It Could Happen Here - On the Ground at Defend the Atlanta Forest: Part Two

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

Learn how the movement evolved after the city council vote. In part 2 we get into tactics and hear more of the conversations with Forest Defenders from Garrison's trip to the Atlanta Forest. https://defendtheatlantaforest.com/https://stopreevesyoung.com/https://opencollective.com/forest-justice-defense-fundhttps://scenes.noblogs.org/warriorup.noblogs.org Links above best viewed on Tor BrowserSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. 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. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis, and this is part two of the two-part miniseries on the Defend the Forest movement in Atlanta, Georgia. of the two-part miniseries on the Defend the Forest movement in Atlanta, Georgia.

Last month, I traveled to Atlanta to stay a week in the woods and talk with some of the forest defenders. In the previous episode, I covered the movement from its inception to where the city council approved the Cop City Project near the end of last summer. I went over a lot of historical background between the land itself and the history there, the increasing gentrification of Atlanta, how the movement pulled the veil off the secretive plans for Cop City and pushed it into the public spotlight. We talked about the early days of sabotage and the targeting of individuals in positions of power. Basically, I did a lot of talking, maybe too much talking. This episode will be more led by the discussions with forest defenders that I had during my week-long excursion to the woods. We'll learn about how

the movement evolved in the wake of the city council vote up until the current state of affairs. One thing that makes the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement very different from previous eco-defense projects in recent memory is that it's right in the middle of a sprawling metropolitan area. Right outside the forest is an Amazon facility. Downtown Atlanta is just a 10-minute drive away. We'll be talking tactics a bit later on in the episode, but just the simple nature of doing a forest eco-defense project while still inside a city gives a lot of pretty interesting tactical opportunities. You get to selectively use some of the older, more rural eco-defense strategies while having the backing of a city-based mutual aid network. There's the option of rapid response popular

mobilization that city-based protests can have, but are more challenging for eco-defense stuff that's like three hours into the middle of nowhere. For the people camping in the forest, they can easily get supplies, or switch out who's staying in the woods and who's living in the city. The combination of forest and urban prompts and necessitates the crucial experimentation and innovation that's been badly needed in eco-defense projects and protests for the past decade. There's a lot of trains that go by here. It's generally pretty noisy. So it's definitely the most urban forest defense thing I've ever been a part of, but it's really beautiful

and unique to see a lot of like urban folks who live in the city be able to be involved in like urban tactics kind of mixing with, you know, more traditional, whatever the hell that means anymore, earth-firsty forest tactics. It's kind of like the rulebook. I know a lot of people say this, but I like it, so I'll repeat it. The quote-unquote rulebook for how to engage with the multiple enemies in this area has been, like, chewed up, spit out, shadowed, and burnt over because we're kind of doing something that doesn't really happen a lot. Something similar I can think of is the sacred oak grove that was being protected in Minneapolis in the late 90s, maybe early 2000s,

and it was another kind of anarchist indigenous alliance with a big earth-first presence, but that's kind of one of the more urban, in this part of Turtle Island, struggles I can think of like this, but this is unlike anything I've ever done. I think another interesting part is like,

a lot of force defense stuff is focused on like, old growth. Being like, we should defend it because it's old growth. Yeah, this is not an old growth forest. This is like a messy, dirty, confusing... I've gotten lost so many times.

It's... Yeah, there's tires, there's barrels. It was built on the prison farm. You'll find old portions of the prison, which is incredibly fucked up and haunted. In terms of haunting, there's this specter of what used to be there. Police are trying to build over it with a bomb range. That's very much like they're

just building over the thing. But it doesn't need to be old growth to be worth defending. range, right? It's like, that's very much like they're just building over the thing. But it doesn't need to be old growth to be worth defending, and that's an idea that I think people need to understand more, is like, it has value even if it's not, like, 500 years old. Like, it has value despite

not even despite being a 100-year-old forest. It has value because it is a 100-year-old forest. Like, it has value because it is a forest in a city. And that's something that's worth emphasizing. I also think that's cool, and people talk a lot about invasive plants, and there's...

I think the Bradford pears in this forest are a really interesting example. They're these trees that are feral. They used to be planted here when it was a farm, plantation, or whatever and um those trees are fucking spiky they're sugar-fying trees they're spiking as shit well but you know the good news is they're awful and the bad news is they're awful like i know where they are

are when i haul ass through the forest i usually don't get bad for pairing my eyeball like and um but someone chasing me yeah and and so it's just it's cool to kind of interact with all these things and get to choose how you want to interact and like yeah it is a um you know i think it's interesting it's not yeah like a traditional forest or like whatever forest that people would value in that way um but for me uh i connect to it i think even more than that because it's not this like held up as this thing of like purity like they fucking bulldoze and like a month later that shit was overgrown you couldn't see it again that was all quote-unquote invasive plants like whatever the fuck that means which is often that's a whole thing they're often racialized plants you know

it's it's almost like a punk forest it's like we're surrounded by enemies and that is the problem is um they see this as a cesspool and something i talked to a lot of liberals about like when they're taught we're telling them about defend the forest like oh is it a pristine wilderness with large old growth trees and like you know what that would be cool the problem is this forest needs to be allowed to return to that because there's been so much abuse. And part of like whether, I don't know what it means to quote unquote win or lose, but there's a lot of like little wins and losses all along the way

and we've had a lot of wins. There is some big trees that are left in the forest. They're legally supposed to leave all the big trees by the creek, but from what historical precedent do we trust the cops to quote-unquote be accountable to anyone? I don't know where we're thinking that'll happen. I've heard a lot of people be like, oh, some of these tree houses are strategic. They're in the spots they can't cut. And I'm like, you know what, friends, I've looked at the map and it looks like this whole motherfucking place is slated for clear-cutting. Exactly one month after the city council voted

to approve the land lease ordinance for Cop City, the defend the forest slogan was put to the test. On October 8th, 2021, contractors and land survey workers showed up around the forest and appeared to be clearing land to take reference photos and collect soil samples. Two dozen forest offenders emerged from the woods and confronted the workers. The people hired to destroy the forest fled the work site, and after they left, a police surveillance tower in the area was toppled, and the forest defenders were able to disperse with no arrests. Ten days later, a similar turn of events took place. A group of survey workers and construction teams were on site again. A small

group of rapid response force defenders disrupted the surveying and ground clearing at the old Atlanta prison farm. Simply the mere threat of an on-site protest shut down construction for the whole day. Key access points for machinery were blocked using available materials like piles of nearby tires, preventing vehicular machinery from moving freely through the destruction site. No construction occurred despite the attempts of the DeKalb County Police and the Atlanta Police Department, who mobilized 20 vehicles in the vicinity of the forest in an effort to prevent the protest or punish the participants. By the end of the day, no one was arrested, and yet again, select monitoring systems and police surveillance towers were toppled and dismantled.

A statement released online from anonymous force defenders read, It became clear that for the next phase of the struggle, to defend the forest, people would have to directly target and oppose the contracting companies hired to decimate the woods and build the facilities. To date, we know of at least three companies that have been contracted by the Atlanta Police Foundation to do work on the old prison farm land. Some of the surveying work appears to be done by Long Engineering, and two companies, Reeves Young Construction and Brassfield & Gorey, were hired to do grounds clearing and early construction. It is not yet clear who will be contracted to clear the land in Entrenchment

Creek Park, where Black Hole Studios hopes to expand their soundstage. Again, quoting the Crimethink article, The City in the Forest, Reinventing Resistance for an Age of Climate Crisis and Police Militarization, quote, the information that is known to date was hard won by diligent activists on the ground. Shortly after the city council voted in September, surveyors and small work crews began entering the site near two key roads. The trucks and uniforms revealed the names of the contractors, which once again gave opponents of the Cop City Project a chance to initiate a struggle on their own terms. Had the forced offenders utilized only virtual or bureaucratic channels to collect information, they might not have learned that Reeves Young were being called in to do the actual destruction

until it was publicly announced much later. The ability to break news to the public before the city government has been a consistent advantage. In trying to keep the momentum of the movement going post-city council vote, a second week of action was planned for November, albeit with some new twists. From November 10th through 14th, various groups organized a wide range of cultural events, info nights, bonfires, and meetings. For this week of action, many of these events occurred in or near a publicly advertised encampment on the Entrenchment Creek Park side of the forest. Days after the second week of action, 30 people converged on the Reeves Young Construction Headquarters in Sugar Hill, Georgia,

40 miles outside of Atlanta. Holding banners and demanding that the company sever their contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation, the group was able to walk right into the offices, disrupting a board meeting involving company president Dean Reeves and CEO Eric Young. Initially, the executives tried to keep their cool, but in short time, the businessmen started getting more annoyed and eventually violent towards the protest. There was a protest that, like, was at the Reeves Young office, went into the office, and

disrupted a board member meeting that happened to have a lot of the people who were, like, CEOs and chairmen there, and um, from what I gather, it was a brawl. Yeah, I know there was reports of the Reeves CEO guy punching protesters. Yeah, there's a joke that a worker puts someone in a guillotine,

and I love the notion of these workers doing WWE stuff. But yeah, the brawl is what it's generally referred to. the notion of these workers doing, like, WWE style wrestling moves. But yeah, the brawl is what it's generally referred to. We'd love for more cop fights, fights with cops, to just be WWE style. Yes, it is. My body's got a chair! Assault! Oh, it's a gold match.

Disrupting the board meeting was another successful step in the goal of applying direct confrontational pressure to the Atlanta Police Foundation's contracted construction service providers. Days later, two more bulldozers were lit on fire. We're ready to entertain the rest of the vehicle fire at 2058 Goldsmith Road at a no-name construction site. Engine 10 is on scene. We got two construction vehicles, a bull involved. Engine 10 will be out to sting some radio. Go ahead and send PD out to my location as well. 10-4, Engine Team. This equipment was located on the land swap parcel by Blackhall Studios, the planned future location of, quote, Michelle Obama Park, unquote. These were the 11th and 12th pieces of heavy machinery to be sabotaged, and I think now we're at, like, around 25, which is a lot. The anonymous communique this

time was short and to the point, quote, we burnt two bulldozers in the South Atlanta forest. No cop city, no Hollywood dystopia defend the Atlanta forest. On top of the more publicly advertised encampment at Entrenchment Creek Park, around the second week of action, a small cluster of forest defenders set up a secondary, more secretive encampment on a stretch of woods in the old Atlanta prison farm. Again, quoting the CrimeThink article, "...a few dozen people pitched tents, erected tarps and makeshift kitchens, hung banners, and constructed a bonafide protest camp in the woods.

Establishing a semi-permanent presence in the forest was a way to gather information on an ongoing basis and to provide an immediate deterrent to developers. So, I was involved in the original occupation of the forest. There was a group of autonomous individuals who, many of whom, were housing insecure, and were like, we need fucking housing. And like, there's this struggle and we believe in it and we want to fight in it. And so we moved to the fucking woods and we lived in these woods. I believe the official time is six weeks that we were in the woods. And we had a higher quality of life than like like, many people who, like, lived in houses and apartments. We had the nicest kitchen of anyone we knew.

We had, you know, we had armchairs and couches and fire pits. And we, you know, we had more food than we knew what to do with. And so we just started feeding people. And, like, we created a social space that like, allowed the movement to grow, simply because we're like, well, we need these needs met in our lives. Why don't we go do that? And that like, evolved over time. Little over a month after the more secretive encampment was established, about a dozen protesters, some bearing witch hats,

marched to the gate of Black Hole Studios on Constitution Road and blocked the main entrance. A communique posted online read, quote, Iconic spells for destruction were loudly chanted at Black Hole's general direction as the witch block held hands, cackled, and skipped in a sunwise direction, blocking Black Hole Studios' main entrance. Smoke torches were lit. Approximately one hour

post Witch Block Antics, DeKalb County Police responded to a call made by Black Hole Studios saying that they, quote, followed the protesters into the woods and deduced an encampment they came upon must belong to the apparent witches, unquote.

Which is quite the sentence. Shortly after, a large contingent of police raided the forest, evicting the protest camp established there. There was, at one point, a group went and held a demonstration outside of Blackhall's outside of Blackhall's site near the Litz and they expressed their discontent at the

at the things an entirely peaceful yeah an entirely peaceful protest at Blackhall Studios that was, like, just kind of standing in, like, the front gate where employees leave and enter, um, and generally doing stuff like burning American flags, holding signs, like, um, and just, like, taking up space and making the, like, actual entrance and leaving of the facility, like, leaving of it, the facility, like, uh, less doable, and the response was for Blackhall to lie, and say that, like, the camp encampment wasn't trespassing on their property, which was

actually in place in a, like, a public park, um, and orchestrated with the police to evict, um, it, um, and they orchestrated with the police to do, like, a pretty, like, intense eviction for, like, what it was, essentially, we were what amounted to a homeless camp living there, and they had two helicopters circling more police than I could count, they were throwing our shit into dump trucks and actively pursuing people through the woods. It was an absolute, I mean, it was a very visible show of force against us. Quoting the Crimethink article again, quote,

At the urging of Blackhall, DeKalb County police entered the forest en masse, mobilizing police cruisers in the parking lot, Quoting the Crimethink article again, quote, forced offenders based in the encampment escaped without being detained. This was the first time a concerted effort was made by law enforcement to engage protesters in the South River Forest. And to be honest, it was a fucking pain in the ass, and it was a traumatizing event, and like, that is all true, but it's also an event we learned from, and like, we got a pretty good idea of like APDs and like DeKalb County's uh like capabilities and like how they are like surveilling protests and how they're surveilling camps and like how they figured out where we were and like what triggered them to act against us. And, like, that's allowed us to move in far more confident ways that are also far more subversive.

It's really interesting that, you know, just like when they make it, you know, illegal to do NVDA, whenever they attack like that and do these really violent raids that put people in, like, awful positions and, like, traumatize the shit out of people, they are teaching us how to fight back, they are showing us their weaknesses, and in a really ironic way, the next time they come in and they fuck it up because people know what to expect, it'll be a monster of their own making, they fuck it up because people know what to expect it'll be a monster of their own making because like for every one step of aggression that they take that's two steps further we can take towards them with everything that we learned from the struggle yeah and obviously this forest

is really beautiful and the more time i spend here the more i feel connected to it and driven to like protect it. But also a big part of it for a lot of us is, for me is like, you know, they are doing this for their own morale. And so my goal is to make sure they are unhappy. And so, yeah, even if I, yeah, even if they win, as long as we come back and we learn from that and we keep pushing back, you know, it is a war of attrition and, um, it is about their morale. And like, it doesn't matter if they build the police facility. What matters is that every

single time the police move to recuperate that their losses, which they just took a big one, they are faced with just unyielding hostility. And I think that, like, that's something that's really important, is, like, we don't expect to not take a lot of Ls. Like, in the forest occupation, we understand the nature of this thing. We're in a static position, and the police are moving around us. The encampment was just one part of a large, ongoing fight. Over the course of those six weeks, hundreds of people were able to circulate through this camp, enjoying meals and performances, making art together,

and spending time around campfires, building and sharing a life in the woods. After the camp was attacked and structures were destroyed by DeKalb County police, land defenders and Atlanta residents mobilized quickly to recover camp supplies and belongings, and continued on with efforts to defend the forest. A great thing about these types of free autonomous zones is that they can directly demonstrate to people what a free life outside the confines of regular society can look like and what it can feel like. It's not just like we want to save this woods and we want to go back to our

regular ass lives. A lot of us are realizing that we're living in the apocalypse and we're just going to we want to keep living like this it's not just this words it's not just this police facility and we want them to not have any more space or platform to organize as police but we want a lot of us want to be free we want other people to like join that idea of like whatever the fuck it is hitchhiking train hopping living in the woods the fact that it's a fucking crime or considered crazy to be the people living in the woods the fact that it's a fucking crime or considered crazy to be the people living in the woods is insane and that's kind of the vibe we got from the muscogee folks yesterday they're like our whole world like we're here trying to reclaim our culture because there's

a lot of hope for saving the land from like an indigenous perspective if people would respect them and the whole point is the U.S. government doesn't actually want them and doesn't actually respect them. And reservations literally have prisoner of war numbers because they're hoping by blood quantum if they kill these people off, they can take their land back.

So the whole land back idea fucking freaks them out. Anyway, we want to save this forest, but it's not just about this forest. We're kind of endangered species. We've talked about ourselves feeling like deer. like how deer, like they'll be chilling. They'll be like, all right, I'm being a deer, I'm eating food. And they're like, always on guard, you know, to do something else if there's an enemy around. It kind of feels that way.

Like, we'll be chilling, nothing's going on, all of a sudden there's cops. But the whole point is, if it can happen here, ha ha, did it. It can happen somewhere else, and we hope to spread the vibe that people not like Occupy, what a horrible name for a movement, but it's cool that that happened at the time that word made sense. Nobody knew any better. We know better now. That's great. But

get the vibe, we're getting this vibe to like continue this kind of stuff. And obviously there's people in all kinds of places that squat buildings and do all sorts of shit shit but the more territory that we occupy and control and can help rematriate back to indigenous grassroots comrades

not IRA, Indian Reorganization Act government sanctioned indigenous groups right, they can't not everyone's our ally, they just have to be allyships that make sense, the Muscogee comrades that we're close to, obviously not all of them, that's some

romanticized, generalized bullshit. They said the same shit that when we talk to them they're like, even our own people betray us sometimes because we're not all the same. That's some homogenous bullshit. And I've seen that play out poorly in other places. They're like, we gotta give the land back to the natives. I'm like, which natives?

Like, people, we're all on a spectrum of colonization and decolonization, and sadly some of us are further along the lines than others, and it's very much on the colonizer's fault for doing that, but where we're at is the people,

the people that feel the call to anarchy, the people that feel the call to some kind of radical left orientation that can find it in their hearts and in their patience to tolerate each other. We need to band together to come up with better plans because we're all we got

and it doesn't get better. It's getting worse. So hopefully this can be an inspiration for people to do other shit. I'm inspired. I'm not from anywhere fucking near here, but I've been here for a year now and I don't want to leave

because I'm tired of the same old tactics, and I have been a part of stuff that has been successful before, and it had nothing to do with non-violent direct action, and I had to do time for it, and I know people that have done time for it also, and if there's any message I can give to the young generation is there's no future and it's worth it and like if your future is just like working a nine-to-five and like watching the earth still they're like shrivel into nothingness I would argue it's not really life might as well might as well be dead so I hope you live I hope you choose to live I think it's a really interesting thing, the psychological aspects of this, because the first time you do... The way we're socialized in this society is to be obedient and fearful,

and the first time you do something illegal, the first time you do something that, you know, is against the world, the first time you steal some food, the first time you smash something that, you know, is against the world, the first time you steal some food, the first time you smash a window, the first time you do any of that, you're scared. But then you get away with it. You realize that this is a thing you can do, and a thing that the state can't stop you from doing, and you realize, oh, I can do so much more. And once you get over that initial fear, once you've smashed that window, and you've gotten home, and you're like, oh, I didn't go to jail for this. But when you, like, get home, and you're like, I have all this food now that I didn't have to pay for, you start to realize, maybe I don't need to work a job. Maybe I don't need

to work 9 to 5 or, you know, 5 to midnight every day to, you know, get a job and pay rent. You realize, wait, maybe I can just steal the food I need. Yeah, I've been wanting to talk about that for a while. I want to make another Hyperobjects episode and talk about the anarchist properties of Klein bottles. And I describe this type of freedom as like, it's like how a Klein bottle works for a fourth-dimensional object. There's this extra degree or extra dimension of movement that we usually don't think is possible but it is actually there if you know how to interact with it um and yeah it's like we're domesticated in so many ways to view here's what's possible here's what isn't possible i have to exist within this framework um and only doing these things which are seen as correct and there's actually more degrees of freedom than that we just don't often like acknowledge them uh but you can totally phase

through things and you can totally find that extra degree of freedom and once you do that's a super interesting feeling um as opposed to like waiting for gay luxury space communism you can instead do like fourth dimensional like hyper anarchism uh which gives you so much more freedom right now instead of just waiting for the communism that will never come. And the relationships you build, the relationships you build that are based on a trust that is, I trust you to have my back, I trust you to work with me and do this thing,

is so much deeper than the trust of, I guess I trust my co-worker, but, like, do I really trust him not to snitch to my boss? Like, the trust that comes from a relationship where you're like, hey, yeah, let's, like, we need food, let's go steal it together, that kind of trust is not something that can be recuperated and that kind of like relationship where it's like our relationship is built on the fundamental we will do what we have to to survive it creates an intimacy that you can't find anywhere else and a criminal intimacy you might say yeah and that was the point.

Somebody else picked one. Yeah, just to double down on that too, I think it's cool too because when you also come to a space like this, you can live like that on your own or with your friends, but then there's something wild when you come to a space like this like you can live like that on your on your own or with your friends but then there's something wild when you come to this space um and then all of a sudden it's like when you start attacking something that a lot of other people want to see attacked all of a sudden all you have to do is attack that thing and food's there you know and like and and like yeah and like you have all these

resources and you can focus on that and so like it's like yes i'm like it's like a joke to some degree but like if you want to be a lifestyle anarchist if you want to actually be an anarchist right now and do anarchist shit you can come to atl and do it. And, like, it's not easy. It's fucking scary. It's sketchy. It's hard. There's freaky-ass bugs. But, like, yeah, you don't have to wait. And, like, yeah, it, I think that that's something that, like, for me is really magic, is that, like, actually, the more you attack and the more you like position yourself to be antagonistic towards the world the more this like fourth dimensional like wing leash you're talking about like which i immediately understand like starts to kind of like self

actualize and um yeah i think it's cool and like it freaks me out to think that there's mad people who are probably pretty cool, like waiting for some opportunity. Like waiting just teaches waiting and we don't have that much time. Yeah, you can live anarchy now. You don't need to wait for the collapse TM because turns out that already happened. It's already happening. That already happened. We're just waiting in the liminal space until the climate change catches up. The emissions are already there. We're already living in it. We just don't realize it yet, or some of us are in denial of it yet. But the collapse is like, now

it's already the thing. We don't need to wait for the one big collapse because that's a myth. But you can live anarchy and do stuff. You don't need to wait for the next communist president who's going to run and fail. There's no coming social movement there's no coming collapse there's nothing to wait for to keep on waiting as madness

i think a really interesting aspect of this movement about like how we are attacking a popular target and how like in attacking a popular target we've built this like thing is we are attacking a popular target and how in attacking a popular target we've built this thing is we are... We're not just here and attacking this thing that doesn't exist in isolation. We're here and we've built a movement

and we've built a... Through attack, we've built a movement and we've built, through attack, we've built this popular idea that actually, if you want something to not be there, instead of talking to a politician, you can set it on fire. Vote harder. Vote harder. Just one more vote. I swear, I'm... I'm not addicted. I'm not addicted. This one's different. This one's different. I can't save it this time. This one's when they'll save us.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Now, I'd like to talk more about tactics. Since the City Council vote, on-the-ground tactics have gained a much more integral role and grown past the basic sabotage and house visits, although both of those still are crucial aspects in keeping the movement going. Different ways of preventing physical construction, surveying of land, and destruction of the forest made up most of the on-the-ground direct action efforts inside the forest. I think a really interesting aspect of the way that the struggle has happened here is that because it's so decentralized, there are people people and no one really knows who but there are people

who will just show up and like you know it's like there were people who were like getting the cops called on them in the woods and shit and then like a bunch of fucking anonymous people showed up and like toppled all the camera towers, and people stopped getting the cops called on them in the woods for a really long time, and, like, that kind of decentralized thing, especially where it's, like, you know, regardless of even, like, if the people in the woods were, like, you know, like, into doing shit, it's, like, it's really useful when people who have more skills and people have more knowledge and more ability to do things and more ability to take risks. It's really awesome when those kinds of people can come and make things safe for a larger mass of people. And I feel

like that is, like, a strategy in, like, the insurrectionary space that can be truly, like, expanded on where people who know their shit can make things safe for large groups of people to generalize revolt. Yeah. I look

at, like, a lot at a lot of how the struggle has been framed from the very beginning as like, there was no call to action do X, Y, Z. There was a bunch of people pursuing their own individual desires and what they saw as a

forward-facing, like a projection of their own ideas into the future and made that happen. And it was underneath this framework where there was no limit, there were no boundaries, and there was no idea of, like, us all having to be on the same page about that. Yeah, you don't need to, like, attend a march to be, to, like, do effective things. In fact, it turns out doing things that are not attending a march can often be way more materially effective yeah and to double down on that like

um so many times there's just like a script that people follow oh this is how we do it and then there's and there's like this action that's applied to like everything that people don't like and holy shit that's a crazy bug that was a wild bug i don't know think about that but yeah there's these like things that are applied to everything and this struggle very much has no script uh which is really exciting and but but what's even cooler about that is that it's not it's also not reinventing the wheel and so there's people who are taking from you know like kind of like classic insurrectionary anarchist uh like approaches there's people looking at eco-defense stuff from all over the world thinking about um uh there's people looking at some successful nonviolent direct action,

there's people looking at ALF struggles, and how those campaigns, targeted campaigns, secondary targeting, how things like that work. The contracting and subcontracting companies hired by the Atlanta Police Foundation made up the new targets of the pressure campaigns and direct confrontation methods that threatened physical and social capital. Bringing back the house visits mentioned in the previous episode, in late December, banners that read Reeves Young out of the Atlanta forest were hung in the backyard of the private residence of Dean Reeves in Suwannee, Georgia. Dean Reeves serves as the chairman of Reeves Young Construction

and was among the board members present at the November action. And he personally, allegedly, shoved and assaulted protesters inside the brawl. After the backyard banners were hung, an anonymous online statement read, we hope this action gives

but a minuscule dose of what the creatures in the South Atlanta forest you want to bulldoze might feel, unsafe in the place they call home. A month later, on January 18th, Reeves Young Construction and representatives of the Atlanta Police Foundation entered the forest with a bulldozer. They started knocking down trees to complete more surveying work and determine the construction supplies needed for laying of building foundation. Forest destruction was halted when approximately a dozen protesters approached the workers and Atlanta Police Foundation Representative Alan Williams and demanded that they leave. Workers were safely

escorted out of the woods and the bulldozer was left at the scene and was subsequently taken out of commission. In my interviews with some forest offenders, I believe one of them referred to this as the bulldozer chirping and falling. So that's fun. The day after, autonomous groups of people finished construction of multiple well-built treehouses up in the canopy near the site of the previous day's confrontation. People climbed up into treehouses and announced their intention to remain there in order to delay further construction, riffing off the old tree-sit and bipod tactics.

From October 2021 to this point in the struggle, which is like mid-January 2022, work was consistently able to be stopped by small, dedicated groups of people without resorting to force. Throughout the next week, attempts at land surveying in the area of the old Atlanta prison farm continued, but now with workers being accompanied by the Atlanta Police Foundation, Atlanta Police Officers, and DeKalb County Police. With the backing of cops, workers were able to accomplish more of their tasks, including tree felling and soil boring. Per Crime Thing, quote, in some instances, only a handful of activists were on the scene behind makeshift barricades.

Reinforcements cannot arrive rapidly enough to assist those on the ground, unquote. Reportedly, enough to assist those on the ground, unquote. Reportedly, undercover cops surrounded the forest, intimidating those who would park nearby. As such, some outside support did show up, but not in mass. Meanwhile, in the forest, it was a game of cat and mouse between the workers, forest offenders, and cops. Police went so far as to start chasing people on forest trails while riding on ATVs. Barricades and the tactical removal of land survey markers did slow down work on some days, but ultimately efforts were unsuccessful in halting the destruction process entirely. This week of land destruction and cat and mouse culminated on January 28th. Around 60 people, the largest crowd in months,

gathered to march into the South River Forest and onto the old Atlanta prison farm to directly confront construction workers who were boring holes in the ground, doing soil sample collection. DeKalb County police attacked the protesters, tackling multiple people and arresting four. The first arrests inside the forest within the context of the movement. Quoting Crimethink again, quote, police attacked the march, tackling several people. The other demonstrators did not mount a proportional response to this

aggression, despite outnumbering the police. Perhaps some of the tactics popular during the 2020 rebellion, such as the mass use of umbrellas or makeshift shields, could have equipped the participants to feel more capable of decisive action. Alan Williams of the Atlanta Police Foundation was filming protesters looking a little anxious as he did so. A statement on the Defend the Forest scenes.noblogs.org site concluded their report back with this sentiment, quote, At this point, we are in need of two main things.

More people to help support tree sits and defend the forest from destruction, and legal attempts to delay construction. Yeah, always you want more people to be on the ground in the woods, in the city. Chaos. We need chaos. We'd like, right, the chaos star, we'd like that shit for a reason. You want to wear out the enemy in a lot of different ways, and the enemy is a lot of different people. The enemy is Reeves Young. The enemy is their subcontractors.

The enemy is the police. The enemy is Georgia Power. Georgia Power owns, quote-unquote, owns the power cut that divides both Entrenchment Creek and the OPF side. There's a lot creek and the opf side there's a lot of different people so if there's a lot of and we also have a lot of different people involved in a lot of different ways there's people living in the woods there's people living in town so in reality people already know these things and it's already happening we should be visiting

the offices we should be visiting these fuckers at home at their goddamn church we should be visiting them in the forest there should be there should be no peace for the enemy. And I believe that's how we can win, because we need to make it unpopular and unsavory, and hopefully next to impossible for them to make these choices. Because even though this is a small part of the forest, they're just going to continue on to the next thing. I want to briefly go into some details about a method of protest that combines pressure to both physical and social capital in hopes of resulting material changes from businesses, corporations, or people in power. It features many of the actual tactics we've in fact already discussed. We'll refer to it as the shack method for reasons that will be shortly explained. for reasons that will be shortly explained.

House visits, targeted vandalism, phone calls, and hanging banners in backyards all have a place in this methodology. It's a focused drive to dissolve that safe political or corporate astral space that I talked about in the last episode. The CrimeThink article contains a really good summary of the Shack Method, so instead of just regurgitating their explainer, I'm just going to narrate certain sections of it,

because that'll make my job easier, and I'm a hack and a fraud, blah blah blah blah blah. Quote, the goal is to hold those responsible for these projects personally liable for their decisions and the decisions of the companies they own. Because the entire system of rules and norms we live under dictates that exploiters, warlords, mass murderers, and those that destroy ecosystems must not face pressure at home as a consequence of the decisions that they make at work. This strategy is bound to be controversial. It rejects the entire logic of limited liability that forms the basis of corporate rule in our society. At the beginning of the 21st century, animal rights activists in the UK and the US set out to take down the biggest animal testing corporation on the planet, Huntington Life Sciences. The campaign to stop Huntington Life Sciences was called Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty, or SHAC.

It formally disbanded in 2014, and is best known for its period of ambitious international participation in the early 2000s. The methodology of this movement, which encompassed direct action, symbolic protests, cultural events, sabotage, pranks, and more, included many features that had been since used in a wide range of campaigns. included many features that had been since used in a wide range of campaigns. The overall strategy of SHAC involved mobilizing a few hundred people to maximize their effectiveness against a major enterprise by focusing only on their ability to function economically. The SHAC model is centered around tertiary targeting, i.e. isolating service providers from third-party contracts in order to limit their ability to provide services to the client, which is the actual target.

Okay, now, I'm just going to pause here, because if that sounds confusing, let me briefly provide an example. So the actual target here would be the Atlanta Police Foundation, since they're the ones with plans to build Cop City. since they're the ones with plans to build Cop City. The Police Foundation has contracted a few companies, Brassfield & Gorey, for one, and Reeves Young. So these companies are the service provider. The Shaq model attempts to isolate the service provider, so Reeves Young, from all of their third-party clients and contracts,

which will, in the end, go back to hurt the actual target, which is the Atlanta Police Foundation. Back to Crimethink. The service provider, so in this case, Reeves Young, the service provider depends on many third parties. Third parties provide the service provider with insurance, materials, equipment, security, catering, cleaning, mail service, data maintenance, and more. All of those third parties can be pressured to drop the service provider. Furthermore, the service provider is likely a company with more than one client, and those other clients can also be pressured to drop the provider. Any company or contractor that is able to move their money away from the service provider because they have other

economic opportunities can be pressured to do so. Essentially, this strategy does not directly challenge the bottom line of any of the third-party companies. It only isolates and demoralizes the service provider and therefore the end target. To date, it still remains unclear who is the service provider for the Blackhall Studios development, although that information will come out sooner than later. In considering the limits of the shack strategy, in actions outside of the forest, it might be more difficult for activists to maintain a sense of urgency. and homes will chiefly bring out those who are excited about such confrontational methods, rather than those who prefer to maintain welcoming spaces of encounter, to build treehouses, or to clean campsites, to cook for others, to cultivate the kind of collective imagining that is needed to transform society. Also, if people fail to do proper research or mapping,

activists could waste their time targeting minor institutions and companies that are unwilling or unable to drop their contracts. They could spend months facing down insignificant companies with many possible replacement subcontractors. Sorry, that was a big info dump, but I think it is useful information. So the goal isn't to sway companies with moralizing arguments, but to frame their association with militarized policing or ecological destruction as a bad look that could hurt their reputation and ability to secure future clients. Combined with economic incentives inflicted on the service provider, like acts of sabotage, the resulting

targeted campaign attacking physical and social capital can lead to pressure on third parties to influence the decision of the service provider on whether or not to stay on the project. Methodologies can be put to the test through practice and be judged by the outcome. The proposal to employ the shack strategy to defend the forest is just built on the simple hypothesis that if Reeves Young is forced to drop the contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation, the Atlanta Police Foundation investors will then lose the confidence that's required to find an adequate replacement, and the project could stumble or fail. The same goes for the Blackhall project.

If activists defeat Reeves Young by means of direct action and self-organization, even if the project finds a new contractor, the sophistication and confidence that the movement will have developed in the process will likely help it evolve once again. Also, like, one thing that we, that people have figured out, because, like, for the first two, after the first two arsons, you could literally just walk up to, during daylight, up to the, like, area of Michelle Obama Park, and, like, touch, take pictures of, like, have sex around, like, make out with the construction equipment that had been burned, and you could see the stickers of where they had rented these, like, construction equipment, destruction equipment.

these construction equipment, destruction equipment, and after the first one, it changed. It was no longer rented from the same company, and after the second one, it changed again. And there is reason to believe that with every arson or attack that they are changing construction equipment companies because rental companies tend to not like it. Whenever

their equipment is destroyed, it costs them a lot of money, and oftentimes they cannot afford hundreds of thousands of dollars going down the drain to support a project that is highly unpopular. Yeah, and the other thing, what we're talking about with a modified, like a policing modifying itself, is it's interesting because we're at this point where policing is highly unpopular, and so it's kind of hedging its bets and then it's also just like mask off doubling down buying mad guns like like yeah just becoming increasingly more militarized increasingly more violent and like moving mask off like an occupying force so there's this split where there's no and people are well aware of this, there's no, like, public chance of convincing a lot of companies that this is wrong, right? It's, well, it's very divided. So the people who are committed are very committed. There are fucking enemies, and we're their enemies,

and that's it. But then there's other people who are doing this for economic reasons and kind of understand that policing is not cute, right? And that it's at least unpopular or going out of fashion to some degree and can make money in other ways. So yeah, it's this interesting thing where being able to fight battles for public opinion maybe doesn't super work, and all you have to do is kind of try to cut away the people who are supporting, people who are ideologically committed to our destruction, and we feel reciprocal. If you look at the photos of what was happening with Michelle Obama Park, the land swap site they were trying to build on,

you can tell that Heavy Yellow Equipment LLC of Marietta, Georgia stopped providing them equipment after, like, the first or the second time that their machines got lit on fire, and now it's ALIF, A-L-Ii-f of i don't know where georgia so you know these are photos that you can see like you can look at these communiques and just tell like like if there's a photo attached like there is a traceable like trend of companies are dropping the fuck out because they for whatever whatever reason, just cannot take the heat. No pun intended. On June 12th, 2020, while fully in the throes of nationwide revolt against

police after the murder of George Floyd, two Atlanta police officers killed Rayshard Brooks, a black man who had been sleeping in his car in the parking lot of a Wendy's. Not long after, the restaurant was burnt to the ground by determined crowds. In the time period between June 2020 to the end of the year, more than 200 Atlanta police officers left their jobs, including their chief of police. Local sheriff's deputies, state patrolmen, and transit cops also resigned during the year of the uprising at a higher than average rate. As the entire system of policing and capitalism face a crisis of legitimacy, corporations, business owners,

landlords, business associations, and international real estate companies demand a public pacification and a reassurance of a future with stable consumerism. Profit incentive and police need each other in a symbiote-like relationship. I'll do one of my last crime think quotes here. Quote, forces in local and federal government, business associations, police departments, and armed militias have continuously worked to make sure a popular uprising does not reoccur. A large part of the institutional reaction to the 2020 popular uprising has focused on managing public perception. Industrial interests and private investment companies have conducted influence campaigns using local news outlets, 40% of which are owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group, a right-wing news organization. Between Sinclair, Nexstar,

news organization. Between Sinclair, Nexstar, Gray, Tega, and Tribune, this coordinated reframing of events has damaged the way that many sectors of the television viewing public perceive the 2020 revolt and its consequences. In the wake of the uprising, a false narrative circulated to the effect that police, while demoralized and underfunded, cannot control the crime waves currently sweeping the country. This orchestrated narrative has shaped the imaginations of suburban whites, small business owners, and many urban progressives. The crime wave framework implied that police departments around the country had in fact been defunded or had their powers curtailed and were consequently unable to assure social peace or free enterprise. In reality, the vast majority of police departments received an annual increase

in their budgets as they normally do. If anything, they accrued more power following the events of 2020. So it's no coincidence that the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Atlanta Police Department are pushing to build a militarized urban warfare training center in the wake of the 2020 uprisings by leveraging that crime wave narrative and the fears of future social unrest. They want to have the tools to bring down the inevitable upcoming revolts for racial, environmental, and economic justice, and now more than ever, including reproductive justice. Cop City is leading the charge as a part of a new effort to adapt American policing strategies to our new era of societal decay and the ever-crumbling that will define this century

as we face the escalating consequences of industrialization and climate change. I think another really important thing to look at with this also is when you look at the George Floyd uprising and the crisis it brought in policing, when they realized that, oh, holy shit, people are so angry about this that they will pose a threat to the sovereignty of the state, which is the first time that has happened in an extremely long time. When that finally happened, the state, the morale of police departments around the country was broken. Cops everywhere were like, it was a demoralizing thing. And when you think about cops as an occupying force, as an occupying military force, thinking about the fact that we broke their morale

is really important. And then thinking about this place as they intend to build a training facility to increase morale, which is a classic military tactic of create cool and interesting ways to train your soldiers to do a murder, is, like, that is a classic military tactic, and when you begin to think about this as social war, when you begin to think about this as not just a struggle against Cop City,

but as a struggle for disabling and destroying the police, when you think about this as a material struggle against the occupying forces that are the police, this becomes, like, way more contextual. I feel like that is the best way to contextualize this movement. Yeah. So, one interesting thing is, like, after Rayshard Brooks was murdered and the two cops involved were subsequently charged, what was it, 600 cops went on sick out.

Hundreds. Hundreds. Um, and their morale was broken. Atlanta police has always been understaffed

for, like, as long as I've known. Um, and not understaffed by, like, any media propaganda spin standards,

but, like, every single day they're facing backlogs in every zone where they cannot answer calls. And that's a good thing. This is a war of attrition where their current training facilities have broken

toilets, have leaky pipes, have unmanaged... Several inoperable sinks. Yeah. Have like have undeniably miserable conditions. Their cars are continually on their last legs. And that is a path to abolitionism, making it so it is so undesirable to be a cop in this city or any city

that no one would dare do it. It is crucial that police are not the only ones that seek to evolve their tactics for a new era. And moving beyond the kind of non-violent action that's become so common during protests during the Trump era and the post-Green scare, and even like post-Occupy, there is this looking for a new form of anarchist or radical resistance. for a new form of anarchist or radical resistance. I want to really emphasize the learning things here, is that this struggle, like, took all the different rulebooks,

tore them up, set them on fire, and used the ashes for their shitter. Like, everyone here is learning things. People who have been doing things a long fucking time are here and learning new things. We're not just tearing up and destroying the rulebooks. We're like... We're like lodges out of them. We are weird. The rulebooks are like a doll.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It like put them like... It like tore all of them up, made collages, put them, like, it, like, tore all of them up, made collages out of them, and, like, is trying to create this, like, weird paper mache mesh of a experimental path into the future.

And, like, when we say we are experimenting with new forms of revolt, new tactics, new strategies. We truly mean there aren't existing models to do what we're doing. We are writing the book as we do it.

And yeah, we fuck up sometimes, but we've also got some really cool shit happening. Shit that hasn't happened in 20 years is happening, and shit that hasn't happened in 20 years is happening, and shit that hasn't happened ever is happening here. And I think that's, like, a really... It's a really important

thing to touch on, is that, like, much of the... you know, much of the, like, eco-defense shit that's happened in North America for quite a while the, like, eco-defense shit that's happened in North America for quite a while has, like, not done, you know, or at least not released communiques about, like, shit that happens here seemingly every couple weeks, you know? Like, You know?

Like, the shit here is crazy and wild beyond your dreams. It's also scary and hard and traumatizing. And it's beautiful and terrifying. And, like, if that sounds great,

you should come. Yeah, this is a step away from us actually evolving out of the... I look at this as a huge step in what land defense looks like after we have faced green scare repression, and now we are moving past the post-green scare repression movements and figuring out how to move forward. And regardless of if this, like, uh, lands in a really repressive, like, boots down our throats, like, situation, I don't think anyone should ever

stop experimenting. I don't think people should go back to the old ways. I don't think that we should be resigned to not experiment. I think that everyone, like, we are in a situation where there is no future. There, like, the collapse is now. We're probably not going to avoid 1.5 degrees warming. Our police are only further militarizing. And the, like, reality of resistance is that we just that we desperately need experimentation yeah if there was a winning strategy that was proven to be effective then it would have it would have been effective and there would be we would have a winning strategy there's a popular meme in the forest which is the are you winning some meme except instead of are you winning some it? Instead of, are you winning some? It says, are you experiencing the joy of attack, son? And I think that is an important one. The same way cop cities are part of the new evolution of American policing,

defend the Atlanta forest can be seen as kind of trailblazing for future movements. A look at how they might develop post the George Floyd protests. For my last and final crime think quote, this campaign represents a crucial effort to chart new paths forward in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion, linking the defense of the land that sustains us

with the struggle against police. The movement opposing these developments, mobilizing around the watchwords, defend the forest, and stop cop city, have passed through several phases of experimentation, using a wide array of tactics and strategies to keep pace with the current course of events. It represents an important effort to revitalize eco-defense and police abolition strategies in the wake of the George Floyd Rebellion. So considering the possible wide-ranging impacts of both the evolution of policing and the evolution of resistance tactics, the Defend the Atlanta Force movement is extremely relevant to all people who want to improve the world, whether or not they live in Atlanta.

in Atlanta. Atlanta has for a very long time been a testing ground for new surveillance tech. And in experimenting with new forms of struggle here in Atlanta, there are things that

not only are we in many ways on the front lines of experimenting with new tactics and integrating new strategies and how they work, but we're also on the front lines of different kinds of both in-person and digital forms of oppression that don't have to be worried about other places. that don't have to be worried about other places, and, like, it also provides a proving ground for ways to struggle specifically against those forms of surveillance, and understanding the different ways that sometimes the most effective thing in protecting yourself from repression isn't some super high-tech shit. It's asking you to mask a pair of gloves

and not bring in your phone. And, like, people don't seem to, like, think about that. I don't need to go into that part, but yeah. So, speaking of surveillance, we actually have, like, not we. I don't claim that. The police here and the state here has like the video the integration system which i believe is like one of the like integration center

video integration center where they take where businesses and homeowners with like ring cameras can volunteer their video surveillance equipment to be plugged into a network that can be monitored and pulled up at any time by the police in a downtown location. And they and that is like one of the largest surveillance network systems in the

world, I believe. And it is actually leading the charge in new forms of surveillance in other cities are looking at this as a model of how to better surveil their own cities. Which obviously makes London Police Foundation trying to create their own little mini-city a very interesting prospect in terms of establishing new ideas on how to take policing forward into the 2020s, 2030s, after we've had these waves of social justice,

like uprisings and uprisings for Black Lives Matter. Not many places actually got defunded, but the propaganda has to be different, and the way that police optics work definitely needs to be changed, from their perspective, or they're trying to have them be changed. One of the strongest things I feel like came out of this movement and what really put us ahead was our ability to get ahead the game on like the narrative and then never being able to recuperate that narrative because their plan was this institute for social justice is a new way of training police to, quote, be better or, like, not murder people as much and, like, more refined. And I don't want more refined, like, police that, like, murder, quote, the right people or beat the right people or cage the right people.

That's not my desire. I want to end to policing. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of projects happening in the forest. And, you know, I also just want to emphasize, like, I'm not from Atlanta, but I feel like it's really important for me to be here. You know, I think a lot of people who felt inspired by the George Floyd uprising, like, this is an attempt to recuperate. Like, I've said this a million times. It's an attempt for the police to recuperate from that, and I'm trying to finish what we started.

I also think that we need to understand that this isn't just about Atlanta. Like, one of the buildings that they're trying to build and, like, one of the points of this training facility is that it is, like, a hub in the same way Atlanta, with a movie theater, the same way they're trying to make Atlanta this hub, right? There's an infrastructure for it being a hub in the same way atlanta with a movie theater the same way they're trying to make atlanta this hub right it's there's an infrastructure for being a hub from shipping and stuff like that

and so now they're trying to make it this this economic hub in a more white color way and so they're trying to make it a hub for police in atlanta but also to train police to do fucked shit and to mutate like nationally and i know that the police from the you know whatever city I live in are probably going to come here and go back and fuck that up so I'm trying to make sure that they can't come here and that you know police are demoralized in every city and they're having trouble in every city and this isn't just about the APD if you live pretty much anywhere on the east coast there's a high chance that your police are going to come here and then go back to your house and fuck you up.

So come here and make sure they can't. And the other thing I want to say is like, yeah, they want to make this a training facility for police. Right now, it is a training facility for anarchists. If you come here, I promise you, you will leave with more courage and with more skills and knowing a lot of fucking people who are really fucking down all over the country. And I think it's worth it. That's what I'm saying. I wanted to jump in and say, like,

this is about you. An hour or two hours south of here is the School of the Americas, you might have heard of it, it's here in Georgia, it's where a lot of awful fucking dictators and their henchmen learned how to do really awful shit, a bunch of war crimes, and here in the city of Atlanta, uh, a local school, the largest, the largest university in the state, Georgia State University, hosts something called the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, or GILI, which is where they and the IDF get together to train local police forces here in Atlanta and around the country.

And if you don't think that Cop City is going to play a huge role in your police department learning from the IDF how to beat you up. You have another thing coming. You should come here to Atlanta and join what's going on because this is about everyone here. Like, this is about the whole country. They are coming to Atlanta to learn how to brutalize people. And it's going to take all of us to stop it. to learn how to brutalize people, and it's going to take all of us to stop it. A funny thing about this project is that there's these sort of dual intersections and dual microcosms. On one side, there is the intersection of policing, gentrification, racism, ecological

destruction, and climate change. And on the other side, there's the intersection between the tactics of urban city protest and rural eco-defense. But there's also this dual microcosm. On the side of the state, they're trying to construct this police facility with a mock city to train in microcosm for protest suppression and practice urban combat against people who live in American cities. And on the people's side, there's this microcosm, not only for how resistance movements can evolve post-2020, but more importantly for the people involved in the struggle, a microcosm for how you can live a life free of the oppressive societal mechanisms that we claim to oppose. I think another really interesting thing about this being, like, such an ungovernable space is that

because it's ungovernable, because it's impossible to control, it allows us to create these, like, new ways of relating to each other that can't happen other places. Like, where else are, like, people in their everyday lives just going to

be able to walk around as gender-fucked as they want and, like, just, it's fine, like, you know, if they're, if a queer basher comes into these fucking woods, like, it's gonna be a bad time, because literally everyone here is queer, like, we don't, that's the thing, is, like, when we exist in these these spaces in this ungovernable way we like are like creating mini versions of the society we want to see at large yeah this is something i want to talk about something i wanted to talk about in terms of like the microcosm macrocosm idea of after 2020 uprising looking for new paths forward the defending line of force thing can be viewed as this micro like

this microcosm of how we can approach different struggles going into the 2020s going into the 2030s and stuff um because yeah like it is like this small version of what we want there's also the whole idea of like what i've seen here in the forest more closely resembles like an actual temporary autonomous zone than like the Chaz ever did in terms of like people actually like actually living free, actually living, like not relying on like city water, like not,

like not living in like the, in a downtown metro area. It's like, it's an actual free space where people can be queer and be all of the things and climb trees and talk with the deer and like that's people are actually allowed to do that like there's not all of the stigma that even

a thing like Chaz had like so many problems right like extremely extremely hashtag problematic in terms of how that resulted and yeah this is such a microcosm of like an autonomous area where people are able to do those things. I also kind of want to talk on like,

our ideas of safety and security don't reside in like the ideas of say, a safety or security force. It doesn't, it resides in our trust in ourselves and each other it resides in like we actually keep each other safe we have each other's backs we like will fight for each other and any threat to any one of us is like taken seriously we have this, like, intimacy, this criminal intimacy, that, like, allows us to build more genuine relationships with high highs and low lows than anything ever could. chemically induced regulated median of gray and terrible is that's not what we live yes some days here it sucks to wake up and everything you own is wet and you gotta go shit in a hole but it's flooded but also some days things here are fucking awesome. And I get to wake up to the birds calling and go, like, have a party with my friends. I don't, like, exist here in a way that is, like, comprehensible or legible to, like, a wider, like, society.

I don't exist in a way that people look at this and be like, ah, that's what you need. But I have never been happier than when I've been in the woods with people I trust and care about and know have my back. People don't have to worry about working to pay their water bill because you can go just get the things you need from places you don't have to pay for it and like you don't have to worry about all of these things all of these societal pressures there's not this constant threat of oh i lose my job oh all those things all those things all these mental constructs that control us aren't there anymore because we've built a world that doesn't rely on that in the slightest. And I think that's, like, a really powerful thing that, like, we've already met our own needs, and so we can fight back in these beautiful and fiery ways, pun intended, that like allow us to just experience things that like have

been stolen from us for generations. Yeah, I was going to say we're not safe, but we're free. And I think that anyone who makes that decision as an act of decision to not be safe, but to be free, I may not like, but but by definition i'll ride for them because i made that decision welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're now nearing the end of the episode, but before I finish, I need to go back to talking about tactics for a bit, and end with some actual good news. From January 2022 to present time of recording, there's been an increase in solidarity attacks in cities across the country, some targeting Reeves Young and Long Engineering Equipment in other states, third-party service providers of contracted construction companies, or locations and offices

of corporate sponsors of the Atlanta Police Foundation. This past March, six machines owned by Reeves Young, including two large excavators and a bulldozer, were destroyed in Flowery Branch, Georgia. The online communique reads, quote, so long as you continue to contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation for the destruction of the South Atlanta forest and the construction of a cop city in its place, know that your equipment is not safe, your offices are not safe, your homes are not safe. Unless your company chooses to pull out of the Atlanta Police Foundation's cop city project of its own volition, we will undermine your profits so severely that you'll have no choice but to drop the contract, unquote. Subsequent solidarity attacks have happened in Portland, San Francisco,

Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, and Highland, Michigan, to name a few. Many of these attacks were targeted at Atlas Technical Consultants, who own many smaller companies, such as Long Engineering, which has done work with Reeves Young and Brasfield & Gorey for the Cop City project. In the vein of shack-style methods, this past April, on the 9th, a website called StopReevesYoung.com launched onto the interwebs. The site listed some of the various third-party clients and subcontractors under Reeves Young Construction, and ways to contact them to voice concern about their relation to the deforestation and this urban warfare construction project, as well as including the names and addresses of executives within Reeves Young and some of their affiliates. their affiliates. On the day I was set to leave Atlanta and say goodbye to the forest for the time being, activists got word that Reeves Young Construction might be dropping out of the project. This would obviously be a big, big win and an indication of the possible effectiveness of the shack method combined with sabotage and the forest encampment tactics.

At a stakeholders meeting for the Cop City Project the next day, it was publicly confirmed that Reeves Young will not continue work on the new police training center. In the public statement addressing Reeves Young's lack of future involvement, the Atlanta Police Foundation tried to frame the situation as Reeves Young simply have, quote, finished their role in the project. This is a laughable deception, as Reeves Young simply have, quote, finished their role in the project. This is a laughable deception, as Reeves Young is one of Atlanta's major construction firms and has even built massive, quote-unquote, public safety facilities in the past. They do not merely do preliminary subcontracting survey work. They work on projects from start to finish, taking lead

contracting roles. It was speculated that Reeves Young itself may have been the main subcontractor hired to do complete construction of Cop City by Brasfield and Gorey, who have more established ties to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Quoting from the Stop Reeves Young website, quote, The Atlanta Police Foundation would have us believe that Reeves Young was contracted to do nothing more than hire a bulldozer and walk alongside long engineering work crews as they planted a few surveying stakes and did some soil testing. Police and their corporate backers don't want to let it be known that a focused group of activists have delivered a devastating blow to the cop city construction. While the Atlanta Police Foundation tries to

save face, we are celebrating a major victory, pressuring a main contractor out of the project. We are pleased that the movement has built up so much momentum and that the Cop City development continues to face setbacks because of the intelligent actions of regular people. However, the struggle continues. Brasfield and Gorey, another large general contractor, remains with the project. A Georgia open records request from April confirmed via paper trail that the Atlanta Police Foundation has been working on the Cop City project with Brasfield and Gorey, another major general contractor in the southeast region of the United States. Brasfield and Gorey is an LLC and a multi-billion dollar general

contractor, ranked as a top contractor in the Southeast by Engineering News Record. Based on recent Atlanta Police Foundation emails required through public records, we can now assume that Brasfield and Gorey act as the sole contractor for Cop City. Quoting again from the Stop Reeves Young website, quote, Brasfield and Gory are dependent on subcontractors to complete their projects. Now they must hire a new entire set of subcontractors in order to build Cop City. We believe it is in their best interests for Brasfield and Gory to follow the lead of Reeves Young and drop Atlanta Police Foundation as a client, rather than remaining complicit in the destruction

of the forest. It is up to all of us to make that clear to them. We can pressure Brassfield and Gorey out of Cop City by complicating their ability to do business. This does not have to be limited to the Cop City project. Their various construction projects and third-party service providers are numerous. If Brassfield and Gorey begin to feel like they must choose between all of their contracts and their Cop City contract, we are confident that they will choose the former. By working to convince subcontractors, consulting firms, surveyors, architects, etc. around the country that Brassfield and Gorey are not a good business investment, we can make it easier for the construction company to do the right thing and dump the Atlanta Police Foundation for good.

This has been an incredible period of momentum and research, but nothing is over yet. Now that we have made a decisive victory, it is important to remain more focused than ever. In the coming weeks and months, we will need to continue pressuring all of the contractors associated with the project to create economic incentives for them to simply move their time and resources to other endeavors. The Stop Reeves Young website will continue to serve as an educational hub for this ongoing campaign. End quote. On top of confirming that Reeves Young was dropping out of the project, a few other interesting pieces of information came out at the recent stakeholders meeting held on April 26th. Allegedly, there will be a bid for the next

contractors or subcontractors in the coming weeks, and that will be publicly announced. It was also announced during the meeting that the Cop City planners will keep construction timelines secret and may surround the construction site and future facility with an unwanted fence in response to the, quote, law-breaking protesters. Atlanta Assistant Police Chief and Site Security Chief Darren Sheerbaum said, quote, we are working with DeKalb County to address any criminal acts related to trespassing and vandalism, unquote. He also stated that police were also concerned with protesters targeting those who work on the project at other locations.

Here's an interesting note from our Forest Defender pals on how the Atlanta Police Department function and are allowed to operate while inside the old Atlanta prison farm and Entrenchment Creek Park. This is something that's true of city police departments in general, but as soon as a cop is, you know, out of, like, streets and things like that, that cop is uncomfortable. And, like, cops here are carrying 20, 30 pounds of gear on them at all times. And not only are they carrying that much gear, but they spend most all day running around and sitting in a car.

And, like, you know, that cop not only doesn't want to chase you through the woods, but they also probably aren't capable of it. the woods, but they also probably aren't capable of it. And aside from the obvious like, you know, their infrastructure issues, them being away from their cars, not being on the streets, having all of their gear,

we're also not in the city of Atlanta in this forest. We're in unincorporated DeKalb County, which means Atlanta Police Department doesn't have legal jurisdiction as police here. They only have legal jurisdiction as police here they only have legal jurisdiction as agents of the city of atlanta because the city of atlanta owns this property which is outside of the city so in any time when they're conducting an arrest they have to have

dekab county police department officers present with them there there can be an atlanta police department and has been major like like, one of their huge, like, high ranks, who has no legal authority here, except to represent the city. And that relationship is kind of, like, tenuous at best. They're not pals.

They hate each other. Yeah. And, you know, so if you're headed in the town, like, bear in mind that is a huge place to drive a wedge, because they, they fucking hate each other. Yeah, no, there's, like, um, there was, like, one thing, one time where, like, Atlanta police officers were, like, inside the forest, um, with, like, a specific goal in mind, and DeKalb County police cruisers, not only did DeKalb police not want to get out of their

cruisers and go into the forest, because they have, they didn't care, they didn't want to do this, so the Atlanta police, uh, were screaming into their radios, saying, get this person, they're walking out of the forest, get this person, they're walking out of the forest, and it would just be, like, five or ten minutes before DeKalb police cab police like cruisers to just roll down the road and like you know there were like people who like ran into the woods and like ran from them and the cab police like were like i'm not going into this these woods and i'm also not calling to let the atlanta police to let them know that this person just ran from me into the woods, because then I'll have to actually go in after them.

Also during the April 26th stakeholder meeting, Security Chief Schierbaum announced that the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agreed to an assistance request in mid-April from Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant, and will be assigned to the site, while attempting to work with neighborhood watch groups. He noted that, quote, we look forward to working with those agencies to ensure that this is a safe project that is occurring here and addressing any criminal acts that may be occurring on site to try to stop the project from proceeding, unquote. The co-chair of the Stakeholder Advisory Committee, Sharon Williams, invoked the term eco-terrorism as relating to the forest defense, marking the first time that word has been used

by the government officials to refer to this batch of protests. She also thanked the cop city planners for, quote, transparency in explaining why they cannot be transparent on the construction timeline. Emails between the Atlanta Police Foundation and the City of Atlanta obtained via public records requests do give a possible look into the future of the development. In a January 2022 email, Police Foundation Representative Alan Williams said that we, quote, plan on enabling work possibly in the May 2022 and June 2022 timeframe. Our project will last until the last quarter of 2023, and our contractors are currently working on an overall site logistics and safety plan, unquote. Although at the time,

their contractors still included Reeves Young, so there's no telling how accurate that timeline is now. Other emails detailed plans for Homeland Security to obtain ring camera subscriptions to monitor quote, criminal activity at the new academy footprint, unquote. In general, when involved in any level of protest, no matter of the alleged legality, security culture considerations should always be among people's top priorities, especially with more eyes being directed to the Defend the Atlanta Forest project. Each person should be responsible for themselves, and I think that the type of action you're interested in taking should severely inform the type of personal security precautions that you're taking.

I think that's been a recurring theme as the movement builds. There are folks that come into the movement not having heard the term security culture, OPSEC, or whatever you want to call it. And so that can be really jarring for folks that are just first trying to get involved. But people pick it up surprisingly quick. Once you have built as a community like norms and customs around, is this a phones on or phones off meeting? Are we talking about this on Signal?

Is the call for this action going out on social media? Are we just sharing this amongst friends? Where that hadn't really been a thing, and where frankly a lot of people face significant repression here in Atlanta during the uprisings because of security culture decisions that were made. I think that a security culture is being built here that where it didn't really exist before, or at least wasn't widespread before, is going to survive long past this movement. I think, like, one of the biggest aspects of these things is, like, the generalizing of the norm of if someone answers you vaguely and seems uninterested in continuing the conversation, just understanding that they have your best interests at heart when they don't want you to know, and, like, quite frankly, you just can't accidentally share information you don't have.

And so, like, you know, when we sit here in these woods and people say, you know, like, you say, like, so, you know, where have you been, blah, blah, blah. And they're just like, oh, you know, places or something like that. I just don't ask questions, and I understand that I don't just, not only do I not need to know, but I probably don't want to know. And, like, you know, when it comes to, like, more, like, material, technical things, those are important, but, like, the social aspects of security culture are so, so much more important than the technical aspects. your phone out of the room, but like, you know, if you take the phone out of the room and talk about doing crazy shit with complete strangers, you don't, you know, you don't have a reason to trust them, and like, coming here to Atlanta, like, if you wanna do crazy shit, don't, you know, if you wanna do, if you're coming to Atlanta, let

me rephrase that, if you're coming to Atlanta and you wanna do crazy shit, like, you know, think about, like, how to do that in a safe way, or as safely as possible, you know, don't, or as safely as possible, you know? Don't, don't come to us and be like, hey, I haven't met you before, but, like, do you want to go do some federal felonies? Because no, I don't, and I don't want to know that you're doing that either. Like, we have, if you want to do crazy shit, that's cool, just, like, I don't want to know you did it, and, like, if you're, like, coming here with the intention of creating, like, with the intention of, like, doing shit because it's, like, cool and fun, if you're coming here with the intention of, like, I want to gain social capital because I did crazy things.

Like, maybe rethink that. Like, if you want to do crazy shit and you do want to come here, find your closest friends, plan a road trip, and don't tell anyone. In a recent interview, Atlanta Police Foundation President and CEO Dave Wilkinson estimates that Defend the Forest quote-unquote group members have done

hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to utility equipment and has brought up plans to add a fence around the entirety of the site as construction begins, saying, and anyone on the site will be arrested and as we move forward, the enforcement will become stricter and stricter, unquote. Also stated in an interview is that, quote, the police foundation also hopes to build separate museums on site dedicated to police officers and the labor prison that was once located there. So that's what the kids call mask-off moment of building a dedicated museum to cops and the labor prison, aka slave labor prison, anyway. The first phase of the project had the initial $90 million price tag attached, with taxpayers being forced to pay $30 million of that,

and it's still unclear what the final cost of the facility is slated to be, or what the estimated operating costs are, or really how many phases of construction they really plan on doing. The past few weeks, the sight of cops in the woods has become a more and more common occurrence. Whether to do scouting, or just apparently detonating explosives for funsies at their current makeshift shooting range like they did a few days ago. One morning when I was there, I woke up to people yelling, cops in the woods, which by the way is a very effective substitute for caffeine in terms of making you very awake and alert quite early in the morning. And then while running through the forest, I saw a beautiful

deer and a hopping rabbit. So nice clash of feelings and sensations there. In terms of closing sentiments, based on conversations and observations I had from my brief time in the woods, it's this. Play to your strengths. Don't play by the enemy's rules. Utilize the intersection of urban city-based tactics and resources while taking inspiration from classic forest-based eco-defense. Attacking from the cover of the woods and ensuring that the terrain is as unwelcoming as possible to vehicular machinery can help buy time for rapid response popular mobilization from people living in the city, if and when that time comes. Yeah, 5-0, go ahead. Hey, y'all be careful coming down Key Road. They throwing bottles at the police and all that. Bottles and smoke bombs. So be careful. They in the woods throwing at the police cars and stuff like that.

I'll copy. Appreciate it. Yeah, and despite the defensive nature of defending the forest, there still is a large amount of making sure that as often as possible you can do the prep work to set the terms of engagement so that they're fighting on your terms. You're not always complying to theirs, which can be useful for defensive stuff, obviously. It's a whole aspect of defending a forest like this that you, I think, defenders can have this almost, like, spectral quality of, like, cops don't know where people are,

what they've built, what's in the forest, what's in the woods. And that's, like, spooky. Like, you don't know who's up in a treehouse. You don't know who's behind what tree. You don't know what things are in the woods. And that spectral quality of the forest defense is a really interesting aspect of it that you don't see in, you don't really see that in, like, pipeline protests like pipeline protests as much you don't really see that for like protests in a city um because the city very much is like a kind of more of like a cop's terrain um so i really do like that aspect of

like cops are kind of scared to go in the woods because they're spooky they have openly testified like in court testimony that said that when this forest defender was arrested, the police officer that gave his statement to the judge was shaking, physically shaking, because he was so afraid from being yelled at. Like that was all that had happened is a bunch of protesters were yelling at them, and he was shaking. The police are really dependent on their infrastructure. They are dependent on all of that kit that they carry around. They are not mobile. They are meant to be attached to that squad car,

and every further step they take away from that, they are more and more uncomfortable, and when they look around and realize they're in the middle of the fucking woods, that's terrifying for them, and that needs to be, like, like taken advantage of and it is woods that like they that their drones and their police helicopters have problem even with their

thermal tracking of seeing through the canopy woods that like and i want to say like it was really funny to me that um in that like it was said that the protesters were screaming we know where you live we know where you live, we know where you live, we're coming, we're coming. Yeah, which is the whole ghost thing. Because in terms of thermal stuff, I brought a thermal camera of mine here, and the woods are very hard to see through with my thermal camera.

I cannot see more than 20 feet away. I've tested it on people. That's a super interesting aspect. And yeah, it's the whole Ferngully, Princess Mononoke thing of when people come out of the woods wearing ski masks, that's freaky. It's like you can be the thing that goes boo in the night. That is you.

And that's something that should be taken advantage of when there's people invading the forest and trying to destroy it I think this is a really important thing to touch on is that for a lot of us even though many of us have been socialized to think of the dark and the night and the woods as this scary thing

this is where I feel the most safe. This is, if you give me a bunch of camo and like send me off into the woods, there's nowhere I'm going to feel more safe and more capable both of safety and attack. When I'm out here, I feel like I can do anything. You give me a bunch of woods, a bunch of hills, like, there's so much we can do because we're not in this position of, you know, entering hostile territory to, you know, do things. This is territory that we control, and this is territory that we are using to fight back, and we're weaponizing not just, you know, the cop sphere, but we're weaponizing the terrain itself, we're weaponizing the trees, we're weaponizing the hills,

we're weaponizing the ruins, and we're weaponizing everything here as, like, literally a thing to use to attack the state. If you give me a ridgeline, I can hide from the cops better than any fucking, you know, high-tech thermal scattering ghillie suit is ever gonna give me, you know? Out here, you don't need a bunch of fancy shit to, like, engage in conflict with the state. You don't need thermal cameras and all that. You can walk into a military surplus store and buy, you know, for 50 bucks, you can buy everything you need to, like, do just about whatever you want out here. And that's, like, that's, like, a really important and beautiful thing, is it's not hard to do what we're doing, you just have to break down the mental barriers and do it.

You just have to break down the mental barriers and do it. Yeah, we do our best to protect the trees, and the trees protect us, too. It's cool living here, and it's, like, obviously something everyone, most people probably, like, think about is, yeah, how important wild spaces are. But it's cool to really fucking feel it, and it's like, like, yeah, this, this place is super important because of how it interacts with the ecosystem, and how it filters the water, and that it's a safe haven for a lot of, like, really beautiful animals and plants, but also this place is important because wild spaces are fucking uncontrollable, and I want to live in an uncontrollable way, and, like, you need those things, and things. And it is- it's really cool that this is a wild space. It's also a forest in a city, which is cool. It's fucking weird. Like, there's-

there's city people who come here who are fucking weird and do weird shit, and it's sick. And like, it is an uncontrolled space, and like like, sometimes that means that there's, like, fucking shit chemicals that are, like, fucking plants up, but also sometimes that means there's people who, like, are doing things that are free and doing things they couldn't do in the city, and, um, and it doesn't matter if I like it or not, it makes me, yeah, it makes me happy to just know that those people can act on their desires, um, and, yeah, it's not always fucking convenient or good, and sometimes I end up in antagonistic relationships with that, because it conflicts with my desire, but there's no mediation, and there's, there's, there's no one getting in between, and, um,

yeah, it's just, it's really important, and I think and i think like the the slogan that people say of not what is it not one tree not one blade of grass like is like an inspirational thing but it's also like a strategy you know like it's like a tactical assertion that is important for us like yeah if like this forest and these wild spaces are essential not just for us to physically stop the police, but, like, essential to be an anarchist. Like, if there are not wild spaces, spaces that, they can't put security cameras up here because there's no electricity and the trees are too dense for solar panels and they'd get smashed anyway. Like, you know, like, it's important to have those things if there's not places like that there's not places where you you know like and and so that for itself is cool and the other thing is just living here with the fucking animals like um it's cool the deer if you want to find a good hiding spot in

the forest pay attention to where the fucking deer sleep. They sleep in different places most nights, you won't fuck them up as long as you don't pick the exact same one they're sleeping, and they're really fucking hard to find. Same thing with the coyotes, like, same thing with the snakes, and, like, it's just very cool to, like, get to observe and live with all these animals, and, um, you know you know, there's an owl, this barred owl, and starts fucking screaming five o'clock every day.

It's like a nice little marker. And that's, for me, that's better than, you know, looking at my watch. It's pretty cool. This leads us up to our present day and the upcoming week of action in Atlanta, Georgia,

happening from Sunday, May 8th to Sunday, May 15th. If you are anywhere near the Atlanta area, you have no reason to not check it out. It's a week's worth of events spanning from early in the morning to late into the evening, every day for seven days. You can find the calendar of events on defendtheatlantaforest.com. And if you are not near Atlanta, I would still recommend you make your way there post-haste if you are able to, whether that's during the week of action or later on down the line. More boots on the ground is almost always a plus. Here's some more info on the upcoming week of action from May 8th through May 15th. So generally in the past, the past two week

of actions have been like really above ground, really getting people comfortable with forests, getting people into the forest, community events, and just public gatherings, info nights, skill shares, other stuff like that. And I believe that this one will likely have a lot of those events, but I also believe that due to the nature of what's going on, um, that it's much more urgent that people, uh, come and create their, bring their own ideas, bring their own incentives, their own desires, and, yeah. We get action. It's, uh, it's gonna be weird.

It's gonna be crazy. It's gonna be all the things. I think there's gonna be family-friendly, we're like hugging trees kind of shit, and I'm excited for that, and I think there's going to be some like, what the fuck is going on in the woods kind of, here's a bunch of cops kind of shit.

Obviously, we don't know what's really going to happen, but anyone that has been reading stuff, they're like, oh man, I want to go throw down with the crazies. You should come and do that. And we have some stuff to share, and hopefully there'll be so many people here that don't know how to deal with it. The problem down here is the Atlanta Police Force. There is a lot of them, but honestly they're also, they're stressed out and they are run

what's it called, not run dry. They're spread thin. They really, they don't know how to deal with all this wood shit from shit that we've heard them talking about. They don't know what to do. They're not totally prepared. I think it's going to be a really fun and crazy shit show. And we want y'all to come to our shit show

in a good way. I know you'll be like, oh, you shouldn't use those words. But in reality, nobody actually knows what's going to happen. We know what we're going to do. We have plans that people can plug into. Some stuff you can bring your kids to, and some stuff you should not bring your kids to. And there will be more, to be honest with you, you really got to just be there in person because there's some, you can't put everything on Instagram. We're doing our best to like communicate to folks what's going on down here, but there's just some things you gotta come to whatever,

the week of action. It's always a week of action, but this is like, we're hoping people get really turned up for this week of action, and maybe we all just become a roving nomadic war machine together. That would be the dream. So you have a thing in your hometown or wherever the fuck is going on, or your territory, and we nomadic war machine over to your spot. And we just keep doing that. That'd be cool. A few resources that some of the forest defenders

wanted people to know about is first, obviously, DefendTheAtlantaForest.com, which has the Week of Action calendar. To keep up on news regarding the movement, you can follow them on Twitter and Instagram at DefendTheAtlantaForest or DefendATLForest. There is the Forest Justice Defense Fund at opencollective.com slash forest hyphen justice hyphen defense hyphen fund, where people can donate to support the work of the broad coalition dedicated to saving the

forest. There's of course StopReevesYoung.com, which has information on subcontractors and third-party service providers relating to the cop city construction. Very useful even just for simple call-in campaigns. The website scenes.noblogs.org hosts other news relating to the movement, anonymous communiques, and stuff like maps of the area, and random other useful information resources. For info and guides relating to direct action, there's a website titled warriorup.noblogs.org, and people can go there or to warriorup.noblogs.org slash guides for various interesting information, I'll say. And that last one is really best viewed on Tor via the Tor browser, just as a heads up. Also probably with like a VPN and I don't know. Anyway, be careful with that last one. But all

of these sites will be linked in the show notes. The future lies in your hands. You have more freedom than you know if you can find the unconventional ways of expressing it. See you on the other side, and I'll end with a word from our forest defender friend.

There's no future. Let's nomadic war machine together. We might as well live. Yeah, hopefully we're going to stop the police training facility. I think we really are looking forward to people, hopefully some people sticking around after the week of action, because we are hoping that it doesn't die down too much to the point where a smaller entity than that was here for a week of action gets attacked. We would love it if some of y'all would stay.

Stay a while. And exactly that. If it can happen here, I wasn't thinking about that, but that's funny and that fits. It could happen where you live, and maybe we can just keep... The idea is we share enough skills,

we make ourselves obsolete. No one should be integral enough to the movement that you can't die off or leave, and it can't continue. People should be reading manuals, sharing skills, telling stories, humming at the moon. We should be doing all this stuff to make each other just aware of the different things that are possible for us to win because maybe we don't have all the guns and the steel and the gold, but if we have enough people being creative and doing some guerrilla shit, we can get all that

done. And at the end of the day, you can do you have to be careful about how many hats you're wearing. If you don't know about the RNC 8, that's a long time ago now. Look that up. They were really great community organizers, but they were wearing too many hats. It was the first time the Patriot Act kind of

new laws after 9-11 was utilized on people, and a lot of it didn't stick. But what we really need is more faceless saboteurs, because honestly, that's what we need. We need people to be... Just in reality, there's not enough people willing to do night work. It looks like there's an uptick in that behavior, which is great, but be safe, be smart, act alone or act with little.

And that's what we need more than anything. There's a lot of people that are willing to do above ground stuff. There's a lot of people that like want to be known and that's great, but we have enough of that. We need something else. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media, visit our website,

cool zone media.com or check us out on the I heart radio 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. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, from the shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo,

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