Garrison Davis (23:59)
One of the things I've been reflecting on regarding Cop City is the way people talked about fear as a tool. Frank Herbert's litany against fear was a common refrain to overcome the fear that the state used as a weapon. But the first time I heard fear mentioned as an offensive measure wasn't in reference to this state using fear. It was in early 2022 when I first visited the forest encampment and the anarchists talked about how the police were scared of entering the forest, how delusions of Vietnam style booby traps demonstrated that the cops are not impervious super soldiers. Instilling fear is a major aspect of police training. They are susceptible to emotional impulses like all of us quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote. But while we understand our own fear, I think people often fall into the trap of not understanding that the state is also afraid of them. Because the state feels like this monolithic machine, like this unassailable entity that it is not. It's made up of people with flaws and emotions who have the same cortisol response to being threatened that you or I do. A big part of the lessons learned from Atlanta has to be a willingness to engage with them in a way that is personally endangering. That is the single way out. They're human and they get scared. The fear that I think had them so tight until May of 2022 was a fear that manifested itself in a lot of paralysis. Fear is a normal human remotion to danger. So whether you're the most hardened SWAT team guy going up against the craziest eco freak in the world. Fear is a normal reaction to that. But what really had them so tight was fear as a matter of them being paralyzed by it, that they could not find out how to move. And once they did find out, around May of 2022, we really start to see things change. And like they were scared enough in the woods to shoot someone to death, like they were still afraid. We were able to instill an immense amount of fear in our enemy, which is an absolutely necessary tool if you're going to be on the very nimble, small green team insurgency side of things. You have to make your enemy afraid of the dark, but also you have your defensive strategy against fear. You would hear all the time in Atlanta, the whole let the fear wash over you and through you mantra. That was a thing that people talked about and said constantly. Because you have to find a way to move through that paralysis eventually. And with the help of a multi agency task force, the cops in Atlanta were able to move through that fear and continue their actions. They were not totally paralyzed by it. In contrast, the pseudo paralysis affecting Stop Cop City only set in very late into the movement as a cumulative result of a coordinated sequence of oppression tactics as the movement has been winding down and transitioning to court support. Something people in Atlanta have had to balance is the urge to keep Stop Cop City in this sort of unalive zombie state, where you're still kind of acting like it's an ongoing thing, even though the immediate local result is pretty clearly finished, but in keeping this kind of zombie version of the movement alive, it prevents you from actually moving on and internalizing what happened here and using that for whatever comes next, which is at this point a burgeoning police state and right wing power bloc. Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, internalizing not just in terms of like lessons learned and things that you need to learn from and skill up on to keep that honed combative edge in Atlanta, but to think about fighting on a larger scope than just Atlanta as the cops took their lessons learned here nationwide in terms of how they're doing repression towards Palestinian liberation movements, towards a lot of the way that ICE operations are currently happening, that necessitates that we also take our lessons learned here and also go to a larger scale with them. Also, if you never close the book yourself on this battle that you're a part of, which people incurred a massive amount of trauma doing, at a certain point, this could just remain like an open wound on you forever if you let it. And it Is probably, like, unhelpful to keep seeing the movement to stop cop city is doing a rally here. Like, when it's built, it's there. And now we need to move on to other things. We need to move on to other things that are larger than Atlanta. There's still a police state to engage with here. You don't need the container of this struggle to justify going out and taking action against the police, unquote. And there are other things happening in Atlanta. There's ice raids happening in Atlanta, in the north suburbs of the city. Cop city is actively being enacted, and if people want to continue stopping it, they'll have to actually stop what the effects are, which are now happening on a nationwide scale. An early irony of the movement was that though cop city was conceived as a training ground for police, first it became a training ground for anarchists as top Cop city became the first mass movement following the 2020 George Floyd protests. Whatever happened in Atlanta would demonstrate what activists have Learned from the 2020 uprising, as well as influence what future movements against police expansion might look like. Atlanta police chief Darren Sheerbaum expressed as much during the public safety training center grand opening. Because when antifa put out its call for individuals to rally here in this spot and on Peachtree street, from across the nation and literally the globe, we were up against a playbook we had never seen at the Atlanta police department. And we ourselves put out the call for help. And no sheriff said no. No police chief said no. The Georgia state patrol, the department of natural resources, should side by side with this department, as did the FBI and the atf, because we all knew that that playbook was successful here in Atlanta, Georgia. It would find itself across this country, and public safety would be stymied wherever we go. While Atlanta served as this training ground for anarchists in response, the state also used the movement to test out strategies for the next generation of counterinsurgency tactics well before the cop city facility was finished being built. And now, with this specific localized struggle at completion, both organizers and the state are carrying lessons forward. As Trump expands police power, deploys national guard increases ice operations, and continues repression against organizers protesting the Palestinian genocide. To quote an Atlanta anarchist quote, I think it's a matter of reimagining the struggle that you're a part of. Insurrectionary struggle is often an imaginative one. And if you were part of this thing here, you are now, like a veteran of the fight in Atlanta. This thing, like this specific thing that was defend the Atlanta force to stop cop city is something to be learned from and valued and also moved on from and to move on from while taking lessons learned, experience gained and connections made and following those things through to their logical conclusion such that the state has as well, they have taken lessons learned from here and followed them through to their nationwide logical conclusions. We are necessitated to do that as well. That doesn't mean you have given up, it just means that there's new shit happening. It's helpful to reimagine yourself not as just we're in Atlanta, we're doing Stop Cop City to Now you are engaged in a nationwide anti fascist struggle against like a fascist police state, unquote. This nationwide focus has always been an aspect of Stop Cop City. One of the movement's key slogans was Cop City is everywhere. Organizers did speaking tours around the country to educate about the movement, and thousands of people from all around the country and the world traveled to Atlanta to participate in weeks of action. The physical fight to Stop Cop City also expanded outside of Atlanta with solidarity attacks and direct actions as a part of the tertiary targeting campaign against subcontractors and insurance companies. This nationwide drift also happened on the side of the state, with similar police training facilities having been proposed in dozens of other cities. And the strategies of repression used in Atlanta have been copied on a national level. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist now the cops are spreading out and their strategies and the strategies of repression, both militantly on the ground and legally, and even their propaganda and their messaging has gone outwards from here. And so too then must our lessons learned both in how we prepare and engage in struggle in Atlanta, but also how we make connections to the rest of the country. People who came here are now back home and will make connections to the people around them. The cops in different cities, they have big conferences, they talk to each other, they learn from each other. There's no reason that we shouldn't be, you know, doing so with caution and security culture. Don't have your Atlanta veteran hat on, but we have things to learn from each other. And if you were here, you've got a lot to potentially teach people. Even if that was just like, here's how we fucking run a kitchen where we cook for like 400 people in a day, or here's how we sneak around in the middle of the night, unquote. This is a representative of the Fire Ant movement defense at a Cop City trial press conference from September 2025. The horrors we predicted have come to pass. Federal agents now stalk communities from coast to coast, masked and unnamed, snatching people from buses, farms, kitchens and churches. Who can argue now that we were wrong to resist the endless expansion of police power, now that Trump commands them, now that they are his police? The very people who helped lay the groundwork now scramble to distance themselves from his orders, his camps, his federal troop deployments. But they built the logistics. They funded the training centers, they expanded the surveillance. Surveillance Liberal governments like Atlantis help pave the way for the descent of our country into autocracy. As Marlon Kratz of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund told the New Republic, quote, what's happening in Atlanta is a vision of the future. This is a test run of a repressive playbook that authorities on many different levels are experimenting with to discover what they can get away with, unquote. Let's look at some examples of expanding surveillance, increasing police resources, and the strategies for counterinsurgency that are spreading in the era of Trump 2.0. In January of this year, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced a resolution titled deeming Certain conduct of members of Antifa as Domestic Terrorism and and designating ANTIFA as a Domestic terrorist organization, which the measure justifies by referencing multiple instances of protesters in Atlanta being charged with domestic terrorism. The Atlanta based surveillance company Flock Safety gained early notoriety for their camera towers placed around the slated cop city construction site in the South River Forest, which protesters repeatedly toppled. Flock has grown massively the past four years with over 80,000 quote unquote AI powered cameras in 49 states. These cameras complete over 20 billion scans per month. Flock cameras and license plate readers have spread all around the country and are used by all manners of agencies, including ice, as well as Texas sheriffs who have used the nationwide camera network to track pregnant women seeking abortions. Border Patrol has used Atlanta's local Flock camera network to make over 3,200 searches from January to November 2025. In April 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled Strengthening and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens. This order calls to, quote, unleash high impact local police forces, protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by local officials, and surge resources to officers in need, unquote. It directs the Attorney General to create a mechanism to have private sector law firms provide pro bono legal defense to police officers who, quote, unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law, unquote. This tries to make it harder for police to be held accountable for both civil and criminal misconduct, basically extending qualified immunity to the criminal realm. The order also calls to use federal resources to increase pay, expand training and strengthen legal protections for police officers, as well as to, quote, seek enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers promote investment in the security and capacity of prisons and increase the investment in and collection, distribution and uniformity of crime data across jurisdictions. Unquote. The Attorney General is directed to review and remove any previous accountability restrictions placed on local or state law enforcement agencies that might unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions and then finally, quote, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist state and local law enforcement and shall determine how military and national security assets, training, nonlethal capabilities and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime. Unquote. As the police become further militarized, the military prepares to do more policing One of the executive orders from Trump's police takeover of Washington D.C. contains a section directing the Secretary of Defense to, quote, designate an appropriate number of each State's trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization to assist federal, state and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and that, quote, a standing National Guard quick reaction force shall be resourced, trained and available for rapid nationwide deployment. Unquote. Later, In October of 2025, the Department of Defense sent out memos to each state's National Guard mandating that each state have their own quick reaction forces operational by January 1, 2026, with crowd control equipment and two full time trainers by the National Guard Bureau being provided to each unit. The units contain on average, 500 troops per state ordered to be ready to deploy within 8 to 24 hours. The initial portion of the Bureau training courses cover how to, quote, form squad sized riot control formations, employ a riot baton as member of a riot control formation, how to supervise a riot slash crowd control operation, crowd management techniques, and domestic civil disturbance training. Unquote. On September 22, Trump signed an Executive order designating ANTIFA as a domestic terrorist organization. Three days later, Trump signed the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 on Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, which calls for a new national law enforcement strategy to, quote, investigate all participants of these criminal and terroristic conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts, unquote. The memo orders local joint terrorism task forces to, quote, investigate potential federal crimes relating to acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons for the purpose of political violence, terrorism or conspiracy against rights, unquote, as well as investigating institutional and individual funders, including employees of organizations which are, quote, responsible for, sponsor or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct, unquote. As previously described, the Treasury Secretary will work with the Attorney General to, quote, identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political violence and shall deploy investigative tools to examine financial flows and coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit funding streams. The memo also instructs the IRS to, quote, take action to ensure that no tax exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism, unquote, and that the IRS shall refer organizations and their employees to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution. Quoting the memo one final time, quote, investigations shall prioritize crimes such as the following assaulting federal officers or employees, conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to commit offense, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, money laundering, funding of terrorist acts or otherwise facilitating terrorism, arson, violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, RICO, and major fraud against the United States, unquote. At Trump's White House and TIFA Roundtable meeting, Seamus Bruner, the Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute, discussed his theory of how a network of NGOs are funding Antifa and specifically mentioned Stop Cop City. There was an event in Atlanta called Stop cop City. Over 60 rioters were charged with domestic terrorism. These groups received money for that from both the the billionaire class as well as taxpayer money. So on May 1, 2025, Homeland Security Investigations, Secret Service and the acting ICE director raided a home in Irving, California, looking for a man who allegedly posted flyers around Los Angeles containing the names, pictures and phone numbers of ICE agents, with text in Spanish reading careful with these faces. In April of 2023, three activists were arrested for allegedly posting flyers identifying a police officer connected to the killing of Tortuguita on the mailboxes in that officer's neighborhood in Barlow County, Georgia, about 40 miles from Atlanta. The activists were charged with felony intimidation and were later added to the Cop City ric.
