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- [00:00]
Garrison Davis
This is an iHeart podcast.
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- [02:37]
Garrison Davis
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- [03:19]
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We have a very serious left wing.
- [03:21]
Garrison Davis
Terror threat in our country. State of the art organized and well funded Activists in criminals on April 29, 2025, after almost exactly four years of protests, sabotage, encampments and organizing against the construction of a state of the art police training facility dubbed Cop City, the Atlanta Public Safety Training center officially opened atop of the south river forest in DeKalb County, Georgia. 1, 2, 3 cut the Atlanta Public Safety Training center is open. A handshake between governor Brian Kemp and a relieved Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens. Getting here has not been an easy journey. The opening of the $118 million complex for police, fire and E911 personnel, which includes academic, leadership and simulation centers, came after not months, but years of public pushback. This is it. Could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. I've been covering the combined Defend the Atlanta Forest Stop Cop City movement on this show since 2021. I first traveled to Atlanta to report on the ground from inside of the protest encampments in spring of 2022, and I moved to Atlanta to continue covering the story more in depth in 2023. My coverage has tracked the trajectory of the movement as well as my ability as a reporter, but this will be my last piece on the Stop Cop City movement. Every other report or miniseries I've done on Stop Cup City was written while the movement was still ongoing and the final outcome had yet to be fully determined. Something that set the movement in Atlanta apart was the genuine belief that this fight was actually winnable, as opposed to the many lofty aspirations of other anti police, anarchist or leftist struggles. I believe that we will win and Cop City will never be built were common turns of phrase, not just repeated mindlessly as a protest chant, but deeply believed. But now, six months after the grand opening of Cop City, I want to use this distance to offer a look at the whole movement based on Interviews and conversations I've had with organizers, anarchists and forest defenders analyzing the movement's rise and fall in momentum and why Atlanta is the bridge between the 2020 protests during Trump's first term and the current expansion of police surveillance, ice activity and increased state repression against, quote, unquote, radical left terrorists. We don't have enough time to retread a complete, in depth play by play of the movement's history, most of which I've already covered in previous episodes. But I will attempt to break down the movement into a series of discrete phases. After organizers learned about the plans to build Cop City in April of 2021, the movement to defend the Atlanta forest first took form with an opening attack phase throughout the entire summer of 2021, with tree spiking and sabotage targeting construction equipment on the east side of the forest, which a movie studio was planning to develop at the time in partnership with local government. To quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, early stages of the movement were very intentionally defined by lots of sabotage and unapologetic militancy. Just absolute. This is what we're doing, this is what we're about, this is the goal. If you don't like it, that's cool, but then don't be a part of this. That was just what we were doing, unquote. In September 2021, the Atlanta City council voted to approve the land lease ordinance authorizing the Atlanta police foundation to use hundreds of acres of city owned land in the south river forest to build cop city. After this vote, electoral strategy gets largely eschewed and soon after, the next phase fully kicks off that fall with the physical occupation of the forest and the start of the pressure campaigns targeting subcontractors working on the construction project to again quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, persistent encampment occupation, lots of direct action happening, lots of sabotage happening, and the cops just not knowing what to do at all. Small incursions would get made, but they just had not figured out what to do about it yet. There was just kind of like free reign, unquote. For the first half of this occupation phase, the Atlanta police and DeKalb sheriffs seemed to be stuck in a form of paralysis, not knowing how to disrupt the forest encampments or prevent equipment sabotage. Meanwhile, the pressure campaign inspired by the tactics of the animal rights group Shack, showed early promise in getting subcontractors like Reeves Young construction and material suppliers to drop out of the COP City project. But after this stream of steady success, from fall of 2021 to May of 2022. The police were forced to up the ante and started conducting large scale raids in the forest to remove force defenders and damage encampment infrastructure. Quoting an Atlanta Anarchist quote May of 2022 is the end of the paralysis phase for the cops. We had our first grid sweep raids where the paralysis phase is broken. You're getting your multi agency large sweeps where they're really coming in and putting in a lot of work. That really leads up to January of 2023. So where Torte got killed prior to the police killing of Tortaguita during a forest encampment raid on January 18, 2023. The occupation phase proved highly effective in preventing pre construction, but the killing of Ortoguita essentially marked the end of the continuous occupation phase. What followed was a period of high octane intensity. Let's call this the revenge phase. Quoting an Atlanta Anarchist you get this kind of like trading blows with the cops repeatedly during that time and things are getting pretty fucking crazy. Hitting their highest pitch at March 5 during the South River Music Festival. On March 5, a few hundred people splintered off from the festival and marched to the nearby COP City construction site. The crowd repelled police and construction equipment was set on fire. The cops retaliated quick swarming the area with all available units in Atlanta, kettled the festival and eventually arrested 23 people, charging them with domestic terrorism. After the events on March 5, the movement entered an odd limbo phase with heightened tensions among the Stop Cop City Coalition on the role of direct action and sabotage within mass movement actions. During this period, police fortified and regularly patrolled the perimeter around the forest. Entry became heavily restricted. Following this denial of operating space. The forest around the slated construction site was preemptively clear cut to both prepare for construction and demoralize the movement. But a month later, the bail fund and legal defense nonprofit the Atlanta Solidarity Fund was raided by police and were later charged with money laundering and charity fraud. Just a few days after the raid, the City council approved a $67 million cop city funding pack. The next day, organizers announced a referendum campaign to gather petition signatures to put the COP City land lease ordinance on the upcoming November ballot. Despite setbacks, there was still energy going towards stopping Cop City, but it was fragmenting in ways that it hadn't really before. There was no clear consensus on the direction to take the movement. Previous periods of shift in the movement were often marked by an organized week of action, which was a convergence of people from all around the country or even the world who traveled to Atlanta to partake in a week's worth of events, actions and protests against Cop City, the Atlanta Police foundation and contractors hired to build the facility. The summer of 2023 saw the sixth organized week of action, but it too was caught in this limbo phase. And without the forest as an operating zone, the week of action struggled to find its purpose. Despite the surge in movement participation around the city hall budget vote earlier June, the next phase was the first to be positively determined by the police. The repression phase, which really sets in around August of 2023 with the RICO indictment charging 61 people with racketeering, arson and domestic terrorism. State repression then evolved in the form of persistent surveillance of activists, house raids and additional charges, which leads to the current trial phase. To quote an Atlanta anarchist quote, I think an important aspect of this phase is obviously supporting your defendants, preparing for the potential of long term prisoner support, and also not letting the state be the one to close the book. By doing this, because you don't want to let them define the narrative of this forever. By getting to put their rubber stamp on the end of the trial and calling it otherwise, the Moomin gets stuck in this permanent, like, zombie phase where we're still saying, stop Cop City is this thing that's happening when it's. It's built, it's built, it's right there, right? Like, it doesn't mean that we all just go home, but it means that you're like a veteran of this battle now and there's new shit to do, new stuff to work on. Even in retrospect, people have been largely hesitant to assign blame to a specific factor and why the fight to stop Cop City fell short of achieving its stated goal. But we can track a decline in momentum which allowed the state to gain the upper hand. For nearly three years, state repression tactics failed to disrupt the growing momentum against the Cop City project. Forest raids, arrests and criminal charges made little impact. The use of terrorism charges as a repression tactic started back in December of 2022 following an encampment raid resulting in six people being charged with domestic terrorism. This was the first time that charge has been used in Georgia, following its adoption in 2017 in response to the white supremacist mass shooting by Dylann Roof. Just a month after domestic terrorism charges were first deployed, Tortuguita was killed by police in another forest raid. But this tragedy only seemed to strengthen the resolve of the movement to fight Cop City, which then only grew. Similarly, the clear cutting of the force itself wasn't enough to demoralize the people in Atlanta. Rather, the hesitation to Build on the momentum of a widely publicized direct action like March 5th provided the state an opening while the movement was stuck in limbo. Throughout this limbo phase, the movement was adjusting from intensified momentum and the high octane aspects of leading to March 5th. But as the energy tapered down, the state jumped on that dip in momentum, then dealt a pretty significant blow with the RICO indictment. The RICO charges in August of 2023, followed by the series of house raids in February of 2024 were a pretty crippling one, two punch that stifled the momentum to almost a complete standstill. Quoting an Atlanta Anarchist A lot of people will argue their opinions about what was the stifling thing. I think some of the more electorally or mass movement big tent minded people would argue that like March 5th takes a lot of the wind out of the sails. I think a lot of people would disagree with that just because like you can build on the momentum of a March 5, you can build on like a triumphant battlefield victory. It's a lot harder to build on just everyone getting more charges and also people getting their doors kicked in really early in the morning. It's hard to build on that. Despite the RICO charges, acts of sabotage did continue, but isolated sabotage alone wasn't enough to propel the movement. After the referendum campaign was effectively nullified by the state in fall of 2023, there was a lack of willingness among its organizers to engage in serious efforts to get people engaged in mass actions or pressure campaigns targeted against elected officials. Something multiple activists in Atlanta have mentioned to me as a contributing factor to the eventual decline in momentum during this limbo stage is a sort of failure to prefigure alternative strategies and adapt. After the forest occupation became impossible to maintain, especially considering just how much weight people had put into that strategy, but then did not come up with a clear next step. After the police were able to suppress that tactic by completing their ODA loops and improving their own strategies. The ODA loop is a four step military decision making model used across a large variety of professional fields, including policing. STEP 1 Observe. Gather as much information as possible, then orient. Synthesize that information with background knowledge. Decide on the next course of action using that newly synthesized information, and finally act. And the results of your actions should then send you back to step one. Failure to act at all or too slowly often ends in defeat. To quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, you need contingency lines, right? Either things that you're willing to escalate in the current line of strategy that you're doing to make it still viable or a complete change in strategy. It can be change in tactics to something new and exciting. Either of those are valid options. Doing both of them at the same time can be extremely effective. But at the end of the day, you have to. When the cops start to break out of paralysis. An example from any eco defense or occupation, whether in Atlanta or somewhere else, when cops start to break out of that paralysis, you have to escalate in some way. The occupation, the defense of it has to escalate in some way to prevent them from feeling safe coming in or trying to. Or the physical space of action has to change because now they need to recalibrate to, oh, shit. Like, not only is the occupation less assailable than we thought because there's been a change in tactics, but there's also a massive uptick in shit going on everywhere else. And that significantly impedes their ability to have an ODA loop to do battle with. You can even look at the ice pickups that got a lot of attention in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were not expecting that many people just to show up. You can see when the crowd starts to hit, like, a critical mass of rage and getting really close to those guys that they fucking panic. They freak out. Like, it's very clear even just in the small amount of their faces and their movements that you can see that they were panicking, unquote. Similar scenes have since taken place in Chicago and Portland. And I've seen this before with BORTAC during the 2020 protests in Portland. I think anyone who has watched the cops retreat has seen this before. But the more the same thing happens, the more you get used to it, the more you experiment and find ways to adapt and overcome. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote. Cops panic. And you can see it in the way they walk. Like they weren't ready for that. And next time they might be. Which means you have to add something new, a new spice, has to get thrown in, a new flavor profile. They'll get used to pushing through crowds like that until someone hits them at the end of the day. And whether you're like, confronting them on the ground or trying to get to the neighborhoods ahead of time to knock on people's doors to get them out, eventually cops will start to find ways to counteract your strategy. And eventually you will have to reshift and recalibrate the tools you are using to orient back to Atlanta. All these instances I've mentioned amount to failing to take advantage of key moments, whether that be in the aftermath of March 5, the seeming impossibility of continued forest encampments or the city's blanket refusal to accept the results of the referendum. In these moments the police in the state were able to determine where battle lines were drawn and quite literally so during the quote unquote block cop city protest in October of 2023, where police easily repelled a protest march from even reaching the road to the COP city construction site. And the state continued to push their lines forward with the joint FBI ATF raids on activist houses in February 2024, which further stifled the movement and was coupled with months to years long persistent surveillance and intimidation denoted by cops parked outside of homes of alleged activists, mobile surveillance and hidden cameras placed in front of activists homes and a local community center. One of the more frightening incidents came in May of 2024 where a resident of one of the homes raided that February woke up in the middle of the night to a bright light outside of the bedroom window only to find a lit road flare catching the wooden railing of their porch steps on fire.
- [21:21]
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- [22:53]
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- [23:23]
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- [23:59]
Garrison Davis
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.
- [43:59]
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- [46:02]
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- [46:38]
Garrison Davis
To circle back to the topic of fear. The targeting of people putting up flyers. Simply identifying cops or anonymous ICE agents demonstrates how the state understands fear as a weapon. That's why they did the RICO charges. That's why they do the house raids. That's why they do overt surveillance where you're getting followed around by police. But they are susceptible to fear as well. Through their actions, ICE demonstrates a high level of fear. They are taking massive steps to hide the identities of ICE agents on the ground and punishing people who attempt to identify these agents. They're complaining about being compared to Nazis and called the Gestapo. They're referencing very dubious statistics about an increase in assaults against officers. And they are afraid enough to shoot their guns at unarmed people more than half a dozen times in the past six months. They are scared. And as evil and super soldiery as they may seem, they are indeed afraid. To quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, unless you do something to keep them afraid, eventually it will stop. Unless you change your strategy, change course, escalate in some way that shatters their ODA loop. They will break free of their paralysis and they will find a way through their fear. So when that starts to happen, it's time to do something new and insane. Because you have to keep them afraid because like by every moral right, they should be. They should be fucking terrified to leave their homes. And if they are too afraid to leave their homes, then they can't go out and do their jobs. At the end of the day, that's their ODA loop right there. The scale of fear as a tool of repression is always exponentially larger than the scale of physical or legal repression. It punches well above its weight. You can look at Atlanta as a good example of this, and you can even look at some of the arrests made in response to Palestinian liberation protests. It takes black bagging six people to paralyze 6,000. Because it's terrifying, because it's scary, like it's fucked up. That's a bad thing to have happen to you. And like, of course people are afraid. Fear is one of those things that if you're engaging in anti fascist struggle, whether you're an anti fascist, whether you're an anarchist or whatever, all of us have an ethical obligation to ourselves and the people around us to push through fear as an emotion, to find ways to work with it. Because it won't go away and it shouldn't. Fear can also keep you safe. But we are necessitated by the political moment we are in to find a way to take extensive action in spite of that. Unquote. 2020 was a lot of people's first experience with mass protest. And some of those people then carry those experiences into Cop City. But then for other people, stop. Cop City was their first experience. And now you have an even younger generation of people, the Gen Alpha terrorists, who aren't even old enough to have been involved in Atlanta. But people are still looking at what happened in Atlanta as this bridge Gap between 2020 and 2025. The movement to stop Cop City as the bridge between these two different eras of uprising and resistance against authoritarianism. As the Cop City chapter closes, activists in Atlanta want people to carry on what's been learned in the contents of their struggle onto whatever the next volume is. Because Cop City itself is in a sequence of events that have happened beyond and longer than what me or anyone involved in. Cop City has been alive by generations. Cop City is not volume one. Cop City is volume like 32. But at the same time, it's also the immediate prequel to the rise of a nationwide expansion of police power and surveillance led by a wannabe right wing strongman. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote A big lesson learned from Atlanta is that it is way safer to do shit in the middle of the night than anything else. We've had exactly one arrest made over the years, an arrest that's not gone to trial. This is an alleged crime of one midnight sabotage action of the dozens and dozens and dozens of arsons that have happened. And this arrest happened very late into the movement. Out of the dozens and dozens of attacks that have happened, only one arrest has been made after the fact, unquote. Another lesson learned is the difficulty of daily counter surveillance and how much that requires militancy as a daily practice. To again quote from an anonymous anarchist in Atlanta quote, militant anarchism as a daily practice. Understanding your adversary not just as this thing that you meet on the field for 20 minutes of action and then you both go home and like call it, but that they are constantly pursuing you, that you are being like hunted for sport and you have to evade and maneuver constantly. That security culture is a persistent thing that throughout the years that you are going to continually keep having to be a part of it and do so in a very disciplined way, unquote. A lot of the success that Stop Cop City achieved was based on a willingness to take an extremely militant approach to pre figurative infrastructure which added longevity to the combative struggle. Both were necessitated as symbiotic elements of the same creature. Throughout the Cop City struggle, organizers and activists learned that if you're not always able to engage in a directly combative fight using militancy and discipline in their infrastructural projects the same way they would in a combative engagement. Helps prepare for what will be necessary when things do turn combative. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote the state is this constantly churning machine like it is always trying to acquire new tools and equipment and lessons, and we can't just sit still while they do this and be like, okay, well, at some point in four to five years, a flashpoint will happen at the place that I live and I'll go out there and I'll be like I was in Atlanta. So I'll be good because I remember how to do all that. Because if you do nothing for the next four to five years, we're just gonna be reinventing the wheel over and over again. And all the like fucked up trauma that you incurred doing that won't have been like helpful at all if you don't remember the skills learned on the ground, because all skills atrophy and get weaker over time, unquote. Looking back at Stop Cop City won't provide all the answers to solve the problems facing the country today, especially in light of the end result of the movement. But it would be a mistake to overlook the ways Stop Cop City made a legitimate impact on the resulting facility and the political situation in Atlanta and and beyond. I think there's ways of looking at degrees of success the movement had while still recognizing its obvious shortcomings, considering the fact that there is a facility called the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. But a small group of activists turned a proposed police training facility into a national political issue. Its opening was delayed by years at at least $30 million over budget, and the current facility lacks the full mock city design that it initially had, which inspired the Cop City namesake. Moving forward, both the successes and shortcomings will be internalized by thousands of people who traveled to or lived in Atlanta and joined in the movement to Stop Cop City. As Trump now signs executive orders expanding military equipment, federal training and legal protections for police, deploys the National Guard to quell civil disturbance and targets anti fascists, anarchists and left wing activists or NGOs as domestic terrorists, quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote. What we are seeing is the logical conclusion of our adversaries lessons learned in Atlanta, taking the things that they learned how to do here, the skills they honed, taken to a nationwide scale, this is the logical conclusion of that. And there's a reason that they are doing that. And if they are doing that, then we should also do that. Like there's logical conclusions and escalations of the things that we learned in Atlanta that it would be silly for us to not try and push those further, including expanding the physical and metaphysical terrain of battle, unquote. The immediate terrain for Stop Copsity was obviously the forest and now the Cop City site itself. But there was also the rest of Atlanta and all the other construction sites and then all the subcontractors around the country and everything that supplies them. And this same model can apply to, say, the Palestine protests. There's a network that exists beyond Columbia University campus that extends into the weapons manufacturing industry, which could be targeted beyond consumer boycotts, like what we saw with Shaq, like what we saw in Atlanta, where boycotts were an aspect, but by far not the most effective aspect. And in fact, forcefully inflicting monetary damage caused a much greater degree of hurt to the companies involved in the Copsody project, as opposed to the infighting caused by a Waffle House boycott. When reframing what the terrain of battle could entail, it is actually intimidating to think about what the reality of stopping these things might look like. And as soon as you realize that these fights go beyond a physical building, it becomes this Lovecraftian entity that exists everywhere. And it's unnerving to contemplate what you'd be forced to do to actually realistically confront that. Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote. It's important to not get trapped in the, you know, we're doing an occupation on college campus and we're just going to keep trying to do an occupation on college campus over and over again. And the cops are really good at clearing us up. But now maybe this time, and I think a part of the struggle here though, for people is when you decentralize like that, the thing that you're doing starts to take on a much different vibe. It can be everywhere versus this is the college campus where we're doing protest. Generally think at the end of the day it starts to feel a little bit too much like terrorismy. It starts to feel too much like an insurgency. And you see the path, you see the Pandora's box start to open up a little bit and you back off because it's scary. And that this thing will kill you. This thing will try and kill you eventually, if you push it far enough, it will try and kill you and it might succeed. And like, that's just the reality of engaging with fascism combatively as an ideology. It's the reality of engaging with advanced capitalism. That was the reality of engaging with the police state, one that is well understood in Atlanta and in many other places, that this isn't a game. You're not gonna get anywhere just kind of sitting on the same college campus green over and over again, hoping for a different result, unquote. And as we've seen this year, with the State Department cracking down on pro Palestine protests, just sitting there on the college green doesn't prevent you from being black bagged by the Feds. Taken to a black site and deported to close the episode. In September 2024, the Georgia Attorney General's office dropped the money laundering charges against the organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, though the defendants still remained on the RICO indictment almost a full year later. On September 9, 2025, the defense successfully argued that the state AG's office did not have the jurisdictional authority to prosecute the 61 defendants under the state's RICO statute due to simple procedural error in neglecting to first ask the governor if the AG's office could prosecute this case. Judge Farmer found that the AG does not have the authority to prosecute Count one of the RICO indictment, the racketeering and conspiracy charges. Without the sweeping RICO charges engulfing the 61 defendants, just five defendants would be left with count two of the indictment, the domestic terrorism charges, which the AG does have authority to prosecute, and count three, the arson charge, though Judge Farmer indicated that that charge could also be thrown out on a similar technicality. The prosecution is appealing this decision and the defense has argued that the state domestic terrorism law violates the Constitution and is far too broad and should be altered or overturned. Judge Farmer has yet to rule on this, but he's expected to very soon. Some of the 61 defendants could face charges individually in Fulton and DeKalb county, but that remains to be seen. The referendum case is still under appeal in federal court and the case against Jack Mazurek is still in pre trial. Just because the Cup City trial is finally progressing does not mean that movement participants are safe now quoting an anonymous Atlanta Anarchist quote, people should be very mindful going into the trial phase. That does not mean that they are safe. There is no statute of limitations on a lot of this stuff. Like with a lot of radical movements, you're gonna have to hold a lot of that shit forever. Rely on your support structures, rely on your community. Be careful about who you talk to. As Stop Cop City becomes history, there will be an influx of people trying to define the legacy of the movement, whether that's through podcasts, documentaries, a college dissertation or who knows how many books are incoming. There already has been a true crime ification of the movement in certain coverage which grossly objectifies the life of tortuguita platforms, police as more objective than movement participants and removes autonomy from key subjects to reframe the entire movement around other public facing individuals. To quote an Atlanta anarchist one final time quote, I think a big lesson from Atlanta, and this is one that we actually still have to win at, is to not let outside forces, whether that be the state or capital define the ending. That is a scope of battle that we are still engaged with and still have to win. We need to close the book on it ourselves. We need to rubber stamp it ourselves. No other entity can do that for us. It would be disastrous if they did. This has been It Could Happen Here. See you on the other side. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in Episode Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening. If a Lenovo computer for your business is on your holiday list, don't shop around, just go directly to the source lenovo.com you'll find exclusive deals on the PCs you want for your business like the ThinkPad X9 14, Aura Edition and Yoga 7i 2 in 1. So avoid all that shopping chaos and price comparing and just go directly to to the source lenovo.com where PCs are up to 50% off. That's lenovo.com.
- [62:46]
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- [63:46]
Garrison Davis
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