit about their prehistory or their early history organizing. And Michael, your history goes back the furthest, as you know it does. So I thought we could kick off with you and then talk with Emily, and then daryl um just kind of getting into your background so how did you get started in movement work actually i should say first when did you get started in movement work uh well yeah so i sometimes feel like a little bit of a dinosaur i was born in 1947 so uh the fascism and power was a fairly recent Fascism and power was a fairly recent reality in my life.

My father was an immigrant from Poland. He came here in the 30s. Most of his family was destroyed in Bialystok. They had an uprising there, similar to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and almost everybody was liquidated in that process. So there's a family history there for me. Also, obviously, grew up in the shadow of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the U.S. incarceration of Japanese Americans in concentration camps. I lived in an Orthodox Jewish immigrant working class family neighborhood in Brooklyn, which is now dominated by extremely right-wing forces. Borough Park, it's one of the bastions of probably neo-fascist Republican pro-Zionist.

But somehow, when I grew up there, that was not the case. Anyway, I got involved in politics in the 60s and, you know, student movement stuff, anti-war stuff. And at Brooklyn College, which when I was there was a free public four-year college, part of the city university system in New York. And I was actually eventually elected student body president. They had liquidated the student government earlier when people opposed the Korean War. And we had a struggle to get, you know, for student rights and anti-war stuff and so on. And we succeeded in getting student body elections for officers for the first time in about a dozen years but you know as part of all that anti-war and

anti-police brutality and other stuff that was going on in brooklyn at the time and then we raised the question of the fact that brooklyn college was 98 white 99% white in a borough that even then was, you know, majority black and Puerto Rican. And suddenly all the student support we had had for all the other struggles, cops off the campus and, you know, Navy off the campus and so on. And we got, you know, got a dean of students fired and other stuff. But as soon as we raised the question of opening the campus up and having open admissions to the city university system and a special admissions program for black and Puerto Rican high school students, most of our student support evaporated.

And for me, that was an object lesson that unless you're consciously organizing about internalized and institutionalized racism, Everything else you do that is, you know, progressive or anti-imperialist or anti-war is kind of a house of cards or, you know, castles made of sand. And in particular, in raising those issues, we discovered that there was a fascist element on the campus.

There were people who formed the early Jewish Defense League in Brooklyn who were primarily anti-black and also there's a group called the youth uh what is it young americans for freedom which was like the youth wing of the uh national review uh right wing republican formation and they were pretty openly fascistic in their politics so uh you know it became a question that if you were doing you know know, anti-racist and anti-war and anti-capitalist organizing, you were going to face not just, you know, a struggle

against the force of the state, but that there were reactionary elements within particularly white society. And I think because of settler colonialism, you know, there's a mass base for that. And struck by the title of the show, I'll just say, I don't know if people are familiar with the book. It can't happen here, but obviously your title is a reflection. It could happen here. I think it has happened here. For one thing, I think that fascism has always been an element of US political culture because of settler colonialism. You know, M.A. Césaire's definition of fascism is that it's bringing the methods of rule of the colonies into the metropole. But the U.S. is a settler colony

and therefore there are colonized people inside this country and always have been. And so fascistic elements of, you know, slave labor, genocide, you know, land theft,

all the rest of it have always been part. And part of that is also creating that mass base within the settler population that supports, you know, that leadership. So anyway, I think that, you know, both those personal aspects and that consciousness. And so I came in contact with, you know, the very radical forces in the black freedom circle back then, the black Panther party was very active.

There was a, one of the people in the black student union joined the black Panther party. You know, it was a period of very fascistic attacks and the Panthers had formed the national committees to combat fascism and had an analysis that, uh, you know, the U S was fascistic and, uh, you know, George Jackson, uh, at that time said, you know, fascism is already here. And I think he meant it, you know, literally. And so that's part of the perspective I've, I've carried through for, you know, I don't know what that is 60 years now, uh, close to.

Yeah. I mean, I think really quickly, I would like to hear kind of what your experience was with forming John Brown. Where did the idea come from? Because I think for a lot of people who are thinking of recent anti-fascist, American anti-fascist history, that ends up being kind of a starting point for a certain kind of no-platform tactic. So how did you first kind of develop that what brought you in so yeah uh just to say uh i was uh you know coming out of the movement as i

did uh i moved from new york to california because there was a strong uh there's a newspaper called the movement which was the newspaper basically of friends of snick it was the people who left snick when snick adopted a black power analysis and said that white people who were involved should go organize in the white community and there was a you know kind of a i was part of a working class organizing collective in hayward california eventually out of that i got uh connected with you know some of the people that later formed Prairie Fire Organizing Committee. I was in a group in the Bay Area called the June 28th Union. It was a gay men's, pro-socialist, anti-imperialist, pro-feminist collective of mostly people of European descent.

And we went to what was called the Hard Times Conference, which was put on by Prairie Fargo Organizing Committee in Chicago. And it turned out that there was secretly an effort by the Weather Underground to come up from underground and create a new communist party. And they serviced that at that conference. But there was a lot of opposition to that from across the board, from different Black liberation, American Indian movement, Puerto Rican independence struggle, Chicano movement, all of them felt that there was a sellout of the politics there. Anyway, out of that process, I was part of, I joined a Prairie Fire Organized Committee eventually,

and that split. And then there was a West Coast group, which kept the name Prairie Fire. The East Coast formed a group called the May 19th Communist Organization. And they asked for outside supporters to begin to expose that and deal with it and help them deal with it. And John Brandon's Klan committee was formed out of that. Separately, very far on the West Coast, it formed a group called Take a Stand Against the Klan. That was the period at the beginning of the sort of Nazification of the Klan that was going on. So this was the 70s.

And eventually, you know, under a challenge from particularly the New African Independence Movement, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, New African People's Organization, which both pre-fire on the West Coast and May 19th on the east coast were uh you know connected to they pushed for a joint organization so at that point there was a kind of reconstitution of john bernett the clan committee and so i was part of that and

we merged you know there were chapters in atlanta, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, where I ended up, New York, I think Bowling Green, maybe a couple of Connecticut. And so they were quite active in that period in, you know, street level confrontations and, you know, other exposures of early neo-Nazi activity and clan activity. But particularly from a perspective of conscious and active solidarity with the black freedom struggle and particularly the new African independence movement, which is a very high level of unity. And over a period of time,

there was a struggle to broaden that out and try to be a more all-embracing organization that could relate to the struggle. There were a lot of different formations at that time. There was the National Anti-Klan Network, and there was a couple of others, and there were differing politics among all of them. And John Brennan at the Klan, I think, at that time, took more of a position of pro-direct action,

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Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The anti-Klan network, I think some people kind of know that's where the Southern Poverty Law Center eventually came out of. Another of the networks of these different groups out here in Oregon, the rural organizing project was sort of like a down the line there. I think it's interesting, too, about the founding story. Roth, who was part of the founding of that very first iteration of the John Brown Committee, was they were doing prison organizing with Black Panthers in upstate New York. And they were writing these letters saying, the prison guards are Klan. And they thought, you mean they're really racist? You know, obviously, they're prison guards.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when they went and looked it up, no, the president of the Prisoners Guard Union was the grand dragon of the state KKK. He had a position within the prison system as the head of the sort of educational activities in the prisons. And was using his formal position within the prison system to organize white prisoners along with the guards into Klan caverns. white prisoners along with the guards into Klan caverns. It seems like a total, that was sort of a validation with the centerpiece of John Brown being that cops and Klan have that kind of collaboration because that was their kind of the founding lesson of that organizing.

Sure. The blue by day, white by night, and a lot of those slogans come out of that period. And, you know, I think it is, you know, it's related to later the ARA line period and you know i think it is you know it's related to later the ara line that you know fascism is built from above and below that there's you know elements within the state that are operating independently but they're also state forces and then there are you know independent yeah so-called revolutionary fascists that you know claim to be opposing the state but are not really well i think to fast forward a little bit, quite a bit. Emily, I don't remember when we first met each other. Obviously, it was probably shortly after Unite the Right happened.

But how did you first get drawn into organizing? Did you have a long history before that happened? Or were you just part of getting involved around the ramp up to that? No, I think, you know, compared to the other folks here, I'm sort of the summer child of the group. I don't have a super long history in organizing. I think that, you know, I came to anti-fascism before Unite the Right happened. Before Unite the Right happened, I work in the tech industry and sometimes sort of around the Gamergate era, I started noticing how white supremacist the tech industry had become. It was sort of this nexus for a lot of this strongly libertarian, strongly supremacist mindset. authoritarian strongly supremacist mindset um it was sort of the worst of that meritocratic ideal that a lot of us had to um experience in university and in our workplaces and it just seemed like it

was getting out of control and that was kind of at the same time that we were seeing a lot more women come into the tech industry we were starting to see a lot of changes in the space. And then there was sort of like this vacuum left by Gamergate as that all sort of died down. A lot of this sort of energy needed to go somewhere. And so I started speaking out against some white supremacist organizing that was happening at conferences and things like that. And I think the first wake-up call for me happened when some folks that are linked to Milo Yiannopoulos put together a list of SJWs, social justice warriors. And this was journalists and activists and people who were speaking out. And I somehow made that list. And I realized after looking at this and seeing what was going on, that being

apolitical, being sort of just somebody with an opinion wasn't, you know, there was no way to be, that wasn't a defense against what was coming. And so I just sort of looked inside and said, well, if this is the way it's going to be, like, I'm going to fight back. I'm going to, I'm going to figure out what to do. I didn't really have a lot of organizing ties. I didn't really have a network. So like every other person, I just shouted at Twitter, and somehow that worked. The irony of this all is that all of this was going on. I was starting to do digital activism, using my tech skills to try to shine light on things that were wrong in the federal government and the Trump administration and things like that.

And I really just wanted to step away from that. I kind of had like I went to Prague after Trump was inaugurated. I wanted to like, you know, clear the air a little bit. I didn't like the fact that I was on this hit list that was put together by people who have like a couple of handshakes away from the president's desk. So I went to Europe, I went to Prague, and I cleared my head. And when I came back, I said, you know what, I'm going to just focus on local activism. I'm going to focus on the issues that are in my community. I knew that we had things going on with our local low-income housing space. We had a lot of, you know, stuff around the statues that was coming up in town. And I didn't really expect, like, it was kind of random that Unite the Right was, you know, destined for Charlottesville. And so all of the work,

all of the organizing that I had started to do that spring and that, or I guess that winter and that spring started to pay off as, you know, as Charlottesville became the target of all of the neo-Nazis. So I think it was sort of, I don't want to say it's, it's fortunate because it's not really the greatest, like, it's not a positive thing that that's what happened, but I guess that I am lucky that as I came to this awakening, it was happening, you know, before and not after. And that I was able to use the network that I was building,

the audience I was building in order to help fight back. So, yeah, I guess that's, that's sort of like, I don't know that I would have been, you know, as much as dedicated as I was if it wasn't for that very personal sort of experience. And I look back at that and I'm kind of embarrassed by that. But, you know, we all have our own paths. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's something interesting about that year in advance of the Unite the Right, where different groups were testing the waters a little bit and how that was their ability to ramp up in the area. But it was also the anti-fascist ability to ramp up.

So talking with Mimi and other organizers there, those earlier events, like the earlier Klan rally that happened months earlier, those that early flash mob that richard spencer led that gave people the opportunity to build up the base so how did you kind of shift to focusing on that first i guess how did you hear about unite the right as this big kind of like target event but what was the steps along the way there yeah i think um one of the things that I really tried to do that year was to use the experience I was having traveling to try to understand the history of where the Prague Spring took place and where the Velvet Revolution took place and how these groups of people were able to overcome this massive amount of state violence and still be successful. And when Richard Spencer first came to town, that first flash mob, what is now called Charlottesville 1.0, I was in Berlin at the time. I woke up to see what was going on.

And it was, you know, I think, again, just sort of these, you know, the universe coming into alignment as that was happening. There was also this big anti-Nazi demonstration that was happening in Berlin. So I took that opportunity to go and learn about what anti-fascists are doing in other countries and other localities, how they are organized and how they spread their message. And so I think that, you know, as I learned about all of this going on, what the first thing that I tried to do is just look around and say, what can we learn from people who have been here before, who have done this before and have this in their living memory? And that's what I tried to take back to Charlottesville. And then, you know, I think it was after that trip, I was in Berlin in May. I came back for that trip. I joined an anti-fascist march almost as soon as I got back.

And that's when we had heard, we've like learned about the two rallies, the July 8th KKK rally and the August 12th Unite the Right. And at that point point like from that moment it was just like every waking moment of of my day was spent organizing um for this one for those rallies it's this sort of effect that just circumstance sort of speeds people's capacity to do it but not maybe even maybe capacity is not the right word. The kind of understanding of like what it takes to do that work. So I was interviewing a number of the rabbis in the area. And these were not super political folks.

These were not people like from some activist synagogues or mainline synagogues. But they connected with a number of faith leaders from the historically black churches, both of which were saying, OK, we're both going to be targeted here. And there's no there's no institutions coming to help. really. There's no one we can count on here. So they created those collaborative spaces and really pretty complicated and effective organizing models, having no experience doing it because of that hyper intense space, which I think is, in a way, that's why those circumstances have such an important effect on it so how did you basically plan those couple of weeks in advance how were you thinking about it and what was the kind of groups you were working with these like networks that were coming together or formal organizations yeah i think um there were a bunch of you know organizations on the ground that i

connected with. Certainly, we had a local chapter of Surge showing up for racial justice, and they were doing a lot of organizing. And there was the anarchist people of color, APOC. They were a great group of people that we connected with and that I connected with. And it also happened that I started dating somebody who was also connected to the local anti-fascist scene at the time. So I sort of brought into all of these circles through that relationship as well. And so I think that sort of all of these things combined really made it clear that we had a small but very knowledgeable base of people that could organize. And I think that one of the things that we did exceptionally well in the

lead up is because we had such a small core of people who don't, who didn't really have, you know, a breadth of experience, you know, in doing this, we were able to compartmentalize really well. You know, some people were focusing on, you know, what are we going to do with the, you know, the clergy collective and how are they going to organize? What is their action going to be? And we had a media collective and that was where I put most of my energy. And so I think that we had these different groups of people that could focus on different things that helped us unblock ourselves from the grander, more theoretical, more abstract way to respond. We just, we didn't

have the time to debate over tactics. We didn't have time to debate over the ideology of anti-fascism, what the right thing to do was, or what the best thing to do was. We really had to focus our time on what do we have time to do? What can we achieve given the constraints that we have? And with those sort of constraints, I think that maybe we left some good actions on the table, but what we came up with, I think, was fairly effective. Do you think that it carried those community folks together through and after the event? Do you feel like those community ties are still there? I think some of them are and some of them are not. There are certainly community ties that have broken. There was a lot of pressure that built up. There were differences of opinions that we set aside and hoped to resolve afterwards. And those did not necessarily get resolved.

resolve afterwards. And those did not necessarily get resolved in some cases, some interpersonal issues, some inter-organizational issues. I remember at one point there was a decision that was being made, driven by a couple of the organizing groups, that they would not support anyone that was going to be armed. And this was a tension point between those groups and groups like Redneck Revolt that were coming armed to help support anti-fascist rallies. And that like that is something that still affected me pretty well because I was being targeted because of how present I was in social media and Twitter and things like that. I needed to have an armed security detail. And, you know, that created a lot of a lot of tension. I didn't have legal like I had legal support pulled away from me. I didn't have legal support until until November of that year when noise of a lawsuit started happening. So I think that some of those things did create some some tension that led to fracturing of

community. But some things actually really did tie the community back together and and kept it close even as we have drifted apart and moved into different um you know different cities different countries different states whatever i think it's a bit of both you know there's one of the founding members of rose city antifa said something that kind of stuck with me which is that a lot of people will look to anti-fascism as a way to rebuild the left or as to build this big mass united left, but that's not actually what's being demanded of the situation. The situation is very pretty straightforward. It's to basically destroy this opposition of people. And how you do that, I mean, you can have considerations about how to bring in the community and try and align with other groups but in the end there's other decisions are being made um and so people often

get disappointed when that ends up being what those projects actually are now daryl you were down there at unite the right right correct right that was there you're everywhere when we're there i think um one of the things about about Charlottesville that was really important is that we saw it coming and we had seen it coming months, probably even years before it even happened. my case because um one of those everywhere places i had been was um in york pennsylvania about 20 years prior where you had somebody from a group called the world church created he was um he was a local from world church of the creator that invited the leader of that group matt hale to um hold the public meeting at their local library. It was a tactic that that particular group had. And what that resulted in was about 300 neo-Nazis coming to York, PA, about three, four hundred anti-fascists coming out to oppose them.

And you pretty much saw a parallel of um charlottesville as i said um up to and including a um this was january 12 2012 and up to and including a someone driving into a group of people and uh no no one pat no one And no one died. No one was killed. Hurt pretty bad. I think the only reason why he served two years was because one of the people that he hit was a cop. Now we fast forward to Charlottesville and ironically, I saw the person that organized things in York represented Vanguard America at Charlottesville.

And two days prior, my group, One People's Project, had a little bit of a podcast where we basically said that after everything that was going on in Charlottesville prior to Charlottesville 1.0, Charlottesville 2.0, and then this whole Unite the Right thing was happening, where they were just making a big production out of having this event. We pretty much were resigned to the idea that this was going to be the so-called alt-rights ultimatum, in the sense that this was going to be what sent everybody, you know, realizing how bad things can get. You know, it's going to be bad. We expected it to be bad.

I went to Charlottesville armed. And I think really it was one of the first times that I ever did strap up when I went to one of these things. When everything went down, I mean, prior to everything going down, I was just basically doing my thing, videotaping everyone, cracking jokes. I was playing Happy Warrior because, you know, you see this all before, up to and including the fighting. The fighting is there. I mean, that happens all the time. Even that massively, I'm used to it. What I wasn't used to was when someone was murdered, when someone was killed, because that's never happened. And that actually freaked me out.

It actually, I actually got really pissed off when that went down. And I think a lot of us did. Because if we recognize this ourselves, if we who have been on the front lines all these years recognize that this was the direction it was going in, we also recognize that we had the ability to do something about it beforehand. That's one of the reasons why the ACLU got into a lot of trouble, because they were busy trying to protect the free speech of everybody in all the neo-Nazis there and insisting that they were going to be in that park because that's where they wanted to be. And when everything went down, a lot of people just looked at the ACLU and said, could you at least recognize just how dangerous they was trying to make the situation? they was trying to make the situation. ACLU, I believe, will no longer represent groups that insist on holding armed rallies. I think that was one of the things that they had said that they

were one of the change-ups. And even with the whole discussion about their freedom of speech and saying it was a matter of their free speech, people's attitudes were just like, okay, fine, that's a given, but couldn't you let them get their own attorneys? Why do you have to keep defending the worst of society in the name of a free speech that, frankly, doesn't seem to be afforded the rest of us whenever we are opposing them? That's the attitude that a lot of people had. whenever we are opposing them. That's the attitude of a lot of people had. And it was really the last straw. Charlottesville was really the last straw. And people really got on a different footing in dealing with fascism. I was used to people trying to pull all the stops and trying to defend the quote unquote defend the freedom of speech of not just the fascists in our society, but the right in general. So every time I would criticize somebody on the right, somebody would try to say things ranging from we have to respect their freedom of speech or we should just ignore them.

You know, and I hated it whenever it was and when it was combined. The best way to fight hate speech is with more speech. You use the more speech. Well, why don't you just ignore them? That stopped after Charlottesville. All of a sudden, people started saying, OK, we need to start doing something about this group. That's why you saw 40,000 people. In Boston, protesting against the fascists up there when they tried to hold a rally, maybe a week or two later, you know, that's why you saw websites like the Daily Stormer get, you know, yanked out of the mainstream and now they're sitting on the dark web. That's why you saw people disowning their family members because

they went to this rally. We are seeing people being not just James Fields, but others being held legally accountable for what they did in Charlottesville. And all of those individuals are fascists. All of the individuals are white supremacists. We realized that we had the ability to do something. And we started doing something. Unfortunately, we stopped. After Trump lost.

Unfortunately, we stopped after Trump lost and people tried to go back to that whole just ignore them routine. And within months, we got January 6th. And that was when they they ratcheted up again about how we're going to really curtail the right and all that. But now that just became rhetoric. We're here again because you're starting to see a lot of the rumblings with the attacks on the trans community. Basically, conservatives across the country are primarily trying to essentially do something to the rest of the country. I mean, you heard that when you go to the CPAC meeting, the Conservative Political Action Conference,

a couple of months ago, all they did was talk about things they wanted to do to America, you know. And this is what we have been fighting all our lives. This is what we have been warning about all our lives. And while anti-fascism has essentially become mainstream, there is still a lot more work that we have to do in order to basically see all that work bear fruit. And that's pretty much the deal. Yeah. Hey, guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about.

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to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast hey i'm jack peace thomas the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands,

for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That 40,000 person kind of response to a Proud Boy rally in Boston, just a couple of weeks after Unite the Right, it was one of the most common sense kind of moments. And it totally dwarfed them. I mean, 40,000 people will do whatever they want, right? 40,000 people will

stop any kind of small march, even a large one. And so the lesson was learned and it seemed to be forgotten immediately. And they're a perfect example of that because that group that they were protesting went on to become Super Happy Fun America. They're the group that are now pushing the straight pride rallies. And they are really in the forefront of all the anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ plus activity. all the anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ plus activity. And of course, some of them got arrested at January 6. So they pretty much built up their stock since then, but so did we. And it's just a matter of using that stock. Who's going to use that stock more effectively yeah i think it was really interesting how you centered this like this shift that happened among people who weren't previously involved in anti-fascism from this kind of neoliberal understanding or maybe even liberal understanding of the sort of

struggle against fascism being one that could take place in the open with free speech being the most important thing that's at stake and one that moved like in a moment right when when a nazi killed heather hire to there's a ton more at stake than we thought and i think you're right that we've gone back uh like right we've gone back to to the previous understanding which i think is what everyone kind of a lot of people i guess they felt like they could vote for joe biden and then it was done like it had disappeared and i'd be interested to hear all of your insights with all your experience in the movement and like what needs to be done i guess to keep that organizing going as we're in this kind of nadir or I don't know,

thermidor of like anti-fascist organizing in the US? If I could offer something from maybe a little bit of a longer view. Yeah, please. Yeah. You know, Daryl talked about somebody being killed and that never happening before, but of course it has happened before. And so in 1979, there was a death of the Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, and people were, you know, attacked and killed by an alliance of

the Klan and the Nazis with, you know, the ATF had people in one and the, I forget, I think the FBI had people in the other and were instrumental in bringing the two forces together to attack the uh anti-klan group and uh several people were killed in that and then the same thing with ara in in uh las vegas lynn's newborn a black tattoo artist and darren scherzky uh was actually i think a sail an active duty sailor who were in anti-racist action in Las Vegas, were executed and killed by neo-Nazis there. And so I think there is a history of that that we need to be aware of, but also that there's ups and downs and lulls in both fascist organizing and anti-fascist organizing. One of the things that happened after the 79 killings is that Ronald Reagan launched his campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the scene of the killing of Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman

on a state rights platform. And while he was president, you know, brought in Pat Buchanan and, you know, went to Bitburg. So there's a long history of the president, you know, brought in Pat Buchanan and, you know, went to Bitburg. So there's a long history of the state, you know, playing footsie with these people. And I think we should recognize that. But also that there are going to be ups and downs in both fascist and anti-fascist organizing. And, you know, see that that, I think that long arranged perspective that is important to understand. The other thing I did want to take a little exception to is,

is the idea that the role of anti-fascists is to destroy fascists. And I think that, I don't completely agree with that analysis. I think that it's critical that actually anti-fascist forces see themselves as part of a revolutionary transformation of this society in its entirety. And that the ability to actually reach and organizing people has to do with making it clear that fascists are not providing an alternative to what's wrong with this society, although they claim to be. And that we are, that we're part of liberatory and, you know, self-determination elements, anti-colonial elements, support for sovereignty of indigenous people, support for LGBTQ people's rights, and all those things that have a positive aspect of a way to reorganize society in a different way than the fascists are putting

forward. And I think that that is critical to trying to sustain a base and build a base by having a positive. You know, one of the things that I've been doing for many years, I published Turning the Tide, which, you know, started as a little zine. We were sending it to the other chapters of anti-racist action and also into the prisons. And, you know, eventually we changed the subtitle of that to the Journal of Intercommunal Solidarity in the sense of saying, OK, it's not just anti-racist action, it's not just anti-fascist, but what are we for? You have to have a positive, you really want to organize people, you have to have a positive sense of what you're struggling for, not just what you're struggling against. Yeah, Michael's right. Greensboro did happen.

I was really referring to, in recent wasn't it was the first time for myself to be at a rally and not see anyone and see somebody get murdered. But yes, Greensboro, November 3rd, I believe, 1979 in North Carolina, that happened. And all the Klan members had actually gotten away with it. They did not. They were found. They cleared them. They simply cleared them. Meanwhile, they were cleared in state court and federal court both.

Their claim was that they were not, they were brought up on civil rights charges in the federal court and they claimed they weren't against black people. They were just against communists. And that right there

was something that even family members, when I first heard of it, remember, I'm a kid at this time. I'm sitting there listening to family members basically laugh about the situation because all they saw were Klan and communists. And they just had the attitude of just let them kill each other. And that was actually a line that was said. I don't know which family member said it, but that was a line that stuck with me since I was a kid.

And at the time, I wasn't really politically astute. I just, that's how I, um, recall that, um, situation. And with Dan and spit,

um, the Las Vegas murders, um, um, that, that is a different situation, however, because that was on the rally.

They sought them out. That was basically on the off time so to speak yeah that was an assassination yes and we've seen that before most certainly luke kröner from portland for example i mean he survived but he's a quadriplegic because somebody came after him the the german police intercepted one when adenloffen came to Germany to try to get me. I don't know if you know about that. Yeah. No, I didn't know about that.

Yeah, similar. I think it was. Same thing. Yeah. Because I have been fairly public. I've been doxed and tracked down by fascists on several different occasions in different places that I lived in. trolls that, you know, at various points that, you know, it, it, it, it's clearly, you know, they do try to target people as well as, you know, attacking mass actions. Emily,

you've gotten as much as anyone I've ever seen in terms of doxing and harassment and targeted attacks and threats like that. Who are you referring to? Oh, I think we've all gotten it bad. I don't, I don't think that there's any, there's no competition here. Contest. Who has the most death threats on 8Q? Let's take a tally off. I did want to just jump back real quick to the thing that you were mentioning,

Michael, about, you know, building. Antifascism needs to be about building. And I think that there's two sides to this. I like to talk about like the breaking work, which is what a lot of the street anti-fascism is about, right? Like sometimes Nazis come marching into your town and you have to break that. You have to stop that. You have to confront that. And you have to do things to make it so that they don't want to come back into your town or any other towns like your town. And I think that that's breaking work. You know, the work of fracking down Nazis, doxing them, exposing them, whatever, that's breaking work. I think that in the last few years has become more high profile for various reasons. But I think that as we're looking at, you know, what you were mentioning,

Daryl, like the anti-trans legislation, the rise of the political far right in government and in power, we do need a different solution. I'm not saying that you can't go out and like intercept Ron DeSantis' motorcade and like punch him in the face. I am saying it will probably end very badly for you if you try to do that. Right. Right. So maybe what we actually also need is to try to build those alternative structures that are not reliant on the state. Right.

You know, when we see these, these trans bands coming in, like it's a horrible thing, but the only thing that actually comes through my mind is we have more tools, more resources now to create the networks of support than we've ever had in history. mobility and that freedom of movement, rather than just trying to run up against this brick wall that is this Republican, you know, um, behemoth that is moving, you know, forward into, into all of our rights. Like we're not going to face it down head on. We need to go around it in some way. And I think that that, that going around it is going to require that building, that community, that, that, um, sort of redevelopment of those alternative structures. So I think it's so important to have that as well.

Big thanks to Shane Burley for setting up this conversation. The second half of our talk with Michael Novick, Emily Gorchinsky and Daryl Lamont Jenkins will be coming out tomorrow. We'll talk a bit more about the modern state of anti-fascism and what things from the past might help inform us in the anti-fascist struggle of today. See you on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey, guys. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs,

and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step Into the Flames of Fright, an anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

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