![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/17/2.jpg\")
\nWhile public attention has focused on the Twin Cities this month, where nearly 3000 federal mercenaries are engaged in a rampage of kidnapping and murder, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers remain active all around the country, terrorizing communities and preparing for future surges that will be just as brutal as what is taking place in the Twin Cities. Yet this also opens up opportunities for people across the continent to act in solidarity with those targeted by ICE by striking blows elsewhere, revealing the weakness and unpopularity of federal forces and spreading their attention thin.
\n\nPeople in the Bay Area did precisely this on January 10, smashing 47 windows at the federal building in Oakland and covering it with spray paint in order to identify it as a base of ICE operations in the area. We received the following report as an anonymous submission.
\n\n\nThese days, everyone hates ICE. People across the political spectrum want them out of our cities. Since their massive expansion in 2025, new formations have been mobilizing together to push back against state violence in a way we haven’t seen in years. In the past, most recently in the uprisings against police brutality in 2020, a similarly broad base of revolutionary energy fizzled and was redirected into electoralism by liberals, while the left devolved into burnout and infighting about political tendencies or tactics. This time, if we’re going to seize the opportunity to create resilient movements and confront the worldwide rise of authoritarianism, we need to do something different.
\n\nIn the Bay Area, we have been.
\n\nOver the last ten months, the fight against ICE has created a necessary shift in the organizing styles and relationships between different radical formations in the Bay Area. We have seen grassroots networks form neighborhood assemblies, dense Adopt-a-Corner networks keep watch over schools and work sites, and new relationships and strategic approaches grow from the conditions at sites of struggle.
\n\nOne of the chief sites of struggle has been the federal immigration courthouse in San Francisco, where ICE was abducting people appearing for their immigration check-ins. Once this site was identified as a major point of intervention, community groups came together organically and began holding protective presence outside the courthouse. Underground anarchist groups began working in tandem with Marxist formations, aboveground mutual aid networks and community groups, lawyers, and even liberal nonprofit organizations in a way we had never seen before. Anarchists fought ICE agents in the streets alongside faith leaders outside the courthouse. Militants in black bloc held the line alongside priests and families during the federal incursion into Coast Guard Island; this eventually resulted in the federal government calling off the planned ICE surge into the Bay Area in October.
\n\nAs our enemies become increasingly resourced, we consolidate our power by looking past sectarianism and working alongside individuals and organizations who align with our shared vision for the future, even if they hold different theories of change and political inspirations. This is done not by making ideological concessions to liberals, but rather by identifying our respective skillsets and common goals. People have maintained a principled clarity around the need to directly confront the state even while working with others who were not yet ready to take those actions.
\n\nThis principled coalition building—holding a shared vision of what we are trying to accomplish through our many different positions, skills, and tactical tendencies—is working. Detentions at courthouses plummeted; they are now blocked by an injunction filed by the American Civil Liberties Union this January. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security are struggling to travel anywhere in the Bay Area without being chased and harassed by everyday people, thanks to the expansion of neighborhood watch groups and lines of communication across the region.
\n\nPeople in the Bay have recently identified another site of struggle: the Oakland Federal Building. Thanks to a broad network of researchers keeping tabs on ICE activities, the Federal Building was identified as a staging ground for ICE operations in the East Bay.
\n\nA coalition of anti-fascists involved in the fight against ICE in the Bay Area responded to the murder of Renee Good by planning a militant response on January 10. This action sought to attack federal infrastructure and impede ICE operations on a local level, both by publicly marking the Federal Building as a site of ICE operations and by causing material damage. This action also sought to revive a culture of militancy in the Bay Area that has waned over the past five years, and to display our strength and ability to fight back. It was orchestrated in solidarity with the uprisings in Minneapolis, and as an act of vengeance for Renee Good, Keith Porter, and all the lives lost at the hands of the “US” empire.
\n\nA crowd of 80-100 people gathered at the Lake Merritt Amphitheater just after sunset on January 10, 2026, most of them clad in black bloc and keffiyehs. Comrades delivered speeches about local initiatives to combat ICE abductions, the fight against the expansion of Flock cameras, and the links between the Palestinian struggle and the struggle against ICE. Then the march set out.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/17/1.jpg\")
\nThe crowd marched past the Alameda County Courthouse, decorating it with slogans before passing Oscar Grant Plaza to reach the Oakland Federal Building. Protesters smashed 47 windows on the building and covered it with spray paint to mark it as a site of ICE operations in the Bay Area—a fact that was relatively unknown to the public at the time. Energy was high and chants were spirited, and many who were present described the event as the largest black bloc they’d seen in the Bay Area since the 2020 uprisings. Protesters stayed tight and watched each other’s backs. The crowd maneuvered quickly, stayed together, and was able to evade law enforcement until it dispersed.
\n\nThe response to this action was overwhelmingly positive. As protesters smashed windows and spray-painted messages, passersby cheered and motorists honked their horns; some cars even maneuvered around the crowd to slow down the police cruisers in pursuit. The following morning, local influencers flocked to the federal building to film videos praising the action. An article about the event that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle garnered traction and received support even from liberals. Over the next few days, damn near every Oaklander learned what had taken place that night, and learned that ICE had been mobilizing out of the federal building in our beloved city.
\n\nOverall, attendees described the action as successful. It demonstrates an offensive strategy that is replicable anywhere ICE is present: marking out and demystifying the site of ICE operations to the public and attacking their infrastructure, while garnering support and input across the political spectrum. The reorientation towards militancy across political tendency showed that Oakland still has deep roots in confrontational struggle and the necessary backbone to fight the state. This action indicates that the movement against ICE and the colonial empire at large is gaining power and gaining new capacities. The diverse range of speakers, attendees, and supporters would not have been possible without the months of coalition building and public-facing projects that provided people new to movement spaces an in-road to militancy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/17/3.jpg\")
\nThere are limits to every action and every political project, of course. While the January 10 action at the federal building was successful in its aims to normalize militancy and disrupt federal infrastructure, ICE continues to abduct our friends, families, and neighbors, and their funding and power grow daily. Seizing vengeance for our martyrs is not the same as achieving justice, nor does it undo the grave harm happening all around us.
\n\nThe people of the Bay Area want ICE out of our home and out of everywhere. We know that the fight against ICE is the fight to free the land and to free all oppressed peoples everywhere. We know that we must build a left-wing mass movement that is lasting and resilient—that has the capacity to topple the existing empire. And we know that to accomplish that, we need each other.
\n\nICE, the police, imperialist aggression, and all forms of state violence succeed when there is a lack of organized opposition, when they can carry out their operations clandestinely with no pushback. When we identify strategic chokepoints and intervene, we win. When we use intervention as a means of building towards mass uprising, we win.
\n\nSmashing windows alone under cover of darkness isn’t automatically an effective political strategy, but it can become effective as a star in a broader constellation of resistance.
\n\n—xoxo, anonymous gay people in occupied Huichin / so-called Oakland, California
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2023/02/10/we-remember-jen-angel-a-eulogy", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2023/02/10/we-remember-jen-angel-a-eulogy", "title": "We Remember Jen Angel : A Eulogy", "summary": "In memory of Jen Angel, an anarchist organizer whose efforts spanned four decades, we review Jen’s achievements and share memories from those she inspired.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/header.jpg", "date_published": "2023-02-10T17:09:52Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:56Z", "tags": [ "Bay Area", "ohio", "media", "independent media", "eulogy" ], "content_html": "We mourn the passing of Jen Angel, a tenacious anarchist organizer whose efforts spanned the better part of four decades. Below, we’ll review some of Jen’s many contributions over the years and share some memories from those who love her.
\n\nYou can donate to a memorial fund for Jen here. You can read a selection of her writing here. Justseeds has published another tribue to Jen here.
\n\nWe were fortunate to know Jen. Her generosity and exuberance inspired us and we worked together in a variety of ways.
\n\nLike many of us, Jen got her start in do-it-yourself print media and counterculture at an early age, before the internet brought digital connectivity to the average North American household. Her career extended from the high point of the do-it-yourself counterculture through the turn-of-the-century movement against capitalist globalization to the Occupy movement, the Trump era, and the George Floyd uprising.
\n\nJen had an ampersand tattooed on her wrist. You could say that this represented her approach to organizing, taking on responsibilities, and addressing differences and conflict in her community: “Yes, and.”
\n\nShe was a dependable friend, affectionate and curious, who brought an even keel and considerable stamina to her projects along with an unpretentious Midwestern demeanor. She dedicated herself to a wide range of collective undertakings, providing thankless behind-the-scenes work and offering the kind of warm-hearted hospitality that enables people to put down roots together.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/5.jpg\")
The penultimate issue of the zine Jen started as a teenager, Fucktooth.
\nIn high school, Jen started out as a classical musician. Although the punk scene was to play a central role in her life story, this was the closest she got to playing in a band.
\n\n\n\n\n“I played the bassoon. Nobody would let me in their punk band.”
\n\n \n
“I learned a lot from punk,” Jen later explained in an interview: “to assert myself, to express my opinion… those are all important things, things that are also inherent in independent media. Independent media outlets like Clamor allow regular, everyday people, not experts, to get their opinion out in the world.”
\n\nStarting in her mid-teens in 1991, Jen published the zine Fucktooth. Like many of us, she cut her teeth as an author and organizer by bringing out a publication of her own, learning by doing. This was how she developed the skills that she later put at the disposal of an array of social movements.
\n\nAs a teenager, Jen also explored non-monogamous relationship models, at a time when non-monogamy was unthinkable for many people of her generation, especially in the Midwest, where she grew up. She was at the cutting edge of a variety of experiments that later spread far and wide.
\n\nJen became involved with punk infrastructure where she lived in Columbus, Ohio, including the notorious Legion of Doom punk house and Columbus More Than Music Fest. In 1996, she participated in the Active Resistance gathering in Chicago, providing a counterpoint to the Democratic National Convention. Active Resistance was an important forerunner of subsequent anarchist convergences such as the mobilizations in Seattle during the protests against the 1999 World Trade Organization summit and, later, in response to the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
\n\nThat same year, Jen got involved with publishing the Zine Yearbook, drawing on her experience in do-it-yourself publishing to collect the best of the underground press. The Zine Yearbook appeared annually from 1996 until 2004.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/7.jpg\")
The third Zine Yearbook.
\nAt the invitation of Tim Yohannan—longtime editor of Maximum Rock’n’Roll, arguably the most influential do-it-yourself punk magazine—Jen moved to the Bay Area in 1997 to help coordinate MRR. At the time, the magazine had a monthly circulation of 14,000 copies. As Jen put it, “I’ve been doing zines for a really long time and Maximum is the biggest zine there is.”
\n\nYou can read a lively and entertaining interview with Tim and Jen here, and another interview with Jen from that era here.
\n\nDuring this stint in the Bay Area, Jen worked at Punks with Presses, another classic punk institution of that time. But Tim died of cancer in April 1998, and Jen was forced out of her position at Maximum Rock’n’Roll shortly thereafter.
\n\nJen published the 24th and final issue of her first zine, Fucktooth, in 1999. In the intervening years, the punk underground and the zine culture it helped sustain had developed into a massive global network interwoven with other movements worldwide. This culminated in riotous demonstrations against the 1999 summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, confirming the arrival of a new global era of protest. Jen moved back to Ohio, where her partner Jason Kucsma was attending Bowling Green State University, and the two founded a new magazine together, Clamor. The first issue appeared in early 2000, including—like every like-minded publication of that time—breathless accounts from the WTO demonstrations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/3.jpg\")
Jen and Jason working on Clamor.
\nJen helped to organize the annual Underground Publishing Conference in Bowling Green, initially founded as the “Midwest Zine Conference” in 1999 and later rebranded as the Allied Media Conference, which continues to this day in Detroit. Jen and Jason moved to Toledo in 2002, where they continued working ceaselessly on Clamor.
\n\nUltimately, Jen and Jason published 38 issues of the magazine. When their distributor went under, Clamor collapsed; the last issue came out in fall 2006. Jen’s romantic relationship with Jason came to an end, as well, illustrating the risks for activists who afford themselves no breathing room between their relationships and their projects. You can read all the issues of Clamor on their website.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/4.jpg\")
Clamor magazine.
\nWith the end of Clamor, Jen shifted her attention to organizing publicity for authors. This developed into the collective Aid & Abet, through which she worked with David Graeber, Jacob Conroy of the SHAC 7 and Will Potter of Green Is the New Red, Margaret Killjoy, Frank López of SubMedia, scott crow of Common Ground, and many other authors, filmmakers, and organizers over the next several years.
\n\nJen moved back to the Bay Area in 2006, fostering a community through collective dinners and other traditional punk and Midwestern forms of conviviality. Though many radicals who experiment with alternative family structures withdraw to nuclear families later in life, Jen continued to invest her energy in living collectively and nourishing a dense network of polyamorous relationships; these remained important to Jen throughout her adulthood. At that time, the Bay Area was rapidly gentrifying, but it remained an epicenter of radical activity, including the movement responding to the murder of Oscar Grant in 2008 and Occupy Oakland in 2011.
\n\nIn addition to public organizing, Jen made her home into a space of encounter drawing together people of a variety of interests and walks of life. For example, when we published After the Crest, reflecting on the waning phase of the Occupy movement, dozens of the fiercest participants in the Oakland Commune crowded into her living room to discuss it. Years later, during the To Change Everything tour in the United States, participants in the tour got to inspect an early version of the game Bloc by Bloc at a salon Jen hosted.
\n\nRevolutionary potential blossoms when people give it space and resources the way that Jen did.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/9.jpg\")
\nJen became a core organizer of the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, the longest-running anarchist book fair in the United States. Behind the scenes, she helped several radical projects to balance their books, aiming to protect them from the fate that had befallen Clamor. From 2013-2014, she helped organize the Bay Area Radical History Project, a series of presentations focusing on Bay Area activism over the preceding three decades, seeking to connect the wave of people who became involved in radical politics through the Occupy movement with veteran activists from earlier movements.
\n\nIn October 2014, she joined Ryan Only in debuting Anarchist Agency, a project dedicated to interfacing between anarchists and mass media.
\n\n\n\n\nThe goal is to raise awareness of anarchism as a whole, and we are completely prepared to do promote diverse (and contradictory) parts of anarchism as long as the ideas, groups, and individuals we are working with identify publicly as anarchists and share our core beliefs…
\n\nThis is not an attempt to water down or make palatable the more militant parts of anarchism or of the community. Some anarchists run child-care programs and some anarchists smash windows and engage in sabotage. Sometimes the same individuals do both things.
\n\nHelping anarchists be more transparent about what they are doing and why, and with what goals, will make anarchist ideas more accessible in hopes of allowing more folks to understand that a different world is possible.
\n\n \n
With considerable support from the community that she cultivated around her, Jen also got her cupcake business off the ground and sustained it through a series of challenges. This ensured that she could make decisions in her activism on the basis of her values rather than financial pressures, even as life in the gentrifying Bay Area became nearly untenable.
\n\nOrganizing involves ceaseless challenges and, often, a tremendous amount of heartache. Despite decades of stress, disappointment, and grueling unpaid labor, Jen continued forward cheerfully. She helped to make the 2022 Bay Area Book Fair a success and was involved in the organizing for the 2023 Book Fair at the time of her passing.
\n\nReviewing Jen’s life, it’s easy to be reminded of Aragorn!, another Midwesterner who grew up making zines in the do-it-yourself punk scene, moved to the Bay Area, worked on Maximum Rock’n’Roll, and distinguished himself as a publisher and a fixture in the anarchist milieu. During Occupy Oakland and its aftermath, Jen and Aragorn! lived only a few blocks apart in Berkeley.
\n\nIt has been almost exactly three years now since Aragorn!’s untimely passing—three years that have seen such a spate of tragedies that it’s hard not to feel desensitized. But the losses of Aragorn! and Jen are linked, for both erode our access to the generation of anarchists who emerged from the crucible of the 1990s.
\n\nIn attitude and approach, the two could not be more different. While Aragorn! pursued confrontational critique almost as an end in itself, Jen focused on logistics nearly to the exclusion of ideology. Coming out of the motley crowds of the punk scene and the heady optimism of the Seattle WTO protests, Jen took for granted that theoretical cohesion was not as important as openness and inclusivity. While Aragorn! wrongly interpreted Jen as an appendage of his perceived rivals at AK and PM Press, Jen couldn’t see what there was to gain from sectarian debate—even when there were real strategic differences at stake.
\n\nThe important thing to understand is that Jen’s and Aragorn!’s approaches to anarchism evolved in continuous response to each other over a period of decades. Each sought to correct the shortcomings of the other’s strategy. Consequently, although neither would acknowledge it—or rather, precisely for that reason—their efforts add up to a complementary whole. Those who wish to learn from one of them must also understand the other.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/8.jpg\")
The credits for the June 1997 issue of Maximum Rock’n’Roll, listing the names of both Aragorn! and Jen Angel—but as far apart as possible.
\n\n\n\n“There’s this misconception that anarchism means chaos. But the term means ‘without rulers.’ We don’t expect people to organize for us. We organize for ourselves.”
\n\n \n
Jen’s untimely passing is a senseless tragedy. She lost her life as the consequence of an apparent robbery attempt. As her loved ones emphasized, she would be furious if anyone were to use this as an excuse to justify more police violence:
\n\n\n\n\nJen’s family and friends ask that stories referencing Jen’s life do not use her legacy of care and community to further inflame narratives of fear, hatred, and vengeance. We do not support putting public resources into policing, incarceration, or other state violence that perpetuates the cycle of violence that resulted in this tragedy.
\n
Anyone who has spent time in the Bay Area over the past decade knows that one of the primary forces driving violence in the East Bay is the skyrocketing cost of living. The real estate profiteers who have heartlessly filled the streets of Oakland with desperate evictees and the politicians who have funneled money into the pockets of the police with no concern for the processes that are immiserating millions bear the lion’s share of responsibility for the risks that Bay Area residents face today.
\n\nJen spent her life working to create a world in which everyone would have access to the food, shelter, medical care, and community that they need—a world in which there would be no incentives for anyone to do harm to others for the sake of material gain. No amount of violence from police, courts, or prisons could bring us an inch closer to such a world. We owe it to her to continue her efforts to abolish capitalism, the state, patriarchy, white supremacy, and all the other forms of hierarchy that contribute to violence and precarity in our communities. To the extent to which we make progress towards those goals, the world will be a safer place for everyone.
\n\nNothing we can do will bring Jen back, but we can honor her life and her unflagging commitment to social change by taking up the torch she passed to us.
\n\n\n\n\n“The core tenets of anarchism are autonomy, mutual aid, voluntary association, and direct action. These are all positive things.”
\n\n \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/2.jpg\")
Jen and Jason in the Clamor days.
\nI’m a teenager at our local infoshop. I overhear two of the volunteers debating the value of a new magazine, Clamor.
\n\n“I think it’s trying to be too accessible,” says one.
\n\n“Yeah, but it’s Jen Angel’s magazine. You know why she has that name right? Because she really is an angel.”
\n\nAccessible is a four-letter word to me, because I like punk rock. But, somehow, because I like punk rock, I’m also drawn to four-letter words and to that which is disparaged. Plus the magazine is for sale at our infoshop, and our infoshop is cool. So I pick up a copy. OK, I think to myself, it’s not dripping with sweat and slobber the way Slug and Lettuce or Profane Existence are, but the articles are provocative.
\n\nIt’s good. Because when Jen did things, she did them well.
\n\nI’m in my twenties. My best friend from that infoshop invites me to launch an anarchist communications collective with him and Jen Angel. I remember that name.
\n\n“Clamor, right?”
\n\n“Yeah, she’s got her shit together.”
\n\nShe did. They both did, but I didn’t. After a few years, I fell out of the project, but I remained friends with Jen.
\n\nI’m in the Bay Area and I need somewhere to crash for a couple nights. Last time Jen was in my town, on a speaking tour with a recently released political prisoner, she offered “Next time you’re in the Bay and need somewhere to crash…”
\n\nI hit her up and I get to sleep in a padded and mirrored room next to hers. She has always been kind to me, grounded, has had her shit together. But this is the trip we really become friends.
\n\nHer house is beautiful. You can tell how much intention and collectivity goes into how the house functions. Especially the kitchen.
\n\nI can’t believe it when she tells me that she was an editor at Maximum Rock’n’Roll—having been passed the torch from none other than Tim Yohannan. We had been friends for a few years at this point, but I had no idea.
\n\n“Maximum Rock’n’Roll?!”
\n\n“Yeah.”
\n\n“You’re punk as fuck!”
\n\n“I guess.”
\n\nWhat an angel. We spend an evening around the dinner table swapping dumb punk stories about stupid bands. My jaw dropped at the Maximum Rock’n’Roll reveal, but it completely detaches when I learn that she founded the punk house where I experienced my first kiss with the first girl I fell in love with: The Legion of Doom. She was the one who gave it that name.
\n\nThe next day, I pick my jaw up from the floor so I can munch on one of Jen’s cupcakes. It’s good, like really good. Because when Jen did things, she did them well.
\n\nI’m at the San Francisco anarchist bookfair. There has been hella online drama for the weeks leading up to it because the bookfair is huge—thanks, in part, to Jen’s role in the organizing collective—and the best venue they could find is a former armory belonging to a high-profile pornography company. Some threatened to boycott, others threatened worse.
\n\nThe day of the bookfair comes and I catch Jen for a second. She’s busy, I know it, but she barely seems it. “How are you doing with all the chatter?”
\n\n“Oh, it’s going fine. I put together a discussion later to talk about the decision-making that led to us choosing this venue, but frankly, we just needed more space, and they were happy to have us.”
\n\nShe’s grounded, relaxed, and seems to be enjoying the event—not burdened by responsibility, just happy to be in the company of so many comrades sharing, communing, participating. I see friends from far away and long ago. I meet Gee Vaucher and Penny Rimbaud from Crass. I take my mom’s new boyfriend to a performance put on by some of my friends and collective-mates, and he’s wowed by it. It’s everything an anarchist bookfair should be. When Jen did things, she did them well.
\n\nI’m at Point Reyes, walking along the beach with Jen on her birthday. Her new boyfriend sees a pod of dolphins, strips down, and runs into the water to swim with them. We’re both like, “Whoa,” but I welcome it, because the dude is kind of, um, enthusiastic, and now we can really talk.
\n\nShe just seems happy. Another birthday, life is going well, she’s busy and entertained and fulfilled. I don’t remember her fretting or worrying about her life much in all the times we talked. She was never distracted when we talked, and she was purposeful in the projects she put her effort into.
\n\nJen Angel had a good life, because when she did things, she did them well.
\n\nI’ll miss you, Jen.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/02/10/1.jpg\")
\n\n\n\nI met Jen before I knew I was an anarchist. I already was one at the time, and on some level, probably always had been, but I didn’t have the words or even know it was an option until shortly before meeting her.
\n\nI remember her asking me what made me think I WASN’T an anarchist, and when I said that I didn’t agree with some of the things that a lot of other anarchists thought and did, she laughed and told me that disagreeing with other anarchists is probably the one thing all anarchists agree on.
\n\nShe helped me understand that agreement isn’t what makes us anarchists, so much as how we go about disagreeing, and whether we respect that other people are still free to do as they will even when we don’t agree with it.
\n\nIt still took me a while before I was ready to consider myself an anarchist, but I don’t know if I’d ever have gotten there without those early conversations with Jen.
\n\nJen and I worked together for a long time, but I’m struggling to find anything to say about those years because no matter how much of herself she poured into the bakery, she was bigger than the business she built to survive under capitalism.
\n\nJen wanted to live in a world where we could bake cupcakes and lovingly share them with our community because we wanted to, not because we need to sell them to earn a living.
\n\n-Elle Armageddon
\n
\n\n\nJen wasn’t usually the loudest person in the room or the center of attention in Bay Area anarchist and activist spaces. But she was almost always working behind the scenes to build, sustain, and promote the crucial infrastructure that we all relied on (and sometimes took for granted). She rarely let sectarian infighting distract her from her ongoing work or undermine her long-term vision.
\n\nJen was always a champion of the projects her friends and comrades pursued, a constant source of encouragement and sage advice. She was an early supporter of Bloc by Bloc (the board game inspired by social insurrection that I designed) and organized some of the first playtests of the game at her house in 2015. Jen’s optimism, perseverance, and consistency should be an inspiration to us all. She will be missed.
\n\n-T.L. Simons
\n
\n\n\nJen’s legacy to political hardcore punk started as a Midwest emo kid who made it OK to be emotional and passionate and political, but most of all, smart. She gave the best hugs. She was a writer’s writer, someone you could sit with discussing which word fit best here or there. She gave workshops in the 1990s at the Columbus More Than Music Fests and Chicago Active Resistance, drawing people in and explaining the most difficult things in everyday language. Perhaps her biggest impact came through publishing indy-media, anarchist and political punk zines and magazines, from the photocopied Fucktooth to the glossy hardbound Zine Yearbook and Clamor. Tim Yohannan even chose her to take over publishing Maximum Rock’n’Roll before he died. She used words to connect us and ideas as sinews for our community. For Jen Angel, it was always about more than music.
\n\n-Eric Boehme
\n
\n\n\nJen Angel was loving, was loved, and was love. She exuded a presence which was magnetic and powerful. It was an invitation for like-minded souls to join hands with her and together reach forward into a better world.
\n\nAs I’m typing, the very writing of this eulogy makes no sense. Jen isn’t supposed to be dead. This world isn’t supposed to go on without her in it. She is supposed to be here as she was last week, and every month and year before this one. I started typing this thinking that finding the right words would be possible, but all of this is wrong. All I can say is that connecting with Jen was pure fire.
\n\nI’m holding her close tonight. I’m in shock that all this has happened. And I am hoping anyone reading this feels, amidst the shared pain we are all experiencing, that you are not alone. We will remember her together. And mourn together. And we will hopefully, on whatever level we can, help make the world better together. This would be a fitting legacy. None of this makes sense. But knowing that Jen would want us all connected, does.
\n\n-Greg Bennick
\n
\n\n\nJen Angel believed in my work and took it and me seriously before I even really took myself seriously. She was always doing thankless behind-the-scenes work, but with an eye towards being strategic, towards building the better world we’re fighting for, and specifically, towards building each other up, providing venues for sharing ideas and coming to know one another.
\n\n-Margaret Killjoy
\n
\n\n\nOver the last 30 years, Jen Angel has been a visionary influence and pioneering participant within multiple movements and subcultures that have significantly informed and shaped our world in the here and now, from punk rock and anarchism in the 1990s, through the Global Justice and anti-war movements of the early 2000s to Occupy in 2011 and contemporary fights for racial justice, climate justice, economic justice, and beyond.
\n\n \n
As Anarchist Agency recounted, on her 48th birthday, a few days before her death, Jen posted this poem by Mary Oliver on social media:
\n\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/01/03/how-anti-fascists-won-the-battles-of-berkeley-2017-in-the-bay-and-beyond-a-play-by-play-analysis", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/01/03/how-anti-fascists-won-the-battles-of-berkeley-2017-in-the-bay-and-beyond-a-play-by-play-analysis", "title": "How Anti-Fascists Won the Battles of Berkeley : 2017 in the Bay and Beyond: A Play-by-Play Analysis", "summary": "2017 saw a harrowing showdown between fascists seeking to get a grassroots movement off the ground and anti-fascists determined to stop them. What can we learn from the struggle in Berkeley?", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/header.jpg", "date_published": "2018-01-03T16:21:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:35Z", "tags": [ "Bay Area", "antifascism", "Berkeley", "fascism" ], "content_html": "“Tell me, what else should I have done?
\n
\nDoesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
\nTell me, what is it you plan to do
\nwith your one wild and precious life?”
The perilous politics of militant anti-fascism defined 2017 for the anarchist movement in the United States. The story in the Bay Area mirrors that of the country at large. It’s a narrative full of tragedies, setbacks, and repression, ultimately concluding with a fragile victory. Yet there was no guarantee it would turn out this way: only a few months ago, it seemed likely we would be starting 2018 amid the nightmare of a rapidly metastasizing fascist street movement. What can anti-fascists around the world learn from what happened in Berkeley? To answer this question, we have to back up and tell the story in full.
\n\nFascists chose Berkeley, California as the center stage for their attempt to get a movement off the ground. The advantage shifted back and forth between fascists and anti-fascists as both sides maneuvered to draw more allies into the fight. Riding on the coattails of Trump’s campaign and exploiting the blind spots of liberal “free speech” politics, fascists gained momentum until anti-fascists were able to use these victories against them, drawing together an unprecedented mobilization. As we begin a new year, anti-fascist networks in the Bay Area are stronger than ever. Participants in anti-fascist struggle enjoy a hard-earned legitimacy in the eyes of many activists and communities targeted by the far right. By contrast, the far-right movement that gained strength throughout 2016 and the first half of 2017 has imploded. For the time being, the popular mobilization they sought to manifest has been thwarted. The events in the Bay Area offer an instructive example of the threat posed by contemporary far-right coalition building—and how we can defend our communities against it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/1.jpg\")
Clashes escalate outside a Trump Rally in San Jose on June 2, 2016.
\nThe clashes between far-right forces and anti-fascists that gripped Berkeley for much of 2017 were the climax of a sequence of events that began a year earlier. On February 27, 2016, Klansmen in the Southern California city of Anaheim stabbed three anti-racists who were protesting a Ku Klux Klan rally against “illegal immigration and Muslims.” The rhetoric of the Klan echoed the same vulgar nationalism that the Trump campaign was broadcasting. Under the banner of the alt-right, many white supremacist and fascist groups began to use the campaign as an umbrella under which to mobilize and recruit. They aimed to build an ideologically diverse social movement that could unite various far-right tendencies within the millions mobilized by Trump. A reactionary wave had steadily grown across the country in the last years of the Obama era. The combination of continued economic stagnation, proliferating anti-police uprisings of Black and Brown people, and rapidly changing norms related to gender identity and sexuality had spawned a violent backlash. This was the wave that Trump rode upon and his campaign had broken open the floodgates.
\n\nTrump rallies became increasingly contentious in cities such as Chicago (March 11) and Pittsburgh (April 13) as protesters held counterdemonstrations to confront these open displays of bigotry. On April 28, 2016, small-scale rioting erupted outside a Trump rally in the southern California city of Costa Mesa. The next day, in the city of Burlingame near San Francisco, large crowds disrupted Trump’s appearance at the convention of the California Republican Party, leading to scuffles with police.
\n\nDays later, on May 6, a newly-formed fascist youth organization, Identity Evropa (IE) held their first demonstration on the other side of the Bay—an ominous portent of things to come. This initial experiment was organized by IE as a “safe space” on the UC Berkeley campus to promote “white nationalist” ideas and their particular style of business-casual far-right activism. Inspired by European identitarian movements, IE worked to coopt the rhetoric of liberal identity politics and use the contradictions inherent in those politics to build a new white power movement. Their strategy was part of a larger effort across the alt-right to recruit young people and legitimize white supremacist organizing as an acceptable form of public activism. The rally brought together Nathan Damigo, the founder of IE, with members of the Berkeley College Republicans and the alt-right ideologist Richard Spencer, who flew in from out of town to attend. Although the event was barely noticed, the participants declared it a success and a first step towards building a new nationalist street movement.
\n\nThe most violent clashes outside a Trump campaign rally unfolded in San Jose on June 2. A handful of experienced activists attended the counterdemonstration, but the vast majority of protesters were angry young people of color from the South Bay unaffiliated with any organization. The police response was slow and confused; clashes between the crowds raged into the evening. Photos of people punching and chasing Trump supporters spread online, leading to calls from many on the far right for revenge.
\n\nOn June 26, over 400 anti-racists and anti-fascists converged on the state capitol in Sacramento to shut down a rally called for by the Traditionalist Workers Party, a neo-Nazi organization based in the Midwest. The rally was initially billed as an “anti-antifa” rally organized in response to the protests at recent Trump events. It was also an attempt to build bridges across various far-right tendencies. The majority of the anti-fascists wore black masks; other crews represented various leftist cliques. Together, they successfully prevented the rally from ever starting. Comrades held the capitol steps, chasing off scattered groups of Nazis and alt-right activists.
\n\nAbout three hours after the counterdemonstration began, two dozen members of the Golden State Skins, geared up in bandanas and shields decorated with white power symbols and the Traditionalist Workers Party emblem, suddenly appeared on the far side of the capitol and attacked the crowd from behind. Six comrades were stabbed, some repeatedly in the torso, while riot police watched impassively. Nearly all those targeted in the attack were either Black or transgender. Miraculously, all of them survived.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/13.jpg\")
Members of the Golden State Skins attempt to kill anti-fascists in Sacramento on June 26, 2016.
\nAfter the bloody clash, many people urgently felt the need for a new politics of militant anti-fascism. Over the preceding decades, one rarely heard the term antifa among anarchist and anti-capitalist movements in the Bay Area. Previous generations of anti-fascist and Anti-Racist Action (ARA) organizing in Northern California were largely situated within subcultural contexts. Much of the work these activists accomplished in the 1980s and ’90s focused on kicking Nazis out of punk and hardcore scenes.
\n\nThe events in Sacramento helped usher in rapid transformations of the local anarchist movement. A network of comrades formed Northern California Anti-Racist Action (NOCARA) to research and document increasing fascist activity across the region. Other crews linked up to practice self-defense and hone their analysis in the rapidly shifting political terrain. Antifa symbols—the two flags and the three arrows—quickly became as ubiquitous as the circle A in the Bay Area anarchist milieu. Some lamented this as a retreat from struggles against capitalism and the police into a purely defensive strategy singularly focused on combating fringe elements of the far right. But the majority understood it as a logical step necessitated by the rising tide of fascist activity around the country and world. They aimed to situate an anti-fascist position as a single component of the larger struggles against capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy that comrades had been engaged in for years. Most participants had cut their teeth in various rebellions and movements in the Bay area over the preceding decade, including Occupy Oakland and Black Lives Matter. They saw antifa as a form of community self defense against the violent reaction to those struggles for collective liberation. Many were also eager to use anti-fascism as a means to open a new front against white supremacy and the state.
\n\nOn November 9, the night after Trump’s electoral victory shook the world, a march of thousands followed by the most intense night of rioting in recent memory took place in downtown Oakland. Fires broke out in the Chamber of Commerce, the Federal Building, and the construction site of the new Uber building. Angry crowds of thousands fought police with bottles, fireworks, and even Molotov cocktails as banks were smashed, barricades blocked major streets, and tear gas filled the air. Other cities across the country also saw significant unrest; rowdy protests in Portland, Oregon lasted for days.
\n\nThis made 2016 the eighth year in a row that serious rioting took place in Oakland. 2017 would end that pattern. The locus of street conflict in the Bay was about to shift up the road to the neighboring college town of Berkeley.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/2.jpg\")
Thousands swarm San Francisco International Airport to protest Trump’s “Muslim Ban” on January 28, 2017.
\nThe tone for 2017 was set on the cold morning of January 20 in Washington DC. As mainstream media pundits nervously reiterated the importance of a peaceful transition of power, a black bloc of hundreds chanting “Black Lives Matter!” took the streets to disrupt Trump’s inauguration. In the course of the day, hundreds were arrested, a person in a black mask punched Richard Spencer as he tried to explain alt-right meme Pepe the Frog, and video of the incident went viral.
\n\nThat same evening in Seattle, Milo Yiannopolous spoke on the University of Washington campus as part of his “Dangerous Faggot” tour. Milo had made a name for himself over the previous year peddling misogyny and Islamophobia in his role as tech editor for Breitbart News under the mentorship of Steve Bannon. He had become a leading spokesperson for the alt-right auxiliary known as the alt-lite. The logic behind his tour was similar to IE’s strategy of targeting liberal university enclaves using a provocative model of far-right activism rebranded for a millennial audience.
\n\nHundreds turned out to oppose Milo’s talk in Seattle. As scuffles unfolded outside the building, a Trump supporter drew a concealed handgun and shot Joshua Dukes, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, in the stomach. Milo continued his talk unconcernedly as the critically injured Dukes was rushed to emergency care. Fortunately, he survived, though he spent weeks in the hospital.
\n\nDespite the unprecedented degree of tension in the air, Oakland was quiet on J20. A few small marches, mostly departing from high school walkouts, crossed downtown. But by nightfall, the rainy streets were empty; hundreds of riot police deployed for the anticipated unrest packed up their gear to go home. This new year was not going to play out along familiar lines.
\n\nThe next day, millions across the country marched against Trump in the Women’s Marches, many of them wearing pink “pussy hats.” Oakland was the location of the main Bay Area march and tens of thousands walked through downtown in a staid and orderly display of disapproval. Later that week, Trump signed executive order 13769 suspending US refugee resettlement programs and banning entry for all citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries, including people with valid visas. By the following afternoon, a spontaneous and unorganized national mobilization was underway as tens of thousands swarmed the international terminals of every major airport in the country to oppose the “Muslim ban.” Loud marches and blockades continued for two days inside San Francisco International Airport.
\n\nIn many ways, the airport protests marked the high point of the year in terms of mass action that undermined the regime’s ability to carry out its agenda. The mobilization immediately disrupted the implementation of the executive order and provided momentum to challenge it in the courts, where legal maneuvers continued throughout the rest of the year. Nevertheless, the protests did not coalesce into a more sustained sequence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/3.jpg\")
Sproul Plaza outside Milo’s cancelled event on February 1, 2017.
\nOn February 1, Milo arrived in Berkeley for the final talk of his tour, hosted by the Berkeley College Republicans. Days earlier, his talk in nearby UC Davis had been successfully disrupted by student protesters; all eyes were now on UC Berkeley campus.
\n\nBerkeley is an upper-middle-class city of 120,000 bordering Oakland, defined by the prestigious flagship campus of the University of California system that sits adjacent to downtown. The city’s history as a national hub of countercultural movements and far-left political activism stretches back to the early 1960s. In 1964, student radicals returning from the Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi set up tables on campus to distribute literature about the growing Civil Rights movement. The administration cracked down on their activities, sparking a wave of civil disobedience that came to be known as the Free Speech Movement (FSM). In many ways, it was the beginning of the student activism against racism and imperialism that proliferated across the country throughout the 1960s. Yet by the turn of the new millennium, Berkeley could be more accurately described as a hotbed of liberalism, not radicalism. The legacy of the FSM had been successfully coopted and rewritten by the university administration for their prospective student marketing materials. Students can now sip cappuccinos as they study for exams in the Free Speech Movement Café on campus.
\n\nOn the south edge of campus sits Sproul Plaza, site of some of the most important demonstrations of the FSM and subsequent waves of activism. As the sun set on Sproul that Thursday evening, between two and three thousand students, faculty, and community members filled the plaza in a rally against Milo, the alt-right, and Trump. Layers of fencing surrounded the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union as platoons of riot police watched the chanting crowd from the balconies of the building and the steps leading down to the plaza.
\n\nMilo’s talk was about to start. Despite the large protest, it appeared that the massive police presence would enable it to proceed without a hitch. Then a commotion on neighboring Bancroft Way drew the attention of the crowd. A black bloc of roughly 150, some carrying the anarchist black flag and others carrying the queer anarchist pink and black flag, had just appeared out of the neighborhood and was busy building a barricade across the main entrance to the student union’s parking garage. As the barricade caught fire, the bloc surged forward to join the thousands in Sproul.
\n\nThe sound of explosions filled the air as fireworks screamed across the plaza at the riot cops, who hunkered down and retreated from their positions. Under cover of this barrage, masked crews attacked the fencing and quickly tore it apart. Thousands cheered. Police on the balconies unloaded rubber bullets and marker rounds into the crowd, but ultimately took cover as fireworks exploded around their heads. With the fencing gone, the crowd laid siege to the building and began smashing out its windows.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/20.jpg\")
Anti-fascists rip down fences on UC Berkeley campus on February 1.
\n“The event is cancelled! Please go home!” screamed a desperate police captain over a megaphone as the crowd roared in celebration. A mobile light tower affixed to a generator was knocked over, bursting into flames two stories high. YG’s song “FDT” (Fuck Donald Trump) blasted from a mobile sound system as thousands danced around the burning pyre. Berkeley College Republicans emerging from the cancelled event were nailed with red paint bombs and members of the Proud Boys, the “Western Chauvinist” fraternal organization of the alt-lite, were beaten and chased away. Milo was escorted out a back door by his security detail and fled the city. A victory march spilled into the streets of downtown Berkeley, smashing every bank in its path. Milo’s tour bus was vandalized later that night in the parking lot of a Courtyard Marriot in nearby Fremont.
\n\nThe cover of the next day’s New York Times read “Anarchists Vow to Halt Far Right’s Rise, With Violence if Needed” below an eerie photo of a hooded, stick-wielding street fighter in Berkeley. “Professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters are proving the point of the millions of people who voted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump tweeted that morning before threatening to withdraw federal funds from UC Berkeley if the university could not guarantee “free speech.” Milo had been stopped and militant anti-fascism was now a topic of national conversation.
\n\nBut a confused controversy over free speech was just beginning. Liberals quickly fell into the trap set by the alt-right. UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich, who had been Secretary of Labor under Clinton, went so far as to embarrass himself by groundlessly claiming that “Yiannopoulos and Brietbart were in cahoots with the agitators, in order to lay the groundwork for a Trump crackdown.”
\n\nFrom organizing “white safe spaces” to pretending to represent a new free speech movement, the ascendant fascists understood that the hollow rhetoric of liberalism utilized by hacks like Reich could be weaponized against anyone opposed to white supremacy and patriarchy. Liberal enclaves were especially vulnerable to this strategy. They had become the chosen terrain on which 21st-century American fascism sought to step out of the internet to build a social movement in the streets.
\n\nMeanwhile, Milo’s days were numbered. Despite liberal commentators’ assertions that paying attention to Milo would only make him more powerful, Milo’s career imploded two weeks later. Under the intense scrutiny that followed his spectacular failure in Berkeley, a conservative social media account circulated footage of Milo condoning consensual sex between underage boys and older men. His invitation to speak at the American Conservative Union’s annual conference was quickly rescinded, as was his book deal with a major publisher. The next day, Milo was forced to resign from Breitbart. While emblematic of the rampant homophobia of the right, none of this had anything to do with his views on sex. After Berkeley, Milo appeared to be an increasingly controversial liability that conservatives could no longer risk associating with.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/4.jpg\")
Based Stickman (left) leads the goons on March 4.
\nWhile many celebrated Milo’s downfall as a blow to the alt-right, various far-right and fascist cliques hastened to take advantage of liberal confusion around the emerging free speech narrative.
\n\nOn March 4, modest rallies in support of Trump occurred across the country. In the Bay Area, vague fliers appeared calling for a Trump Rally in downtown Berkeley’s Civic Center Park. There was considerable confusion among local anti-racists and anti-fascists over who had called for the rally. Many assumed it was just right-wing trolling that would never materialize in public. Nevertheless, various small crews of anarchists, members of the leftist clique By Any Means Necessary, anti-racist skinheads, and an assortment of unaffiliated young people converged on the park to oppose any attempt to hold the Saturday afternoon rally. They found a bizarre scene that few could have previously imagined.
\n\nA grotesque array of far-right forces had assembled from across the region to celebrate Trump and defend their ability to propagate various forms of nationalism, xenophobia, and misogyny. One man in fatigues and wraparound sunglasses carried a III% militia flag. Another man with a motorcycle helmet, tactical leg guards, and a kilt sported a pro-Pinochet shirt depicting leftists being thrown from helicopters to their deaths. Still another right-wing activist happily zipped around on his hoverboard while taking massive vape hits and live-streaming the event via his phone.
\n\nMany in the right-wing crowd were not white. The alliances being formed through public activism had brought together a range of fascist tendencies, some more interested in defending violent misogyny or building an ultra-libertarian capitalist future than promoting white power. MAGA hats and American flags were everywhere as the crowd of nearly 200 attempted to march into downtown Berkeley. Fistfights broke out, flags were used as weapons, and pepper spray filled the air as anti-fascists and others intervened to stop the march. A masked crew of queer anti-fascists dressed in pastels, calling themselves the Degenderettes, used bedazzled shields to defend people from the reactionary street fighters of this strange new right-wing social movement. Chaotic scuffles and brawls continued off and on for three hours.
\n\nRiot police located around the perimeter of the park made some targeted arrests; yet as in Sacramento, they largely avoided wading into the melee. Ten people were arrested altogether, from both sides of the fight. One of these was alt-right sympathizer and closet white supremacist Kyle Chapman. Chapman had helped form the vanguard of the right-wing brawlers throughout the day. He wore a helmet, goggles, and a respirator while carrying an American flag shield in one hand and a long stick as his weapon in the other. News of his arrest combined with footage of his assaults immediately elevated him to celebrity hero status within the online world of the alt-right and alt-lite. Memes of Chapman went viral under his new nickname, “Based Stick Man.”
\n\nTactically speaking, there were no clear winners in Berkeley on March 4. But the nascent fascist street movement was energized and ready for more. Anti-fascists had underestimated the momentum of this new far-right alliance and were quickly trying to figure out how to play catch up.
\n\nOn March 8, a group of revolutionary women and queer people in the Bay Area organized a “Gender Strike” action in San Francisco as part of the national “Women’s Strike” planned for International Women’s Day. The strike was called for as a means of moving beyond the liberal feminism of January’s massive Women’s Marches against Trump. From Gamergate trolling to Trump’s gloating over his sexual assaults, from the Proud Boy’s valorization of traditional family values to the bizarre right-wing alliance manifesting in the streets of Berkeley, the rise of neo-fascism was being fueled by misogynists intent on preserving and expanding patriarchal power relationships as much as it was being fueled by white supremacists. The organizers of the strike aimed to connect radical tendencies within the growing feminist movement with various anti-racist and anti-fascist struggles. Nearly a thousand protestors marched on the downtown Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in a demonstration of support for San Francisco’s sanctuary city status and solidarity with those targeted by surging xenophobia. An even larger crowd of Women’s Strike demonstrators marched in the streets of downtown Oakland that evening.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/5.jpg\")
DIY Division (left) and other fascist thugs on April 15.
\nTwo weeks later, on Saturday, March 25, over two thousand Trump supporters held a “Make America Great Again March” in the southern California city of Huntington Beach. Marching with the large crowd was an imposing squad of athletic white men clearly looking for a fight. These were members of the openly neo-Nazi group known as the DIY Division or the Rise Above Movement. When a handful of anti-fascists attempted to disrupt the march, this squad assaulted them and beat them into the beach sand. The fight was broken up and the anti-fascists fled as the crowd joined the DIY Division fighters in chanting “Pinochet!” and “You can’t run, you can’t hide, you’re gonna get a ’copter ride!”
\n\nTo the horror of many in the Bay Area, another alt-right demonstration in Berkeley’s Civic Center Park was announced for April 15. Billed as a “Patriots’ Day Free Speech Rally,” it featured a lineup of speakers flying in from out of town. As the date grew closer, it became clear that every crypto-fascist wingnut, weekend militia member, millennial alt-right internet troll, alt-lite hipster, civic nationalist, and proud neo-Nazi from up and down the West Coast wanted to attend. The growing movement got a critical boost when the Oath Keepers militia announced two weeks ahead of time that they would be mobilizing from across the country under the name “Operation 1st Defenders” to protect the so-called “Free Speech Rally.” The Oath Keepers are a right-wing militia composed of active duty and veteran military and police officers that claims to have 35,000 members. The “operation” was to be led by Missouri chapter leader John Karriman, who oversaw the armed Oath Keeper operation to protect private property during the Ferguson uprising of 2014. Oath Keepers’ founder Stewart Rhodes would also be on the ground.
\n\nBay Area anarchists met regularly during the weeks leading up to April 15 in hopes of developing some kind of strategic response to what was shaping up to be the most important showing yet of this far-right popular movement. Many comrades believed it was necessary to find a new approach in order to avoid spiraling into a violent conflict with an enemy that was better trained and better equipped than anti-fascists and anti-racists could ever be. A general plan was hashed out through meetings and assemblies that prioritized reaching out to the broader left and other activist circles in hopes of mobilizing large numbers of radicals who could drown out the alt-right rally while avoiding the kind of conflict that would strike the general public as a symmetrical clash between two extremist gangs. There was no specific call for a black bloc, which by this time had largely become synonymous with militant antifa tactics. Instead, fliers and posters began to circulate promoting a block party and cookout that could occupy the park at 10 am with large crowds listening to music and speakers before the “Free Speech Rally” started at noon.
\n\nEarly in the morning of April 15, these plans collapsed disastrously. Dozens of Oath Keepers in tactical helmets and flak jackets established a defensive perimeter before sunrise alongside riot police who sectioned off various zones of the park with fencing and checkpoints. The organizer of the rally, the Oath Keepers, and the police had coordinated for weeks ahead of time.
\n\nRiot police surrounded comrades arriving in the park for the counter-demonstration; they confiscated trays of food for the cookout, musical instruments, flags, and signs. Police intervened to stop small scuffles as members of the DIY Division, in town for the rally from southern California, began to exchange taunts with anti-fascists. As noon approached, the 200 or 300 anarchists and anti-fascists who mobilized that day realized with terror that their attempts to reach out to other activists had fallen on deaf ears. They were alone, badly prepared for a fight, and were quickly becoming outnumbered by hundreds and hundreds of right-wing activists led by a street-fighting fascist vanguard and protected by a disciplined patriot militia.
\n\nChaos erupted as the first speakers at the rally began to address the MAGA hat-wearing crowd inside the Oath Keeper perimeter. In a desperate attempt to give momentum to the demoralized and scattered anti-fascists, a crew with a mobile sound system in a street next to the park began blasting “FDT” to the cheers of many counterdemonstrators. People coalesced around the sound system and began moving around the edge of the rally. Some threw M80s into the park; others tried to breach the fencing. Most simply tried to stay together.
\n\nThe police withdrew from the streets as fascist squads of young men emerged from within the rally to go on the offensive. Bloody fights broke out. Kyle Chapman, flanked by similarly geared-up brawlers including one man wearing a Spartan helmet, led a series of forays that split the crowd and left comrades bleeding on the ground. In one such attack, an anti-fascist was beaten by masked white men and dragged behind enemy lines to be stomped out. It was only through the intervention of the Oath Keepers and others functioning as “peace police” for the alt-right rally that the beating was interrupted; the comrade was shoved back across the skirmish line into the hands of friendly street medics. During the short pauses between clashes, fascists chugged milk and screamed as they pumped themselves up for the next assault.
\n\nThough outnumbered, anarchists and anti-fascists fought as best they could. Many Nazis and their sympathizers left that day bruised and bloodied. But the counterdemonstrators could barely hold their own against the fascist street fighters, let alone the Oath Keeper presence maintaining the interior perimeter. The rally of hundreds continued uninterrupted. As fatigue set in, the fascists made their move led by Chapman, members of DIY Division wearing their signature skull bandanas, and members of IE including Nathan Damigo. They blitzed the remaining counterdemonstrators and pushed them away from the park through a cloud of smoke bombs and into the side streets of downtown. A cautious retreat became a hasty run as the remaining anti-racists and anti-fascists were chased off the streets by Nazis. The fascists had won the third Battle of Berkeley.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/19.jpg\")
Kyle Chapman, DIY Division (right), and Identity Evropa (far right) prepare for their final offensive of the day on April 15.
\nThe fallout began immediately. Emboldened by the victory on the ground, an army of alt-right internet trolls on 4chan’s /pol thread and elsewhere began a doxxing witch hunt to identify all those who had opposed their shock troops in Berkeley. Within hours, they had used footage to identify a woman who had been brutally beaten by Damigo and others during the final assault of the day. Louise Rosealma had previously worked in porn; a misogynistic campaign of harassment against her began immediately. Oversized posters showing her naked next to Damigo’s smiling face with the words “I’d hit that” soon appeared on the streets of Berkeley.
\n\nEric Clanton, a Diablo Valley College professor, became another doxxing target. Trolls claimed to have identified him as the masked anti-fascist caught on camera hitting a man in the head with a bike lock. The man on the receiving end of this blow wore a “Feminist Tears” button and had been seen attacking people alongside members of DIY Division throughout the battle. Eric received a slew of death threats; his online accounts were hacked and angry calls poured in to his employer that would eventually cost him his job.
\n\nOn April 23, Kyle Chapman formalized his new role as leader of the militant vanguard of the alt-lite. He announced the formation of the “Fraternal Order of Alt Knights,” which was to function as the “tactical defensive arm of the Proud Boys.” Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys and co-founder of Vice Magazine, had helped promote the “Free Speech Rally” and had welcomed Chapman to his show multiple times.
\n\nOn April 27, McInnes joined another far-right rally in Berkeley’s Civic Center Park. The rally had been organized to coincide with Ann Coulter’s visit to UC Berkeley, which she cancelled at the last minute. Nonetheless, a large crowd of Trump supporters, fascists, and reactionary goons of various stripes flocked to Berkeley that day to get their piece of the action. They found themselves unopposed. Anarchists and anti-fascists were still licking their wounds; they had collectively decided to avoid a confrontation that could lead to another painful defeat like the fiasco of April 15. Later that night, the windows of the Black-owned Alchemy Collective Café were shot out. The café is located just blocks from Civic Center Park and its windows had been displaying posters in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and indigenous struggles.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/11.jpg\")
A bullet hole in the window of the Alchemy Café on April 28, the day after another far-right rally in Berkeley.
\nSoon after, Eric Clanton was arrested by Berkeley Police in a house raid and charged with four counts of assault with a deadly weapon. During his interview at the police station, the detective expressed appreciation for 4chan’s /pol forum and informed Eric that “the internet did the work for us.” Eric’s case is pending and he faces years in prison.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/18.jpg\")
Solidarity demonstration with Charlottesville, August 12.
\nIn chess, a player is said to “gain a tempo” when a successful move leaves their units in a more advantageous position while forcing their opponent to take a defensive move that wastes time and derails their strategy. The growing far-right social movement had gained a tempo at the expense of anti-fascists during spring 2017. The February victory against Milo and the alt-right in the first days of the Trump presidency had played an important role in disrupting attempts to normalize a dangerous new form of far-right public activity. Each attempt that fascists made to materialize in public risked extreme conflict. But anti-fascists’ success had helped to spawn an ugly reaction, which anarchists and other militant anti-fascists were unable to handle on their own.
\n\nThere was nothing normalized or “respectable” about the armored and belligerent fascists who were determined to mobilize in Berkeley. Yet on a tactical level, they had proven they could leverage the necessary resources and foot soldiers to hold the streets in enemy territory. Anti-fascists had been forced into a downward spiral of responding to each new move without a strategy of their own. Paranoia, anxiety, and self-criticism characterized the local anarchist movement during late spring and early summer.
\n\nYet important changes were underway. April 15 had caught the attention of many Bay Area activists who had remained outside the fray thus far. They were not convinced by the “free speech” rhetoric that had confused so many liberals. Militant anti-fascists had no interest in giving the state additional repressive powers to criminalize or censor speech. That was never what this struggle was about. Confronting fascist activity in the streets to stop its normalization and proliferation is a form of community self-defense. Increasing numbers of anti-racists understood this. Bay Area movement organizations such as the prison abolitionist organization Critical Resistance, the Arab Resource Organizing Committee, white ally anti-racist groups such as the Catalyst Project and the local chapter of Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), and the Anti-Police Terror Project, who had played a leadership role in the local Black Lives Matter Movement, began to work with those who had been in the streets throughout the first half of the year to build a coordinated response.
\n\nMany of these groups had previously been at odds with anarchists. Some of the most bitter disputes revolved around issues of identity and representation within the various social movements of the preceding decade. Many anarchists rejected most forms of identity politics after seeing them used time and again by reformist leaders from marginalized groups to manage and pacify antagonistic movements. Liberal city officials, organizers of non-profits, and some social justice groups had regularly dismissed local anti-police and anti-capitalist rebellions in Oakland and elsewhere as the work of white anarchist “outside agitators” corrupting otherwise respectable movements led by people of color. This paternalistic and counter-insurrectionary narrative intentionally obscured the diversity of participants in these uprisings and erased their agency.
\n\nThings had begun to change in 2014 as anti-police rebellions spread across the country and the forces of racist reaction mobilized in response. Despite unresolved tensions, the anarchist movement played an important role in helping sustain struggles against white supremacy and other movements of oppressed people. Increasing numbers of activists and movement organizations supported the uprisings and understood the necessity of working together as part of a united anti-racist front. This convergence helped lay the groundwork for the unprecedented alliances that arose out of anti-fascist organizing.
\n\nThe urgency of building these coalitions was tragically underscored on May 26, when a white supremacist cut the throats of three people who had intervened to stop him from harassing a young Muslim woman and her friend on a commuter train in Portland, Oregon. Two of the men died. The attacker, Jeremy Christian, had attended Free Speech Rallies organized by the Portland-based alt-lite group Patriot Prayer. At his arraignment, Christian yelled “Get out if you don’t like free speech… Leave this country if you hate our freedom—death to Antifa!”
\n\nA few weeks later, on June 10, thousands of anti-racists and anti-fascists in Seattle, Austin, New York, and elsewhere successfully mobilized against a day of anti-Muslim rallies attended by various groupings of neo-Nazis, militia members, alt-lite activists, and alt-right activists. During the Houston rally, scuffles between patriot militia members and an alt-right activist attempting to display openly fascist placards exposed growing cracks within the far-right alliance that had been built up through the spring.
\n\nOn July 9, the growing anti-fascist network in the Bay Area held a packed forum in the Berkeley Senior Center, blocks from the site of the spring’s clashes. A range of speakers from the coalition helped educate the hundreds in attendance about the rising tide of white supremacist and fascist activity as well as the necessity of organizing for community self-defense. The crowd left the forum energized and eager to mobilize.
\n\nAnother round of alt-right rallies was on the horizon. Many hoped that this time the response would be different. Patriot Prayer was calling for a rally in San Francisco on August 26 and a “Rally Against Marxism” was planned for the familiar battleground of Berkeley’s Civic Center Park on the following day. As the end of summer approached, fascists across the country made it clear they aimed to double down on their offensive. When a reporter for the New York Times asked Nathan Damigo about IE’s goals for UC Berkeley during the new school year, he laughed and responded, “We’ve got some plans.”
\n\nBefore any of this could unfold, events on the other side of the country changed the course of history.
\n\nThe first step of this renewed fascistic offensive was a mobilization in Charlottesville, Virginia promoted throughout the summer as a rally to “Unite the Right.” Building on their successes in targeting liberal enclaves over the previous months, alt-right leaders including Richard Spencer and Nathan Damigo aimed to take their movement-building to the next level by forging an alliance with Southern white supremacists under the banner of their rebranded far-right activism. Charlottesville is a liberal college town that, along with other cities throughout the South, had been planning to remove monuments celebrating the Confederacy. Spencer had previously led a small torch-lit rally in Charlottesville on May 13 to protest the proposed removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. The August 12 rally was supposed to be the turning point that could transform the young movement into an unstoppable reactionary force under the cover of the Trump regime.
\n\nOn the evening of August 11, a surprise torch-lit demonstration on the University of Virginia campus attended by hundreds of white supremacists gave the impression that this turning point had arrived. Footage of fascists surrounding and attacking outnumbered anti-racist demonstrators at the foot of the statue of Thomas Jefferson on UVA campus spread around the country, provoking terror and urgency in equal measure.
\n\nYet the following day turned out to be a historic disaster for the fascists. Anarchists and anti-fascists managed to interrupt the fascist rally, ultimately forcing police to declare it an unlawful assembly. The white supremacists retreating from the streets of Charlottesville knew that they had lost: their rally had been cancelled and the media was turning on them. They had failed to create a situation in which the volatile white resentment they drew on could be gratified by a successful show of force. That is why James Alex Fields, a member of the fascist organization Vanguard America, plowed his car into a crowd of anti-fascists that afternoon, killing Heather Heyer and grievously injuring 19 others.
\n\nFascists had sought to attain the upper hand in the media narrative by presenting their opponents as enemies of free speech. But after “Unite the Right,” the alt-right was inextricably linked with images of armed Klansmen and Nazis carrying swastika flags. The connection between far-right activism and fascist murder had become too obvious for anyone to deny. Charlottesville immediately became a rallying cry for an emerging broad-based anti-fascist movement that mirrored the microcosm of cross-tendency networking unfolding that summer in the Bay Area.
\n\nThe heroes of this story are the anarchists and other militant anti-fascists who put their bodies on the line to throw the “Unite the Right” rally into chaos. Grotesque images from the streets of Charlottesville on August 12 showed armored fascist street fighters engaged in combat with outnumbered anti-fascists. These delivered a fatal blow to the alt-right’s stated goal of using the rally to legitimize the popular movement they hoped to build. Anti-fascists had forced the alt-right to show its true face; the results were catastrophic for the movement’s future. If the brutality of April 15 forced the Bay Area to reconsider far-right propaganda about “free speech,” August 12 in Charlottesville did the same thing for the whole country.
\n\nResistance movements in the Bay Area are always strongest when they are not alone. When rebellions in Oakland, Berkeley, or San Francisco are simply militant outliers or exceptions that prove the rule, they are ultimately isolated and neutralized. Comrades in the Bay are most effective when their actions are a reflection of what is happening elsewhere around the country. The events in Charlottesville kicked local anti-fascist coalition-building into high gear. Within hours of Heather’s murder, nearly a thousand anti-racists and anti-fascists gathered in downtown Oakland and marched to the 580 freeway, where they blocked all traffic and set off fireworks in a display of solidarity with comrades in Charlottesville. Many drivers waved and raised fists in support.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/6.jpg\")
Solidarity with Charlottesville demonstration shuts blocks the 580 freeway in Oakland on August 12.
\nOver a hundred solidarity demonstrations took place around the world over the following days. Many targeted Confederate monuments in the South. On August 14, demonstrators in Durham, North Carolina pulled down a statue of a Confederate soldier. Meanwhile, the Three Percenters Militia, which had deployed fully-armed platoons as part of the Unite the Right rally, issued a national stand-down order stating, “We will not align ourselves with any type of racist group.” Infighting between various far-right tendencies blaming each other for the disaster reached a fever pitch.
\n\nThe national discourse around militant anti-fascism that had begun in response to the events in DC on January 20 and Berkeley on February 2 shifted dramatically. After Charlottesville, anti-fascists were suddenly riding a tidal wave of support from the left and many liberals. Cornel West, who had attended the counterdemonstration with a contingent of clergy, pointedly stated on the August 14 episode of Democracy Now, “We would have been crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the anarchists and the anti-fascists.” Traditional conservative leaders such as Republican senators John McCain and Orin Hatch even lent tacit support to anti-fascists as they went on the offensive against Trump. Mitt Romney weighed in on August 15, tweeting, “One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.” By August 18, Steve Bannon, the most powerful and visible face of neo-fascism within the Trump regime, was forced out of the administration in an apparent act of damage control responding to the growing crisis. Anti-fascists were once again in control of the tempo.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/12.jpg\")
Black Bloc helps settle the score in Berkeley, August 27.
\nFar-right activists from the Bay Area who had attended the Unite the Right rally returned home to find they had lost their jobs. Fascist podcast personality Johnny Monoxide was fired from his union electrician job in San Francisco after posters appeared at his workplace outing him as a white supremacist and neo-Nazi sympathizer. Cole White, who had assaulted people in Berkeley alongside Kyle Chapman and others throughout the year, was fired from a Berkeley hot dog stand after being outed by the @YesYoureRacist twitter account for attending the torch march.
\n\nBy mid-August, a complex network of spokescouncils, coalition meetings, assemblies, and trainings were bringing together a diverse range of activist, left, and anarchist tendencies in the Bay on a nearly daily basis to prepare for the alt-right rallies of August 26 and 27. Honest conversations about how to allow for a diversity of tactics while respecting different risk levels and different vulnerabilities forged an unprecedented level of trust and solidarity. On August 19, in Boston, Massachusetts, over 40,000 counterdemonstrators confronted a few dozen alt-right activists and Trump supporters, including visiting alt-lite celebrity Kyle Chapman, who were attempting to host another “Free Speech Rally.” This was the largest demonstration against fascism and the alt-right in the US throughout 2017. It was another sign of the turning tides. In Laguna Beach, just down the coast from where 2000 Trump Supporters had marched with DIY Division in March, a small “America First” rally against immigration was vastly outnumbered by 2500 anti-fascists and anti-racists.
\n\nMorale was high among Bay Area anti-fascists and anti-racists as the weekend rallies approached. Local graffiti crews lent support, spreading a campaign of writing anti-Nazi and anti-Trump messages in cities around the region. Various local businesses announced that they would not serve alt-right rally attendees while opening their doors to offer spaces of refuge for anti-fascists. Calls to action emerged from almost every single Bay Area activist and movement organization. A common thread in many of these calls was a respect for different approaches to confronting fascism and a commitment to “not criminalize or denounce other protesters.”
\n\nSaturday’s alt-right demonstration was planned for San Francisco’s Crissy Field with the Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop. On the eve of the rally, Patriot Prayer organizer Joey Gibson announced the event was cancelled due to safety concerns. Instead, Patriot Prayer planned to hold a press conference across the city in Alamo Square Park.
\n\nDespite the apparent change of plans, over a thousand anti-racists and anti-fascists converged on Alamo Square the next day. Among them were members of the ILWU and the IBEW, Johnny Monoxide’s union. This labor contingent had mobilized to support the counterdemonstration and to make it clear that fascists would not be tolerated in their ranks.
\n\nThey found the park completely fenced off and occupied by hundreds of riot police, but no sign of Patriot Prayer or other far-right activists. Gibson and others including Kyle Chapman had retreated to an apartment down the coast in the city of Pacifica, from which they issued a statement over Facebook blaming city leaders and antifa for their own failure to hold a rally. It was becoming clear that their movement was imploding and the real obstacle to their rally was the potential of an embarrassingly low turnout. A colorful and celebratory victory march took the streets of San Francisco, making its way towards the Mission district. Throughout the rest of the day, anywhere far-right activists were sighted, counterdemonstrators swarmed the location and chased them off. Late in the day, Gibson and a handful of others made a surprise photo-op appearance in Crissy Field. A large crowd of counterdemonstrators chased them to their cars and they fled.
\n\nThe “No to Marxism in America” rally planned for Berkeley on Sunday at 1 pm was also cancelled by organizer Amber Cummings. Nevertheless, the anti-racist and anti-fascist mobilization showed no signs of slowing down and Berkeley police were preparing for the worst. Berkeley City Council had passed a series of emergency ordinances giving the police special powers to set up multiple security perimeters around Civic Center Park and to ban items ranging from picket signs to masks. Over 400 police officers stood ready in and around the park on that sunny morning.
\n\nTwo major rallies against the alt-right and against white supremacy were planned for the day in Berkeley. The first was organized by a coalition including local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), campus student groups, and a range of unions. It began across downtown on the edge of the UC Berkeley campus at 10:30. By 11, thousands were in attendance.
\n\nOther smaller groups went straight to Civic Center Park, where numbers had been growing since early in the day. As noon approached, nearly a thousand anti-racists and anti-fascists milled about between concrete barriers and various layers of fencing as hundreds of riot police monitored the scene under an increasingly hot sun. Screaming and shoving erupted multiple times as scattered Trump supporters and alt-right adherents attempted to enter the park. Some punches were thrown; this time, in contrast to March 4 and April 15, squads of riot police responded immediately to break up the fights and make arrests. The few anti-fascists who arrived with their faces concealed were tackled by police and arrested for violating the emergency ordinances.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/15.jpg\")
Riot police face off against thousands of anti-fascists in Civic Center Park on August 27.
\nA few blocks away, in Ohlone Park, the second rally, organized by the local chapter of SURJ along with other anti-racist groups, was just beginning. Thousands were preparing to march. The call to action for this mobilization explicitly asserted the necessity of confronting fascists with a diversity of tactics and asked all attendees to respect those utilizing more confrontational forms of resistance. As a sound truck began leading the crowd towards Civic Center Park, a black bloc of nearly 100, many wearing helmets and protective gear, emerged from a side street ahead lighting off flares and chanting “¡Todos Somos Antifascistas!” The bloc parted for the sound truck and joined the front of the march to the cheers of the crowd. There were now nearly 10,000 anti-fascists of all stripes on the streets of Berkeley.
\n\nThe black bloc doubled in size as it marched. Riot police standing guard around the Berkeley Police station on the corner of Civic Center Park looked on in dismay as the bloc led the crowd right up to the edge of the outer security perimeter. Tensions quickly escalated as riot police formed a skirmish line along the perimeter facing off against the bloc. One cop attempted to grab a masked comrade’s shield; others forced him back. Another cop fired a rubber bullet into the bloc as masked comrades with shields moved to the front line. A speaker on the sound truck announced that those wanting to help form a defensive line could move forward with the black bloc and all others could step back across the street to the steps of the old City Hall to hold space. Dozens of large shields were distributed from others in the crowd to those on the “defensive line.” Riot police began strapping on gas masks and aiming their various projectile weapons at the crowd. A major clash between two well-prepared sides was about to break out.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/16.jpg\")
Anarchists hold the defensive line with shields on August 27.
\nSuddenly, the cops pulled back. All riot police in Civic Center Park had been ordered to withdraw to side streets in order to avoid instigating a riot. The crowd surged forward over the concrete barriers with the black bloc at the front chanting “Black Lives Matter!” Thousands flooded into the park, openly disobeying the emergency ordinances. Many chanted “Whose Park? Our Park!”
\n\nWhen Joey Gibson and his crew of patriots arrived minutes later, the crowd cheered on militant anti-fascists as they chased the pathetic showing of alt-lite reactionaries down a side street, where police fired smoke grenades to end the confrontation. Back in the park, the mood was jubilant and calm. Many applauded the black bloc and thanked them for keeping the crowd safe from neo-Nazis and white supremacists, who had been spotted leaving the area after seeing the size of the anti-fascist crowd.
\n\nA second march from the morning rally arrived in the park and members of the DSA, carrying red flags, gave high fives to members of the black bloc carrying black flags. Clergy members made speeches and sang from the sound truck as people dismantled more of the police barriers. After an hour and a half of holding the park, the decision was made to leave together. The clashes had been minimal, the police had been forced to back down, and no one had sustained serious injuries: this was undeniably a massive victory.
\n\nA diverse yet united front of 10,000 anti-fascists had finally settled the score in Berkeley. As the black bloc joined the march out of Civic Center Park, they chanted “This is for Charlottesville!”
\n\nThe top story of next morning’s San Francisco Chronicle began,
\n\n\n\n\n“An army of anarchists in black clothing and masks routed a small group of right-wing demonstrators who had gathered in a Berkeley park Sunday to rail against the city’s famed progressive politics, driving them out—sometimes violently—while overwhelming a huge contingent of police officers.”
\n
What this description left out was the coordination and solidarity with thousands of other demonstrators that had allowed this “army of anarchists” to take back Civic Center Park without any significant clashes. That was the important story of the day. But the narrative emerging from the anti-fascist victory in Berkeley looked very different to those who were not there. Corporate media described anarchists and militant anti-fascists as hijacking an otherwise peaceful movement. These media outlets focused on a few scuffles that broke out with Gibson’s crew and some other reactionaries, including a father-son duo, wearing a Trump shirt and Pinochet shirt respectively, who had entered the park and pepper sprayed the crowd at random.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/17.jpg\")
A father-son duo, wearing a Trump shirt and a Pinochet shirt, are pushed out of the park after pepper spraying the crowd on August 27.
\nAugust 27 was a relatively relaxed and celebratory day in the streets of Berkeley. Yet from the outside, national media outlets that had ignored the much uglier violence of April 15 painted it as a disturbing street battle between extremist gangs. The short-lived window of mainstream support for militant anti-fascism that had opened after the tragedy in Charlottesville was now closing. As long as anti-fascists were understood only as victims of white supremacist violence, liberals could support them. Yet as soon as those wearing black gained the upper hand, they were described as a threat to the status quo—potentially as dangerous as the Nazis themselves.
\n\n“The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted,” read a quickly-issued statement from Democrat house minority leader Nancy Pelosi. “I think we should classify them as a gang,” said Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin. “They come dressed in uniforms. They have weapons, almost like a militia and I think we need to think about that in terms of our law enforcement approach.”
\n\nHowever, the diverse coalition that had been forged over the summer stood its ground. “We have no regrets for how they left our city. We do not want white supremacists in our city,” said Pastor Michael McBride in a press conference on the steps of the old City Hall the following day. “We don’t apologize for any of it,” said Tur-Ha Ak of the Anti-Police Terror Project. “We have a right and an obligation to self-defense, period.” A declaration of victory published by the Catalyst Project stated that it was “hard to convey how meaningful it was, after Charlottesville, for a very disciplined group of antifa activists to offer protection to the crowd from both police and white supremacists.”
\n\nWithin activist, left, and anarchist circles in the Bay Area, there was no infighting after August 27. The unprecedented levels of trust and coordination that had developed between various groups held firm. Compared with the intense sectarian conflict that followed the spectacular demonstrations of the Occupy movement and the various waves of anti-police rebellions in the Bay, the revolutionary solidarity of 2017 was unheard of. This was the real victory of the Battles of Berkeley.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/7.jpg\")
Milo exits the stage escorted by his $800,000 police security detail on September 25.
\nThe emergent fascist social movement that had grown throughout the first half of 2017 was now in ruins. Anti-fascist victories in Charlottesville, Boston, and Berkeley had shattered reactionary dreams of a far-right popular movement coalescing in Trump’s first year. The various tendencies that had converged under the banner of the alt-right were running for cover and turning on each other.
\n\nIn a desperate attempt to give a new lift to his falling star, Milo had been hyping his triumphant return to Berkeley for a so-called “Free Speech Week” from September 25-28 in collaboration with an offshoot of the College Republicans calling itself the Berkeley Patriot. Together, they promised days of provocative events on and around campus featuring far-right speakers including Ann Coulter, Blackwater founder Eric Prince, and even Steve Bannon. The anti-fascist coalition in the Bay braced for another wave of reactionary posturing and violence. On the eve of Free Speech Week, hundreds took to the streets of Berkeley as part of the No Hate in the Bay march. As the march ended without serious incident in a rally at Sproul Plaza, Chelsea Manning made a surprise speech in a show of support for anti-fascists.
\n\nOver the preceding days, signs of infighting among the organizers of Free Speech Week had become increasingly apparent as venues changed, plans were cancelled without explanation, and the media received contradictory messages from Milo’s PR team, student Republican leaders, and campus administrators. In the end, Free Speech Week fizzled completely, reinforcing the increasing irrelevance of Milo and the alt-lite. On Sunday, September 25, about 60 far-right activists and Milo fans stood in an empty Sproul Plaza listening to Milo talk for 20 minutes while waiting in line to get his autograph. They were surrounded by a massive militarized police presence that cost the university $800,000.
\n\nBAMN and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) turned out about 100 counter demonstrators who made some noise outside the police perimeter. But most anti-fascists stayed away. Milo had already been beaten back in February and the fascist reaction to that victory had now also been overcome.
\n\nWithin less than hour, it was all over and Milo fled the city once again. Small groups of alt-right activists who had flown in for Free Speech Week tried their best to build momentum throughout the rest of the week. One group stood outside the RCP’s Berkeley bookstore and banged on its windows. Another rallied outside the Black Student Union on campus. Joey Gibson and Patriot Prayer even held a small demonstration in People’s Park. Students organized a rally that Monday to protest the fascists’ presence on their campus; militant anti-fascists were on edge all week as they monitored each of these events. Yet none of this activity enabled the insurgent far right to reach critical mass again. Evaluated as publicity stunts, recruitment tools, and tactical advances, all the events surrounding Free Speech Week were pathetic failures. They were barely noticed and did nothing to change the balance of forces.
\n\nOn October 12, alt-right and white supremacist sympathizers within the Berkeley College Republicans were deposed in an internal coup that gave more traditional conservatives more control of the student organization. Bitter infighting within the group continued throughout the rest of the semester, reflecting similar splits on the state level within College Republicans. Identity Evropa also faced unstable leadership following the collapse of the strategy of targeting liberal university enclaves, which they had pioneered on Berkeley campus in May 2016. Nathan Damigo resigned as IE’s leader on August 27 following his disastrous participation in the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. He was replaced by Elliott Kline, who was then replaced at the end of November by Patrick Casey. In an interview in which he announced his plans to move away from the damaged brand of the alt-right and to stop attempting to hold any kind of large public demonstrations, Casey stated, “We can’t go into these liberal areas and essentially repeat what happened with Unite the Right.” Reflecting on his movement’s shortcomings, the Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin admitted that “large rallies on public property, where we know there is going to be confrontation with antifa, are not a good idea.”
\n\nMeanwhile, in southern California, on October 21, former member of Kyle Chapman’s Fraternal Order of Alt Knights and fellow alt-lite leader Johnny Benitez accused Chapman of not being racist enough and personally profiting off of his “activism,” leading to a fist fight between the two men at the California Republican Party’s 2017 convention in the Anaheim Marriott. The next day, Chapman led a squad of Proud Boys to disrupt a Laguna Beach Benghazi rally organized by Benitez. Both men accused each other of being Federal informants and infiltrators. Fully 150 riot police were deployed to keep the quarreling factions apart. Later that week, Chapman found himself in yet another messy public split with Florida fascist August Invictus who had previously been FOAK’s second in command. The alt-right meltdown was in full swing.
\n\nThe core leadership of the fascistic far right continued desperately attempting to regain all they had lost. Patriot Prayer returned to Berkeley yet again for another tiny and insignificant rally in People’s Park in November. In December, Kyle Chapman promoted a march through San Francisco aimed at using the acquittal of the man charged with Kate Steinle’s death to protest the city’s “sanctuary city” status. Other far-right activists in Portland, Oregon, Austin, Texas, and elsewhere across the country attempted to use this same issue to mobilize the crowds that had stood beside them earlier in the year. Yet by December, their numbers were minuscule; in most cases, they found themselves overwhelmed by anti-fascist counterdemonstrations.
\n\nNowhere was this clearer than in DC on December 3, when Richard Spencer, Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Worker’s Party, former IE leader Elliott Kline, and other fascist leaders attempted to hold a rally. They were forced to cancel their march when less than 20 people showed up. They had failed to reignite the momentum that neo-Nazis and white supremacists rode on in 2016 and early 2017. By the end of the year, their movement was in total decomposition.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/8.jpg\")
The August 27 black bloc marches in front of a sign printed and distributed by the city of Berkeley.
\nThe alt-right has been defeated. The convergence of fascist and white supremacist tendencies under this rebranded far-right umbrella has been successfully disrupted, cutting off the core leadership from the base of Trump supporters from which they sought to draw power. Militant anti-fascists who took action in Berkeley, Charlottesville, and dozens of other cities across the country should be proud of the role they played in achieving this victory.
\n\nIt is important to emphasize that this was not accomplished through a militaristic application of force. During the darkest days of the spring, when the alt-right mobilizations in Berkeley were at their strongest, it was not certain that even the largest of contemporary black blocs could have defeated the array of fascistic forces prepared to do battle. What tipped the scales, ultimately leading to the Nazis’ downfall, was the strength of solidarity between various anarchist, left, and activist groups committed to combatting white supremacy, patriarchy, and fascism with a wide range of tactics. As anti-fascist networks expanded and grew increasingly resilient, the ideologically heterogeneous networks of the far right imploded. The alt-lite turned on the alt-right, the civic nationalists turned on the ethno-nationalists, the patriot militias turned on the neo-Nazis, and the average Trump supporter who had dabbled in this growing movement was left confused and demoralized.
\n\nYet the struggle against fascist and reactionary forces in the United States during the Trump era is just beginning.
\n\nThere is no going back to a time before the stabbings, doxxing, Pinochet shirts, Pepe memes, torch-lit marches, and murder. Movements struggling for collective liberation must remain hardened and ready to face down whatever future fascist mutations rear their ugly heads from the cesspool of the far right. This is especially true for the anarchist movement in the United States, as anarchists have stuck our necks out further than almost anyone else to combat the rise of the alt-right. We cannot lower our guard; comrades will have to continue prioritizing individual and community self-defense for the foreseeable future. Many of these radicalized fascists will seek to exploit future crises to jumpstart their movement-building in new and unexpected ways. Other far-right activists will likely attempt to gain positions of power within law enforcement and other security agencies. Lone wolf attacks and other manifestations of far-right violence will almost certainly continue.
\n\nSo we must remain on high alert. But if the threat of an imminent far-right popular movement with a fascist vanguard continues to recede, the politics of militant anti-fascism can evolve. This is what happens when we win.
\n\nAnarchist projects and initiatives can once again set their sights on the foundations of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Some comrades can work to develop a revolutionary anti-fascist tendency that builds on the momentum of recent years. Others can take what they have learned from this sequence and refocus on advancing the struggles they have always been a part of.
\n\nEither way, anarchists and other militant anti-fascists are starting 2018 in a much more advantageous position than we held a year ago. The diverse networks of affinity and solidarity that turned the tide in 2017 will remain vital to the safety and resilience of everyone engaged in these dangerous activities.
\n\nAt the same time, it must not be forgotten that fascists took advantage of the contradictions inherent in liberalism and the elitism of liberal enclaves to gain strength in 2016 and 2017. We must not water down anti-fascism via “popular front” politics until it becomes nothing more than a defense of liberal capitalism. We have to defend ourselves against co-optation as well as fascist agitation. The victories of 2017 have afforded us a brief opening to catch our breath and reaffirm the profoundly radical nature of our struggle for collective liberation. Imaginative revolutionaries must now lead new offensives on their own terms that bring us all closer to the world we wish to build.
\n\nSome Bay Area Antagonists\nJanuary 2018
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/10.jpg\")
Taking the Park on August 27.
\n![Fest](\"https://i0.wp.com/seancarnage.com/wp-content/uploads/1998/06/more-than-music-fest-1998_line-up.jpg\"){kind=link}