![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/06/3.jpg\")
In the long run, Democrats may find that they are bringing a ballot to a gunfight. This photograph was taken at the pro-Trump rally in Washington, DC at the end of 2020, immediately preceding the gathering on January 6, 2021.
\nWhat if we knew that we would face the same situation that occurred on January 6 again, but with Trump and his supporters better prepared for it? How would we prepare?
\n\nThe year 2021 opened with the farcical culmination of the reactionary momentum that had been building throughout the second half of 2020: a bungled coup attempt intended to keep Donald Trump in office by brute force—or at least to normalize such stunts for the future. As with Trump’s election, we had noted the signs that this was on the way, but it still took us by surprise when it occurred. It was hard to believe Trump would burn all his political capital on such a long-shot attempt to stay in power.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1476530923827085319\n\n\n
In retrospect, once Trump was no longer going to get to remain president, he had no incentive not to try to carry out a coup, as far-fetched as his scheme was without a critical mass of government officials on board. In the year since, he has regained much of the ground it seemed that he had permanently lost, consolidating the majority of the Republican party around an agreement that what happened on January 6 was no big deal.
\n\nThe Democrats have fallen into the same error that Trump has lured them into time and again: they have been trying to investigate him. A year of small revelations about January 6, dribbling out one at a time, has served to kill the story by overexposure. Over the past four years, Trump has survived countless such revelations about his conduct. There’s no delegitimizing him with his base—the worse he is, the better, as far as they are concerned.
\n\nWe had already identified this phenomenon in 2018:
\n\n\n\n\nThere’s no need for new revelations about Trump’s overt racism, perpetration of sexual assault, or illicit dealings with other authoritarians. All of these are already flagrantly obvious. The focus on investigating him serves above all to re-legitimize the same FBI and justice system that are already being used against anyone who honestly sets out to interrupt the harm that both Trump and his centrist rivals are perpetuating through the institutions of the state.
\n
As we pointed out in 2019, all the investigating in the world will be worse than useless if the balance of power within the state remains such that it is impossible to impose consequences on Trump:
\n\n\n\n\nRank-and-file Democrats still don’t understand how power works. Crime is not the violation of the rules, but the stigma attached to those who break rules without the power to make them. (As they say, steal $25, go to jail; steal $25 million, go to Congress.) At the height of Genghis Khan’s reign, it would have been pointless to accuse the famous tyrant of breaking the laws of the Mongol Empire; as long as Trump has enough of Washington behind him, the same goes for him. Laws don’t exist in some transcendent realm. They are simply the product of power struggles among the elite—not to mention the passivity of the governed—and they are enforced according to the prevailing balance of power. To fetishize the law is to accept that might makes right.
\n
Lacking the political will to take action, the Democrats and their mouthpieces in the corporate media have settled for trying their case in the court of public opinion. Again, this is a profound failure to understand the situation. By their own account, their adversaries are rallying adherents to an explicitly anti-democratic program—and the Democrats’ only response is to attempt to use this talking point to gain an advantage in the next election.
\n\n In the long run, Democrats may find that they are bringing a ballot to a gunfight. This photograph was taken at the pro-Trump rally in Washington, DC at the end of 2020, immediately preceding the gathering on January 6, 2021.
\nLet’s be very clear about this: if you believe that the Republicans are plotting to take power via undemocratic means, then limiting yourself to trying to outvote them is explicitly self-defeating. If the things that liberals are saying about January 6 are true—and there is reason to believe that they are—then it stands to reason that everyone who is concerned about this should be learning about direct action and anti-fascist means of community defense.
\n\nInstead, in a variety of ways, centrists have used the events of January 6 to direct people away from precisely the measures they should be taking, to delegitimize those measures and discredit the people with whom they might take them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/06/4.jpg\")
We can’t make this stuff up.
\nThe events of January 6 and the ensuing backlash and repression set the template for 2021, a dramatic lull following one of the largest waves of protest in United States history. Democrats took advantage of the opportunity to restore the battered prestige of law enforcement, depicting police officers as beleaguered guardians of democracy, and valorized snitching and surveillance as tactics via which ordinary citizens could join them in defending democracy. At the same time, they took steps to discredit direct action by associating it with pro-Trump “lawlessness.”
\n\nWhen police murdered George Floyd, public trust and respect for law enforcement plummeted to unprecedented depths. Demands to defund or even abolish the police migrated from the extreme political margins to become serious proposals that were widely debated in the mainstream. Fox News and its imitators continued their racially charged crime alarmism, but with diminishing returns; efforts by police unions, PR firms, and liberal corporate media outlets to feature stories of cops doing good made little headway against the widespread suspicion that had taken hold from the left all the way to the center.
\n\nIn this environment, the failed coup of January 6 was a godsend to the state. Police could pose as both victims and heroes again, the National Guard as saviors and bulwarks against chaos; even the Federal Bureau of Investigation was doing its part to protect democracy from right-wing thugs. Liberals and mainstream media outlets seized upon these interpretations and ran with them, with extraordinary success. The conviction of Derek Chauvin sidestepped one of the only circumstances that would have immediately catalyzed a new round of rioting while bringing courts and prosecutors into the circle of institutions that grateful liberals praised for holding the line. Pretty soon, ex-cop Eric Adams was on track to be the next mayor of New York City—and the new face of an aggressively amnesiac Democratic Party.
\n\nAll the while, police continued to murder people, again and again and again—protected not only by qualified immunity, but also by the discrediting of militant protest and the restoration of officers to the roles of martyrs and heroes.
\n\nAt the same time, government officials were carrying out a massive campaign—complete with billboards and bus stop advertisements—to crowdsource information with which to identify participants in the storming of the Capitol building, drawing the enthusiastic participation of thousands. This establishes a new precedent for sharing out the work of policing across the entire online population. Because the campaign is directed against right-wing extremists, it draws buy-in from the center and the left—considerably more so than the same approach did when it was directed against Muslims and other “suspicious” persons in the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
\n\nThose with long memories will recognize that these volunteer online forensics squads are descended from earlier groups that set out to identify members of the black bloc at various G20 summits, often in response to groundless conspiracy theories to the effect that the anarchists were actually police infiltrators seeking to discredit “legitimate” (read: legalistic) movements. The more normalized this kind of crowdsourcing becomes, the more we will see it used against us the next time we participate in protest activity that stands a chance to change the world.
\n\nCorporate media outlets, including those with a liberal slant, also expanded the range of intrusive technologies that they were willing to utilize in their coverage of January 6, mainstreaming the merging of doxxing and reporting that increasingly characterizes journalism today.
\n\nAll this occurred alongside the continued authorization of both state and right-wing vigilante violence against social movements, exemplified by Florida’s draconian anti-protest laws and Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal and subsequent elevation to Republican stardom. The embrace of Rittenhouse indicates that even if insurrections and coups are still too much for some Republicans to stomach, there is widespread support for lethal violence against any social movement that is perceived as a threat to law and order.
\n\nAcross party lines, the political class has sought to re-establish their monopoly over politics while suppressing grassroots mobilization and protest. For all their aggressive performance of partisan division, Republicans and Democrats are both relieved to see the locus of politics shift back from the streets to the well-defended halls of power. So long as the current state of affairs prevails, both parties benefit from the repression of protest across the board—be it protest from armed militias, anti-vaxxers, and Trump loyalists or Black Lives Matter advocates, water protectors, anti-fascists, and anarchists.
\n\nShould this state of affairs come to an end, the Republicans now have a plan B. The centrist Democrats, not so much.
\n\nAnd what about us? How should we navigate this situation, which is much less conducive to grassroots organizing than 2020 was? And how can we prepare for a possible future in which the locus of power shifts back to street action, but on the terms of the likes of Trump and his supporters?
\n\nThe centrists are currently ascendant, while the wings of the extreme right that are most connected to the storming of the Capitol—the Proud Boys and their compatriots—remain under intense scrutiny and in disarray, more or less discredited. However, they may not be the ones who will pose the chief risk to us in the next round.
\n\nThe evolution of right-wing politics in Greece over the past decade offers an instructive example for our situation in the US. Despite our anxieties a few years ago, the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party ultimately failed to gain electoral ground in Greece. The other political parties all united against them, portraying them as the illegitimate ones—the supposed opposite numbers of the uncontrollable anarchists. This enabled the old-fashioned conservative New Democracy party to snap up many Golden Dawn voters and win the next election running on a platform borrowed in part from Golden Dawn. New Democracy went on to implement many of Golden Dawn’s policy proposals—with grievous consequences for anarchists, immigrants, and others—without provoking any of the pushback that Golden Dawn would have received from the European Union and various elements of Greek “civil society” if it had won.
\n\nSimilarly, though the Proud Boys are in disarray, perhaps the chief risk is that their fascistic program will filter out into the Republican Party at large. If the reversals of January 6 enable the Republicans to weed out their lunatic fringe while radicalizing to the right as a whole—the same process via which the Nazi skinheads of the 1980s gave way to Richard Spencer—we could find ourselves in a dangerous situation indeed.
\n\nBiden’s grandfatherly normalcy has calmed the center and the left, elements of which took advantage of social movement exhaustion to rationalize going back to brunch. Anti-Biden outrage on the right, while extensive, has not reached anything like the vehemence directed against Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Yet the Biden administration’s unsurprising lack of success delivering on its promises has demoralized the center, paving the way for a Republican resurgence. Combined with the downturn in radical social movement activity, the situation appears similar to the second year of Obama’s presidency, when the lack of a substantive radical opposition was one of the factors contributing to the rise of the Tea Party and an emboldened grassroots right wing.
\n\nThis year will see the first election since Trump introduced the “stolen election” narrative into United States politics along with the revanchist program it implies. There will be considerable attention focused on voting procedures and further experiments to see if the “big lie” model can be used to undermine Democratic victories. At the same time, we can anticipate much lower voter turnouts and a great deal of indifference, without the fear of Trump or radical street action to goad either of the rival bases.
\n\nIn this context, there are many questions we should ask ourselves about what the next generation of street protests ought to look like. For the purposes of this reflection, though, we’ll end with a single one.
\n\nWhat if we knew that we would face the same situation that occurred on January 6 again, but with Trump and his supporters better prepared for it? How would we prepare?
\n\nLet’s go back to the afternoon of January 6, 2021. Anarchists were completely exhausted by the beginning of that January; a few tried to mobilize against the Trump rally scheduled in Washington, DC, but ultimately nothing came together. Liberals were arguing strenuously that it was better not to counter-protest the Trump rally, describing it as a trap. Consequently, thousands of Trump supporters showed up in DC, while the streets were virtually empty of anyone else.
\n\nUnless Trump was trying to reverse-psychologize us, this appears to have been exactly what he wanted:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/07/2.jpg\")
\nIn the end, things worked out well enough for anarchists and anti-fascists. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake, as the saying goes. Trump and his supporters overplayed their hand and suddenly found the rest of the political spectrum completely united against them.
\n\nBut what if Trump had been in a stronger position? What if he had been able to pull off a coup?
\n\nSome liberals have argued that it was essential that anti-fascists and anarchists and other participants in the Movement for Black Lives were not there on January 6, or else the National Guard would have focused on us and would never have gotten to the Capitol. According to the liberals, Trump was counting on us to be there, and it was our absence that sabotaged his plans.
\n\nIt’s possible that the liberals are correct here. We can’t rule it out—though it’s worth noting that liberals tend to glorify inaction just as aggressively as anarchists celebrate action, and usually having given less thought to the matter. In any case, counting on the state to hold the threat of fascism at bay leaves us in an extremely vulnerable position. It’s not unthinkable that at some point, a far-right coup will succeed, at least in some parts of the country, and we—not just anti-fascists, but all people of good conscience—will find that our concerted action is the only thing that stands between us and the establishment of an even more authoritarian society. That is precisely what happened in Spain in 1936.
\n\nThis is not just a hypothetical question about the past or the future. It’s chiefly a question about how we should be organizing today, what we should be preparing to be able to do.
\n\nThe embarrassing defeat of Trump’s supporters on January 6, despite all their tactical gear and ferocity, is a strong argument against a merely militaristic answer to this question.1 In the future, we’ll explore alternatives to the kind of ineffectual show of force that Trump and his supporters engaged in that day.
\n\nFor now, we leave you to confront this question, yourself—for it is the question facing all of us.
\n\nOn some level, the participants in the storming of the Capitol seem to have believed that they were doing what they thought “antifa” had been permitted to do, only more efficiently and effectively. To quote another analysis, “Years of obsessing about a cartoon caricature of ‘antifa’ led Trump’s most hardcore supporters to act out precisely the fantasy they were most afraid of others enacting. We should take care not to trade places with them.” ↩
\nPoliticians have come together across the aisle to decry the storming of the Capitol on January 6 as “lawless,” “anti-democratic,” and “extremist,” going so far as to misrepresent the result as “anarchy.” But the problem with the invasion of the Capitol was not that it was unlawful, undemocratic, or extremist, per se, but that it was an effort to concentrate oppressive power in the hands of an autocrat—which is precisely the opposite of anarchy. Direct action, militant tactics, and a critique of electoral politics will remain essential to movements against fascism and state violence. We must not let the far right associate them with tyranny, nor permit centrists to muddy the waters.
\n\nThe way politicians and corporate media tell it, there was nearly an anarchist revolution in the United States on January 6 when Trump supporters invaded the Capitol.
\n\nDemocratic Representative Elaine Luria labeled the protestors “the President’s anarchists,” condemning “those members of Congress who have supported this anarchy.” Republican Senator and Trump loyalist Tom Cotton echoed, “Violence and anarchy are unacceptable,” while Marco Rubio couldn’t resist injecting a racist and nationalist note: “This is 3rd world style anti-American anarchy.” For sheer Orwellian doublespeak, nothing could beat the Fox News headline: “Attack on Capitol by un-American anarchists is a terrorist act and disservice to Trump.”
\n\nCompounding the confusion, Trump loyalists from Rush Limbaugh’s radio show to Rep. Matt Gaetz in Congress are claiming that “Antifa” infiltrators were somehow responsible for the lethal riot—even as QAnon enthusiasts and Proud Boys are being identified and arrested or fired for their roles in the mêlée.
\n\nElsewhere around the world, headlines trumpeted the “anarchy” that had broken out at the Capitol, with British tabloids decrying “Anarchy in the USA.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/12/4.jpg\")
Strategic disinformation.
\nFor actual anarchists who opposed Trump and his agenda from day one at severe cost, it is a particularly cruel irony. At the dying gasp of his administration, when the final act of his ignominious reign finally unites the entire political spectrum against him, his last die-hard militant supporters are slapped with the label of those who struggled the most courageously against everything he stands for.
\n\nMark our words—in the long term, the repressive measures provoked by our bitterest enemies storming the Capitol will be directed at us. Biden has announced that he will prioritize passing a domestic anti-terror law and create a federal post “overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists.” Since September 11, 2001, the top “domestic terror” priorities have been suppressing earth and animal liberation activism as well as anarchist and anti-fascist movements; we can anticipate a new wave of crackdowns on our own struggles under the guise of cracking down on the extreme right.
\n\nBut this effort to rebrand unruly Trumpism as anarchy could have even more sinister consequences.
\n\nThe Movement for Black Lives that emerged onto the national stage in Ferguson in 2014 and exploded this year with the George Floyd uprising represented a tremendous step forward for social movements. As we argued last summer, these protests reflected anarchist ideas in action in that they embodied decentralization, mutual aid, resistance to white supremacy, and other core values. For a brief period, anarchist approaches to social change gained widespread traction, with police and politicians of all stripes in retreat.
\n\nFierce backlash against these movements consequently focused on demonizing anarchists and anti-fascists, while manufactured panic over the election diverted momentum from struggles based in direct action towards voting for the lesser evil. Now, outrage over the storming of the Capitol could equip centrist politicians to portray key anarchist approaches to social change as beyond the pale, confining movements to ineffective reformism for many years to come.
\n\nAs the world pushes back against Trump and his crumbling authoritarian spectacle, the extreme right appears to be on the defensive, and we may dare to hope that the coming years could offer popular movements for freedom a chance to regain the initiative. It remains to be seen whether the events of January 6 provoke a backlash that incapacitates the MAGAverse or lay the groundwork for a mass base for fascism to emerge—or both. But our ability to respond, both offensively and defensively, depends on whether we can reclaim core anarchist ideas and practices and apply them on the new terrain that is emerging in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol.
\n\nToday, it’s more important than ever for anarchists to speak up—actual anarchists, who fight for a world without hierarchy or domination, not the clowns LARPing in the Capitol with Confederate flags and “Fuck Antifa” patches. We have to defend and extend our approaches to social change, showing what distinguishes them from both the fascists who attempted to carry out a coup and the politicians they sought to bully. We have to make it clear that direct action is not the province of the extreme right—that Trump and his minions don’t have a monopoly on critiques of electoral democracy—that militant protest still belongs at the center of our movements for liberation.
\n\nWhat does it take to change the world? Anarchists have long insisted that the best way to get things done is to take matters into our own hands rather than waiting for politicians to pass laws or police to grant permission. We call this direct action. We endorse direct action not only because it’s effective, but because it’s a means of self-determination, a way to realize our own desires rather than those of leaders or representatives. In this model, everyone takes responsibility for pursuing their own goals while seeking to coexist and collaborate as equals and respecting each other’s autonomy.
\n\nBut as we saw at the Capitol on January 6, defying the law and acting directly against politicians can serve other ends, as well. Expanding the range of permissible tactics to concentrate power in the hands of authorities at the top of the hierarchy has been a defining feature of fascist politics from Mussolini’s blackshirts to the Nazi Kristallnacht. Even when it involves breaking the law, carrying out marching orders from your Beloved Leader the way the MAGA drones did at the Capitol is not anarchist direct action. The whole point of anarchist direct action is to keep power horizontal.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/comradesanchez/status/1347646661443596294\n\n\n
In the narrative emerging from Washington, the heroes of January 6 are the politicians and on-duty police—the same people who exploit and brutalize us on a daily basis, whose job is to prevent us from engaging in real self-determination. The villains in this narrative are the ones who defied the law, fought the police, and drove the politicians from their comfortable seats—not because they were attempting to keep Trump in the office that democracy elevated him to in the first place, but because this time, they were doing so in defiance of democracy and law and order. According to this logic, had Trump won the election by receiving a few thousand more votes, any degree of tyranny he might have introduced would have been absolutely legitimate, so long as he did so via legal means.
\n\nShould this version of the story gain traction, the reaction to the coup attempt will become a profound defeat for all who seek liberation—for it is precisely this separation of the ends of political action from their means that characterizes both the politicians and Trump’s insurgent hordes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/12/5.jpg\")
The same police who brutalized people all summer to suppress the Movement for Black Lives emerged from January 6 as heroes, at least in the narrative spread by centrist politicians.
\nTo the politicians, no action is legitimate unless it goes through their channels, follows their procedures, and affirms their power over us. Freedom and democracy, they claim, only function if the rest of us content ourselves with casting a vote every four years and then returning to our roles as spectators. What’s important is not the outcome—whether we have access to health care, are able to survive COVID-19, or can protect ourselves against racist police, to name a few examples—but that we remain complacent and leave everything to our representatives, come what may.
\n\nFor Trump supporters, the ends are also separated from the means, but in the opposite way. Their goal is to preserve authoritarian power by any means necessary, and to subjugate and punish all who oppose them. In defense of that “sacred” end—Trump’s tweet on January 6 shamelessly channeled Mussolini here—they hold that people are justified taking power into their own hands, regardless of what on-duty police or politicians say.
\n\nOnly anarchists insist both on freedom for all and the unity of ends and means. Freedom is meaningless unless it is for everyone, without exception; and the only way to get to freedom is through freedom. Whatever progressive reforms Biden claims he will enact, we are supposed to submit and obey as we await them—to delegate our power away. Such “freedom” can only be a hollow shell, vulnerable to the next shift in the seats of power. But the insurrectionary means of the Capitol rioters, though clothed in the rhetoric of freedom, can only further disempower us when its goal is to bolster white supremacy and prop up a tyrant’s power.
\n\nThis is why we must defend direct action as a pathway to social change, rather than letting the proponents of law and order reduce us to the dead ends of lobbying representatives and begging power brokers. Remember—had their clumsy coup attempt somehow succeeded, direct action would have been the only way to resist the government they would have implemented. At the same time, we insist that the value of direct action lies in restoring power where it belongs—distributing it to all on a decentralized basis, rather than concentrating it in the hands of leaders.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/12/1.jpg\")
In an Orwellian fashion, the far right have attempted to appropriate the language of rebellion—including the word “Orwellian”— to serve their project of suppressing rebellion.
\nBy storming the Capitol in a mob bent on upholding authoritarian rule, Trump’s rioters did the Electoral College a favor. Critics across the political spectrum have condemned this bizarre system; even the most fervent loyalists of US electoral democracy have criticized its flaws. Yet suddenly, despite the fact that it was designed explicitly as a hedge against popular sovereignty, the incursion of January 6 has transformed it into a sanctified symbol of the popular will, reuniting the country behind this archaic procedure.
\n\nMore importantly, it has intensified a phenomenon that Trump’s months-long campaign against the validity of the election catalyzed: the uncritical defense of American electoral democracy as the only bulwark against fascism. Trump’s fascistic belligerence has been a blessing for defenders of the status quo, marshaling fear to prop up a system that had been losing legitimacy in the public eye and associating any criticism of US democracy with authoritarian ambitions.
\n\nIn the solemn rhetoric of the politicians who were chased out of their cozy offices, the only alternative to fascism or mob rule is their brand of democracy. But this centralized, winner-take-all, majoritarian electoral system has bred widespread popular disillusionment, while propagating the idea that it’s perfectly legitimate to employ systematic coercion to govern one’s political adversaries. Together, these effects make more authoritarian approaches dangerously appealing in times of crisis, especially in the hands of a charismatic leader who glorifies power while presenting himself as victim, underdog, and superman all at once. One of Trump’s strokes of genius has been to craft a language that deploys popular resentment against Washington, “the swamp,” federal power, elites, and the like to expand that very power and elitism while concentrating it in his hands alone. This is how he was able to incite a band of self-described “revolutionaries” to attempt to carry out a coup intended to strengthen the same state that they were defying. Trump tapped into the resentment and alienation that democracy has generated to lead a rebellion against democracy in the name of defending democracy—a rebellion that, had it succeeded, would have only exacerbated the worst things about democracy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2016/03/16/1b-1.jpg\")
Trump has capitalized on widespread disillusionment with representative democracy to promote something even more authoritarian.
\nMany liberals scratch their heads at Trump’s misled masses who continue to insist, without a shred of evidence, that the election was “stolen,” that somehow Trump must have actually won. While the precise mechanics of how this supposedly occurred vary from one absurd conspiracy theory to the next, it’s more useful to look beyond the conspiracies to the emotional context of the election and its political consequences.
\n\nNearly 75 million people cast their ballots for Trump. In the winner-take-all system of American democracy, since these weren’t distributed in such a way as to capture an Electoral College majority, they had zero impact on the outcome. Having been whipped into a frenzy by demagogic rhetoric and encouraged to believe that voting for Trump was the only thing they could do to protect their liberty, these voters were suddenly confronted with liberal media outlets telling them that all their votes had amounted to nothing. Facing that outcome, and encouraged by Trump and other proponents of white supremacy or Christian dogmatism to feel that they were the only ones entitled to power, it’s not surprising that many chose to embrace a dramatic narrative in which nefarious liberals had stolen the election.
\n\nIf you believed that narrative, you, too, might come to Washington, dreaming of taking a lead part in the drama yourself, imagining a story in which your actions wouldn’t be limited to a wasted vote, in which you could put your body on the line to sweep away the corrupt elites from the halls of power and usher in the millennium yourself.
\n\nOf course, the dream became a nightmare. Whether they were trampled by their MAGA comrades, shot or beaten by police, fired from their jobs, or arrested on federal charges—or simply returned home with the world labeling them seditious traitors—their efforts to take revenge for the profound disempowerment of the election by disempowering others failed, for now. But if the political center thinks that this means that democracy is safe, they are deluded.
\n\nThe lesson here is not simply that demagoguery threatens democracy—it was democracy that rewarded Trump’s demagoguery in the first place. Rather, it is that democracy is buckling under its own contradictions, its own failure to deliver the sort of empowerment and self-determination that it promises. Smug liberals may condemn the ignorance of Trump die-hards who tilt at voting machine windmills and spout absurdities from QAnon conspiracy networks. But they are failing to see that the grievances Trump voters are voicing are caused by real problems, even if their response is misdirected. While those who deny Biden’s victory employ rhetoric about democracy having been betrayed, it would be more precise to say that they feel that democracy has betrayed them. And in a sense, they are correct about this.
\n\nWhat kind of a system presents the vote as the supreme expression of empowerment and participation, describing it as our sole and sacrosanct political “voice”—then tells 75 million voters that their votes meant nothing and changed nothing, that they have to return to passivity for four years, obeying the dictates of a regime they oppose and had no hand in choosing?
\n\nA democratic one.
\n\nThis is the context in which we must view the denial of Biden’s victory. Key hallmarks of fascist politics include popular mobilization, the emotional investment of the masses in the state, and the sanctification of politics. Trump’s machine masterfully manufactured all of these, generating high levels of voter turnout and intense reactions of furious denial when he lost. Yet these could not have had such power if not for the already existing disillusionment with the way that the lofty promises of democracy compare to the reality of the alienating electoral spectacle. We see this in the popular disdain for Washington, with its remoteness from the everyday lives and concerns of ordinary people and its air of unaccountability and corruption.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/features/democracy/images/fightingfor2000.gif\")
The events of January 6 cast this political cartoon of ours in an even grimmer light.
\nThere’s much here that resonates with an anarchist sensibility. The difference is that we take this frustration to its logical conclusion by looking at the root cause. The problem is the system itself—a way of organizing society and making decisions that limits our participation to meaningless rituals and delegates our power to distant icons, while forcing us to go along with decisions made without our consent and imposed on us from above. At best, we can choose who wields coercive power over others, but we can never escape it ourselves. When this alienating hierarchy in the political sphere is echoed in the other spheres of our lives—at work, at school, and in so many other contexts in which someone else is calling the shots—it’s no wonder that people feel powerless and resentful. Without an analysis of how this power operates, they may displace that resentment onto others who are not actually responsible for their alienation, siding with some of the beneficiaries of the system against those who are even worse off than themselves.
\n\nUnlike the political center and left, which insist on the legitimacy of the election’s process and outcome, and the far right, which insists that it was stolen, anarchists say every election is a steal. Representative politics steals our agency, our ability to make decisions collaboratively and to determine our own lives directly. The problem with the 2020 election wasn’t that Trump should have won instead of Biden—that would have led to even more people being disempowered and oppressed. The problem was that no matter which politician wins, we all lose.
\n\nWhile the 81 million people who voted for Biden emerged from the election with a greater sense of satisfaction or at least relief that their vote counted for something, in fact they have no control over what Biden does with that power and little recourse if he wields it contrary to his promises or their desires. As for the 77 million who voted for someone else—not to mention the 175 million who didn’t or couldn’t vote, the real majority, as in every other election in the history of the United States—they don’t even have the consolation of being on the winning team. No wonder this leaves people cynical and alienated, grasping for conspiratorial explanations, however far-fetched.
\n\nAnarchists propose that we need neither the false promises of democracy nor the false premises of conspiracy theories to organize our own lives. What we need, rather, is collective self-organization from the bottom up, solidarity and mutual defense, and a shared understanding of what we all have to gain from coexisting in peace rather than struggling for supremacy. We reject the legitimacy of any system, democratic or otherwise, that alienates us from our shared capacity for self-determination and collective coordination.
\n\nAs we argued around the election, if Trump had been duly elected according to protocol and certified by the Electoral College, that wouldn’t have made it any more ethical to accept the legitimacy of his rule. There is no democratic process that could justify mass deportation, mass incarceration, mass COVID-19 deaths, mass evictions, homelessness, hunger, ecological devastation, or any of the other consequences of Trump’s authority. Those things are wrong—not because they are “undemocratic,” but because they are incompatible with a free, just, and egalitarian society.
\n\nEven—or especially—if it is unpopular after this contested election, we must articulate these critiques and demonstrate alternative forms of popular self-determination. We can put these into practice in countless ways in our everyday lives without necessarily needing to storm a Capitol to do it. We can undertake collective participatory decision-making in our homes, workplaces, schools, and movements. We can organize mutual aid projects, neighborhood assemblies, and other gatherings as spaces of encounter to build relationships with each other outside the adversarial model of party politics. We can draw inspiration from radical experiments around the world that organize power from the bottom up, from the caracoles of autonomous Zapatista territory to the council system of Rojava. We can undermine the authority of bosses, managers, and politicians who claim to speak for us by defying their orders and organizing to meet our needs without them, or at least organizing to resist their efforts to prevent us from trying to.
\n\nAt a moment when the entirety of what passes for the left in the US seems to have no more visionary program than to defend the integrity of the electoral system, anarchists have a responsibility to acknowledge that the emperor has no clothes—to affirm all the good reasons why the electoral process should not be worshipped as the highest expression of freedom and responsibility. If we fail to do this, that will leave the far right as the only ones articulating the problems with the current system, just as they have managed to position themselves as the chief critics of the corporate media.1 That would be a huge advantage for them and a costly missed opportunity for us.
\n\nThe “revolution” that these self-described patriots have in mind is the very opposite of the free world we want to create. Where anarchists propose coexistence and mutual respect across lines of difference, they aim to use force to dominate everyone else. For all their “Don’t Tread on Me” rhetoric, the events of January 6 showed their willingness to trample—literally and figuratively—on the bodies and freedom of any who stand in their path, even their allies. Anarchists, by contrast, advocate racial justice, mutual aid, and horizontal grassroots organizing as antidotes to the toxic mixture of white supremacy, hyper-capitalist individualism, and authoritarianism that the red-hatted crowds embody.
\n\nEven if some Trump supporters are responding to real frustrations with American democracy, we must distinguish their confusion from our critiques. Like all binaries, the supposed absolute opposition between authoritarian “liberty” of the Trump hordes and the alienated “democracy” of the Congress they stormed breaks down when we examine it more closely. Whereas we aim to decentralize power so that neither majorities nor minorities can coerce us, those who stormed the Capitol want to centralize it in their preferred executive rather than the unwieldy legislature. This makes it all the more critical that we distance ourselves from both centrist “defenders of democracy” and those who attack it from the right, asserting that neither fascist strongmen nor duly elected Washington elites deserve to call the shots in our lives.
\n\nWhile pundits lament the partisan divide, there’s always one issue that unites all politicians, both Democrats and Republicans: they agree that they should be the ones making decisions for us. This is what brought Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell together so swiftly on January 6. If Trump and Biden supporters joined the actual majority—the ones who cast no ballot last year—and decided that together we could make decisions better than representatives in Washington, we could remake society from the bottom up.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/12/6.jpg\")
Those who occupy the Capitol building and those who stormed it have at least this much in common: both seek to rule us.
\nIn the aftermath of the “riot” of January 6, Joe Biden joined many commentators in pointing out the stark contrast between the militarized repression brought to bear against the Black Lives Matter uprising last summer and the willingness that police officers showed to let an armed mob storm the Capitol. From a liberal perspective, this illuminates how race, rather than a concern for law and order, shapes police responses to protest; from a radical perspective, it shows how white supremacy is integral to law and order. But the agenda that Biden was pursuing when he made this comparison sheds light on how last year’s protests are being strategically (mis)remembered to reframe what sort of protest tactics will be publicly affirmed as legitimate in the years to come.
\n\nIn contrasting the Justice for George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests to the storming of the Capitol, most liberal media outlets define the anti-police uprisings as “peaceful” or “mostly peaceful” while castigating Trump’s hordes as “violent.” Have we forgotten that one of the most catalytic moments of 2020 occurred when rebels captured and burned the Third Precinct in Minneapolis? Have we forgotten the looting that broke out from New York to Los Angeles to Philadelphia? Have we forgotten the months of nightly clashes with police and federal officers in Portland? The conservative media certainly hasn’t, even if their cherry-picking is just as disingenuous as they attempt to paint pro-Trump rioters as the real victims.
\n\nThis is just the latest example of the tendency to define actions or groups as “violent” or “nonviolent” according to whether the speaker wants to frame them as legitimate or illegitimate.
\n\nPresident Obama notoriously praised the Egyptian revolution—a mass uprising in which a hundred police stations were burned during weeks of fierce fighting—as “the moral force of nonviolence that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.” He used this rhetoric in order to acknowledge the legitimacy of the outcome—the overthrow of a (US-backed) dictator—without acknowledging the efficacy or even existence of approaches to social change that exceed the limits of “nonviolence.” We have already seen that sort of selective amnesia and doublespeak in regards to the Justice for George Floyd rebellion. The left portrays the actions of last summer as legitimate by emphasizing that they were nonviolent, while the right condemns them as illegitimate by emphasizing that they were violent. These are competing strategies for keeping people pacified and forestalling the threat of revolutionary change. While the right-wing strategy promotes aggressive repression by conjuring images of violence to justify external policing, the left-wing strategy carries out underhanded repression by spreading a false memory of a nonviolent movement in order to justify internal policing. The goals are the same: both seek to keep people in line, protecting the rich and powerful against real threats to their power.
\n\nIf the anti-police uprisings of 2020 were legitimate, it was not because they were “nonviolent.” They were legitimate because they responded to immediate threats to people’s lives and communities. They were legitimate because they mobilized millions to push back against racism and brutality, expanding popular awareness of white supremacy and policing and shifting the balance of power in the United States. It was strategic that some of the demonstrations remained non-confrontational, especially in places where the forces arrayed against them could have easily overpowered and brutalized them; and it was strategic that many of the demonstrations were confrontational, especially where that empowered the participants, pushed back the police, and sent powerful messages of resistance that resonated across the world.
\n\nSo the ones who invaded the Capitol should not be condemned simply for being “violent.” Certainly, we don’t want to live in a society governed by coercive force; neither the brutality of the Capitol stormers nor of the riot police who belatedly pushed them away model the world we want to create. But what was significant in the events of January 6 was not the violence that the rioters undertook in pursuit of their message—or that the police marshalled in response—but the immense suffering that would have resulted had they succeeded. Trump’s supporters deserve to be condemned because they were trying to help a tyrant hold on to power in order to preserve an administration that is inflicting misery upon millions of vulnerable and oppressed people. The problem was not that the invaders adopted militant tactics, but that they did so in order to intimidate and dominate.
\n\nInsofar as Biden will govern by the same means and preserve many of the same policies, it will be necessary to resist his administration as well as the fascists who threaten it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/12/3.jpg\")
Neither the brutality of those who stormed the Capitol nor of the authorities who seek to establish a police state represent the world we wish to create.
\nAs anarchists, we’ve always insisted on the value of a diversity of tactics and the importance of doing more than politely asking the powerful to make concessions. In the aftermath of January 6, we can expect to see politicians and pundits across the political spectrum uniting to shift focus away from the agenda of those who stormed the Capitol towards the tactics they used that exceeded the boundaries of law and order. A particularly brazen and hypocritical example of this occurred just hours after the incursion, when Florida governor and Trump loyalist Ron DeSantis used what had happened at the Capitol as an excuse to revive his push for one the most draconian anti-protest laws in the country. This echoes Trump’s notorious effort to make a false equivalence between the murderous fascists in Charlottesville and the anti-fascists who sought to defend against them, or the Southern Poverty Law Center’s shift from targeting hate groups to focusing on “extremism,” a category that includes militant liberation movements as well.
\n\nIn the face of such maneuvers, we should redirect the focus to what we’re fighting for and what it will take to get there. We can challenge the liberal amnesia about this past summer’s uprisings by pointing out that the only reason we know George Floyd’s name—in contrast to the names of thousands of others the police have killed—is because the courageous rebels in Minneapolis paid no attention to the boundaries between violence and nonviolence. We can point out that for all of the invective against the supposed violence of “antifa terrorists” and Black Lives Matter rioters, the red hat-wearing Blue Lives Matter crowd killed more police officers in one afternoon than the entire movement against police violence and white supremacy did throughout 2020. We can draw on revolutionary history and examples from parallel struggles around the world to show that militant tactics are necessary to make lasting change and to defend ourselves against an emboldened extreme right that has no scruples about wielding force.
\n\nFinally, we can organize in our communities to turn out into the streets in defiance of whatever efforts politicians make to clamp down on protest in response to the events of January 6, insisting that fascism can only be defeated through popular grassroots self-organization. Strengthening the state will not protect us from fascism—it only sharpens a weapon that, sooner or later, is bound to fall into the hands of fascists.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/09/2.jpg\")
From Charlottesville to Berkeley, anarchists and other anti-fascists have played an essential role in impeding the rise of the far right through militant tactics. Who knows how much stronger they would be by now if not for these efforts to interfere with their recruiting.
\nIn the aftermath of January 6, we have to debunk the smear campaigns that portray Trump supporters as anarchists, refute efforts to delegitimize our ideas and tactics by associating them with our enemies, and brace for the repression that may nonetheless sweep us up alongside them. Our work is cut out for us.
\n\nBut we have many advantages, too. This past year, millions of people saw how powerful direct action and militant protest can be. They can catalyze millions to act, effecting lasting change. We know that our critiques of electoral democracy speak to an alienation that is deeply felt throughout this society.
\n\nFor anarchists, revolution doesn’t center around storming symbolic citadels, but reorganizing society from the bottom up—so that even if the Capitol is occupied, the occupants cannot impose their will on us. In the end, this is the only truly reliable defense against aspiring strongmen like Trump and mobs like the one that tried to seize power for him. Electoral politics can just as easily raise them to power as remove them; laws and police can implement their power grabs as easily as thwart them. Horizontal grassroots resistance is the only thing that can secure our freedom.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/12/2.jpg\")
Now more than ever.
\n“The knee-jerk reaction to Trump’s strategy has been to defend the importance and integrity of the corporate media. On the contrary, Trump would not be able to capitalize on widespread distrust of the media if we hadn’t already failed to popularize an anarchist critique of the corporate media ourselves. One of the roles that the far right plays is to compel us to side with the other oppressive forces in this society, normalizing them. If we do so, the next generation of rebels will have no reason to trust us—and the next time corporate media outlets attack us, it will be more difficult to undermine their narratives.” –“The Real Truth about Fake News” ↩
\nAs a consequence of Donald Trump’s supporters occupying the Capitol building in Washington, DC after a rally promoting his baseless claims of election fraud, the Republican Party is fracturing, setting the stage for the consolidation of a new bipartisan political center—albeit much further to the right than before. Yet this also paves the way for massive sections of Trump’s base to break away from representative democracy altogether, embracing an explicitly fascist alternative. The events of January 6 offer them martyrs and a revanchist narrative that will serve them for years to come, providing an internal mythos for recruitment and a justification whenever they need to use force.
\n\nThe events of January 6 will discredit Trump supporters in the eyes of centrists and force some Republicans to shift their allegiances to the center, but they will also push the envelope regarding what is acceptable. This may help the far right recruit locally countrywide and could normalize similar actions in the future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/07/1.jpg\")
This is actually a very old problem that never went away. As Mike Davis put it, “Deep structures of the past have been disinterred during Trump’s presidency and given permission to throttle the future.”
\nBut this is not the only danger ahead. In the name of a war against extremism, centrists are going to demand to expand the same machinery of state repression that the next Trump will inevitably use against us. This is essentially what happened in Weimar Germany, setting the stage for the rise of the Third Reich. Likewise, Trump’s chief weapon throughout 2020 has been the Department of Homeland Security, created under Bush in response to the September 11 attacks, and he has also benefitted from further centralization under Obama. Centrist appeals to fight “chaos” will serve to draw many of our former allies out of the streets, while justifying new crackdowns that will target us as well as the far right.
\n\nThe state clampdown after this will likely suppress freedoms across the board, targeting all forms of dissent. In Turkey, when Erdoğan put down a right-wing military coup, that paved the way for him to repress every form of protest. State repression of the right will follow the playbook they use against our movements—incorporating reformist elements while isolating and destroying “extreme” elements. If the only pressure on the government is from the far right, the state will make concessions to them.
\n\nWe are already seeing our former allies withdrawal from the streets in the events of January 6. Liberals urged people not to go to DC, counting on the authorities to deal with Trump supporters. This was a miscalculation. Security forces are not particularly inclined to stand up to the part of the population they sympathize with most—and even when they choose to do so, their hands are effectively tied by the deeply engrained institutional habits of treating conservative white people much more respectfully than they treat people of color, poor people, and anti-capitalists.
\n\nIn short, no one is coming to save us. We have to prepare for the possibility that an emboldened fascist movement will continue to carry out attacks around the United States while a new centrist consensus in government enacts measures that target us as well as them. If our movements are to survive, this will necessitate community organizing and solidarity on a scale we have not seen yet.
\n\nWe have already seen signs of a bipartisan shift towards repressing anarchists and anti-fascists. For example, after winning reelection, Portland mayor Ted Wheeler—a Democrat—announced new efforts to target, discredit, and repress anti-fascists and anarchists, using the same language that Trump uses. The New York Times did the same thing to us three months ago, parroting Trump’s talking points almost verbatim.
\n\nTrump himself threatened anti-fascists ahead of January 6, urging them to stay out of Washington, DC lest they interfere with the show he was preparing to stage-manage. The far right has made opposing “antifa” into almost the entirety of their platform—not just because negative points of unity are most expedient in a time of political polarization, but also because anti-fascists have won so many victories up until this point, slowing their growth. On January 5, a White House memo copied straight out of the fascist playbook announced that they were trying to back the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903/1918, seeking to exclude people from the US for opposing fascism. Such policies, begun under Trump, could continue under Biden—for example, if his former Republican supporters join the political center on the condition that it adopts planks from their preexisting agenda.
\n\n\n\n\n\n“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve.”
\n\n-Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1346910092273143809\n\n\n
For the sake of posterity, we have compiled documentation of some of the important scenes that played out yesterday. Later, when this narrative is contested, it may be helpful to have these all in one place. The timeline from the New York Times offers a thorough account of how the events got underway, but breaks off at the important point, when people entered the Capitol.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/SophieAlex1/status/1346886906521464834\n\n\n
This footage depicts the beginning of the incursion. Reportedly, many of the those at the front of the charge were longtime fascists:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Cleavon_MD/status/1347049831655641091\n\n\n
Some have exaggerated how willingly the police opened the gates for Trump supporters. Here’s another view of the initial clashes:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ScooterCasterNY/status/1347156397226659844\n\n\n
Confused scenes unfolded as some Trump supporters attempted to protect officers from other Trump supporters, while continuing to push back the police:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Julio_Rosas11/status/1346904508039892998\n\n\n
This aerial view shows a line of police struggling and failing to hold back much larger numbers of Trump supporters:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/KySportsRadio/status/1347031398176223233\n\n\n
Trump supporters storming the north side of the Capitol building:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ScooterCasterNY/status/1347045282421370883\n\n\n
A clash in one of the entrance corridors.
\nThey got into the building from the first floor and pushed as far as the outside of the Senate chamber:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/igorbobic/status/1346911809274478594\n\n\n
Here we see them arriving in the Rotunda. As many people remarked, these velvet ropes held them back more effectively than the police had:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1346902499178016773\n\n\n
Trump supporters discharged a fire extinguisher inside the Capitol building and proceeded to clash further with police.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/stevennelson10/status/1346900228264308737\n\n\n
Officers drew their guns to defend the floor of the House of Representatives.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ABC/status/1346909639619858434\n\n\n
The Trump supporters who entered the empty Senate found a vacuum at the epicenter of power—they had seized the temple, only to find God absent. Power does not rest in fetishized physical locations; rather, it is comprised of all the different ways that we are accustomed to obey, the countless thoughtless gestures with which we cede agency to the authorities every hour, every day.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/frankthorp/status/1346910235399659532\n\n\n
\n\n\n“But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin, it’s only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power, and furnished without any taste. It’s not to prevent the ‘people’ from ‘taking power’ that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets—real traps for revolutionaries. The popular impulse to rush onto the stage to find out what is happening in the wings is bound to be disappointed. If they got inside, even the most fervent conspiracy freaks would find nothing arcane there; the truth is that power is simply no longer that theatrical reality to which modernity accustomed us.”
\n\n-The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends
\n
Some of the Trump supporters flourished zip-ties, which they may have brought in order to take hostages:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Tara_Writer/status/1347590582634504195\n\n\n
Meanwhile, the New York Times was reporting that explosive devices had been found at the Republican and Democratic headquarters.
\n\nA “source close to the White House” who was in contact with the Trump supporters who had penetrated the building spread the word that the participants intended to remain inside the Capitol through the night. According to subsequent reports, the crowd included off-duty police officers and members of military, some of whom flashed their ID badges.
\n\nPolice had barricaded the door to the Speaker’s Lobby to protect some of the politicians they were evacuating; a handful of officers were guarding it from outside, but Trump supporters persuaded them to step away from it. When they attempted to break through the doors, a police officer positioned on the other side of the door fired a single shot, killing Ashli Babbitt, a former police officer. At that moment, tactical officers were arriving on the other side of the door, immediately behind Babbitt and the other Trump supporters. This disturbing video captures the moment when police shot her.
\n\nHere is another angle on the shooting. Again, the content is extremely disturbing.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1347130762974306304\n\n\n
An interview with the Trump supporter who was standing immediately beside Babbitt when she was shot.
\nWatching the interview with the Trump supporter who was next to Babbitt when she was killed, it’s hard to tell how much of it is artlessness and how much is artifice. It comes across at once as a work of self-conscious propaganda, and yet at the same time, strangely naive—for example, about the consequences of identifying himself by name as a participant in the storming of the Capitol building.
\n\n“Elizabeth was not ready for the revolution.”
\nReportedly, by this time, the police were deploying tear gas:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/adamgoldmanNYT/status/1346931097175810049\n\n\n
Clashes continued as police attempted to recapture the rotunda:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Julio_Rosas11/status/1346918106375995392\n\n\n
Some of the participants had probably gotten further than they had expected to, and—surprised by their initial success—were not able to consolidate their advantage to hold on to the territory. Others, who had announced in public forums that they would execute politicians and occupy the building, were apparently thwarted by the police successfully evacuating and defending the politicians, which gave the invaders little cause to use lethal force to defend the parts of the building that they had gained.
\n\nHere, a large number of Trump supporters leave the Capitol with their faces exposed:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Cleavon_MD/status/1346968764311511042\n\n\n
Meanwhile, similar scenes were playing out at other state capitals around the country:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/MathieuLRolland/status/1346948414689349632\n\n\n
Vice President Mike Pence approved the order to deploy the National Guard, not Trump. This seems to bolster speculation that Trump or his supporters may have arranged for security to be underprepared or otherwise delayed the response. In parts of Mexico, it is said that if the police or military are conspicuously absent, it is because paramilitaries are coming to do the dirty work for them. That remains speculation, but it is certain that Trump arranged to remove longtime officials from the Department of Defense and other agencies last November, replacing them with loyalists as soon as his loss to Biden was confirmed and restructuring the chain of command to concentrate power directly in his hands. At the risk of spreading conspiracy theories of our own, we recall how, at Fort Bragg on November 18, when Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller announced that from then on, Special Operations would report to him directly, he interrupted himself to say “This is an omen”:
\n\n\n\n\nAs we implement the president’s orders, we also recognize that transitions and campaigns are fraught with risk and unexpected challenges and opportunities. That is why I am here today to announce this—this is an omen… I’m here today to announce that I directed the Special Operations civilian leadership to report directly to me instead of through the current bureaucratic channels.”
\n
Some overseas officials have argued that what occurred smacks of a coup. Our own interpretation is that earlier in 2020, Trump indeed took steps to see if he could take power regardless of the outcome of the election—but, likely fearing the the George Floyd uprising was just a foretaste of what would result from an actual coup attempt, important elements of the ruling class chose not to support him, with the result that by January 6, there was no real possibility of a coup, and all that remained possible was for Trump to have his supporters throw one last tantrum to punish the rest of the political class for not permitting him to retain power and to show that, even out of power, he and his supporters could be a dangerous force.
\n\nIn any case, on January 6, after nightfall, a large number of officers were finally deployed:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/cspan/status/1346961353773207554\n\n\n
In the darkness, Police pursued some Trump supporters with something more comparable to the sort of violence they habitually employ against Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/walterodmv/status/1346982242338304000\n\n\n
One eyewitness report claims that 15 vehicles with Trump bumper stickers that had been parked in a lot in the Fort Totten neighborhood in DC had their tires slashed—two per vehicle, so that spare tires wouldn’t solve the problem.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/thatgirlvondra/status/1346937484928802816\n\n\n
Afterwards, inside the Capitol building:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/frankthorp/status/1347029468699914240\n\n\n
(Actually, all the statues in the Capitol building are soaked in blood—but the cameras only show the blood shed by white people.)
\n\nFor his part, Trump congratulated the participants, stopping just short of explicitly endorsing the incursion in order to retain plausible deniability: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred [sic] landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” He added a message identifying the event as a foundational step confirming the emergence of a new political current: “Remember this day forever!”
\n\nIn response, Twitter and Facebook finally imposed embargoes on Trump’s accounts. The moderators for one of the online organizing spaces for the rally also faced pressure:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1347064563733295106\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/jmpalmieri/status/1347064818944118784\n\n\n
Facebook already banned many anarchists months ago—but all the same, while any misfortune that befalls Trump is a welcome obstacle to his totalitarian efforts, it is inevitable that this will ultimately lead to more corporate censorship of anarchists and other participants in social movements, as well. This makes it all the more pressing that we establish and promote alternatives now.
\n\nAs a result of this stunt, the Republicans have already effectively split into two camps, the pro-Trump far right and the “centrists” who have finally been forced to break with Trump, despite riding his coattails for the past four years.
\n\nOne of Trump’s most ominous achievements in advancing the reactionary cause is that today, Republicans who have moved far to the right as a result of his influence can be hailed as heroes of democracy by a bipartisan base—simply for choosing not to support him in an explicitly anti-democratic coup attempt. While Democrats and Republicans who are withdrawing their support from Trump are consolidating a new bipartisan political centrism, the midpoint of that centrism would have been considered extreme right just a few years ago. Obama’s Republican adversary in the 2008 election, John McCain, is now hated by Trump’s base, but a hero to many Democrats.
\n\nIn this regard, Trump’s exodus from the center of the Republican Party only consolidates far-right gains across the board, cleansing them of any association with his polarizing character. If the far right is now represented by rabid neo-Nazis in “Camp Auschwitz” paraphernalia engaging in outright armed insurgency, it will be easier for capitalists who want to deport millions of people and evict tens of millions to present themselves as eminently reasonable proponents of mainstream viewpoints. Yesterday’s chaos in Washington has already enabled far-right parties in Europe to position themselves as dismayed defenders of democracy.
\n\nIt is entirely possible that some Trump supporters will experience the events of January 6 as a wake-up call. But it is unlikely that this change will be an improvement. Some of them may decide that they really believe in state democracy and the rule of law after all; in this case, they will shift their allegiances to the likes of Lindsay Graham and, at best, call for crackdowns on outright fascists as well as anti-fascists. Others—having finally learned what it’s like to be on the receiving end of police repression—will conclude that they hate democracy and cops, too, but for exactly the opposite reasons that anarchists do, and join explicitly fascist groups.
\n\nThis rupture with other Republicans will inconvenience Trump supporters, as it separates them from much of their power and perceived legitimacy; but it is a necessary step for those who have been seeking to establish a mass base for outright fascism. They have established a fascist pole in US politics—complete with martyrs and a revanchist narrative—that will serve them for years to come, providing an internal mythos to recruit and a justification whenever they need to use force. As we argued when Trump came to power, if the state is not able to solve the problems ordinary people face today, then it could be strategic for them to position themselves as enemies of existing government, in order to recruit from desperate and disenfranchised white people whose racial privilege led them to believe that they should not be the ones abandoned by the state and exploited by the economy.
\n\nAs we’ve argued elsewhere, in response to the George Floyd uprising, Trump and his supporters withdrew from the social contract, effectively declaring, “If we don’t retain our privileges, it’s civil war.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/07/3.jpg\")
\nAt the same time, as we argued last month, though the far-right militias describe themselves as rebels against the status quo, it is a mistake to understand them as opposing the state itself. On the contrary—paradoxically, participants in the movement around Trump have sought to brand themselves both enemies of the “deep state” and proponents of state power. Consequently, they have support from within the state even as they pretend to contest it.
\n\nSeven senators and fully 121 House Republicans—more than half the Republicans in the House, and well over a quarter of the House of Representatives altogether—supported the challenge to certifying the election, after yesterday’s incursion—when it had become clear that, in doing so, they were intentionally providing narrative cover for what was either an extremely clumsy coup attempt or the founding of a new fascist party. At least six elected officeholders, including a member of West Virginia’s House of Delegates, participated in storming the Capitol, along with a large number of off-duty police officers from around the country. All this is evidence enough that the movement around Trump is not going away any time soon, and it will be very difficult for the authorities to bring the sort of force to bear against it that it would take to halt its momentum.
\n\nTaking a page from Trump’s playbook, Representative Matt Gaetz and other Republicans have spread the absurd fabrication that the unruly activity at the Capitol was somehow the work of false-flag “antifa” actors. Of course, there is plenty of evidence that confirms that the incursion was comprised of avowed Trump supporters. In boldly spreading barefaced lies, Gaetz and his ilk are building a base that willfully believes and spreads falsehoods as a way to demonstrate their loyalty and spit in the eyes of old-fashioned politicians and journalists who still take credibility seriously. They aim to hasten the arrival of a day when what people consider to be the truth will only be a factor of their political affiliations, and not the other way around.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/RespectableLaw/status/1347055062284120064\n\n\n
Unfortunately, Gaetz is just one of a large number of people from a variety of positions across the political spectrum who are attempting to muddy the waters regarding the political identity of the Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol. Pundits Erin Burnett and Dana Bash joined Fox News and Vanity Fair and politicians Marco Rubio and Elaine Luria in describing Trump supporters as “anarchists”—jumping the gun on the inevitable forthcoming effort to implicate “both sides,” fascist and anti-fascist, as equally to blame for the problems plaguing the United States.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1346994180934004736\n\n\n
Having learned from the last two gatherings of Trump supporters in DC, anarchists and anti-fascists circulating downtown DC in affinity groups were able to prevent brutal attacks on activists of color and others at risk of being randomly targeted by fascists and other Trump supporters. But there was very little good news on this bleak day.
\n\nAnarchists face a double bind in responding to the events of January 6. It doesn’t make sense to risk our lives to defend the institutions that preside over state oppression, nor to provide fascists with easy opportunities to kill or harm us. At the same time, if we cede the entire terrain of conflict to an insurgent far right and a repressive police state, however much harm they do each other, the political horizon will shrink to be small indeed. As a minimum program, we should stake out an anti-authoritarian alternative to both of these forces, establishing new models for action and finding points of intervention that minimize vulnerability.
\n\nIt will probably not be possible for Trump’s supporters to do the same thing twice. On January 20, when Joe Biden is inaugurated president, we anticipate that there will be a tremendous police and military presence in Washington, DC. On the other hand, Trump supporters may attempt to duplicate what they did in DC at state capital buildings around the country. Those who oppose both fascism and state repression may have to go back to the drawing board to identify the most strategic goals in this new scenario.
\n\nOne mistake we must not make is to assume that all the pieces are already on the playing board. This is not true—there are still massive sectors of society that have not yet cast their lot with one side or the other. The rush to escalate towards civil war increases the likelihood that we arrive at that point before we are ready. Civil war may be inevitable, but if it is, that is all the more reason to focus on building networks and appealing to those who have not yet taken a side while there is still time.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1346926794738335744\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1347077202156933121\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2019/07/17/washington-dc-report-from-the-anti-fascist-mobilization-of-july-6-with-reflections-on-the-past-and-future-of-anti-fascist-tactics", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2019/07/17/washington-dc-report-from-the-anti-fascist-mobilization-of-july-6-with-reflections-on-the-past-and-future-of-anti-fascist-tactics", "title": "Washington, DC: Report from the Anti-Fascist Mobilization of July 6 : With Reflections on the Past and Future of Anti-Fascist Tactics", "summary": "Reviewing the day's events, the lessons of previous anarchist mobilizations in DC, and how to expand anti-fascist tactics to other fields of struggle.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/header.jpg", "date_published": "2019-07-17T16:23:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:39Z", "tags": [ "DC", "anti-fascism" ], "content_html": "
On July 6, fascists attempted to hold a “Demand Free Speech”1 rally in Washington, DC. Anarchists and DC Black Lives Matter mobilized in response. Although the massive police presence hampered what anti-fascists could do, the fascist rally was not a success, confirming that anti-fascists have largely succeeded in thwarting the street-level fascist movement that many feared would emerge in the Trump era. The question, now, is how we can employ the tactics we have popularized in the anti-fascist movement—black blocs, de-platforming, and investigative research—in other movements and contexts.
\n\nHere, we offer a short report from DC on how previous mobilizations in DC have informed the strategies they employ today and an account of the day’s events.
\n\nA group of neo-fascists promised to bring out 1000 people to a rally in Washington, DC on July 6, including 100 or more battle-ready Proud Boys. The rally had big names associated with it and local, institutional, and regional support; the organizers included Enrique Tarrio, chairman of the Proud Boys. Because it was sandwiched between Donald Trump’s 4th of July rally and “Christians United For Israel,” a major gathering of the Christian right, DC anti-fascists feared that this event could draw a much larger turnout than recent far-right events had in the area. If a new right-wing coalition emerged that could put numbers back into the streets, that would mean another round of draining confrontations between fascists and anti-fascists.
\n\nIn the end, the “Demand Free Speech Rally” was disorganized and undermined by infighting. Their event was a bust: it brought out dozens, not a thousand. The Proud Boys, which seemed like the last group standing among the fascist organizations of two years ago, couldn’t muster the 100 attendees they promised. Identity Evropa also made a last-minute push and failed to bring out the numbers they anticipated.
\n\nWhile repugnant characters like Adrienna DiCioccio and Jack Posebiac have huge Twitter followings, that doesn’t translate into an on-the-ground street movement. They are social media grifters who consider a trending hashtag more important than the kind of organizing that can mobilize people. They can use their platforms to create misinformation campaigns that cause police to crack down on anti-fascists, but they lack the relationships, skills, and political savvy to produce mass turnout for their own events.
\n\nOf course, that doesn’t mean they can’t learn those skills. We were not born with those skills either. We have to remain vigilant, mobilizing resistance whenever there is a chance that fascists will succeed in their publicity stunts, so they are never positively reinforced for their efforts to recruit.
\n\nOver the past two and a half years, organizers in DC have learned harsh lessons about the risks of collective action. DC anarchists were shocked when DC police chose to mass-arrest and then mass-prosecute over 200 people for the courageous actions of January 20, 2017. The preceding 10 years of comparatively restrained police tactics had made DC anarchists complacent. We had conceded ground to liberals when we should have been developing strategies that could prepare us for the moment when that scenario changed.
\n\nThe now infamous Anti-Capitalist and Anti-fascist Bloc that responded to the inauguration of Donald Trump was isolated from the majority of people on the street in DC that day, leaving it vulnerable to repression. In setting out to deepen our relations with other social movements, local anarchists aim to ensure that we cannot be isolated from our communities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/2.jpg\")
\nOne role the black bloc can play is to defend those who are vulnerable to police attacks. On July 6, the bloc mobilized when we heard a large number of fascists were close to the park; our goal was to preserve space for people from targeted communities.
\n\nJust a year ago, anarchists were asked to stay out of the sites of permitted demonstrations for fear of mass arrests and police violence. Our recent efforts to connect with others have enabled us to make space for anarchist actions in a way that was not possible between 2016 and 2018. Building and deepening relationships takes time, patience, and understanding. We hope that these efforts will equip us to be better prepared for demonstrations in DC in the future, the next time anarchists and anti-fascists mobilize.
\n\nWhen we act, ideally we should be swimming in a sea of people, not alone against the stream of police repression. Different tactics make us stronger and sharing space makes those tactical experiments safer. It’s harder to make a bugaboo out of the black bloc when other people in the streets know who we are and what we are there to do.
\n\nEarlier this year, white gentrifiers demanded that Shaw’s Metro PCS store shut off the music it has been playing for over 20 years. In the 1990s, Metro PCS was rocking Go-Go outside and selling beepers, back when the U Street corridor was known as “Black Broadway.” Formerly known as Chocolate City, DC has been seeing Go-Go events pushed out of the city into Maryland.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/legbacarrefour/status/1147562211025534976\n\n\n
Go-Go is a historically Black music that developed in Washington, DC—a homegrown variant of funk, old-school hip-hop, and R&B music, founded by DC legend Chuck Brown. The disappearance of Go-Go from nearly every neighborhood illustrates the displacement of Black people from DC.
\n\nA massive community-led response to the pressure on Metro PCS brought thousands out to U Street in the face of policing and gentrification. Later in spring 2019, Metro PCS returned Go-Go music to Chuck Brown Way. While police have been shutting down these shows, communities have been using Go-Go dance parties as a form of resistance to gentrification in DC.
\n\nWhen anarchists, Black Lives Matter activists, and local anti-fascists became aware of the right-wing mobilization, we believed it would be important to hold space for Black, Brown, and Indigenous joy in the face of white supremacy. We set out to help bring together social movements in a way that would secure the safety of DC residents and give the protest a specifically DC atmosphere.
\n\nWhile DC organizers believed that this could be a large mobilization, the material force the Proud Boys promised didn’t show. It was a far cry from the “thousand give or take a few hundred” they predicted to the park service.
\n\nLeading up to the mobilization, we intentionally did not discuss their politics. We just branded their event for them, clarifying for everyone that it was part of the same fascist current as previous such demonstrations in DC. A week before the demonstration, public pressure compelled the Spy Museum to publicly denounce the alt-right and cancel their VIP event.
\n\nIn a last-minute attempt to mobilize supporters and escalate the likelihood of right-wing violence, far-right media began circulating rumors about “antifa acid attacks.” Numerous Proud Boys used this opportunity to announce that they planned to carry loaded guns. On the other hand, these rumors also provided cover for several of the speakers to cancel in the face of public pressure from DC antifascists. Jack Posebiac, Mike Cernovich, and Omar Navarrow all backed out before the rally.
\n\nRoger Stone was a no-show. Laura Loomer blamed antifa for the rally ending early. All in all, their rally was logistical failure, with numerous events ending early and lacking attendance.
\n\n10:30 am, at the beginning of the rally—Black Lives Matter organizers explicitly expressed support for the black bloc. “See the people with masks over their faces, and in all black? Those are our people. They are here to keep us safe because police don’t. We keep each other safe.” As the demonstration got underway, crowds gathered against the backdrop of DC’s homegrown funk while anti-fascist speakers from different communities alternated with bands brought in by anti-fascists of color and Black Lives Matter DC.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Julio_Rosas11/status/1147554817524543488\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/ChuckModi1/status/1147556685361405952\n\n\n
Around 11:30 am, as the rally was getting started, groups of right-wing journalists repeatedly attempted to film the demonstration without the consent of organizers or the community at large. Organizers aimed to create an atmosphere characterized by consent and solidarity in which the attendees would actively prevent fascists from attacking community members. At one point, a group of drag queens chased out a group of fascists.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/UR_Ninja/status/1147577101610029056\n\n\n
This began a skirmish between fascists and anti-fascists. As this unfolded, some of them continued heckling and attempting to film. Numerous Proud Boys and their supporters repeatedly came over and were chased away by community members, not just participants in the bloc.
\n\nFor those not in the streets in DC on July 6, the black bloc was hardly the wrecking ball we were on J20. There are no smashed windows to write about, no video clips of Richard Spencer being punched in the face. The most exciting moments of the day were funny rather than inspiring—for example, playing tug of war with police over a newspaper box.
\n\nAround 1:30 pm, the bloc took the streets to confront Identity Evropa, who were a block away from their permitted rally.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/1.jpg\")
\nOther participants in the movement are no longer seeking to police our actions, but the police are still eager to suppress even the most mundane acts of rebellion.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ChuckModi1/status/1147551469111062529\n\n\n
At 5:30 pm, anarchists, Black Lives Matter, and other rally attendees met up again in front of Trump hotel. Despite hundreds of police, several dozen people were able to hold their ground in front of the VIP Bus, delaying its departure by over an hour and a half. The bus, which was supposed to leave by 6:30, left around 8 pm for an undisclosed location in Northern Virginia.
\n\nIn short, while the day can hardly be said to be a tactical victory, we were able to diminish and contain the threat that the rally posed to our communities. It’s for the best that we didn’t have to physically fight a large group of fascists, in any case.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/3.jpg\")
\nDays after the #DemandFreeSpeech rally, the “Mother of All Rallies” organizers cancelled their annual pro-Trump demonstration. They cited censorship on social media, but it’s significant that this occurred days after the flop of the “free speech” demonstration.
\n\nWhen we think about the future—about how to make sure we gain strength and our opposition lays dormant—we need to reflect on the limitations we have experienced in this era and how to make sure we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.
\n\nIn many different mobilizations, we have repeatedly confronted the same issues. When there is a small minority of people who feel comfortable standing up to the police, how do we relate to others who are not prepared to? How do we address the questions of timing and the safety of participants both inside and outside the bloc? When should we push the envelope, and when should we play a supporting role?
\n\nIf we want to increase our ability to act and build relationships with other revolutionary movements, these are important questions. But we can think bigger about what we do next. How do we push for militant resistance in the face of border militarization, concentration camps, police killing, and state violence? How do we take the focus from individual fascists towards state-sanctioned racial violence.
\n\nAs we look forward to replicating the success of mass anti-fascism, we can look to use the skills we’ve built in other arenas. The Republican Party’s vision, while not quite as overt as Richard Spencer’s program, still includes systemic ethnic cleansing and concentration camps for children. How can we map the relationships that create these policies? How can we build campaigns that make it unpopular to support racialized policing and mass incarceration? How do we use research, counter-intelligence, social mapping, and street militancy against ICE and prisons? How do we use these skills in mutual aid projects as well?
\n\nOn one hand, we have to build the ability to sustain and intensify our offensive organizing. On the other hand, we have to support each another through crisis capitalism.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/5.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/6.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/7.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/8.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/9.jpg\")
\nRather than the kind of state-enforced “freedom of speech” in which armored riot police bludgeon the general population while fascists call for even more violence, anarchists seek real freedom, in which communities can self-organize to defend against the violence of police and fascists alike. ↩
\nOn January 20, 2017, 500 anarchists determined to disrupt the inauguration of Donald Trump squared off against 28,000 security personnel in Washington, DC. That day’s clashes helped set the tone for resistance to the Trump administration; in the ensuing legal ordeal, prosecutors tried to set dramatic new precedents for repressing protest activity, but defendant solidarity completely thwarted their efforts. On the two-year anniversary of J20 2017, we published a series of articles analyzing what we can learn from the actions against the inauguration and the defense campaign that followed them. Here, we present zine versions of all those articles.
\n\nThe J20 mobilization and subsequent court cases were historic events. They offer invaluable lessons about how to prepare for mass mobilizations, how to understand the strengths and weaknesses of riot police in situations of public unrest, and how to organize effective support for defendants when the state cracks down. Please print these out to share with your community.
\n\nAs a bonus, in addition to the J20 zines, we have added two more posters and another zine, all of which are listed in the appendix, below.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/anarchist-resistance-to-the-trump-inauguration/anarchist-resistance-to-the-trump-inauguration_front.jpg\")
Click on the image to download Anarchist Resistance to the Trump Inauguration.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/weve-got-your-back/weve-got-your-back_front.jpg\")
Click on the image to download We’ve Got Your Back: The Story of the J20 Defense.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/i-was-a-j20-street-medic-and-defendant/i-was-a-j20-street-medic-and-defendant_front.jpg\")
Click on the image to download I Was a J20 Street Medic and Defendant.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/between-the-sun-and-the-sea/between-the-sun-and-the-sea_front.jpg\")
Click on the image to download Between the Sun and the Sea: Icarus at 12th and L.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/load-every-rift-with-ore/load-every-rift-with-ore_front.jpg\")
Click on the image to download Load Every Rift With Ore: Critical Reflections on the J20 Trial and Support Campaign.
\nIn addition to the J20 zines, we’ve also added the following posters illustrating our analysis Against the Logic of the Guillotine and celebrating workplace theft for STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY. Ready for wheatpasting!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/i-dont-care-who-is-in-charge/i-dont-care-who-is-in-charge_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/if-you-dont-steal-from-your-boss/if-you-dont-steal-from-your-boss_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image to download the PDF.
\nAlongside the serialized audiobook version of our book about borders and migration, No Wall They Can Build, we have prepared a zine design of our interview with a volunteer from No More Deaths about the context that solidarity workers face on the border today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/fighting-border-violence/fighting-border-violence_front.jpg\")
Click the image to download the PDF of Fighting Border Violence from Obama to Trump.
\nThat was the morning we overslept—Friday, the twentieth of January, 2017. It was every activist’s greatest fear: our cell phone alarms blaring in unison, our friends running around us scrambling to get ready, while we just lay there, arms thrown haphazardly across our faces, dead to the world.
\n\nHow could we sleep with Marius Mason in prison, the polar ice caps gushing into the ocean, and Donald Trump entering office?
\n\nFor months, reality had hung on us like a bad dream; riding into DC was like entering its epicenter. Every Nazi troll on the internet was promising to gun us down in cold blood. Newspapers were reporting that two million bikers had promised to form a wall of meat between us and the motorcade of the President-elect. We were all going to prison—if we made it out of surgery. If you want a picture of the future, imagine Pepe the Frog stamping on a human face, forever.
\n\nAll night, we’d discussed the situation, speaking one by one, weighing our options, going around the living room in circles the way one passes one’s tongue over a broken tooth again and again. If Trump entered office with the mandate of an acquiescent population, deporting ten million people would be the new normal. But if we tried to interrupt the spectacle, they would mass-arrest us, put all our names on a list, and our parents and partners would never be allowed to fly again. Would they surround us as soon as we assembled? Would the Nazis shoot us? It was a nightmare from which slumber offered no respite.
\n\nAnd there we were, asleep at our moment of truth. Downtown was filling up with Secret Service agents and crimson-hatted know-nothings as our friends shook us by the shoulders and called out our names. Protesters were already lining up to blockade the checkpoints to the parade route when they resorted to flinging cups of cold water in our faces. It was no use: we were a thousand floors below, wandering the foggy land of Nod.
\n\nThey wheeled the bed out through the broad double doors of the bedroom, down the narrow hallway, across the living room strewn with backpacks and sleeping bags. They carried it down the steep front steps, bracing themselves against the iron railing. Shoulders to the headboard, they rolled us up the hill past the row houses, through alleyways and intersections and shopping districts into the very heart of the nation’s capital.
\n\nThe streets were ominously tranquil: a jogger here, a couple pushing a stroller there. There was no indication of the forces massing downtown. The branches of the trees sailed past us overhead, their shadows briefly fingering the bedclothes crumpled across our chests.
\n\nThen the buildings opened around us and we were in Logan Circle—the convergence point for the anti-capitalist march, a vortex drawing in all the rage and courage within a thousand miles. Hundreds of our friends had gathered already, their faces concealed beneath bandannas and balaclavas, a swirling maelstrom of anarchists and rebels. More were pouring in from the side streets every minute, pulling on masks and gloves, zipping up their sweatshirts, cinching their windbreakers tight around their wrists, unfurling the great black banners proclaiming NO PEACEFUL TRANSITION—FIGHT BACK NOW—JOIN THE RESISTANCE.
\n\nOur friends pushed us to the front of the throng and we set out, a dozen black-gloved hands on the headboard, our cheeks resting on silk pillowslips, our bodies cradled in gauzy silk sheets, the brocaded bedspread folded back beneath our splayed arms as the bed rumbled across the black asphalt. Behind us, the others poured into the street, linking arms, roaring out a full-throated call and response. Are you ready? Yes, we’re ready.
\n\nThis was the notorious black bloc—bristling, if Trump’s Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense is to be believed, with “banners, shields, bull horns, noise making devices, gas masks, medical supplies, police scanners, spray paint, ladders, bolt cutters, handcuff keys, and code manuals for covert communications,” dressed in “steal toe boots [sic], body armor, face masks, helmets, military gear, sports equipment, and other such attire,” wielding “Molotov cocktails, mace/chemical spray, flares, bats, sign polls [sic], bricks, rocks, glass, nails, padlocks, slingshots, brass knuckles, martial arts weapons, and bottles of waste.” A medieval monster in a modern fairy tale.
\n\nPicture the scene as it appeared to the helicopters thundering overhead: the amorphous black mass driving before it the white quadrilateral of the bed—like a Malevich painting, White Square on a Black Block. Ascending higher, the pilots could make out what awaited us a few blocks away: a lattice of metal fences and concrete barriers defended by 28,000 security personnel. It wasn’t the red-hatted fools we had to fear, but the full might of the state. Squads of National Guardsmen clustered around military vehicles at every intersection; fleets of mobile riot police circling on bicycles and motorcycles; vans packed full of armored officers fidgeting impatiently with pepper spray dispensers and bundles of zip ties. All the mercenaries within a thousand miles become a part of the hostile physical architecture of the capitol, become hostility itself.
\n\nFreeze the frame, here, as the march arrives at Franklin Square and the police move into action, rushing to flank us on their bicycles, to chase us with their zip ties, to shoot their less-lethal munitions at us. At the front of the march, the two of us lie in the bed, sunk in unconsciousness, limbs and hair intertwined, jolted by the motion of the wheels over the uneven pavement, our limp bodies without the dubious armor of sweatshirts or bandannas, beneath a hovering hailstorm of projectiles—percussion grenades and rubber bullets and tear gas canisters and frozen arcs of pepper spray. Our frail flesh on the chopping block of the state.
\n\nA hush falls. The police, the black bloc, the Trump supporters in their stupid red hats, the screwballs at Franklin Square demanding the legalization of marijuana, the photographers and spectators and passersby—all of them remain motionless. Only our friends continue forward, picking up speed, sneakers flying across the pavement as they charge the fortified lines of police, driving the bed like a battering ram before them. Finally, shoving the headboard in unison, they launch us into the void, remaining frozen in place behind us.
\n\nThe police lines open before us like the Red Sea and we sail right through. Not on account of Molotov cocktails, pepper spray, flares, bats, bricks, rocks, glass, nails, padlocks, slingshots, or brass knuckles, mind you, not because of the polls or stolen toes—it’s very important that you understand this—but because of the dreaming.
\n\nOn the other side of the columns of Kevlar and polycarbonate, we continue hurtling down the street, zigzagging between the roadblocks, through metal-fenced checkpoints, past detachments of callow Guardsmen and handfuls of stupefied bikers and gauntlets of snappily dressed pundits crowing in victory or wringing their hands. Our bed coasts by regiments of porta-potties standing at attention, marshaled to hold the excrement of a hundred thousand patriots—through the half-filled stands where bootlickers fresh from Rust Belt exurbs crowd together, mouths agape in a monosyllable—and we roll to a halt in the center of the parade route, blocking the way to the motorcade and the future.
\n\nThe sudden stop shocks us awake. Starting from unconsciousness, we find ourselves in a petrified city.
\n\nBlinking, we take it all in: the bleachers dotted with imbeciles—the armored cars—the secret service agents caught midstride, their faces fixed as glowering masks. Behind them, a brass band blows soundlessly, cheeks bulging, sustaining a single inaudible note.
\n\nWe rub our eyes in unison. But when we open them again, nothing has changed. Pushing back the bedclothes, we swing our legs over the sides of the bed and step from our brocaded barricade onto Pennsylvania Avenue. The air is absolutely still.
\n\nMoving in slow motion through this frozen phantasmagoria as if passing through a photograph, a flaming limousine appears trailing a column of smoke like a bridal train. The smoke extends a hundred feet in the air, blotting out the flags, darkening the asphalt, casting its shadow over the uniformed soldiers on parade. The windows of the limousine are smashed out so we can see that there is no one at the wheel. It pulls to a halt before us.
\n\nShould we get in? But what address would we give? Where would we like to go?
\n\nA mile north of the parade route, life continues as normal. Drivers enter their credit cards into parking meters; cashiers at kiosks dispense cigarettes and chocolate-covered monoglycerides beside panhandlers; waitresses and system administrators toil to placate creditors and absentee landlords. Carpenters refurbish drab box houses in someone else’s suburbs as amateur pundits tweet about someone else’s political party. All sleepwalkers in someone else’s dream, captives in never-never land.
\n\nThis scene, not the White House, is truly the center of the nightmare, whence come all the other horrors. The police are not needed here—not in such numbers, anyway. The absence of an alternative does their work.
\n\nThe dreamlessness itself is the police. It is what imposes the nightmare.
\n\nFor the first time, we look at each other, you and I. What is our dream? What will transport us unscathed through the lines of riot police? Where do we want our burning limousine to take us? Where do we want to go?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/05/1.jpg\")
\nDream alone, it’s just a dream. Dream together, it can be reality.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2019/02/04/dissenting-opinion-solidarity-as-a-weapon-a-critique-of-the-j20-support-campaign", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2019/02/04/dissenting-opinion-solidarity-as-a-weapon-a-critique-of-the-j20-support-campaign", "title": "Dissenting Opinion: Solidarity as a Weapon : A Critique of the J20 Support Campaign", "summary": "J20 defendants and others reflect on the strategy of the support campaign and propose other approaches to expressing solidarity.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/04/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/04/header.jpg", "date_published": "2019-02-04T19:53:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:38Z", "tags": [ "solidarity", "strategy", "J20", "Inauguration", "DC", "legal support" ], "content_html": "To wrap up our series on the day of action on January 20, 2017 and the protracted legal struggle that followed it, we present this outside submission from a group including J20 defendants. In May 2018, at the opening of the second J20 trial, a call to action appeared entitled “Freedom for J20 Defendants,” encouraging people to take a more confrontational approach in the solidarity campaign. The following text begins where that one left off, functioning as a reflection, critique, and addendum. While this is not the way that we would put things, we consider it important that various dissenting viewpoints enter the historical record to inform future organizing.
\n\nAll charges have been dismissed for the J20 defendants. Congratulations to all comrades who fought against this attempt to escalate repression in the US. The prosecutors’ collusion with Project Veritas and their over-reaching approach to the case ultimately backfired.
\n\nThe dismissal of all remaining charges is a significant victory. This thwarts the state’s attempt to set new precedents in criminalizing association as organizational “conspiracy.” The prosecution wanted to crack down on both black bloc tactics and the politics of those who utilize them, transforming street protests and the forms of repression with which the state targets political ideas. Outside of a few plea deals, there were no convictions. The campaign has clearly demonstrated the value of working together and adhering to principles of collective solidarity. We developed new strategies, such as disrupting the prosecution’s evidential groupings and preferred trial order. We built solidarity initiatives that sustained hundreds of defendants’ trips to court. These efforts helped the defendants resist the pressure to cooperate with the state and the plea offers that the prosecution was banking on people accepting.
\n\nWe must celebrate our victories. Yet for some of us, this win tastes a bit bitter. Despite all our hard work, it is more the consequence of the errors and limitations of the authorities than of our own strengths. We feel that we did not effectively take advantage of the moment we were in to affirm our stances. Had we actively fought against repression, we would be in a better position for the struggles ahead.
\n\nThe fervor from Trump’s election, the counter-inaugural protests, the airport blockades—all that initial momentum has tapered off. This is to be expected; in our governed society, it is common for the population to swing between outrage and acceptance. However, we believe that the strategy that we chose in the J20 case has contributed to this inertia. Essentially, we presented ourselves as “innocent liberals” and kept quiet throughout the case, basing our approach in tacit restrictions and disempowerment. We feel this defensive posture has contributed to a collective limitation. This becomes especially clear when we reflect on how we could have used the case as an opportunity to propel ourselves. Instead, our movements and the relationships adjacent to them have been left on the back foot. From this weaker position, we must face today’s problems and try to expand on the revolutionary potential in each moment.
\n\nAfter the inauguration, we failed to continue to declare a break from this world. Instead, we reified it.
\n\nMany within this campaign believed that the conservative approach was the best way—or even that it was the only way. The primary aim of this critique will be to challenge that notion, identify its limitations, and propose alternatives.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/04/1.jpg\")
Posters that appeared around Philadelphia.
\nThe J20 case directly impacted roughly 200 comrades across the country and exponentially more by proxy. This was a very large environment to play within and we were situated in a society agitated by Trump’s election and fascinated by us.
\n\nImagine a sensational solidarity campaign that made the case known everywhere: a campaign that broke with normalcy and moved forward with a revolutionary affect, building towards a departure from this presidency, presidency itself, global capitalism, white supremacy, rampant misogyny, and the logistics systems that keep them in place—consider the airport blockades against Trump’s Muslim ban. Looking at the international reach of the 2017 Women’s Marches and the longstanding tradition of international days of solidarity among anarchists, a sensational solidarity campaign could have resonated beyond national borders.
\n\nImagine if this case and its two hundred defendants had become a reference point for every disaffection. A voice that echoed across lecture halls, social centers, high schools, television screens, workplaces, in the streets, and everywhere else. A root system that overrode concerns for property or civility, insisting on tenacious power from below—a tear from which the fabric of our society began to fray. Imagine an effort that turned the J20 case into a national crisis for the state. What would it have taken to accomplish this?
\n\nImagine the momentum from a raucous situation demanding the freedom of two hundred comrades flowing into other social potentialities (e.g., anti-ICE occupations, the national prison strike, anti-fascist struggles). We failed to maximize on building new capacities and bonds and radicalizing and including new people.
\n\nIf our goal is to make governance untenable, we have to strategize expansively. What would increase the longevity of struggle? Along what vectors do struggles coalesce and spread? How do we plan for the next social movement, the next election, the next decade, the next uprising? We exist within a continuum of struggle. Accordingly, we must acknowledge our conditions to make each moment a step towards the next horizon. The question we face after this case’s conclusion is synonymous with the one we face at all times: What now?
\n\nThe question of possibility here is twofold. First, we have to speak about how to build the capacity to make such a vision possible. Perhaps it wasn’t possible at the time. But still, we believe there were a variety of restrictive dynamics within and around the case that limited what possibilities could have emerged.
\n\nThere was a fair amount of momentum at that moment. People shut down Milo Yiannopolis’ event at UC Berkeley. The graffiti collective Indecline had put naked Trump statues in every major city. People dug up Trump’s golf course in Californina, as others did at the Trump golf course in Washington, DC on April 1, 2017, at the opening of the first week of action in solidarity with J20 defendants. Were there ways we could have helped this sort of action to proliferate, or spread news of them?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/04/10.jpg\")
A sticker seen in Washington, DC during the J20 case.
\nWe must contend with how the J20 campaign played into “good” vs. “bad” protester dynamics through silence. We maintain our previous position that the narratives established before the May 14 trial set up those alleged to have engaged in property damage to be thrown under the bus. What good is it to assert liberal narratives like First Amendment rights and innocence if there are not also perspectives and actions that advance militant protest and revolutionary politics? The former alone will not create a bolstered defense—nor do they articulate a vision that could take us beyond the prevailing order.
\n\nThe jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict. The discovery of the Brady violation was fortuitous, and ultimately led to the prosecution’s defeat. However, there was no guarantee we would discover this violation, nor that the judge would acknowledge it. Effective strategies must seek to counteract our enemy’s intentions while advancing our own. Luck must be factored in, but not made the backbone of a strategy; nor can we rely on the proper operations of the state. In a sense, it was a fluke that the Brady violation unraveled the case. In order for a Brady violation to win, one has first to acknowledge the authority of the court system and second to trust that the court will follow its rules and not create an exception (which is to create and follow a new rule). In this moment, when the state lacked legitimacy, it outmaneuvered us and chose not to protect the prosecutor Jennifer Kerkhoff. This move turned out to be an advantageous but limited outcome for us. The court found that she had violated the defendants’ due process rights to receive all potentially exculpatory evidence through discovery. After the cases were dismissed, the District Attorney’s Office promoted her. By finding a Brady violation occurred, the court minimized the consequences of the state’s mistake, but the DA reasserted its authority, by rewarding the prosecutor, free of compromise.
\n\nWhat would it have looked like to use the court’s determination of a Brady violation to delegitimize the state itself?
\n\nWe should reflect critically on this. Why did we hand over so much power and legitimacy to the legal apparatus? Why did we indulge so much in the spectacle of the courtroom? Very little within defendant-led organizing was done to challenge our relationship with the law and its courts. Instead, much work narrowly examined the inanity of the case’s conspiratorial allegations, re-legitimizing the concept of innocence. As anarchists, we are against authoritarian and punitive methods that reinforce power imbalances. We are against prisons and the entirety of the legal system—not simply the nuanced absurdities and contradictions therein. We need to have more faith in what we actually believe in and strive for. By choosing to tread lightly, we compromised an attempt to spread our analyses, ceding significant ground to the authorities.
\n\nIn the sphere of action, things generally remained small. At what point would we have intervened? If things were to turn out negatively in the legal process, it seemed the plan was to “reduce harm” and bid our comrades farewell to prison while hanging onto the coattails of respectability. After the first trial, the state’s strategy seemed to be to isolate the case’s radical elements and drag the broader support efforts into exhaustion. In other words, divide and conquer. This was not a situation in which we were powerless or devoid of options. Within DefendJ20Resistance organizing, refusing to think critically, limiting ourselves, and appealing to civil liberties were dominant habits that went largely unchecked and unchallenged.
\n\nWhile these critiques may seem harsh, we don’t wish to underplay the work that went into fighting the case. Our argument is that in the end, the work was politically unsound, qualitatively deficient, and strategically incomplete. “Going liberal” can be considered the “vanilla” of anti-repression; a fairly plain tried and true approach. But there are many other flavors to choose from.
\n\nWe want to take a moment to honor the complete re-imagining of “Jury Nullification” that took place in DC during the second trial. A juror read the words “Google Jury Nullification” written on a bathroom stall inside the courthouse. She looked it up and then proceeded to share the information with the rest of the jury. We are impressed. One person’s bathroom doodle accomplished so much—disseminating information about jury nullification to the jurors, creating scandal, revitalizing the case in the eyes of comrades, giving prosecutors yet another headache, and, of course, giving us all a good laugh. Bravo. Seemingly small actions such as these should not be underestimated.
\n\nWhat else could have been done? Where else could we have looked for lessons and inspiration?
\n\nFighting repression should be understood as an opportunity to take the offensive. One does not always have to sacrifice substance for results. Looking back on this case, we’re particularly influenced by a few examples.
\n\nDuring the Asheville 11 case, supporters called for solidarity actions ahead of court hearings. The “Yo Tambien Soy Anarquista” campaign against Operation Pandora in Spain fought the imprisonment of several anarchists using graffiti, speaking events, marches, and uncompromising political narratives. And the “To Libertarians” strategy from 20th century Spain presented a calculated call to action, leading to the release of more than fifty anarchist prisoners.
\n\nThrough this discussion, we ask that comrades and their respective networks reflect on this. How can we best mobilize support networks? How can we anticipate and combat burnout? How do we encourage each other to participate in the face of gloom? How do we win the support of those who choose to look the other way? How do we draw on historical lessons, generations of wisdom, and a diversity of perspectives? And then—how do we utilize them?
\n\n![](\"https://kaosenlared.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/6_Antirepre_abril_015-Resolucion-de-Escritorio-1024x682.jpg\")
The “Yo también soy anarquista” campaign exerted powerful leverage against a campaign of state repression in Spain.
\nThe case of the Asheville 11 shared some similarities with the J20 case. On the night of May Day 2010, 11 people arrested in the vicinity of a demonstration that involved property destruction were charged with vandalism, rioting, and conspiracy based on scant evidence. After a harrowing ordeal, the prosecution dropped most of the charges and a couple defendants took plea deals for “misdemeanor riot.” Years of stress and repression left the local community fractured and burned out.
\n\nThe elements we’re most interested in are the confrontational ones: the support crew’s call for solidarity actions ahead of hearings, the actions that accompanied them, and the visibility they produced. The call created a specific kind of power and a new angle of pressure because it asked us to extend our repertoire and kept us engaged.
\n\nComrades from the Asheville support crew pushed a clear narrative: innocent of all charges, police malfeasance, and the aggressive prosecution to suppress radical politics. The call for actions helped keep the case in the public eye. The police corruption, the controversy over the Asheville Police Department’s evidence room and the departure, indictment, and imprisonment of the chief forced the state’s hand in favor of the defendants. The fact that the case stayed public despite years of delay applied pressure to the prosecutor to drop the charges.
\n\nThe Asheville 11 case can be considered a worst-case scenario: very few people supported or understood the defendants and the state was well-positioned to depict them as mere criminals. Yet even then, solidarity actions did not further endanger the defendants.
\n\nTo be clear, we believe that it made sense for people to employ a cautious approach at the beginning of the J20 case. But we believe that there should have been elements such as these inside the overall ecology of resistance to the J20 case at later points. The J20 solidarity actions were mostly comprised of banner drops, press releases, fundraisers, and the like but generally failed to extend to more confrontational forms. Remaining conformist in narrative and action deprived the movement of dynamism and growth, consequently failing to keep the campaign’s participants and supporters engaged. A year into the case, energy for support efforts had tapered off—a problem in itself, given that criminal litigation often drags on for years.
\n\nYet it wasn’t just our side feeling the effects of its duration. At that same time, the state had failed in its attempts to convict defendants in the November trial, looking very bad in its pursuit, and had exhausted countless resources, leaving the lead prosecutor visibly worn. By entering into a new phase of solidarity and changing its nature, the campaign could have revitalized itself, taking advantage of its enemies in a fight they were already losing.
\n\nAt different stages of the case, there should have been shifts. Adaptation is key to survival. A movement that doesn’t develop and leaves its potential unrealized will die. The amount of burnout and fatigue among J20 defendants and supporters both after the first trial and now is indicative of this. The question of adaptation and survival permeates every aspect of our collective existence; we should continually strive to answer it.
\n\nImagine if after the first round of dropped charges, there had been a series of eruptions—widespread disruptions and marches expressing indignation at the remaining charges. A moment encouraging social fissure, a crisis: rabble-rousing at universities and workplaces, marches in the streets, interventions and direct actions everywhere. An effort to get more people behind the remaining J20 defendants without their having to adhere to our exact ideas, a reminder that we are all angry and all long to be free, and, importantly, an effort that brought the participants feelings of joy and power.
\n\nBut what was nurtured around the case wasn’t conducive to making any sort of effort like this possible, even autonomously. Everyone was paralyzed by the campaign’s physiology in narrative, atmosphere, and action.
\n\n\n\n\nAt some point after the first trial, there was a meeting in DC with defendants and supporters. During that meeting, someone proposed the idea of having a march that “went against traffic.” Hearing this, someone who does legal support, with a lot of social capital and movement experience, nervously interrupted, “I think this conversation has gone in a very bad direction.” and rushed out of the room. Everyone (including myself) was then forced to think that the idea was bad. Reflecting on this moment now, I don’t think the idea was. This kind of reaction was common around the case. It made discussion impossible, shut down possibilities, and suppressed the development of our resistance to the case. I saw a tremendous amount of initiative and capacity destroyed by attitudes and paranoia. We missed opportunities such as establishing a long-term collective house in DC for defendants and supporters and discouraged many comrades from wanting to be involved. The conditions around the case caused many people to become alienated or hurt. After a year, dozens of comrades wanted little to do with J20 stuff.
\n
\n\n\nAfter the majority of charges were dropped, there was a West Coast J20 speaking tour organized. The tour was an opportunity for people working on the case to raise support and reach out to regions who were less likely to be up to date or entangled in the case. There was a lot of opposition to this tour happening. Defendants and supporters who opposed it didn’t offer many reasons beyond insisting it was potentially harmful to defendants who were still facing charges. In my opinion, this was the result of bad faith and problematic power dynamics. The practice of hosting anti-repression events is understood all around the world. Such events are essential to overcoming isolation. The tour was ultimately able to go through but we were forced to eject a defendant who was still facing charges because others weren’t okay with them speaking. I’m sure that the tour would’ve been a source of empowerment and fulfillment for that defendant but it ended up causing them harm instead. I believe all of us who were on the tour regretted making this decision. But at the time, there was little room to breathe because of how unhealthy the atmosphere around the case was. There was a lot of paranoia in the air and the question of accountability was consistently difficult to address with such a wide pool of defendants.
\n
As a movement, we weren’t able to maximize the potential of the calls to action. There was an issue of capacity but there was also an issue of participants feeling dis-engaged, which adversely affected the capacity for actions. In our experiences in many conversations around action, people would severely limit themselves because they weren’t sure what was acceptable. After a year of mostly banner drops and fundraisers, many felt that supporting the J20 case meant dressing nicely and going to court or, at most, helping logistically. When this happens, a few people will stick around but most will turn their attention and energy elsewhere.
\n\nActions inform action. In order for actions to generalize, people have to think them up, carry them out, and publicize them so that they can spread.
\n\nWithin the J20 solidarity efforts, there were some fiercer actions, but people seemed hesitant to imitate or advocate for them and people doing work around the case were likely to discourage such things. It makes sense that people doing legal support would be tightly wound, but it doesn’t make sense for people to allow that trepidation to influence our politics and our work as revolutionaries. DefendJ20Resistance was mostly comprised of defendants. As political agents of change, we will not always follow in accordance with what would be considered “legally sound.” Isn’t that why we participated in the action on J20? Isn’t our conflict with the law and its courts the reason why so many of us put in support work against the case? Our solidarity efforts need to reflect our values, or else we risk not achieving meaningful enough goals; we risk inertia.
\n\nPartisans of more conservative approaches managed to make themselves indispensable. For many defendants and supporters, this was their first bout against repression and they deferred to those with social capital, movement experience, and palatable defensive stances. What would be necessary for us to have other options next time? Folks of more militant inclinations who have just as much experience would have to do the same kind of work. We would have to nurture an environment of solidarity, hospitality, and autonomy.
\n\nRadical outlets, such as CrimethInc. and It’s Going Down, co-published calls to action including strong narratives:
\n\n\n\n\n“Make it clear that there will be personal consequences for taking the side of oppression.”
\n
\n\n\n“The best defense is a good offense! If there is a powerful movement against Trump and the forces he represents, defendants from the previous clashes will be more likely to receive the support they deserve. Keep organizing new efforts against Trump, police, nationalists, and the pipelines and profiteering from which they draw their power.”
\n
CrimethInc. also published a compelling piece after the conclusion of the first trial critiquing the state as a whole. This type of messaging was generally depreciated by J20 defendants and supporters. During moments of hardship, people can start to believe that revolutionary aims are too idealistic and naïve, and this can become infectious. We ask that people think twice about where those feelings and thoughts come from. There is no ignorance in unapologetically fighting for a freer world. If anything is naïve, it is the idea that liberalism will solve all our problems.
\n\nWe cannot rely solely on a few radical outlets to disseminate political narratives. We must come up with our own narratives and diffuse them in our efforts wherever we can, or else they are likely to remain limited to our own circles. We must challenge ourselves to advance our struggles. Our efforts should aim to multiply revolutionary possibilities, which means expanding on what’s already in place, not simply replicating existing modes. We need to do a better job of identifying these strengths and weaknesses in order to adjust our approaches accordingly.
\n\nA multiplicity of narratives is expected. When have the people who comprise any political body been unanimous in their positions on direct action and resistance? These differences should be encouraged, not stifled. It’s important to create a diverse set of perspectives, complicating the ways in which reactionary forces seek to marginalize revolutionary gestures and their proponents. The J20 case saw some of that but ultimately too little.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/04/8.jpg\")
No tears indeed.
\nYo Soy Tambien Anarquista. “I am also an anarchist.” In 2014, eleven anarchists in Spain were arrested on terrorism charges in a police action known as Operation Pandora. Seven were imprisoned; the other four were released with charges. After an extensive solidarity campaign and a couple years of court appearances, all of their charges were dropped. The solidarity campaign showed how sensationalized confrontational tactics, a diverse array of actions (e.g., graffiti, speaking events, marches), and savvy uncompromising narratives challenging innocence, guilt, and political targeting can succeed.
\n\nAnarchists accurately saw the terrorism charges as a means to create fear and isolate the state’s enemies. The campaign was able to fight this and effectively garner broad support. Anarchists saw the danger of their politics being diluted by receiving such wide support. They created narratives that built broadly while maintaining their political integrity. Articulate and clear positions dignified their movement and politics while antagonizing and discrediting the state:
\n\n\n\n\n“I too am an anarchist.”
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\n\n\n“Neither innocent nor guilty.”
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\n\n\n“The terrorist is the one who condemns us to a life of misery, not the one who rebels against it.”
\n
\n\n\n“Terrorism is not being able to reach the end of the month.”
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\n\n\n“The only terrorist is the capitalist state.”
\n
As is common in Spain, constant anarchist graffiti maintained an atmosphere of visibility and hostility around the case. Large marches disrupted the flow of normalcy. There were direct actions including blockades and property damage, speaking events that offered discussion and community building, and small-scale clandestine attacks. All of these applied pressure from different angles.
\n\n\n\n\n“The Pandora solidarity campaigns included a large number of solidarity talks that gave information about the case and also talked about the importance of the practices of sabotage and insurrection that the state was trying to punish. And without a doubt, that made us stronger.”
\n\n-An anonymous participant in the solidarity campaign against Operation Pandora
\n
If the state’s intention is to repress an action or political body, it can be powerful to bring the very topics it is targeting to light: to say what is happening and explain what you think it means.
\n\nGenerally, within the J20 solidarity campaign, discussions such as these were few and often very limited in scope. They often focused on Trumpism, the intensity of the charges, and the right to protest. This reactivity came at the cost of gaining qualitative strength. It even seemed to us that many comrades were actually unable to articulate why anyone would break a bank window or torch a limousine. Comrades near the case chose to forego discussion of why people participate in uprisings, allowing the State to keep the discourse about the more confrontational elements in the sphere of “senseless violence” and criminal activity. Whether this was due to inability or unwillingness, it reduced the overall quality of J20 solidarity. Think about Mark Bray explaining anti-fascism on the news or speaking events that discussed the uprisings in DC after Martin Luther King’s assassination and the 1991 Mount Pleasant riots. The final statement made was fine enough, but it was too little too late.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/04/2.jpg\")
An image from the 1968 Washington, DC riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination—the origin of the charges that were pressed in the J20 case. Lack of discussion of this historical link is an example of a lost opportunity.
\nBroad support and the ability to work with others were key in the Yo Soy Tambien Anarquista campaign. In the US, however, we do not have the luxury of a strong historical memory of struggle nor the same anarchist movement.
\n\nThe efforts to connect with the DC Black Lives Matter chapter provide a good example of what it could look like to connect with others and their struggles in the US. At the time, this kind of work would have the most impact in Washington, DC, the main site of struggle for the case. This also offers an example of the kind of work anarchists can be doing right now to be prepared to combat isolation and repression in the future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/04/9.jpg\")
An example of how the everyday repression that marginalized communities face connects to the specialized forms of repression that activists face.
\nThe liberal defensive posture taken in the J20 case did garner the case media attention and superficial support from the likes of Democracy Now! But that support was rescinded as soon as “innocent” protesters, medics, and journalists were off trial and alleged breakers were up. Remembering that Democracy Now! participated in the initial media blackout of the case and the events that led up to it, we should have been prepared to shift directions when left-wing populists like them inevitably turned their backs on us.
\n\nThis type of betrayal is to be expected from the democratic left. It is a reminder to think about the lines we are taking and the directions for us to go at certain junctures. And it is precisely at this type of juncture that we are reminded of a saying: “Words divide—acts unite.”
\n\nAfter the majority of defendants had their charges dropped, most people tuned out. Given the baseness of American public discourse, many of those who were reminded of the case were likely to be on the side of capitalists and their property. Again, this was the state’s strategy: divide and conquer. At this juncture, what good was appealing to notions of innocence or the right to protest? Accusing the government, the prosecution, and the police of injustice only reasserts the concept of innocence within this context.
\n\nThe authors are split on the issue of innocence. Some of us feel that narratives of innocence are useful for garnering wide support and that they should be complemented by stauncher narratives to broaden the discourse of the issues at hand. The others prefer to bypass the question of guilt or innocence completely, refusing to participate in the logic of the state. The latter position presents an interesting challenge for us on the question of innocence. In what ways can we boldly support those who engage in militant protest? How can we dignify black/brown youth who are accused of stealing cigarettes, fleeing, or resisting in other ways that are used to justify police violence without relying on narratives of innocence? How can we combat using the language of our oppressors to create a more liberatory one?
\n\nThere wasn’t a cohesive strategy to support alleged breakers at this point. The campaign had largely disassociated from their situation—for example, many people spread the narrative that defendants were being charged for a handful of windows that only a few were responsible for breaking. This narrative puts alleged breakers on the receiving end of perceived guilt; it didn’t help to spread any justification or support for those who did break the windows, nor for any defendant who might be found guilty of doing so.
\n\nPeople acting on their own initiative accomplished some of the best work that came out of the J20 efforts. However, due to confining interpersonal and structural dynamics, much of the initiative that is vital to effective organizing was inhibited. Despite this, the efforts that did make their way through were often celebrated—but only after the fact. Remember, actions inform action.
\n\nThe common response to repression from the onset of this case was hesitation, often constricting the effort of others. We should consider how to hone our reflexes to such situations and the dilemmas they engender—whether that means working more collaboratively or knowing when to branch off.
\n\nIn Spain, in the volatile aftermath of the Franco regime, more than fifty anarchists remained imprisoned while the more reformist elements of the CNT recuperated the movement’s revolutionary gains. These prisoners were not receiving support due to the illicit nature of their accused crimes, which included bank robberies and bombings. Anarchists in the region reached out to Guy Debord in France for help.
\n\nDebord drafted the text “To Libertarians,” a militant call to action demanding the release of the prisoners. Fully 25,000 people signed their names to the appeal; the text was widely circulated throughout Spain. At that time, the Spanish government was chiefly concerned with fascist threats, leaving it precariously positioned and unable to engage the anarchists. “To Libertarians” clarified for the state what the cost of continuing to imprison dozens of anarchists would be. Thanks to bellicose words, the threat of mass mobilization, and the thorough distribution of the text, “To Libertarians” pressured the Spanish state into releasing the prisoners. The state released them on the grounds of “insufficient evidence,” despite possessing incriminating evidence against many of them. This serves as a golden example of an anti-repression campaign. It retained political integrity, utilized creative ingenuity, and defended its subjects—even the innocent ones.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/05/31/1.jpg\")
Click the image above to access the PDF.
\nOur aim was to emulate this success. We saw the need to intervene after the defendants’ victory in the first trial and the subsequent dropping of 129 charges. When the prosecution was focusing on defendants accused of more explicit criminality, it was important to defend them outside and against the structures of law and order. We decided to deploy an autonomous strategy.
\n\nThe “Freedom for J20 Defendants” text was circulated ahead of the May trial. The text detailed our dissatisfaction with the general orientation of defendJ20resistance, our analysis of the situation, and an intense opposition to the case, its employers, and the world they inhabit. In response, we advocated a militant call to action. The strategy did not solely rely on the internet; we acknowledge the limitations of today’s oversaturation of information. We figured it would suffice to release it on radical news outlets such as itsgoingdown.org, where our enemies were sure to look. In addition, we distributed physical copies in DC where the case was taking place. An alternate and more explicit version of the text was distributed inside the courthouse café, which was frequented by lawyers, legal workers, police, security guards, and various others. In addition, copies were scattered outside both of the courthouse’s entrances and the entrances of nearby metros. The text was both emailed and physically mailed to various people including the prosecutor, the lead detective, various members of the DOJ and USAO, the former judge, and local news outlets. The text reached various local venues and was handed out to press at a press conference.
\n\nAlongside the text’s circulation, complementary actions took place to apply pressure. These actions took place immediately ahead of the May trial to maximize stress on our enemies, limit their time, and proactively take advantage of any unforeseen favorable developments. Actions that shifted the atmosphere in DC and vandalism created an air of hostility towards the case. A proposal for a series of anti-repression speaking events threatened to raise social consciousness. The events were to connect various social movements, identifying the state’s mechanisms of repression. The first event took an explicitly agitational tone. Another call-in campaign furthered our goal of making the USAO a living hell. Because these actions occurred as a consequence of the J20 case, they imposed a cost for prosecuting it further.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/04/3.jpg\")
These stickers were seen throughout DC and appeared at all the metro stops near the courthouse before and after trial hearings. Kerkhoff mentioned them at court, provoking only a shrug from the judge. We believe that whoever wrote “Google Jury Nullification” in the courthouse bathroom was inspired by the sight of these stickers throughout the city. The stickers were popular; people mentioned them with joy.
\nThere was also a video. It was to be disseminated diffusely, and was for a short time; until some, upon seeing it, contemplated including it in something more concrete. The lack of a customary place to host this video points to a need for more insurrectionary infrastructure in the US. Comrades abroad utilize platforms like Actforfree and 325.nostate.net, which American comrades today don’t generally use.
\n\nPerhaps this video can serve to help demonstrate what it could look like for our movement to mobilize revolutionary solidarity in the future.
\nIf the prosecution had attempted to use these materials against the defendants, it would only have further extended their overreach. At what point do prosecutors begin to feel hopeless about trying to prove an alleged criminal conspiracy? Does a scandal such as this give them strength, or create further difficulty and confusion? We know the process can become the punishment. When do they declare “Enough”? We did not fear adding to their allegations of conspiracy, as the prosecutors already believed in these allegations and were struggling to prove them. The formal DefendJ20Resistance network was well positioned to fight against a text and video coming out of left field. Again, an attempt by the prosecution would mean an extension of their overreach, engendering activity that could bring things to the public eye.
\n\nWe were anticipating that the materials’ release would create scandal. Some would say “the police obviously made that” and others would surely create distance. A minority may have felt emboldened and at least everyone was healthily challenged in their views. All in all, we were content with making noise and spreading our analysis.
\n\nIt’s hard to say exactly what kind of effect this strategy had. But we would argue that it did indeed have one. It’s telling that we heard nothing about the article despite knowing it to have reached the opposition’s hands. We’d argue that we have to assume all this activity to have been a factor in their decision-making around the time of the second trial and the acknowledgment of the Brady violation. Like a fly buzzing in the room during a focused staring contest, increasing its volume as the contest endures.
\n\nWe reveal this strategy because we desire not to have to rely on a bluff. We want to facilitate the construction of a force capable of triggering widespread waves of disruption in response to crisis or repression. We want to improve and expand on the forms of solidarity we can produce and to bring the “To Libertarians” proposal into reality.
\n\nPerhaps our first goal should be to arrive at a point at which we can bluff more realistically—for example, by becoming capable of utilizing our collective networks and infrastructure to present a convincing threat of mobilization. From there, the next goal would be pose the same pressure as a reality, not a bluff. (Ideally, we would skip directly to the second goal.) We propose that we need to develop enough movement intelligence and strength to have a shared instinct about when to employ various forms of disruption. This would greatly aide us in fights like the ones against DAPL, against the J20 case, against ICE detention centers and the border—fights in which it is vital to collectively act in such a way as to conjoin our strengths and make such efforts more successful, tapping into tangential possibilities and sustaining a level of uncontrollability. We would love for comrades to critically elaborate and build on this proposal.
\n\nJames Baldwin offers us an American vision for revolutionary solidarity. When Angela Davis was incarcerated, Baldwin wrote an open letter to her in the New York Review of Books:
\n\n\n\n\n“One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.”
\n
Our opponents have interests to maintain; they factor these in when they decide how aggressively to pursue convictions in a particular case. There are boundless forces in any given situation and several ways to engage them. Taking an offensive approach means trying to make the pursuit of such cases or the sustained incarceration of the imprisoned no longer worth it. We could call this the practice of price setting: building on fighting capacities and refusing to allow the state to kidnap our comrades without repercussions.
\n\nCosts may include many things, such as a prosecutor’s mental health, convenience, the USAO’s functionality (which was disrupted by call-ins), the stability of an individual’s job or even of governance as a whole. The cost of breaking a window isn’t financial but social. As many emphasized, the J20 case was never about broken windows, but political dissent. The function of repression is to suppress. By bringing forth what the state seeks to remove or minimize, we could impose costs on the forces of repression. The state fears the potential that property destruction, both the practice and the meaning behind it, will spread as a social contagion.
\n\nSome may denounce the logic of “solidarity means attack.” We disagree, advocating another sense of revolutionary solidarity. It is important to remember that certain actions could adversely affect the outcome of any political trial—so choices must be made intelligently—and it is of utmost importance that political actors exercise caution in their activities. But there is a difference between caution and inaction, and the latter is unacceptable.
\n\nThis type of solidarity acknowledges that for the exploited, repression is a continuous ongoing process, and that all of our struggles are intimately intertwined. It affirms that there is a connection between targeted repression like the J20 case and everyday racist policing, immigrant detention centers, and the counter-insurgency strategies developed abroad. It understands that capitalism and the state operate in similar ways in very different places.
\n\nWhat methods can we borrow across difference? What instills worry? What creates scandal? What makes the state’s pursuit undesirable? A multitude of things can be done to support the accused and combat repression: street demonstrations, fundraising, public meetings, escalating struggle, attempting to radicalize and connect with current social struggles. We should interweave them all in such a way as to deepen our struggles.
\n\nFor fear of justifying the repression that was already in progress, we did not take a proper stance against this system. Even small gestures such as defendants rebelling against being misgendered in court or speaking out in the face of explicit racism were discouraged. This was a mistake. Repression is an inevitable consequence of conflict; therefore, it must be incorporated into any winning revolutionary strategy. Whether we’re talking about attacks, disaster relief, or a free breakfast program, repression is sure to result if it threatens the interests of capital and state power. We do not benefit from being too tame.
\n\nFurthermore, additional repression isn’t always inherently negative. We should evaluate it in relation to our overall strategy, not in a vacuum. Additional repression can offer new opportunities in the overall fight. For example, an indictment for an incendiary speech could be leveraged to (re)gain popular support.
\n\nWe have a choice: we can run and hide or fight back. If we give the state an inch, it will certainly take a mile. All our clichés apply here: stand firm, throw down, take up the gauntlet, hold the line—to the barricades! Repression is being meted out precisely because the social situation is becoming more precarious and because the actions for which the defendants were accused threaten the state. This means that solidarity is not simply raising money for legal defense and pleading to the state for leniency. Instead, it is an attack on power, and choosing to attack is not only refusing to bow down, but also contributing to the wider atmosphere of social antagonism. In many countries, a single slogan abounds: solidarity is a weapon. Let’s put it into practice in the US.
\n\nJanuary 20, 2017 saw the ushering in of a new generation of the radical left, a defining moment in a neo-fascist era. In an epoch with few such entry points, we should not understate the significance of this moment. We will not reiterate the importance of fierce resistance at Trump’s inauguration, but choosing not to act was not an option.
\n\nWe affirm the actions taken that day. Part of what makes these revolutionary days of action effective is how they are followed up. How do we put into perspective the anger and urgency shown that day? How can that moment permeate its way into subsequent moments—to create new ones? What does it mean to understand what occurred from each of our respective localities—and how would it look to externalize these shared perceptions within a larger social framework, creating a subjectivity that can extend beyond activist minorities and radical milieus, beyond protest towards the synthesis of a new world?
\n\nUsing historically grounded black bloc tactics, the counter-inaugural protests of January 20, 2017 manifested a demandless metropolitan riot with an explicitly anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, and abolitionist orientation. The movement itself existed within a broader spectrum of resistance. Therein lies a strength with the capacity to grow relative to its ability to echo and resonate into the future.
\n\nPerhaps January 20 can serve as a reference point for revolt in the years to come: an annual day of anarchist activity situated in a collective memory, with an emphasis on building power and expanding our abilities as a movement. In our present context, it feels especially important to intervene from an anti-electoral perspective, combating the next election cycle and the fallacious notion that we only need to get rid of Trump, not the system itself.
\n\nDefining conflicts compel people to choose sides. There is strength in drawing lines in the sand and demonstrating that the institutions of misery we are forced to co-exist with are neither neutral nor impervious. Spreading signals of disorder can increase our tactical strength as we hone a practice of vandalism, property destruction, public occupation, and rowdiness. This interrupts the narrative of social peace and makes it indisputably clear that people are opposed to the present system and fighting against it. What better moment was there to do that than Trump’s ascendancy? As the failures of the prevailing order become ever more obvious, perhaps we should continue to force fractures of this kind.
\n\nSome may scoff at insurrectionists who cite the Greek anarchist movement, but the situation in Greece is an accelerated version of our own here in the US. Comrades there have described how various sectors of the population took up the confrontational and combative tactics that had been used by anarchists in moments of crisis, such as after the police killing of Alexis Grigoropoulos. The contagion was so intense that even those who had previously decried these tactics joined in. In France, after years of riots in response to austerity measures, police brutality, and attacks on the ZAD, we are seeing disruption spread countrywide. “In opening up spaces free from state control, these ruptures offer an opportunity for liberation: an insurrection.”
\n\nFrom Ferguson, Baltimore, and Standing Rock to J20, it is not a stretch to say we live in an era of increasing conflict in the US, as well. Like it or not, the future will involve social discord and revolution; things will not continue as they are forever. We would argue for agents of change to fight harder and sooner rather than later. Conflict can open up space for new perspectives, discussions, and forms of engagement while playing an important role in defending any revolutionary forms of life we create.
\n\nThe riot is the focal reemergence of rebellion in our era, when the relevance of the labor movement and the strike along with it has dwindled as global capitalism has expanded and adapted. The riot ascends at a time when our commonality, discontent, and strength aren’t primarily formed by our labor power but by our dispossession. This is a time of destitution, when broad antagonisms will continue to take shape against the state and the police.
\n\nWe ask that we be bolder in what we disseminate, plan, and do. That we begin to take ourselves and the freedom we aspire to more seriously. While acknowledging its limits, we ask that we start taking disruption more seriously. The disruptions that most prominently define our time are the riot, the blockade, the occupation, and, on the horizon, the commune. The decision to retreat from combative tactics should only come after we have gained significant strength.
\n\n\n\n\n“The question of pacifism is serious only for those who have the ability to open fire. In this case, pacifism becomes a sign of power, since it’s only in an extreme position of strength that we are freed from the need to fire.”
\n\n-The Invisible Committee
\n
In the past, there have been traditions of solidarity that meant continuing the struggles of those imprisoned or murdered by the state. Let us acknowledge the effects of repression from the J20 case as ongoing and strive to continue with the aims of revolutionary struggle as a practice of solidarity with the case’s defendants and supporters.
\n\nFor freedom!
\n\n-Some comrades (ex-defendants and not)
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/02/04/4.jpg\")
We Coming for Your Finger Sandwiches
\nDuring the inauguration of Donald Trump, police surrounded and arrested over 200 people in the vicinity of a confrontational march. Prosecutors brought identical felony charges against almost every single arrestee in one of the most dramatic escalations of state repression of the Trump era. For a year and a half, people around the United States mobilized to support the defendants and beat back this attempt to set a new precedent in repression. The J20 case was one of the most important court cases about the freedom to protest in modern US history. We present the full story here to equip readers for future struggles like it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/21.jpg\")
\nOn January 20, 2017, tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington, DC to ring in the reign of Donald Trump with protest and rebellion, shattering the spectacle of a peaceful transition of power. What could have been a day of resignation and defeat became a flashpoint of defiance and resistance. Aiming to help set a tone of joyous rebellion for the coming years, protestors engaged in street theater, blockades, and militant street actions.
\n\nBut with resistance comes repression. In addition to shooting pepper spray and concussion grenades indiscriminately at protesters from 10:30 am until well after dark, DC police attacked the Anti-Fascist/Anti-Capitalist March, kettling hundreds of people at 12th and L Street. Several dozen people valiantly charged the police line and escaped, but the majority were trapped in the cold for hours as police slowly arrested and processed them. This was the largest unplanned mass arrest DC had witnessed since the People’s Strike fifteen years earlier.
\n\nOf the 234 people arrested, 230 were indicted on identical counts of felony rioting, a charge that is a laughably false interpretation of the relevant statute. The state dropped the charges for 16 people, mainly journalists and a few medics, before the first superseding indictment in February, which also failed to correctly ground the charges in the cited statute. On April 27, a grand jury returned a second superseding indictment increasing the charges to a minimum of 8 felonies each. After a few people took pleas and a judge adjusted the charges to account for the fact that two of the felonies were not even on the books as a legitimate charge, approximately 200 people each faced six felonies (riot and 5 counts of property destruction, charged collectively under conspiracy liability) and two misdemeanors (engaging in a riot and conspiracy to riot, which provided the grounding for the 5 felony property destruction charges).
\n\nDefendants could have reacted to these outrageous charges by taking plea deals or going it alone. Instead, in an astonishing display of solidarity, almost two hundred people committed to fighting the charges together despite the extremely difficult circumstances. In an attempt to keep everyone out of jail, the defendants invested in collective legal strategies wherever possible and used solidarity and mutual support to keep each other safe, ultimately choosing to go to trial instead of accepting plea deals.
\n\nThe J20 case was one of the largest political conspiracy cases in the history of the United States. The state intended to stifle resistance in the Trump era—to criminalize political rebellion, establish dangerous new legal precedents for conspiracy convictions, and send the message that resistance would not be tolerated.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/04/04.jpg\")
\nThe J20 prosecutions corresponded with a broader wave of reaction extending from the arrests and grand jury investigations of indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock to the backlash against Black Lives Matter and other instances of black-led resistance. They were connected with efforts to make the legal system even more repressive at state and local levels—including the proposal of anti-protest laws in eighteen state legislatures, with the intention of further criminalizing common tactics such as highway takeovers and in some cases making it legal for drivers to intentionally hit protesters in roadways.
\n\nThe government hoped to expand its repressive powers by recasting holding meetings and marching as a group as evidence of criminal conspiracy. They claimed that being in the same place at the same time dressed in similar clothing added up to conspiracy and that the defendants were aiding and abetting a riot by virtue of their mere presence. The idea was to hold people culpable for acts committed in proximity to them. This is why all 200+ defendants were charged with the same counts of property destruction—the idea was that all 200+ of them had actively participated in breaking a small number of windows.
\n\nThe charges against the J20 defendants were an experiment. If the state had successfully set new legal precedents with which to convict defendants of conspiracy, it would have impacted protest movements around the country. While the state gambled that they would be able to use collective liability to bring about collective punishment, the defendants staked everything on collective defense. In the end, the state overextended and lost.
\n\nHow did the defendants and their supporters accomplish this monumental feat? We’ll explore why this case was so important, documenting the legal saga from the arrests up to the day the last charges were dropped, and highlight the legal strategies that defendants used to keep each other safe and prevent the state from gaining another weapon to use against our movements.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/4.jpg\")
In a show of international solidarity, these crafty creatures drawn by a Swedish anarchist were printed on t-shirts and tote bags by AK Press as a fundraiser.
\nMany different actors played important roles in this story. Let’s go through each of them in turn.
\n\nFor the purposes of this text, anyone who was arrested on J20 and did not take a plea deal falls into the category of defendant. The defendants were scattered around the country, but predominantly on the eastern seaboard. Defendants endured up to a year and a half of legal limbo that disrupted their lives, leaving them unsure of their futures in the face of potentially decades in prison. Many participated in creating legal strategies, publicizing the case to the media, and holding local fundraisers and events to raise awareness about the case—all while holding onto each other for dear life, hoping to get to the other side in one piece.
\n\nMany who watched their friends and loved ones enduring this trying ordeal helped by publicizing the case, consulting lawyers, cooking food for defendants and other supporters, publishing articles and editorials, raising money, showing up in court, facilitating spokescalls, and more.
\n\nDefend J20 was the public face of the ad-hoc defense committee formed in the wake of the J20 arrests; they maintained defendJ20resistance.org, the chief website offering information about the case and how to support the defense.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/04/02.jpg\")
“From NC to Standing Rock/From NC to DC/From NC to the border: Solidarity Against Repression.” J20 supporters made many efforts to connect their case to other repression taking place around the US.
\nKnown among her colleagues as one of the meanest judges in DC, Leibovitz presided over the cases in DC Superior Court until the end of 2017. She established herself early on as an acerbic and antagonistic representative of the state who was no friend to defendants. Leibovitz had made her name earlier by sentencing a 78-year-old anti-war protester to jail time and imposing a gratuitously harsh sentence on DC graffiti artist Borf, who responded in an interview with the Washington City Paper by comparing her to a piece of excrement. The comparison is unfair: no piece of excrement ever presided over the kidnapping, captivity, and brutalization of thousands of people.
\n\nMorin was the first of two DC Superior Court judges assigned to preside over the case after Leibovitz. From the start, he appeared more sympathetic to the case, hampering the state’s overreach by limiting the Facebook and Dreamhost subpoenas. He issued the sanctions for the Brady violation after Kerkhoff’s office was caught dishonestly withholding evidence.
\n\nThe second of two DC Superior Court judges assigned to preside over the case after Leibovitz, Knowles oversaw the second trial.
\n\nThe US Attorney prosecutes all criminal cases in DC, which does not control its own criminal justice system as a de-facto colony of the US. Assistant United States attorney Jennifer Kerkhoff was assigned lead prosecutor of the J20 cases. She sought to advance her career by ruining the lives of the defendants by any means necessary—remorselessly misrepresenting them, the events of January 20, and the law itself, as well as mendaciously concealing exonerating evidence. Despite batting 0 for 194 with the J20 cases, Kerkhoff was promoted shortly afterwards to head up the felony major trial division, which is often assigned the state’s most important cases. Kerkhoff’s office has a long history of misconduct, J20 not withstanding, making her the perfect candidate to do the state’s dirty work.
\n\nAnother assistant United States attorney, Qureshi was assigned to help Kerkhoff prosecute the cases. It was Qureshi who filed the motion to drop all the remaining J20 charges in July 2018.
\n\nYou might think it would make sense for defendants engaging in a collective legal strategy and being tried by the state in groups to be able to share lawyers. But no, that would constitute a “conflict of interest,” in which a lawyer’s ability to represent one defendant could be adversely affected by duties to another defendant. Every single defendant had to have a different lawyer, and some had several lawyers. Some defendants hired private counsel, but most were represented by lawyers assigned at random by the court under the Criminal Justice Act (CJA), sometimes referred to as “CJA lawyers.” A few of these lawyers were extremely capable and willing participants in collective defense, but most were overworked, difficult to reach, hesitant to do what their clients wanted, and absolutely baffled by the idea that their clients wanted to engage in collective defense instead of facing the case as isolated individuals.
\n\nThe MPD were the ones in charge of patrolling the streets of DC on the day of Trump’s inauguration. They showered protesters and passersby with sting-ball grenades and peppery spray throughout the day, senselessly targeting small children and the elderly. The ranks of the MPD include Commander Keith Deville, who was in charge of police operations throughout DC during the inauguration, undercover DC police officer Bryan Adelmeyer, who attended the January 7 planning meeting, and Peter Newsham, who ordered the mass arrest of almost 400 people at the World Bank protests in 2002 and was named Chief of Police in February 2017. A number of officers provided testimony in the two trials, including Ashley Anderson, Michael Howden, and William Chatman.
\n\nDisruptJ20 was the banner under which people organized for J20 and administered the disruptJ20.org site, which disseminated information about counter-inaugural events. The host of the site, DreamHost, was later subpoenaed to provide IP addresses for 1.3 million visitors. DisruptJ20.org is already offline, underscoring the importance of anarchists maintaining our own archives.
\n\nDCLP was a collective of activists and legal support workers formed specifically in response to the needs of J20 defendants. They put in countless unpaid hours wrangling lawyers, raising money, obtaining housing for defendants and supporters visiting DC for court, reimbursing people for their travel expenses to DC, coordinating solidarity demonstrations at court appearances, and more.
\n\nMACC is the legal support arm of the New York Metropolian Anarchist Coordinating Council. It includes anarchists with many years of experience of enduring repression and navigating the legal system. They offered support, insight, and legal guidance throughout the case.
\n\nThe Scuffletown Anti-Repression Committee is a defense committee formed in Richmond, VA after the inauguration to support J20 defendants and fight state repression on other fronts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/9.jpg\")
Abandoned black bloc gear in the streets of Washington, DC on January 20, 2017.
\nBy the evening of January 21, everyone who had been arrested at the inauguration had walked out of jail into the arms of comrades; the one exception was Dane Powell.1 The arrestees received food, drinks, hugs, cheers, songs, and metro cards on their release, and some were given phones to replace those stolen by the government. At their court appearances prior to release, each had received one charge of felony rioting. This charge was levied indiscriminately against all defendants, even though there is no statute making “rioting” a felony charge in Washington, DC—the city statute classifies it as a misdemeanor. In late January, a grand jury returned an indictment upholding the “felony rioting” charge against nearly all of the arrestees.
\n\nWashington, DC doesn’t have cash bail; people had to wait to get out, but they didn’t have to pay to get out. To bail out over 200 people arrested on felony charges in a city with cash bail might have been well nigh impossible. In most places, when ordinary poor people are arrested—often on charges as trumped up as the J20 case—they frequently serve months or years in jail before they get to trial.2
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/10.jpg\")
The kettle at 12th and L Street on January 20, 2017.
\nA grand jury released an initial superseding indictment in February 2017, including 214 defendants and dropping charges against 16 people who were mostly journalists, like Evan Engle.
\n\nThe state made its second move in late March 2017, when attorney Kerkhoff submitted a proposal to Judge Leibovitz to group the cases together. Leibovitz accepted the grouping system, instructing Kerkhoff that she wanted six-person trial blocks because it would be too burdensome for the jury to hear more than six cases at a time. Despite everyone receiving the same blanket charges, the defendants were prioritized into different groups based on alleged conduct and affiliation. There were four different groups, though the reasoning behind the groupings was never made explicit. Group 1 appeared to contain the defendants who faced the greatest risk of spending time in jail. Groups 1 and 2 were comparatively small; most defendants were in Groups 3 and 4. Soon after the groupings were announced, Kerkhoff started to offer plea deals to defendants in Groups 3 and 4. These pleas included a misdemeanor charge reduction and required an allocution—a statement of facts—but did not require the defendants to cooperate with the state against other defendants.
\n\nCrimethInc., subMedia, and It’s Going Down called for the first week of solidarity to support arrestees on April 1 to 7, connecting the case to Standing Rock and other struggles taking place around the US. That week, MPD raided an alleged J20 organizer’s house, seizing thousands of dollars in electronics and taking fliers and flags.
\n\nCall for a week of solidarity April 1 to 7, 2017.
\nOn April 27, a grand jury returned a second superseding indictment filed by the prosecution, upholding the initial charge of rioting and adding several more felony charges to each defendant: inciting to riot, conspiracy to riot, and five counts of destruction of property. Roughly half of the defendants were also charged with the same count of assault on a police officer. Three additional people were indicted for the first time under this superseding indictment, including the person who had been the target of the police raid, who was accused of being an organizer of the demonstrations on January 20.
\n\nAdding additional matching felony charges to hundreds of defendants rounded up in a mass arrest was unprecedented in the contemporary US legal system; it marked a dramatic escalation in the repression of protest. Essentially, over two hundred people swept up for being in the vicinity of a confrontational protest were being accused of breaking the same handful of windows. Kerkhoff hoped to use Pinkerton Liability to frame the defendants as culpable of the damage even if they did not even see any of the windows being broken. The additional indictments of suspected organizers reinforced the political nature of the case.3
\n\nThe pre-trial hearings dragged on for months before there was any talk of scheduling trials. The prosecution hoped to have plenty of time to build cases against certain defendants while pressuring the others to accept plea deals. A dozen or so people took pleas in the first few months after the superseding indictment, mostly under the parameters of the Youth Rehabilitation Act, according to which defendants under 24 can have misdemeanors expunged from their record after a year. A total of 20 defendants eventually took plea deals—but remarkably, not one agreed to inform to the state about anyone else.
\n\nSome defendants and supporters had begun to organize immediately after the initial arraignment; many more began organizing in response to the additional charges. Many defendants had been scattered and disconnected over the first few months, but the high stakes of the case were becoming clear. At first, informal regional anarchist networks were the chief sources of connection and support; for the most part, these were centered around places where there were many defendants, including New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, and the entire state of North Carolina. Defendants and supporters began to collectively strategize over spokescalls to facilitate coordination between these hubs as well as loop in the many defendants from other areas.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/7.jpg\")
Clashes in the streets of DC continuing after the black bloc was kettled on January 20, 2017.
\nPeople spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what a collective defense might look like. Ultimately, they arrived at the following points of unity. While not all of the defendants signed on to the points of unity, over 130 did—an overwhelming majority.
\n\n\n\n\nIn order to stand together and support one another through this stressful time, we defendants agree on the following points of unity:
\n\n\n
\n- We will not cooperate against any of our codefendants, nor accept any plea deals that cooperate with prosecutors at the expense of other codefendants.
\n- We will refuse to accept that any of the charges or actions of law enforcement were necessary or justified.
\n- We will share information, resources, and strategy when possible and beneficial. We will not say anything publicly or privately that has the possibility of harming individual defendants or defendants as a group.
\n- We will support decisions individual defendants make, even if we do not agree with them, as long as they do not directly go against the other principles.
\n
In late June 2017, there were four large defendant assemblies in DC after several days during which many defendants were arraigned and had their trial dates set. In response to the more vulnerable Group 1 defendants having their trials scheduled first, defendants and their supporters devised a legal strategy intended to force the state’s hand. In hopes of preventing the state from framing the narrative by prosecuting higher-stakes defendants first, defendants adopted an early trial strategy, proposing that some defendants from Groups 3 and 4 who felt they had strong cases should bravely seek early trial dates. If the state lost, this could delegitimize the charges and punch holes in the case for conspiracy and collective liability.
\n\nOf course, if the defendants who sought an early trial lost in court, it could have had the opposite effect.
\n\nSurprisingly, Judge Leibovitz affirmed the defendants’ right to a speedy trial and scheduled two early trial blocks for the defendants from Groups 3 and 4 who had volunteered to demand them; these were set for November and December 2017, before the trials already announced for Group 1 defendants. All summer, defendants and supporters were busy working with the more responsive attorneys, seeking new lawyers, mulling over legal strategies, creating media about the case, doing interviews as the case finally started to get traction in mainstream news, raising money, researching defense arguments, and struggling to compel lawyers to embrace the collective defense strategy despite their misgivings.
\n\nThe second week of solidarity with J20 defendants began on July 20, 2017. Graffiti, banners, fundraisers, and awareness-raising events appeared around the US and in at least five other countries.
\n\nA video expressing support for Dane Powell, the only J20 defendant to serve time.
\nIn late July 2017, a hearing took place regarding various motions to dismiss the indictment. Leibovitz threw out the assault on an officer charge, finding that the statute cited was outdated and hadn’t been in effect in 2017. In September, she denied the defense’s motion to dismiss the conspiracy and riot charges, confirming that the defendants could be prosecuted under the riot statute: “Each charged defendant who can be shown to be an aider and abettor of those engaging in or inciting the riot is liable as if he were a principal.” Because the police alleged that the arrestees were a “cohesive unit,” Judge Leibovitz affirmed that there was enough probable cause to uphold the arrests.
\n\nIn November, soon before the first trial began, Leibovitz issued a ruling reducing two of the eight felonies (“engaging in a riot” and “conspiracy to riot”) to misdemeanors. She clarified that engaging in a riot had always been a misdemeanor charge in DC law, not a felony.
\n\nLet us pause in awe at the stupefying hypocrisy of those who profess to believe in the “rule of law.” How can it be that the prosecutor, the court bureaucracy, and two grand juries were permitted to terrorize two hundred defendants with multiple nonexistent felony charges for nearly a year? Surely, if anyone is still naïve enough to earnestly believe in the rule of law, they should consider those who are complicit in pressing nonexistent charges to be the number one threat to civil society. Prosecutors, police, and judges neither believe in nor uphold the rule of law any more than the most iconoclastic anarchist does. The difference is that anarchists are honest about this and propose an ethical alternative, whereas the professionals of the justice industry shamelessly pursue personal gain and little else.
\n\nWith the first trials approaching, October and early November 2017 saw multiple pre-trial hearings at which Judge Leibovitz again surprised defendants by agreeing with defense attorneys’ insistence on adherence to basic criminal procedure, limiting identification by video footage and affirming basic legal procedures of eye-witness identification. The prosecution seemed stunned that they would have to abide by these basic rules. The prosecution’s strategy of having the lead detective on the case, Greggory Pemberton, identify defendants based on his literally thousands of hours spent pouring over video footage was strictly limited to pointing out identifiable items of clothing and equipment visible in different video recordings and letting a jury decide whether or not the individuals in the footage could indeed be positively identified as the defendants on trial.
\n\nImmediately before the November trial began, Kerkhoff’s office dropped most of the charges for the December trial group and reduced the rest to misdemeanors (conspiracy to riot, engaging in a riot, and one count of property destruction). Because the defendants now faced less than two years’ potential jail time, they no longer had the right to a jury trial; instead, Judge Leibovitz was to decide their guilt in a bench trial. It appeared that Kerkhoff and the US Attorney’s office were trying out two different legal strategies while seeking to reduce the workload involved in the prosecution. Even if Kerkhoff lost the trial involving the November trial group, she could still hope Leibovitz would hand down misdemeanor convictions in December. Perhaps Kerkhoff hoped this move would encourage the November trial block to file for a continuance or accept her misdemeanor plea deals, and that afterwards she could either convict the December trial group or try them after Group 1 defendants as she had originally planned. In any case, none of that came to pass.
\n\nEight defendants were originally set to go to trial on November 20, 2017, but only six ended up standing trial and the starting date of trial was pushed up to November 15. One person scheduled to be tried in this block was dropped from it immediately before jury selection, because, as he was told, all of his discovery belonged to a different defendant. The defendants who did go to trial included two street medics and a photojournalist.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/16.jpg\")
Clashes in the streets of DC continuing after the black bloc was kettled on January 20, 2017.
\nThe trial lasted six long weeks, starting with jury selection and extending through day after day of deceitful police testimony as Kerkhoff attempted to build a conspiracy case. Kerkhoff admitted from the outset that she had no evidence to prove that the six defendants took part in property destruction. Instead, she sought convictions based on conspiracy; her case rested on demonstrating that all of the defendants willfully aligned themselves with the group. It was cohesion—aesthetic, political, and tactical—that the prosecution deemed criminal. Kerkhoff focused on emphasizing that the demonstrators wore similar clothing, arrived at a predetermined location for a public march, chanted, and covered their faces with masks, goggles, or gas masks.
\n\n\n\n\n“The evidence so far against numerous defendants amounts to no more than video footage of their continued presence in the march and their choice of black bloc attire. If the mass arrest was imprecise enough to sweep up journalists and legal observers, how can it be maintained that the police had probable cause to arrest every single other protester for rioting and inciting? If continued presence, proximity, and black garb is sufficient for the necessary legal standard of individuated probable cause for arrest and prosecution under these charges, the DC police and the government have, from day one of Trump’s presidency, lowered the standard for what it takes to turn a protester into a felon.”
\n\n-Natasha Lennard, “How the Government Is Turning Protesters Into Felons”
\n
In addition to relying on officer testimony as the foundation of her case, Kerkhoff presented video footage surreptitiously taken by Project Veritas, an extreme-right project that “infiltrated” public organizing meetings ahead of the J20 day of action. The collusion with Project Veritas coupled with the prosecution’s practice of withholding and doctoring evidence ultimately proved fatal to the case.
\n\nOn December 21, after three days of deliberation, the jury acquitted all six defendants on all charges. As one member of the jury told Unicorn Riot, “The prosecution admitted the morning of day one that they would present no evidence that any of the defendants committed any acts of violence or vandalism. From that point, before the defense ever uttered a sound, it was clear to me that ultimately we would find everyone not guilty.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/games/j20/images/2019-01-17-15.jpg\")
\nAfter the first trial, the case against the remaining defendants began to disintegrate. Fully 188 defendants were still facing charges, and the DC Attorney’s Office promised “the same rigorous review for each defendant,” insisting that they would subject each and every one of the defendants to a similar trial in hopes of securing convictions.
\n\nThis was just a bluff, a final blustering attempt to terrorize the defendants into accepting plea deals before the prosecution began to collapse. A day before the one-year anniversary of the J20 arrests, for which a third week of nationwide solidarity actions were planned, Kerkhoff’s office dropped all the charges against 129 defendants, including the defendants originally scheduled for the second trial in December. A hearing in March determined that the charges were dropped without prejudice—i.e., the state could theoretically reopen the charges any time before the statute of limitations expired.
\n\nThe prosecution announced that it would pursue charges against a “smaller, core group most responsible for the destruction and violence that took place on January 20.” According to a motion filed by Kerkhoff’s office,
\n\n\n\n\n“The government is focusing its efforts on prosecuting those defendants who: (1) engaged in identifiable acts of destruction, violence, or other assaultive conduct; (2) participated in the planning of the violence and destruction; and/or (3) engaged in conduct that demonstrates a knowing and intentional use of the black-bloc tactic on January 20, 2017, to perpetrate, aid or abet violence and destruction.”
\n
The indictment, however, remained the same. Group 1 defendants were still scheduled for trials beginning in March 2018, while accused J20 organizers were set to go to trial April 17. Part of the Group 1 defendants’ strategy was to seek continuances, hoping to delay trial until after the April trial block. Letting supposed organizers go to trial first would reinforce the fact that these cases were political in nature. Judge Morin granted the requested continuances and the Group 1 defendants were distributed among the other trial blocks.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/13.jpg\")
Two defendants from the first trial block, who helped turn the tide in the struggle against the J20 charges.
\nThe US Attorney’s office filed a notice in early March 2018 declaring that it planned to call an FBI agent who worked undercover infiltrating the anarchist movement to serve as an expert witness. They requested that this expert’s identity be concealed for her safety, even though she is no longer involved in active cases. Defense attorneys filed motions to exclude the government’s anonymous witness, arguing that the prosecution had cited no principle or method that could qualify her testimony as “expert.” Judge Morin denied the Government’s witness, alias “Julie McMahon.”
\n\nKerkhoff’s office then requested a continuance for the two April trials, citing the denial of their previous expert witness. It was granted; in court filings, the government emphasized that it needed an expert to win convictions. The US Attorney’s office filed a notice declaring their intention to call FBI counterterrorism analyst Christina Williams as an expert witness. William’s credentials as an expert on the black bloc tactic rely entirely on open source research, including a recent book by Dartmouth professor Mark Bray.
\n\nThe fourth day of solidarity actions was called for April 20, 2018, following a call-in day to pressure the prosecution. The CrimethInc. call read,
\n\n\n\n\n“Until all the charges are dropped, Donald Trump and Jennifer Kerkhoff are publicly humiliated, the US ‘justice system’ is abolished, and every last chicken comes home to roost!”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/3.jpg\")
\nIn mid-May 2018, four defendants started trial overseen by Judge Knowles. The state claimed it didn’t need an expert witness for these trials, so they proceeded as planned. The prosecution attempted to use the same arguments from the first trial to build a case, even though this time, the trial block included alleged “breakers.” Compared to the first trial, this one was a short two weeks.
\n\nWhile the closing arguments were taking place, hearings took place in Morin’s courtroom for the May 29 and June 4 trial blocks. In the course of these hearings, the defense alleged that Kerkhoff’s office had willfully withheld evidence. The defense had filed motions expressing this earlier, after the state uploaded additional video footage that the defense had never seen before to a discovery database shared by the prosecution and the defense. Judge Morin agreed that the state had in fact withheld exculpatory evidence, violating the Brady rule, which stipulates that prosecutors must disclose any information that might help the defense in advance of trial. It turned out that Kerkhoff’s office had not just withheld one video, but at least 69 videos.
\n\nJudge Morin indicated that he would introduce sanctions against the US Attorney for the Brady violation, but would rule on them the following week. Kerkhoff tried to pre-empt the sanctions by moving to drop charges without prejudice (i.e., charges can be re-filed before the statute of limitations is up) against seven defendants—the six who were to start trial on June 4 and one who was scheduled to start trial on May 29—and reducing the charges against the remaining three defendants on the May 29 trial to misdemeanors. Due to the wide scope of the Brady violation, Judge Morin responded to the prosecution’s motion by dismissing the conspiracy charges with prejudice (so the charges could not be re-filed) and forbade the government from proceeding on conspiracy charges or Pinkerton liability for all the remaining defendants.
\n\nKerkhoff then dropped all the charges against the three defendants who were to go to trial on May 29. That left 44 defendants with charges.
\n\nBack in Knowles’ courtroom, the jury had started to deliberate regarding the verdict. One juror reportedly communicated to the judge that they had seen “google jury nullification” graffiti in the bathroom and had, in fact, looked up the term. Jury nullification is when a jury knowingly and intentionally finds a defendant not guilty if they do not support a law, because the law is contrary to the jury’s sense of justice or fairness or because they do not support a possible punishment for breaking the law. Despite this, neither side pushed for a mistrial. The following day, another juror admitted to the judge that he saw information on twitter that made him question the prosecution’s credibility. This juror remained on the jury, despite requests by Kerkhoff’s office that he be replaced.
\n\nAfter several days of deliberation, the jury failed to find any defendant guilty of any charge. One defendant was acquitted on all charges; the jury was deadlocked on all charges for another defendant and mixed on charges for the remaining two defendants. A deadlocked jury means a mistrials, and mistrials mean that the state can re-file charges within 30 days. But the state never re-filed charges against these defendants.
\n\nIn the beginning of July, the US Attorney’s office conceded total defeat after a year and half of persecuting the J20 defendants, dropping the charges against the remaining 39 defendants (albeit without prejudice). Against all odds, the defendants had won.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/12.jpg\")
\nIt is encouraging that people stuck together, that most people didn’t plea, that no one informed on anyone else, that people were willing to risk trial even when their best legal and personal option might have been to take a plea deal.
\n\nYet it should not be lost on us that this victory took place on a stage crafted by the state. Facing decades in cages, defendants engaged in this struggle because they had no other choice. And while the charges were mostly bully tactics aimed at trying to expand the definition of conspiracy and liability, the danger was very real. Others got involved in this struggle because they could see the broader implications if the state won. Fundamentally, this was a matter of movement defense.
\n\nThe victory took place after the much of the process-as-punishment had already been meted out. The J20 charges distracted hundreds of people from engaging in other forms of social struggle for up to a year and a half. They confined a large number of presumably brave and capable people to a state of torpor in which many did not risk engaging in street actions because of the potential impact that could have on their pending cases.
\n\nIt’s lucky for everyone that the case ended the way it did. It would have been a long and draining process to sustain the level of organizing through dozens of trials or to do ongoing prisoner support.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/15.jpg\")
Someone left this banner outside Kerkhoff’s home on her 41st birthday. The communiqué reads, in part, “We hope our act of modest pettiness, while it might pale in comparison to yours, can bring some small measure of joy to our freed comrades.”
\nDefendants and supporters discussed several other legal strategies that were not ultimately employed, including a collective non-cooperating plea agreement aimed at minimizing the risks facing the defendants in the worst positions. The idea of seeking a “global plea” for all defendants surfaced again and again without gaining much traction.
\n\nLet’s be clear: all engagement with the legal system is harm reduction. There is no justice to be found in the justice industry. While we achieved certain goals with the strategies we employed, we should evaluate our achievements in the context of our larger aim of building a revolutionary movement that can ultimately overthrow the prevailing order. Avoiding prison time is not the same as winning freedom for all. We must not let the state intimidate us into narrowing the scope of our ambitions or abandoning our original goals.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/23.jpg\")
Shirts printed by comrades in Philadelphia to support local defendants.
\nWe can safely assume that at least some of the state’s functionaries thought these charges would stick. This is borne out by the fact that the original charges were expanded rather than dropped in the superseding indictment. There’s no doubt that prosecutors wanted to use the threat of 75 years in prison to force people to take pleas, but they also aimed to establish a different reading of collective liability.
\n\nIt was hardly unusual that the J20 case targeted participants in a black bloc. The state has been carrying out mass arrests at summit protests and criminalizing militant tactics for decades. But this was a broader and more ambitious extension of the use of conspiracy laws. In fact, if the prosecutors had limited themselves to charging a few specific individuals with property destruction, they might have secured convictions and prison time.
\n\nThe indictment cited defendants as co-conspirators on the grounds that they concealed their faces, wore black, moved as unit, and chanted the same slogans. It cast the black bloc as a coherent ideology rather than simply a tactic. The prosecution aimed to synonymize “black bloc” with riot, implying that anyone wearing black near a bloc is participating in a riot. This new use of conspiracy laws echoed the ways that conspiracy and anti-mask laws have recently been used elsewhere around the world, notably in the Locke Street case in Hamilton, Ontario.
\n\nWhile many people compared this mass arrest to the World Bank arrests in 2002, the state repeatedly referred to Carr, a case involving a much smaller mass arrest in 2005 that occurred the evening of the second Bush inauguration in 2005, following an “Anti-Inaugural Concert.” In that case, a court ruled that the police had broad authority to arrest an entire crowd if it was “substantially infected with violence” and if they couldn’t distinguish who was doing what.
\n\nThe authorities weren’t just seeking convictions. This is most evident in the way they played their hand: typically, when the cops carry out a mass arrest, they press serious charges against a few arrestees they are sure they can convict while ticketing or fining everyone else. The aggressive persecution of everyone arrested that day reaffirms that the top priority of the administration was to set a tone from day one that resistance would not be tolerated, even if that meant risking a loss in court.
\n\n“The charges themselves were the punishment.” We heard this time and time again from those deep in the case. While it’s not clear how high up in the government the order to pursue these charges originated, the J20 ordeal was clearly designed to make protesters conclude that it’s not worth it to protest. If we don’t want that lesson to sink in, we have to use the J20 case to mobilize more protest and organizing than would have occurred otherwise, and ensure that it costs the government more than it intimidates people.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/22.jpg\")
\nThe state’s overreach extended far outside the courtroom. They demanded vast troves of website data by issuing a warrant to DreamHost, the company that hosted DisruptJ20.org. The Department of Justice initially demanded that DreamHost turn over nearly 1.3 IP addresses on visitors to the site. It should be noted here that site administrators for DisruptJ20.org intentionally didn’t store this data, but DreamHost did. The initial warrant also sought all emails associated with the account and unpublished content such as drafted blog posts and photos.
\n\nThis prompted much outcry from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and similar groups. The DOJ also seized information from Facebook regarding the DisruptJ20 page and two J20 protest spokespersons via warrants complete with accompanying gag orders that barred the targets from being informed for seven months. Judge Morin eventually ruled that DreamHost could redact all identifying information before handing over data to the court and put additional limits on the Facebook requests, allowing Facebook to redact the identifying information of all third parties.
\n\nThe government extracted terabytes of personal data from any defendant’s cell phone that was not protected by encryption. At the same time, the prosecution requested a rare “protective” order to keep defendants from sharing police body camera footage with the media—complicating efforts to prepare a defense and shielding law enforcement from public exposure.
\n\nSeeking to bully people where it imagined them to be most vulnerable, the prosecutor’s office offered “wired” plea deals to defendants it presumed to share romantic relationships. In a “wired” plea, both defendants have to accept the deal for it to be valid for either. If a couple were offered a “wired” plea deal and refused, Kerkhoff’s office would stipulate that to take an individual plea, either defendant would have to sign a statement of facts potentially incriminating the other.
\n\nThe state also colluded with right-wing, ultra-conservative Project Veritas, relying on undercover videos of J20 organizing meetings produced by Project Veritas as evidence. Project Veritas is known for heavily editing its videos, and that is apparent in the videos introduced in this case. One of the videos that prosecutors introduced came from the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group, overlaid with audio from a Project Veritas video and including a slideshow of pictures from the protest. Prosecutors played these videos in court just one day after Project Veritas sent a woman undercover to the Washington Post dishonestly pretending to be a victim of Roy Moore, a US Senate candidate accused of sexual misconduct.
\n\nThe Project Veritas videos ultimately brought about the downfall of the prosecution, as Kerkhoff’s office had dishonestly edited the videos before submitting them as evidence. It’s not unusual that the prosecution lied—practically all prosecutors lie on a daily basis and face no consequences for it—but that they lied so carelessly as to be caught.
\n\n\n\n\n“To be sure, the people most affected be prosecutorial deception are often not activists, but people of color facing crimes of poverty and the so-called War on Drugs. The injustice of the criminal legal system extends far beyond the repression meted out against the J20 defendants, with one key difference being there isn’t national media attention to put a spotlight on this kind of daily “misconduct” in the average criminal case. Yes, the prosecution lied about evidence, and that’s a disgusting abuse of power, but we also reject the idea of “good” or “ethical” prosecution in a system designed to lock people in cages or keep them captive through other repressive institutions like parole/probation, electronic home monitoring, and living with felony records.”
\n\n \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/20.jpg\")
A banner that appeared in July 2017 during the second week of solidarity.
\nOrganizing 200 or more people scattered across a continent is no small feat. Communication took place via signal loops, a collective defense listserv, and conference calls. At first, informal regional anarchist networks led the charge to raise money and connect defendants. Later, as the organizing structure became more formal, people organized weekly virtual spokescouncil meetings; the idea was that each region could have one or two people on the call who would report back to their respective comrades. If you weren’t from a region with many defendants, you could just join the call yourself, as could any defendants and supporters who agreed to the Points of Unity. The calls usually involved an array of supporters and defendants.
\n\nThe ad-hoc defense committee never had a formal structure. It was self-organized, using consensus decision-making processes but without clarity on what constituted a quorum or who, exactly people were making decisions for.
\n\n\n\n\n“A listserv and weekly conference calls were our best means of keeping everyone in the loop: sharing updates and motions, communicating about legal matters, making sure everyone had housing and transportation to and from DC for court appearances, coordinating in-person defendant meetings after hearings, asking questions, offering resources, and checking in with people about whether their lawyers were being responsive.”
\n\n \n
The establishment of working groups came shortly after, when different defendants and supporters organized themselves into working groups according to their interest and experience. The first working groups focused on legal strategy and media, later supplemented by political organizing, fundraising and finance, social media, wellness, and a cadre of non-defendant facilitators. Weekly bulletins summarized updates on legal developments, plea deals, the media campaign, corporate media coverage, political organizing such as days of action and call-in campaigns, and working group report-backs.
\n\nThis organizing structure played an important role in getting hundreds of people on the same page. Perhaps the most important takeaway here is the value of keeping in touch. Instead of isolating themselves to navigate the halls of justice alone, defendants reached out to each other to act in solidarity whenever possible. While rare, this approach to legal solidarity could be as useful for a dozen defendants as it was to 198. The early trial strategy came directly out of inter-defendant communication early on, before there were larger support structures in place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/14.jpg\")
\nWhile we dream of a life outside capitalism, we’re still living in this nightmare. We needed cold, hard cash to get through the J20 ordeal. The DisruptJ20 organizers had put out a call for money on the day of the arrests, anticipating that the fight would drag on a long time and raising a large initial sum. Regional anarchists networks raised money for local defendants via crowdsourcing sites and fundraising events in their communities. As time wore on, it became clear that we needed more funds and that some defendants who didn’t have a regional network to fall back on were slipping through the cracks. When you clicked on the “donate” button on the DefendJ20Resistance site, you were pointed to nine different regional funds you could donate to. We could practically hear people putting away their wallets.
\n\nTo streamline the process for donations, publicize the case, and increase the likelihood that more people would donate, we created a national crowdsourcing campaign; it went live shortly before the first trial opened. Many artists donated resistance-themed art to the national campaign, for donors to receive in return for their generosity. The money was used to reimburse defendants for their travel expenses to DC, to pay for housing and food during trials, and to assist defendants who had hired private counsel, among other needs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/1.jpg\")
Flash tattoos available at Champion Tattoo Company in DC during a day-long event to raise defense funds.
\nWhen you’re planning a militant protest, you can’t expect the law or the Constitution to protect you. Likewise, when things go awry, you can’t leave your fate solely in the hands of lawyers. The vast majority of them, even the ones who are sympathetic and share some of our values, make most of their legal decisions as lawyers. There are exceptions, but if we’re interested in bringing our fight into the courts and the public eye, we have to take ownership over our cases both as a movement and as defendants. Ideally, lawyers can work with us, but they won’t fight our battles for us. As anarchists, if we’re critical of representation in governance and politics, we need to think through the ways this applies when we find ourselves facing down criminal charges.
\n\n\n\n\n“Beyond analyzing evidence, defendants collaborated and spent hours discussing the prosecution’s theory of the case and how to craft a dignified defense that didn’t throw their co-defendants under the bus. People came up with point-by-point refutations of the indictment, challenged Kerkhoff’s characterization of the black bloc, and even brainstormed potential expert witnesses. These conversations were invaluable and provided defendants with important resources to bring to their lawyers.”
\n
In the J20 case, there were surprisingly few movement lawyers. Most defendants had court-appointed lawyers (including a few from prestigious white shoe law firms), while a few hired private counsel. One person deeply involved in the case had this to say about the ongoing struggle dealing with lawyers:
\n\n\n\n\n“Due to a complete lack of movement lawyers, or lawyers experienced in defending political cases, with maybe one or two exceptions, certain things played out differently than they would normally in this kind of mass political prosecution. First, the reliance on court appointed lawyers or lawyers from high-powered DC firms, and the absence of movement lawyers, meant that their defense of the charges was virtually devoid of politics or left political framing, whether in motions to dismiss, other pretrial motions, or at trial. When the political elements were framed by most lawyers, even the ones who best understood them, they were framed in such a way as to throw the more militant activists under the bus. For the most part, the lawyers also had no idea how to engage with the media to advance their goals in the case.
\n\n“Second, a lack of experience working on these kinds of political cases meant the lawyers did not know how to work collaboratively with each other, their clients, or supporters, or else were unwilling to. Each group acted in their own silo with very little engagement. Eventually, the lawyers used a listserv to communicate with each other and there was some collaboration; but with the exception of a handful of lawyers, that collaboration was very limited in scope. Because the lawyers generally operated in their own silo, what limited collaboration did happen wasn’t necessarily communicated with defendants or supporters and even if it was, that didn’t mean that those lawyers necessarily wanted to engage and discuss strategy with defendants or supporters. Fortunately, there were a couple of lawyers who were willing to take strategy ideas from defendants and supporters and transmit those ideas to the broader lawyer group, but that process was less than desirable since the lawyers involved often did not fully understand the reasons behind the strategy and for the most part were not interested in discussing it.
\n\n“Third, there was a concerted effort by defendants and supporters to involve movement lawyers from outside DC (since so few movement lawyers seem to reside in the DMV area), but those efforts never really panned out.
\n\nSo, with the lawyers in one silo and the defendants and supporters in another silo, legal strategies and reasonable ideas for politicizing the cases were relegated to echo chambers in calls and meetings with defendants and supporters. In a collaborative environment with lawyers used to litigating political cases, lawyers would more naturally work with defendants and supporters and concern themselves less with losing “privilege” and issues of conflict; the political nature of the cases and the benefits from collaboration are often seen as more important to a collective process than the losses or complications such collaboration might bring. This is not meant to dismiss the good reasons that people with very different circumstances and risk factors have to maintain separation, but in this case, collaboration would have weighted the legal battle in favor of the defendants.”
\n
It cannot be stressed enough that wherever the lawyers worked together, it was because defendants insisted that they do so. It was defendants standing up to their lawyers and insisting that they would not participate in a legal strategy that benefited them at other defendants’ expense that determined the outcome of the case. And it was defendant labor looking through the discovery—not lawyers—that uncovered the thread that led to the 69 Project Veritas recordings that Kerkhoff had dishonestly concealed.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/19.jpg\")
\nIn the discourse around J20 solidarity, little space was given order to the rhetoric of rights or the idea of a just or benevolent court. While a narrative of individual innocence might have served some people, most people focused on the violence of the police and the efforts of the state to criminalize resistance. Solidarity regardless of guilt was a guiding tenet: rejecting the legitimacy of the legal system and recognizing the ways it upholds fundamental injustices. Instead of playing into the trope of good protestor vs. bad protestor, people pushed back against the state, identifying it as an enemy, refusing the narrative that there were “good protestors” exercising their first amendment rights while a few “bad apples” spoiled the day.
\n\n\n\n\n“More than facts or the notion of guilt, one’s experience and treatment in court is dictated by race, gender, citizenship, and access to specialized and expensive resources. Our support for all J20 defendants is not dependent on whether they did or didn’t do the acts the state alleges.”
\n\n \n
However, there was an ongoing tension at play between affirming the beautiful moments of rebellion that occurred on J20 and keeping people as safe as possible in the face of potential prison sentences. Defendants and supporters struggled to maintain integrity as they navigated the complexities of coordinating an outward-facing media strategy that didn’t implicate anyone and an internal political framework that supported illegality and militancy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/11.jpg\")
\nDefendants and supporters understood the benefit of shaping the public narrative by generating their own material and “harnessing” corporate media coverage. Defendants and supporters created videos and podcasts, publicizing the case through anarchist media networks. Supporters coordinated synchronized twitter campaigns; Unicorn Riot reported on the trials in detail.
\n\nWhile independent outlets were usually the ones to announce breaking news, the US Attorney’s Office and the legal system on the whole felt greater pressure from corporate media narratives. Coverage of the case appeared in the New York Times, the Washingon Post, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Al Jeezera, and the Independent.
\n\nThe effort to get reporters into the courtroom for the first trial was a huge success. By broadcasting the vulnerabilities of the government’s case along with its collusion with far-right groups and biased, bigoted police officers, defendants exposed the political motivations of the prosecution. Once news of the acquittals from the first trial spread far and wide, the government had little choice but to dismiss scores of cases. By the time of the second trial, Defend J20 Resistance was able to effectively draw media attention to the evidentiary violations and subsequent sanctions against the government, making it impossible for the US Attorney’s Office to proceed further.
\n\nWe began the J20 case in a corporate media climate that either refused to cover the J20 arrests entirely or else that covered them in such a distorted way as to give the public a very negative perception of the defendants. Experienced defendants and supporters coached those who were not as experienced in how to work strategically with mainstream and independent media on high-profile cases involving significant danger. Spokespeople were empowered among defendants and supporters who were willing to speak to reporters. Early on, we began issuing press releases to update media on changes in the case and to spark interest.
\n\nBy the time of the first trial, there was significant mainstream and independent media coverage. The sweeping coverage of the first set of acquittals embarrassed the US Attorney’s Office and compelled the prosecutor to dismiss the majority of the remaining cases. With the prosecutor off-kilter, Defend J20 Resistance never let up, continuing to issue press releases as breaking news was uncovered about fascist and extreme-right collaboration with the US Attorney’s Office and serious evidentiary violations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/5.jpg\")
\nJ20 defense work consumed thousands and thousands of hours of volunteer labor. Many of the defendants and their supporters did not know each other before the arrests. It should not be understated how much work people took on under tremendous stress. Many defendants also had to make weighty decisions while scared and isolated.
\n\nWhile we don’t intend to air anyone’s dirty laundry, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that this arduous process involved conflicts. We speak on these here not to embarrass anyone, but in hopes that our experience can inform future anti-repression organizing.
\n\nThe defendants were ultimately able to present a strong, unified front, but there were tensions between people accused of different actions, questions about “innocence politics,” and conflicting ideas about goals and strategy. Some people felt their ideas or proposals were stifled or even blocked by a centralized group. There were critiques of the formality of the structure and there were many divisions along lines of experience, region, tendency, identity, and capacity.
\n\nNew opportunities for flexibility appeared when people were divided into trial blocks and began to coordinate more closely with each other on that basis. Despite internal conflicts, there was room for creative autonomous activities that complimented the coordinated defense efforts.
\n\nIf anything, we can let this saga inform how we organize in the future. How should people make decisions together? How do we ensure that agency isn’t consolidated in the hands of a small group? And how can we make sure everyone’s voices are heard? What kind of models do we use, especially if we don’t want to fall back on familiar frameworks like spokescouncils?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/6.jpg\")
\nWe approached the J20 case as movement defense.
\n\nWhile we should not overlook the specific cases of those who were threatened with decades in prison, in many important ways we were all on trial. The legal precedents around collective punishment, proximity to crime, conspiracy, intention, and liability would have been far-reaching and incredibly dangerous. People fought the charges and supported the defendants not only to protect themselves and each other, but because it was clear that if the defendants were convicted, many similar cases would follow. The case law would be used in future legal battles, especially in contexts in which people are even more vulnerable within the legal system, such as anti-police struggles and indigenous movements.
\n\nThe capacity and connections we built helped strengthen other struggles against repression across the country. Broadening our solidarity with other anti-fascists, Standing Rock arrestees, and communities that are consistently targeted with police violence helped situate the J20 case as part of a larger movement against the state and capitalism. Aligning with movements against police and prisons, the J20 defendants and supporters fought repression while contextualizing broader struggles against the police.
\n\n\n\n\n“We further challenge the valorization of ‘political’ defendants and prisoners over other people whose lives and families are vulnerable to state violence. The people most often and most brutally affected by the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPD), anti-rioting laws, and the horror of the criminal legal system are not protesters on Inauguration Day, but people of color living in so-called Washington DC who face this abhorrent system every day.”
\n\n \n
There was a consistent effort to acknowledge that all court cases are political, that the system is rigged against the poor and against people of color, that centuries before Trump was elected the state was already a fundamentally colonialist, white supremacist formation, and that lying and concealing evidence are the standard operating procedures of both the cops and the courts.
\n\nIn addition to placing the case in a broader context of repression, defense efforts included various tried and true anarchist methods that engaged a broader body of allies to pressure on the state. There was an ongoing call-in campaign to Kerkhoff’s office to push the US attorney’s office to drop the charges. There were four different calls for days of solidarity actions. Many organizers used the case to spread awareness and strengthen ties in their own communities. The July 2017 day of solidarity offered a necessary morale boost after the case had dragged on for six months. And while it may be a matter of correlation rather than causation, Kerkhoff’s office dropped the charges against 129 defendants the day before the third day of solidarity on January 20, 2018.
\n\nWhen we defeat a state offensive like the J20 charges, this frees us to continue fighting on our own terms, rather than being stuck reacting to one assault after another.
\n\n\n\n\n“The same force that drives people to rebel and fight also drives people to protect and support each other. What we do and how we move through the world differentiates us from what we are fighting.”
\n\n-A defendant
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/2.jpg\")
\nEveryone who was carrying a smartphone when they were arrested at J20 had it seized. As if we didn’t already know better! If you are going to a militant protest, leave your phone at home. As some comrades reminded us in the aftermath of J20, “your phone is a cop.” Investigators attempted to break into all of these phones, using a device made by Cellebrite to bypass passcodes and encryption. One defendant received an 8000-page document detailing the contents of their phone, including everything from contacts, emails, and texts to social media data and communications stored in the cloud.
\n\nThe state had an easier time obtaining data from unencrypted phones, and Android operating systems appear to have been more vulnerable than Apple IOS. But technology changes constantly—what seems secure one day might be cracked the next. Private companies are investing millions in tools like GrayKey that help law enforcement break into phones. We can take steps to mitigate those risks, but simply not bringing a phone with you remains the safest approach.
\n\nAlthough the conspiracy charges didn’t work out for the state this time, we can be sure that all the information they gleaned from seized phones has been saved and analyzed. To some extent, our networks have been exposed and the state has gained valuable insight into who knows whom.
\n\nHad all the participants left their phones at home, the amount of potential evidence would have been considerably less. Many so-called “co-conspirator statements” came from recovered smart phone messages. Evidence of “intent to riot” came from emails and text messages. Participation in activist email lists and having activist events on phone calendars was trotted out as proof that defendants had planned to “engage in a riot” on J20.
\n\nPouring over the evidence in this case—hundreds of hours of video footage, innumerable photos pulled from news and social media—it’s striking how much of the evidence was “open source” information. While there were videos from surveillance and police body cameras, much of the evidence came from videos posted to social media accounts. These were from a variety of sources—not just the far-right groups that insinuated themselves into the protests, but also people who were ostensibly “friendly” to the march. A live-stream of the entire march served as a key piece of evidence in the two trials that actually happened and the prosecution planned to use it in every trial that made it into the courtroom.
\n\nRomanian hackers infiltrated the MPD’s network of outdoor surveillance cameras for several days before the inauguration, infecting 123 out of 187 cameras with ransomware and rendering them unable to record. While some have hypothesized that this explains why little MPD camera footage was submitted as evidence, the department maintains that MPD had all their cameras back on line by the inauguration.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/17.jpg\")
The Anti-Fascist/Anti-Capitalist March assembles at Logan Circle on January 20, 2017.
\nThe J20 case poses questions about what kind of risks and losses we need to prepare for as we consider how to resist the state. We’re not advocating for people to become martyrs who do prison time for the revolution—but the state seems to be increasingly using felony, conspiracy, and terrorism charges to try to crush anarchist resistance, and we need to become more skilled at navigating this reality. We shouldn’t expect the authorities to play fair or abide by their own rules, nor can we expect the law to protect us. We have to strategize within the legal system while crafting our own narratives, aligning our legal battles with other vital struggles and communities in resistance to the state.
\n\nHow do we pass along the knowledge we have gained to a new generation of anarchists? We need to find ways to transfer stories, tactics, and lessons from one generation to the next, filling the gaps in our collective memory. Considering that many J20 defendants were radicalized through the internet, anti-fascist struggles, and Standing Rock, it should not be surprising how many of them were carrying phones when they were arrested. A few security culture trainings ahead of J20 could have gone a long way. As mainstream culture evolves to integrate more technology into our lives, we should keep abreast of the potential impact that can have on our movements.
\n\nMost of us increasingly rely on digital communication; we have fallen out of practice using other communication methods we could have employed on J20. We should be handing out pamphlets at every demonstration explaining good security practices, as well as including contingency plans, rendezvous points, and the basics regarding how to keep a march together. A small map of the part of DC we were in could have come in handy, especially with so many people from out of town. So would scout teams running communication.
\n\nNext time you attend a serious demonstration, consider not taking your phone, or getting a burner phone if you will absolutely need one. If you are kettled with your own phone, consider smashing it before you are arrested. Seriously—take a deep breath and reflect on whether you would rather hear your text messages read back to you in a court of law and hand over the details of your intimate connections to the state so they can weave a web of association between you and your comrades, or if it would be better to have to ask those same friends to help you get a new phone. If you still can’t bring yourself to smash your phone, at least consider spending your time in the kettle erasing it, wiping it as clean as you possibly can. Even when you’re not going to a demonstration, you should always keep your phone encrypted and secured with a long alphanumeric password; any fingerprint or facial recognition features should be turned off.
\n\nThe black bloc works best when employed properly. That means ALL BLACK. There should be no logos visible; both your face and hair should be completely concealed. Any markings on your clothes, shoes, bag, or face will be used to identify you, as will your glasses.
\n\nIf you’re caught in a kettle, get creative: trade clothes with each other until your outfits are so mishmashed that the state will never be able to identify you. Or put all your black clothes in a pile and light them on fire. If it’s not cold, consider adding your shoes to the fire or leaving them behind. Or else everybody could trade shoes, ending up with mismatched pairs. We don’t know the extent to which DNA testing may be employed, but people could pass clothes and shoes around until so many people have touched them that it’s impossible to tell what belongs to whom.
\n\nUltimately, the state had a hard time building cases against individuals in part because of how they were trying the case, but also because we made it hard for them to build cases against us. In short, the black bloc works—and solidarity gets the goods.
\n\nIf the day comes where we have to do it all again, we’ll be there in a heartbeat.
\n\n\n\n\n”Revolutionary solidarity is the secret that destroys all walls, expressing love and rage at the same time as one’s own insurrection in the struggle against Capital and the State.”
\n\nDaniela Carmignani
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/8.jpg\")
Rebels with an umbrella in downtown DC during the inauguration, after the umbrella charge that freed several dozen participants in the march from the police kettle. The J20 case made the umbrella into a symbol of solidarity, showing how seemingly fragile everyday objects can be used to defeat the full force of the police state.
\nI Was a J20 Street Medic and Defendant
\n\nAnarchist Resistance to the Trump Inauguration
\n\nBetween the Sun and the Sea: Icarus at 12th and L
\n\nJ20 Protest Simulator: Choose Your Own Adventure in the Streets and Courts of Washington, DC
\n\nMaking the Best of Mass Arrests: 12 Lessons from the Kettle During the J20 Protests
\n\nSolidarity as a Weapon: A Critique of the J20 Support Campaign
\n\nDrop J20 Podcast—updates throughout the case courtesy of It’s Going Down
\n\nConspiracy to Riot—An episode of the subMedia show Trouble detailing the J20 case
\n\n\n\n\nWhat would constitute real justice for the J20 defendants? If we understand justice as retribution—poetic justice—the police, prosecutors, the judge, and all the other state officials who are implicated in the past ten months of intimidation would be subjected to the same treatment they have inflicted. The police officers would be rounded up and imprisoned; the detective who lied to the grand jury would have his own life ruined by calumny he was powerless to counteract; the prosecutors would be publicly humiliated and forced to face the possibility of spending the rest of their lives in prison. Donald Trump would walk across the desert on a broken ankle, pursued by helicopters and armed men with dogs, before dying of dehydration, terrified and alone, within miles of hospital facilities—as he has forced others to do in the Sonoran desert simply in hopes of rejoining their families.
\n\nOur oppressors should be grateful that we do not believe in retribution. We aspire to transform society from the bottom up, not to mete out supposed justice. If ever we are the ones to determine their fates, we will aspire to forgiveness.
\n\nBut the first priority has to be to interrupt the harm that they are perpetuating.
\n\n \n
Dane Powell was not arrested during the inaugural protests, but identified and arrested by the MPD the next day, when he went to pick someone up at jail. Held for five days before release, he was initially charged with 14 felonies. After the state presented video evidence of Dane breaking windows and throwing rocks at an initial hearing, Dane pled guilty in April 2017 to rioting and assaulting a police officer. Part of his plea deal included signing a statement of facts about his own behavior on January 20, but he did not incriminate anyone else. Leibovitz sentenced Dane to 36 months in prison, but suspended all but four months on the condition that he successfully complete two years of supervised probation. Dane served four months in a federal prison in Florida. He was the only J20 arrestee to serve time. ↩
\nIf we want to see more victories like the J20 case, one of the first steps is making it possible for poor people to get out of jail. There have been beautiful acts of solidarity with those in jail, like the bailouts of black mothers on Mother’s Day and the mass bailout of those held in Riker’s Island, and there are efforts to eliminate cash bail on the grounds that it unfairly impacts poor people, creating modern day debtor’s prisons. But eliminating cash bail alone won’t necessarily solve the problem—most places would replace it with technological monitoring and allow local courts to decide whom to keep in custody and whom to release until trial. The solution is not to reform the system, but to delegitimize it, challenging the notion that the courts have the right to incarcerate defendants in the first place. ↩
\nRioting charges are inherently political in nature. The J20 defendants were originally charged under the DC Riot Act, originally written to criminalize black protest in the 1960s. Shortly after it passed, DC police used the statute to legitimize the arrests of over 6100 people during rebellions following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The law was used to depoliticize rebellion, deeming it “mindless violence.” The Riot Act has historically been used to take the teeth out of political rebellion, but the state often uses additional charges to clamp down on uprisings. While riot charges have recently been pressed against people arrested at demonstrations and protests, those arrested in fierce riots like the black-led uprising in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 are almost exclusively serving time for theft, burglary, or larceny charges. In that case, the state is still trying to depoliticize the situation, pushing the narrative that black-led uprisings against police shootings are not political but criminal. ↩
\nSeveral blocks before the L & 12th Street intersection, I was already feeling that the march had run its course. At each cross street, we met a line of police, sirens blaring. A few brave souls still managed to fell some final windows on the periphery. Yet while the Bank of America windows had crashed in triumphant cacophony, these windows struck the pavement with an urgency that reflected our increasingly dire situation. We had no destination, no end goal. It felt as though we were running solely to evade police. I knew that it was time to break from the group, yet I still held a kind of separation anxiety.
\n\nLeaving has always been hard for me. Dispersing consistently feels like a haphazardly unthought-out ending tacked onto an otherwise compelling novel. A novel that begins with, “Collectively, anything is possible—you can do whatever you’d like” and ends with, “Everyone goes their own way and pretends to be normal.” Leaving the bloc means leaving the safety of a powerful mass of people, often to wander the streets immediately adjacent to crime scenes, alone, with police looking to single out suspects. There was a rumor circulating that, given their history with lawsuits, the DC police would be unlikely to mass arrest. This false prediction spelled doom for us unlucky rioters, as the police did just that. It was with these thoughts circling my head, alongside memories of past dispersals gone awry, that I decided to stay with the march.
\n\nI was with a few friends. We stayed together. We kept track of each other. As the march shrunk in size, we paired off and prepared to jettison ourselves from the bloc. We turned to face an alleyway on L Street between 13th and 12th. I knew very well that this could be my chance to safely exit the march. My friends bolted down the alleyway, not knowing what lay the next street over. For a moment, I thought to follow suit, but decided that too many of us in one place might attract police attention. A few minutes later, I was trapped between a wall and a riot shield. Facing the corridor that had offered safe passage just moments earlier to anyone brave enough to step down its halls, I contemplated the hesitation that had led me to this fate. If there’s anything I can say from my experience being pinned against that wall, it is that a split second of intuition in the street is worth more than weeks of prior planning.
\n\nThe kettle was where I made my biggest mistake. It was there, and the moments just before, that I put almost no effort into escaping. The police had us sardined together so tightly that I gravely underestimated our collective potential within the kettle. I thought that I was about to be arrested with at most seventy people, less than a third of our actual numbers. I was primarily among strangers. In my heart, I felt that I would participate in a second attempt to charge the police line. It was my fear of being cast as a leader, in a film produced by live-streamers and on-duty officers, that kept me from voicing my intent. If there was any time to risk collective trust and courage, it was there, where we were most vulnerable.
\n\nThere was a larger reason I was compliant in my own captivity. I felt myself above persecution. There are two reasons why one would go willingly to their arrest. The first, they think that they haven’t committed any crime. The second, that they committed a crime so flawlessly that they could not possibly be convicted of it. Both of these presumptions involve a false sense of security; neither save you from prosecution. Though I did not delude myself with the pretense that I had performed a perfect execution of black bloc tactics, I considered myself “high-hanging fruit.” I was counting on the prosecution to be lazy, to lack the funding or time to convict me. When I was in the kettle, I was convinced that I wouldn’t actually be arrested. At worst, I would be charged with a misdemeanor, slapped on the wrist, and eventually end up with a check from a class action lawsuit. Instead, I had to navigate the next year and a half with looming felonies.
\n\nI had not come to DC innocently. I knew the risk, the potential repercussions. I chose to look them in the face. The pepper spray and stun grenades were terrifying, but not unexpected. In some ways, they heightened my senses and fortified my convictions. My heart races when I look back on the march—but not from trauma, nor from anxiety. It drums in vigorous reverie, recounts the last time it beat with purpose.
\n\nOver the following year, I was forced to tame my heart. In court, I stilled my breathing, attempted to hide my guilt. I kept a caged life. The legal procedure left me fraught with anxiety. I clung to the safety and certainty of routine. I denied every passion, every risk, in hopes that I would be able to convince a jury that I was simply not the adventurous type. My heart sat and sulked. I came to learn that, as a friend so eloquently put it, “The process is the punishment.”
\n\nFelonies change things. I catch glimpses of understanding in the eyes of my friends who have faced prosecution to this degree. One of the beauties of black bloc is that I might be anyone under this mask; a restaurant server, a designer, a nurse. Once donned, the mask allowed me to act in ways a nurse can only dream.
\n\nTo be unmasked is to be held in purgatory between selves. I was no longer the person I was in the streets, yet I could not return to being who I had been just days earlier. At its core, the bloc hinges on the moment when we shed our black clothes and return to normalcy. While there have been times where I’ve de-bloc’ed with a profoundly different understanding of the world, I was still banking on returning to work with only one less sick day. As time passed after J20 and my charges remained, I realized there was a possibility that I might never return to being the person I had been before my arrest.
\n\nDuring the interim awaiting trial, I chose a course of action that seems common among anarchist pending-felons. I applied to college.
\n\nFor me, college was an attempt to regain some agency in two different ways. In one way, I was trying to influence my potential sentencing. If I could convince a judge that I was an upstanding citizen, then he or she might be a little more lenient in punishing me. Going to college was also an attempt to salvage my future, a future I felt was starting to escape my grasp.
\n\nAt the time I was arrested, I did not consider myself to have a clear vision of the future. Yet in the wake of my arrest, all successful futures seemed out of reach. Success felt like a mirage, shimmering, hazy, always on the horizon. My case continued and evidence mounted against me. I scrambled to claim any sort of successful future I could before a conviction made one unobtainable. I raced towards the horizon without drawing any closer to it, meeting the same scene in every direction. My charges sent me spiraling and forced me to examine my feelings of helplessness.
\n\nWhen I did so, I realized that all along, I had held within me a concrete image of success after all. It was not the unimaginable utopia I had believed myself to be pursuing. On the contrary, it was all too familiar; I had simply kept it intentionally obscured from myself. When I honestly consulted myself about what constituted my image of a successful future, what I found was indistinguishable from the world I already knew—only in the future I had been imagining, I had a little more money, a better presence on social media. I had been so disgusted by this vision that I had I banished it to the horizon of my mind.
\n\nThe anarchist canon has changed dramatically over the past decade. Today, we are not as steeped in subculture. Our politics rely a lot less on consumer choices. We’ve come a long way from the cornerstone pieces of the early 2000s. Early CrimethInc. texts took the Situationist exhortation “Never Work—Ever” literally, proposing a sort of exodus that often looked more like voluntary exile; today, as work becomes more and more a part of our social as well as professional lives, the proposal seems unthinkably absurd. We have largely escaped the cultural pitfalls of the punk scene, expanded our access to funding for our projects, even created our own platforms so that anarchist ideas can proliferate. Along with these conscious efforts to grow and develop nuance with age, for me, something has shifted silently in the background.
\n\nI gave up my resistance to work—even took up office at some of the same companies I believed were bringing about an apocalyptic nightmare. I closed my eyes, clicked my heels, and repeated “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” I justified my increasingly indiscriminate use of money, sought to tally up my influence on the world. I became obsessed with power, quantifiable power. I searched for any sign that the anarchist movement was gaining traction, that one day we could finally make “The Switch.” My measurements for success had paralleled social norms; now they began to overlap with them. Soon Anarchy was just something I believed in. Aside from sharing meals and resources among friends, it was not something I practiced.
\n\nTo some, the black bloc is a tactic, a means to an end. For me, having lived through a myriad of outcomes, black bloc is a practice. Black blocs are a practice in timing: when to return tear gas to the police, when to leave an intersection, when to smash windows, when to disperse. As in all practice, some days are better than others. To be in bloc is to experience what can be possible when the laws that typically govern us are momentarily superseded and how to act when our adversaries try to reassert them. When we participate in black blocs, we are attempting to learn the balance between exercising an otherwise impossible freedom at the cost of our safety and maintaining a minimum degree of safety so that we can continue to act freely.
\n\nEvery night as I mulled over my legal predicament, I would ask myself the same questions. “Are black blocs a pertinent part of the way we do Anarchy today? Are they just hollow tradition from a bygone era? Are they worth risking the world you inhabit daily for a fleeting experience, however ecstatic?” I think of my friends who are a little older than I, who have better jobs, who were noticeably absent from the\nmarch on January 20. For many people, their lot of worldly success is not worth the risk.
\n\nWhen I look back to the texts that inspired me as I was coming of age in radical politics, I trace a common thread binding them. Travel logs, accounts of underground healthcare, epics of animal liberation—at their core, all of them conveyed the same story. They told that There is a Secret World Concealed Within This One; a world that I had long since forgotten. The once-common anarchist saying “Another world is possible” is no longer spoken between friends. It is not overlaid on images of riots, nor commonly held as an anarchist truth. I mourn it’s absence. There are those who would say there is no life outside of capitalism, that we are bound to this world by birth. Only recently has the premise emerged that being born into a position invalidates your ability to transcend it.
\n\nThe truth is that we alone are the visionaries of our success. We define our values, sculpt our objects of beauty. If we build from the blueprints of power and safety laid out in this world, then we will make more of the same. But I believe that we are capable of breaching the precedents of modern life. We can imagine less abhorrent futures, create lives worth living—but to do so, we must abandon the worldly successes we seek for validation. If we want to continue to experience the transcendental, unbridled ecstasy of black blocs, the practice of anarchy and experimentation, then we must create and maintain worlds in which the consequences of a felony rioting conviction are not so dire—worlds worth leaving this one to get to. Another world is not only possible, it is waiting for us. We must believe in our ability to reach it so we can find the strength to depart. We have to let go of our attachments and truly believe that we are capable of taking flight.
\n\nIn the face of repression, I sometimes feel like a young Icarus, hurtling towards the sun only to plummet into the sea. All exercises in freedom have these risks. To those who dare to soar, may we also learn to swim, and never fear the consequences of singed wings.
\n\nDespite its abrupt end and unfortunate outcome, the march on January 20, 2017 was one of the most inspiring, vitalizing moments of my life. Despite its obvious challenges, I am thankful that facing charges has given me time to reflect. Let me take a moment here to explicitly state, with a clear mind and certain heart, that—having eluded conviction—I would 100% do it again no questions asked. I hope someday to share an experience of elation similar to that of J20 with the readers of this piece. If and when that day comes, may we both avoid arrest and get off scot-free.
\n\nWith love,
\n\na CrimethInc. ex-defendant
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/23/1.jpg\")
\nThis is part of a series looking back on the events of J20 and the legal struggle that followed it. Check out the rest of the series:
\n\nAnarchist Resistance to the Trump Inauguration
\n\nWe’ve Got Your Back: The Story of the J20 Defense
\n\nI Was a J20 Street Medic and Defendant
\n\nJ20 Protest Simulator—Choose Your Own Adventure in the Streets and Courts of Washington, DC
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2019/01/22/analysis-anarchist-resistance-to-the-trump-inauguration-learning-from-the-events-of-january-20-2017", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2019/01/22/analysis-anarchist-resistance-to-the-trump-inauguration-learning-from-the-events-of-january-20-2017", "title": "Anarchist Resistance to the Trump Inauguration : Understanding the Events of January 20, 2017", "summary": "An analysis of the J20 protests based in a blow-by-blow review of the actions of police & demonstrators throughout January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/header.jpg", "date_published": "2019-01-22T23:32:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:38Z", "tags": [ "J20", "Inauguration", "black bloc", "DC" ], "content_html": "Two years have passed since the demonstrations against Donald Trump’s inauguration. Thanks to an epic legal struggle, all the charges have been resolved or dropped. Now we can discuss what there is to learn from the events of January 20 and the ensuing court cases. This article focuses on the march that took place on the day itself, utilizing a wealth of information that came to light during the subsequent investigation. We will follow it with an analysis of the J20 legal battle and solidarity efforts, as well as additional perspectives from participants.
\n\nOn January 20, anarchists took on the most powerful empire in the history of the solar system at the heart of the spectacle intended to legitimize its rule—at precisely the moment that a new administration sought to introduce an even more authoritarian model of governance. This was a profoundly courageous act. In retaliation, prosecutors attempted to set a legal precedent that would criminalize protest itself, in hopes of being able to inflict the full force of felony prosecution on anyone in proximity to any act of resistance. The ensuing legal battle lasted a year and a half.
\n\nThe mass arrest that occurred on January 20, 2017 was not inevitable. It was the consequence of specific decisions that the organizers and participants in the march made; it could have turned out differently. Everyone who might one day be compelled to take part in high-risk street protest stands to benefit from an analysis of this action. It is an especially interesting case study in that it represents a worst-case scenario: 500 demonstrators without scouts, a communications network, or a solid plan taking on 28,000 security personnel at a pivotal historical moment.
\n\nWas it a good idea to mobilize against Trump’s inauguration? Was it a good idea to call for a confrontational march on that day? What did anarchists accomplish—and what can we learn from our mistakes and from the strategy of the police? Here, we will present a blow-by-blow review of the events of the day and address each of these questions in turn.
\n\nFor other perspectives on J20 and its legacy, you can read this narrative by a street medic and defendant, this reflection from another defendant from the black bloc, and play this simulation of the events of the day and the court case. For a full overview of the court case that followed it, read “We’ve Got Your Back: The Story of the J20 Defense.”
\n\nA montage of scenes from the day, following the checkpoint blockades. The most charming moment comes at 3:52: “Can you please move, sir?”
\nYou’re reading the news. You read about Trump’s intention to ban Muslims from visiting the United States, put children in concentration camps, suppress information about climate change, and build new pipelines. You see the Democrats trying to cash in on your anger in order to get back into office and renew faith in the corporate media and the FBI. You see the sneering face of power, and you seethe with rage—but mostly you just feel helpless. You are alone, staring at a screen.
\n\nYou meet at Logan Circle at 10 am on the first day of Trump’s presidency. You are wearing a colorful outer layer so you can move through the streets of Washington, DC without attracting more attention than any other pedestrian. Beneath it is a layer of black clothing: black pants, black shoes with no logo visible, a black hooded sweatshirt, black gloves, a black mask. Concealed within a colorful bag, you carry a black backpack containing goggles and a water bottle (in case of pepper spray), earplugs (in case of LRAD), a black motorcycle helmet, perhaps a hammer cleaned with alcohol to remove any fingerprints, perhaps a selection of projectiles, perhaps a fire extinguisher. Maybe you carry a flagpole with a screw driven into the bottom, or a banner to stretch alongside the crowd, blocking the cameras of the police and articulating the things you are fighting for. If you carry a phone at all, it had better be a burner phone, so there won’t be any metadata confirming that you were here. Beneath the layer of black, you are wearing another layer of colorful casual clothing so you can ditch the black clothing and become an ordinary pedestrian again when you need to. Before you arrive, you pick a place out of view of any cameras and change into your black gear, concealing your identity.
\n\nYou’re not alone with your anger here at Logan Circle, the convergence point for the anti-capitalist and anti-fascist march. There are hundreds of you. Your ages, genders, ethnicities, and physiques blur together into a single seething sea of black.
\n\nAll your life, you have been taught to prize your individual identity, to cultivate your personal brand, so institutions can appraise and rank you or target and punish you. Only now, shedding your identifying features in the company of your comrades, can you freely act according to the dictates of your conscience. All your life, you have accepted the supremacy of the police and the inevitability of the world they enforce. Now, you cross the line from using all your resources to accommodate yourself to the prevailing order to using all your resources to contest it. Everything you have turned inward, you turn outward.
\n\nTime itself changes. A hour’s worth of intense events takes place in what turns out to have been sixty seconds. A few moments like this can change a person forever. The people around you seem transfigured; you witness acts of courage and abandon so far outside your ordinary experience they seem to defy the laws of physics. They are bathed in an unfamiliar glow. Perhaps the word for this is dignity.
\n\nAnd it’s terrifying. You’re terrified of the police, of their sting-ball grenades and jets of pepper spray. You’re terrified of the cameras seeking to capture your image so your body can be captured later. But most of all, you’re terrified of your own potential. You feel it in the air, thicker than tear gas: freedom, the most powerful intoxicant there is. Ordinarily, it seems that nothing you can do has any meaning, but here, every choice has far-reaching consequences—both for you and for the world. If all of you truly released yourselves to this moment, gave yourselves to it entirely, it feels like you could rip a hole in history itself.
\n\nFeeling your strength here together, nothing is more terrifying than the prospect of acting on it. You are terrified that you will make a mistake, that you will fail, that you will be caught—but above all, that you could succeed, that what you want might be possible. For if the world you want is possible, then you have no choice but to drop everything and stake your life on trying to achieve it, and prepare to bear the consequences.
\n\nThe consequences, they tell you, could include up to 75 years in prison. This is how they keep you isolated, staring at your news feed, feeling powerless.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/6.jpg\")
A scene from the clashes of the afternoon of January 20.
\nAnarchists have a long history of demonstrating against presidential inaugurations, including black bloc marches in 2001 and 2005. There had been abstract discussion about organizing for the 2017 inauguration since summer of 2016, but it didn’t really take shape until November.
\n\nShortly after Trump won the election, a call to action circulated under the title “No Peaceful Transition” for people to greet the arrival of the Trump era with a bold show of resistance. Meanwhile, organizers in Washington, DC formed the DC Counter-Inaugural Welcoming Committee and held two public meetings, each drawing over 250 people. Locals put considerable effort into creating infrastructure, hosting an action camp with workshops the week before the inauguration, reserving a local church as a meeting place and convergence center in the days leading up to J20, and coordinating three public spokescouncils ahead of the actions.
\n\nMuch of this organizing centered on blockading the checkpoints to the parade route. This was the chief focus of the first mass meetings at St. Stephens. At the end of one meeting, someone asked if anyone was interested in discussing a march, and a large part of the audience stayed afterwards to hold another discussion about this. This was the origin of the call for the Anti-Capitalist/Anti-Fascist bloc.
\n\nIt took some time for this call to assume its final form. Early on, some DC organizers were promoting what they called “operation clusterfuck,” a plan to shut down traffic all around DC. (As grueling as the J20 cases were, we can give thanks that the action got better branding; imagine if the arrestees had been known as the “Clusterfuck 200.”) Only a week before the inauguration, the point of departure for the Anti-Capitalist/Anti-Fascist March was planned for the Francis Scott Key Memorial in Georgetown, far from downtown DC. This could have been a disaster. The authorities had mobilized fully 28,000 personnel and the march was already on their radar. If the march had begun at such a distance from the rest of the demonstrations, the police likely would have had an easier time repressing it, and it would not have contributed to opening up an ungovernable zone around the inauguration in the way that it did. In the end, however, the call was changed to Logan Circle at 10 am.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/9.jpg\")
Clashes outside the “Deploraball” on the evening of January 19.
\nOn the night of January 19, anarchists and others turned out to demonstrate against nationalists and fascists attending the “Deploraball” in downtown Washington, DC. The fact that so many people felt comfortable openly attending a racist event showed the extent to which white supremacist politics had been normalized. Although there were clashes, plenty of attendees and supporters of the Deploraball walked among the protesters with impunity, and the police kept their weapons pointed exclusively at anti-fascists. Signs of the times.
\n\n\n\n\nThings were tense going into the J20 protests. Every Nazi troll on the internet was promising to gun us down in cold blood. Newspapers were reporting that two million bikers had promised to form a “wall of meat” between us and the motorcade of the President-elect. We were all going to prison—if we made it out of surgery. If you want a picture of the future, imagine Pepe the Frog stamping on a human face, forever.
\n
Groups working with Disrupt J20 had organized 12 blockades, one at each of the security checkpoints to the inaugural parade route and commencement ceremony. At seven of these, activists explicitly set out to prevent people from passing through. Over 2400 people participated. The blockades were a tremendous success, offering a wide range of people an opportunity to work together to disrupt the inaugural ceremonies under a variety of banners. You can read a full reportback on them here.
\n\nOne question remains: why didn’t the police crack down on the blockades? There were practically no arrests, even at the checkpoints that were shut down. Some of the most effective blockades were maintained by the most targeted participants, such as Black Lives Matter. Lawsuits resulting from various civil rights violations have pressured DC police to be more cautious in their response to civil disobedience, but this did not restrain the police from responding aggressively to the march at 10 am.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/5.jpg\")
National Guard vehicles were positioned all around downtown in advance of January 20, partially blocking the streets.
\nCertainly, the diversity of the crowds that participated in the blockades helped to discourage the police from attacking them. But had the police believed that they could arrest people without escalating the situation, they likely would have done so. In this regard, the fact that anarchists had organized confrontational plans for J20 likely tied the hands of the police. They aimed to contain and suppress uncontrollable demonstrations, not to give more people cause to participate in them. This illustrates how confrontational organizing can open up space for a wide range of tactics.
\n\nIf the blockades had successfully shut down all access to the parade route, the police would have been forced to attack them and carry out mass arrests. This shows that the police attacked the march at 10 am because it explicitly interfered with their objective of maintaining the illusion that the population of the United States was prepared to accept Trump as a legitimate ruler. They were willing to permit a certain amount of protest activity to keep up appearances, but they were ready to use brutal force to keep Washington, DC under their control throughout the inauguration. This only makes it more impressive that so many people turned out to the march.
\n\n\n \n \nThis set of GIFs from USA Today is fairly useful for understanding the route and chronology of the J20 Anti-Capitalist/Anti-Fascist March. However, it includes at least five significant errors:
\n\nThe limousine by Franklin Square is pictured in flames, but it was not set on fire until late afternoon, fully six hours later. This is a lazy or dishonest attempt to convict the J20 defendants of an arson they could not possibly have committed.1
\nThe march was turned around by a large number of police lines at many different intersections, not only at the corner of New York Avenue and 11th Street at 10:38 am. These are detailed below, intersection by intersection.
\nWhen the march was blocked by police at the intersection of New York Avenue and 11th Street, some people circled the little park triangle, turning south on 12th Street, rather than doubling back.
\nConfirming their incompetence, USA Today puts the McDonald’s on 13th Street on the wrong side of the street.
\nFinally, the incident with the patio chair on L Street did not take place where it is shown to have at 10:48 am, but rather, further east along the street, where the next timestamp is listed, 10:49.
\nThere also seems to be some conflict between the timestamps in the police communications and the timestamps in the USA Today report.
\n\nSeveral complete livestreams from the march are available online, including this one from defendant Alexei Wood. You can find another one here.
\nBy 10 am, over a hundred people had gathered in the park, with more steadily arriving in feeder marches and affinity groups, many already masked. At least seven police vans were parked on the south side of the circle with groups of cops visible around them, along with some individual police cars.
\n\nThe understanding had been that the march would depart at 10:30. This was widely known among locals and organizers, but the 10:30 departure time did not appear in any public venues.
\n\nAt a quarter past ten, hundreds of people were assembled, chanting and burning flags. Several banners were lined up on the south edge of the island inside the traffic circle. The march spontaneously departed ahead of schedule, several minutes before 10:30.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/16.jpg\")
Lining up the banners before the march took off.
\nPeople were still arriving at this point, and it is possible that the march could have been larger—and better organized?—if the participants had waited a few more minutes. Many who wished to participate spent the following twenty minutes scrambling to catch up to the fast-moving and unpredictable march. Of course, police would also have benefitted from the extra time to mobilize more numbers—they were already calling for reinforcements before the march departed. But this is a recurring issue: precisely the same thing happened during the 2005 inauguration, when out-of-town anarchists initiated the anti-capitalist march at Logan Circle ahead of schedule before many locals had arrived or gotten the pieces in place for their plans. (“The eternal hourglass of existence is upended again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!”)
\n\nAlready, as the march stepped off the curb, at least one umbrella was visible behind the banners in the front. The umbrella later became an iconic symbol of the day; umbrellas had been used to protect anarchists against video surveillance at previous marches, notably during resistance to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, but people may have brought them to DC simply because the weather forecast for the day included a chance of rain.
\n\nPolice cars and vans were parked on either side of the entry to 13th Street. The marchers made their way between them without encountering resistance, then fanned out to take the entire street. At this point, there were 500 or more people in the march; some estimate that up to a thousand participated at some point over the following half hour.
\n\nThe police do not appear to have been especially prepared for the march. Although they had a tremendous number of officers on duty, they already had their hands full communicating between different agencies and dealing with the blockades. Like everyone else, the police, too, seem to have been caught flatfooted by the arrival of the Trump era, in which a great many more people were willing to show up to confrontational demonstrations.
\n\nCommander Keith Deville, who was in charge of police operations throughout DC during the inauguration, testified during the first J20 trial that “Our information leading up to the inauguration was this particular group gathering at Logan Circle was going to be problematic. They were anarchists.” At 10:15 am on January 20, he reported over the radio: “This is a relatively large group and appears to be all anarchists.” Estimating the group at 300-350,2 he called for reinforcements, fearing that, “If they get inside a pedestrian-only area where our vehicles can’t go, we’re going to lose them.” This detail should not escape our notice.
\n\nThe march was loose, extending over a block. Two minutes in, people began dragging newspaper boxes and trashcans into street. Someone threw a projectile at the BP station a block south of Logan Circle; a block further, someone apparently started a fire in a trashcan at M Street. As the crowd approached L Street, participants vandalized Au Bon Pain.
\n\nThere were cameras everywhere; several far-right reporters were livestreaming, including an NRA TV reporter and pro-fascist Lauren Southern. One individual attempted to block journalists who were filming someone repeatedly smashing a brick into the parking meter in front of Au Bon Pain. Generally speaking, it is more effective to block cameras with banners than by simply raising one’s hands.
\n\nPolice were tailing the crowd in vans at this point, but not yet engaging. The police helicopter overhead contributed to the charged atmosphere. Debating whether to send officers on motorcycles and bicycles and whether to form a line blocking the march, the officer at the Joint Operation Command Center inquired as to what property destruction had occurred. This corroborates some participants’ speculation that the march might not have been attacked as quickly as it was if participants had held off on property damage, but it’s hard to know for sure; certainly the police would not have been thrilled about a large black bloc moving freely around the city in any case.
\n\nWhen the march turned right on K Street at Franklin Square, the banners were still arrayed at the front in an orderly fashion. A limousine was parked on the north side of the street, not far from the corner. Several individuals ran alongside it methodically knocking out its windows. The driver stood beside the limousine on sidewalk, calmly recording the event with his phone; mysteriously, someone threw a sandwich at him. Later, in court, when the prosecution asked him if he was frightened, he emphasized that he was not.
\n\nA handful of National Guard passed on the sidewalk to the south of this scene without engaging. Throughout the day, the National Guard rarely interacted with protesters. A massive line of police arrived at K Street behind the march: squad vans, lots of bike cops, motorcycle cops, and officers on foot. At this point, the order had gone out to get in front of the march and block it; officers initially were told to hurry ahead to form a line at 13th and K, but the march had already begun to zigzag.
\n\nThe crowd turned south again, passing through the middle of Franklin Square, then turned left once more on I Street. Commander Deville hoped to surround the march in the park; officers scramble out to form a line on one side, but they were not moving swiftly enough. A police van, a few police cars, and a couple motorcycle cops were positioned on the south side of I street, along with a dozen bike cops who did not engage as the march passed them (see 1:50 here). From this point on, there were sirens in the air.
\n\nThis video includes instructive footage of the middle portion of the march, from the first time the crowd passed through Franklin Square until it returned there some minutes later.
\nThe march paused at the corner of I Street and 13th Street to wait for people to catch up, then continued east on I Street. Someone threw a projectile at a white government SUV in the south side of the intersection; others smashed its headlights and windows and spray-painted it. South of I Street, 13th Street was blocked with four jersey barriers on the sidewalk and a dump truck and several National Guard trucks parked sideways in the middle of the road. At this point, the march had been in the street for about 15 minutes, and appeared to have grown in numbers. It was a fierce but heterogeneous crowd, predominantly dressed in black.
\n\nProceeding further down I Street, the march encountered a Starbucks and Bank of America; many people participated in thoroughly demolishing their façades. The march was large enough at this point that from the middle, it was not easy to tell what the police were doing outside it. In fact, a large number of police on foot and many more on motorcycles were shadowing the crowd from the back (visible at 10:00 mark here). They were already attacking civilians at random; soon after they passed the intersection of 13th and I Street, police seized an ordinary bicyclist and threw her to the ground for no apparent reason, then continued around her.
\n\nThe march arrived at the traffic island between I Street, 12th and 11th Streets, and New York Avenue. Police were positioned at the intersection of I Street and New York on the other side of the park, along with a few National Guard and an armored vehicle. The march circled the traffic island indecisively. Things were becoming chaotic. Someone was grabbed and beaten by a Trump supporter who held them until the cops came and arrested them; their charges were later dropped, perhaps as a consequence of another demonstrator filming the confrontation.
\n\nDozens of armored riot police blocked the intersection at 11th and I Street, still scrambling and disorganized. The crowd returned west on I Street, but the police who had been trailing the march were blocking the west and north sides of 12th and I. Officers began pepper-spraying people at this intersection (visible at 3:00 here). Some participants feared that the crowd would be kettled in this area, though it was a relatively open space compared to the closed city block where the march was ultimately trapped.
\n\nThere were no police on New York Avenue at the intersection with 12th Street, only a parked city vehicle turned sideways to block the street. The crowd headed southwest, breaking into a run (visible at 13:15 here). The next city block was open and clear. Deville ordered cops on bikes and motorcycles to pass the crowd on the left in order to get in front of them to form a line, but they were stymied by all the stragglers a block behind the march. Police estimated the crowd at 500 at this point; factoring in all the different groups that were spread out over an area of two blocks, it may have been significantly more.
\n\nThe march turned north on 13th Street at the McDonald’s, which some participants briefly attacked. At this point, had the march proceeded further southwest on New York Avenue, it was just a few blocks to the aforementioned pedestrian area around the inaugural parade route and the White House, where Deville had said his officers would not be able to control the march. Likewise, had the march turned south on 13th, it was only a few blocks to the pedestrian area and the queer blockade at the checkpoint into the parade route. According to USA Today, Trump left the White House only ten minutes later. If the march had reached the checkpoints to the south, it would have caused significantly more disruption; the participants might also have escaped mass arrest. The difficulty of following with police vehicles and the presence of mixed crowds would have posed considerable obstacles to the police. Of course, there might also have been violent confrontations with Trump supporters.
\n\nWhy did the march go north at this point rather than southwest or south? Throughout the half hour that the march moved through the streets, it often changed direction simply on account of meeting a line of riot police, bouncing haphazardly around downtown DC like a ball in a pinball machine. But there was not a large contingent of police blocking the way south on 13th Street. The crowd only encountered a few police at this intersection, though this was the point at which officers began to employ sting-ball grenades and pepper-spray liberally. Still, there were so few that the march could have headed south past them without much trouble. Rather, it appears that the march went north simply as a result of internal miscommunication. This suggests the absence of experienced locals at the front.
\n\nA minute after the report went out that the march was destroying the McDonald’s at the corner of 13th Street and New York Avenue, police were ordered to mobilize a block west down New York, at 14th. Based on this timing, if the march had continued moving quickly down New York, the police probably would not have arrived in time to block them, and the way directly south on 13th Street would also have remained open.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Patrick_Madden/status/822469479296864260\n\n\n
As the march headed north, a few officers ran alongside it, pepper-spraying the participants. One demonstrator answered in kind, fending off an officer with a pole. At the back of the march, a large number of officers on foot, bikes, and motorcycles continued to shadow the crowd (visible here at 8:30).
\n\nNow spread out, stressed, and disorganized, the march made its way through the parked vehicles and jersey blockades that had made the south side of the intersection of 13th and I Street appear impassable from the other direction. Arriving back at Franklin Square, many people hurried along the sidewalk, while others took the street. Footage shows the last arrivals to the intersection of 13th and I Street running past a large number of stationary police (visible here at 1:45) who did not attempt to engage.
\n\nThe march was spread out over a wide area. It was almost a quarter to 11 as demonstrators made their way across the park, regrouping in the northwest corner of Franklin Square. The police, too, paused on the south side of Franklin Square to regain their bearings, then drove around the park to arrive at the intersection of 14th and K Street from the south just as demonstrators were arriving there through the park. This was probably the last opportunity the participants had to disperse before a mass arrest became inevitable.
\n\nA few officers and National Guardsmen had been positioned at 14th and K Street; they spread out to block the way west on K Street, reinforced by the large number of police arriving on motorcycles and bicycles. Had the march proceeded west here, it was one block to the permitted rally site at McPherson Square. However, McPherson Square was still sparsely populated; there was no large crowd to melt into. Heading for that rally might have been irresponsible, as it could have brought police pressure to bear on the rally area. In any case, the march proceeded north.
\n\nAfter the crowd crossed K to the north, bike cops and motorcycle cops at the back aggressively herded people into the march, riding their motorcycles up on people’s heels. They were not aiming to carry out arrests, but rather to concentrate the group they hoped to mass-arrest into a controllable area. The police were likely relieved that the march was leaving the open square for long, canyon-like blocks in which they could trap it. Another police platoon was dispatched towards Logan Circle, to the north, in case the march continued in that direction.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/14.jpg\")
The march passing north on 14th Street past the intersection with K Street, at which Richard Spencer was famously punched a couple hours later.
\nAt 10:46, demonstrators smashed another Starbucks, this one located in a hotel between K and L Streets. At 10:48, meeting lines of police blocking 14th Street to the north and L Street to the west, the march headed east on L Street. Motorcycle police pulled onto the sidewalk on the north side of the street to race ahead of the demonstrators; this was the same strategy that Deville had ordered them to employ when he hoped to surround the march on New York Avenue. These same officers established the police line at the intersection of 12th and L Street. This, too, should not escape the notice of those who may participate in future marches: the police were not able to surround and block the march until the participants permitted the line of motorcycles to pass them. All it would have taken to block the motorcycles would have been for groups to walk in front of them with banners as others continued to launch projectiles or place things in the street.
\n\nAt 10:49, there was an incident on the north side of L Street involving a demonstrator using a patio chair; this interrupted the police operation for a moment, leaving one police motorcycle disabled. Robert Hrifko, a self-proclaimed biker for Trump, also sustained a blow to his face at this point. At the time, he said something to the effect of “hell of a right hook,” acknowledging the strength of the individual who allegedly hit him, but afterwards he told reporters variously that it was a chair or a rock that struck him. A confrontation erupted in which police pepper-sprayed people, bringing both sides temporarily to a halt. The officers could have made arrests, but they did not try to; their aim had been to form a line trapping the entire crowd, and when they realized that some people had already passed them going east, they resumed driving in that direction to try again at the intersection of 13th and L Street.
\n\nAt this point, it was clear to experienced participants that a kettle was imminent. Many participants had already split off from the march and dispersed. The streets were largely empty, enabling the police to treat everyone present as a target. Rather than staying tight, the best policy in such a situation may be for participants who are fleet of foot to sprint as fast as possible whenever they see police lines forming, in hopes of getting to the other side and sandwiching the police between multiple groups of demonstrators; police facing a hostile crowd will rarely risk being surrounded. It is also important to avoid long closed stretches of street in which a march can be trapped—or else, if absolutely necessary, to traverse them as quickly as possible.
\n\nSirens were ringing out continuously. When the crowd moved past the site of the confrontation into the intersection of L and 13th Street, there were no police to be seen blocking the way north on 13, although a couple dozen officers were visible further south on 13th Street (see 4:55 here). The march had come full circle, crossing from west to east the same intersection it had crossed from north to south half an hour earlier.
\n\nAs the march approached the intersection with 12th Street, more and more motorcycle and bicycle cops continued to ride past on the left. An alley was open to the right on the south side of the street; a large number of participants fled down it, hoping that they would not be caught in it the way that participants in the night march following the 2005 inauguration were. The police were not prepared to block them where the alley let out in the middle of 12th Street, and they escaped; the mouth of the alley was strewn with black clothing and accessories until conscientious demonstrators eventually returned to gather them up.
\n\nThe motorcycle and bicycle cops raced to the end of the block and formed a line, backed by a few police cars. It was not a tremendous number of officers blocking access to 12th Street, but they made themselves look more imposing by parking their vehicles behind them, creating an obstacle course of motorcycles and cars. Ten or more members of the National Guard stood along the building at the southern end of the street, ostensibly part of the police line but not actually taking action to participate. Beyond the police line, the canyonlike street gave way to two blocks of open parks in which it would have been much more difficult to kettle a dispersing crowd.
\n\nUnfortunately, rather than immediately charging the police line before it became any stronger, demonstrators paused and turned, hoping to return to the alley, only to find the way behind them blocked by two much larger lines of police: a large number of black-clad baton-wielding riot police on foot, backed by an even stronger line of police in fluorescent jackets. The black-clad police closed in with batons, while a few cops doused people in pepper spray, aiming to force them forward into a smaller and smaller area.
\n\nAs the march drew together in confusion on the northern side of L Street, a small group of people clustered together on the sidewalk on the southern side of the street. This group managed to get away in the disorder after the umbrella charge, simply by letting the police run past them and then slipping out where they saw an opening. Before the umbrella charge, individual journalists managed to step right through the police line (see 24:40 here), and at least one black-clad marcher sprinted between officers to safety as well; the police were still scrambling to get a solid footing, with a commanding officer repeatedly shouting “line formation.” In situations like this, when the orders of the police are to get control of an area rather than to make targeted arrests, it is often not worth it to them to pursue individuals who get through their lines. Demonstrators who can rapidly and correctly assess the priorities of the police can often escape at such a moment.
\n\n\n\n\n“‘We’re being kettled,’ a comrade correctly pointed out. ‘We can’t stay here, there’s more coming, they’re going to trap us, we have to break through. Tighten up and lock arms.’ A couple of us echoed his sentiment louder and we came together and locked arms. Before anyone could think about what the fuck would happen, someone started the countdown: ‘Three!’ More joined in: ‘TWO!’ Then almost all of us: ‘ONE!’ We charged the storm troopers swinging their clubs.”
\n\n \n
Between the arrival of police at the intersection of 12th and L Street and the umbrella charge, fully two minutes passed—an extremely long amount of time under the circumstances. The remnants of the march still consisted of more than 300 people. The ones in front linked arms, one person holding a battered umbrella. Someone shouted, “We’re going to do a countdown!”
\n\nThe crowd counted from ten down to one and charged, aiming at the north end of the police line. Remarkably, the battered umbrella at the front of the line blocked the initial jet of pepper spray and the crowd broke through the line. Approximately fifty people escaped this way, fleeing northeast. As the police scrambled to reinforce their line to the north, openings appeared in the middle of the line; at least one journalist simply stepped through here (see 5:50 here), and a demonstrator who charged the southern side of the police line alone, though initially thrown to the ground by an officer, managed to stand up and sprint through between the confused officers. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/15.jpg\")
The police line immediately following the umbrella charge…
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/8.jpg\")
…a second later, everyone was trapped.
\nBut the remainder of the march did not attempt a second charge towards the middle of the line, instead bogging down in a bottleneck at the north side where a significant number of people had fallen down, blocking the way. The line of police swept in from the back, pinning the crowd. From this point forward, the police employed a tremendous amount of gratuitous violence with the intention of intimidating people into ceasing to try to escape or resist. First they struck out at random with batons and pepper spray, then they threw sting-ball grenades right into the center of the trapped crowd. An officer radioed in confusion as out-of-control cops bullied the captive protesters: “Gas is being deployed at the 1100 block of 12th… We’re not sure who it’s by. We’re not sure who it’s by.”
\n\nThe kettle.
\nMaking their allegiances clear, the police let fascist cheerleader Lauren Southern out along with her cameraman and security detail while continuing to hold everyone else inside, including lawyers and journalists. Inside the kettle, everyone who was carrying something they did not wish to be arrested with let it fall from their pockets in what one eyewitness described as a “rain of sketch” onto the pavement. Outside the kettle, a couple individuals who had nearly escaped in the umbrella charge remained pinned down on the asphalt.
\n\n“Fuck Donald Trump,” one repeated earnestly to videographers. “Fuck Donald Trump.”
\n\nWithin six minutes of the umbrella charge, a line of supporters had already formed on the other side of the street, chanting “This is what a police state looks like!” and “Fuck the police!” More and more people gathered there over the following hours, expressing support to the people in the kettle.
\n\nYou can read reflections on what there is to learn from the kettle at 12th and L Streets here. You can read accounts from the kettle and jail here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/18.jpg\")
The limousine caught fire around 4:30 pm.
\nAt noon, a permitted march departed from Columbus Circle, crossing the city to McPherson Square. Meanwhile, participants who had escaped from the Anti-Fascist/Anti-Capitalist March filtered south, mingling with protesters returning north from the blockades around the checkpoints to Trump’s parade and people coming and going from the daylong permitted rally at McPherson Square. Soon the crowd extended across several blocks. The area north of the parade route became an ungovernable zone.
\n\nAround 1 pm, there were a hundred or more people still in black bloc gear in the vicinity of the permitted rally at McPherson square when a group of Trump supporters showed up wearing “Make America Great Again” hats. One of the Trump supporters gave a Nazi salute; another threw a projectile. Masked anarchists responded, inflicting significant injuries. The National Guard had to escort the injured Trump supporters out of the area. Something similar recurred around 2 pm.
\n\nThe police were bogged down carrying out the mass arrest at 12th and L Street. They had surrounded nearly 250 people. Guarding, processing, and arresting them took a considerable amount of personnel. They maintained a line of cops around the arrestees and another line holding back the increasingly thick crowds who gathered to support them.
\n\nAround 1:45 pm, a clash broke out with these supporters. The police line pushed people south on 12th Street, throwing sting-ball grenades at protesters who threw stones and bricks back in return.
\n\nPushing slowly forward, the police line eventually arrived at 12th and K, where they were held at bay for some time by a few protesters throwing rocks from within a heterogeneous crowd that was sympathetic but not particularly thick. The officers were coughing from their own pepper spray and yelling “Watch out!” to each other in unison as one rock after another crashed into their ranks. For quite some time, they threw sting-ball grenades at random, mostly hitting the bystanders and photographers in front of them.
\n\nBy this point, police had shifted from an offensive strategy in which they tried to control what happened everywhere to a defensive strategy in which they maintained fixed territory by means of thick lines of riot police but exercised very little control over what occurred outside those lines. The more pepper-spray and sting-ball grenades they threw at the crowds without succeeding in dispersing them, the more obvious it was that they were no longer the dominant force in the streets.
\n\nFootage shows masked vandals smashing up the limousine near the intersection of 13th and K long after the Anti-Capitalist/Anti-Fascist March had passed. People played on and inside it for hours. Beside the smashed limousine, a fire burned where trashcans and newspaper boxes remained heaped in the middle of the street just west of the intersection.
\n\nMasked anarchists were able to move freely throughout this area, enjoying the support of a plurality of the crowd, if not a majority. Police feared that any additional intervention would only escalate the situation further out of their control. This is why they were powerless to protect the limousine, put out the fire, or arrest the people who kept them at a distance with projectiles.
\n\nPolice and demonstrators vie for control of the intersection of 12th and K Street shortly after 2 pm. Reportedly, during these clashes, a conversation took place in which one demonstrator accosted those keeping the police at bay with projectiles: “What are you doing? This is not why we are here!” Another demonstrator answered something to the effect, “Yes, this is why we are here! I want to live in a world where people gather in broad daylight to commit dangerous and brave acts of resistance—even illegally, if need be—in order to oppose authority. For me, we are already winning by being here! Regardless of the consequences, this is already the kind of life I think we should live.”
\nBy 2:25, the police line managed to push forward to the east side of 13th and K by means of a tremendous amount of random violence. Here, they reached an impasse. A crowd gathered in response, chanting “Whose streets?” and definitively halting their progress. When a Trump supporter in a MAGA hat objected to the behavior of the crowd, a native veteran shouted him down, forcing him to take off his hat and withdraw to the police lines with his tail between his legs. When a police SUV tried to drive through the crowd from the west, endangering protesters, several people dressed in black blocked its way and smashed in its rear window. It reversed out of the crowd in a hurry. Over the following hours, this line of police repeatedly deployed pepper spray and sting-ball grenades, severely harming an indigenous elder and a child, among others, but the area before them remained an autonomous zone.
\n\nAround 2:30 pm, fascist spokesman Richard Spencer was answering interview questions on the corner of 14th and K Street, where the Anti-Capitalist/Anti-Fascist March had passed less than three hours earlier, when someone ran up and punched him, generating the most memorable footage of Trump’s inauguration. Spencer had showed up to DC expecting to accept political power on behalf of white supremacists across the country, as symbolized by Trump’s ascension to power; instead, he became a symbol of the widespread refusal to legitimize Trump and the determination to fight white supremacists by all means. Judging by attire, the person who punched Spencer had participated in the black bloc.
\n\nAround 3 pm, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser tweeted, “I respect your right to peacefully protest but the damage that has occurred today is unacceptable and not welcome in DC.” Politicians and police had aimed to keep demonstrations against Trump confined to respectful civil disobedience, hoping that people would blow off steam by “speaking truth to power” so business as usual could continue under the new administration. Instead, the riotous atmosphere in Washington, DC was setting a precedent that would help to inspire countless further acts of rebellion around the United States over the following months.
\n\nAround 4 pm, a sit-in blocked traffic two blocks north of Franklin Square at 13th and Massachusetts, where the march had passed five and a half hours earlier. Actions like this and the march that shut down highway 395 continued to spread chaos and disorder throughout the nation’s capital.
\n\nHalf an hour later, the damaged limousine caught fire within full view of the line of beleaguered riot police. Huge clouds of black smoke filled the air, lending downtown an ominous atmosphere at the end of the afternoon. Alongside the punching of Richard Spencer, this was the most iconic image of the day.
\n\nThe fire near the intersection of 13th and K burned until well past nightfall; even after the fire department extinguished the limousine, repeated interventions from police failed to extinguish the trash fire, as protesters simply lit it again and again.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/kingsthings/status/822525966555566080\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/petemuntean/status/822574445730660352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E822574445730660352&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.king5.com%2Farticle%2Fnews%2Fvandalism-fires-dozens-of-arrests-in-dc-inauguration-protests%2F65-388634528\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/DMVFollowers/status/822520129271529474?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E822520129271529474&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.citylab.com%2Fequity%2F2017%2F01%2Finauguration-protests-dc-donald-trump%2F513992%2F\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/petemuntean/status/822592404431798273?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E822592404431798273&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.king5.com%2Farticle%2Fnews%2Fvandalism-fires-dozens-of-arrests-in-dc-inauguration-protests%2F65-388634528\n\n\n
I can see some of my friends inside of the kettle over the lines of riot police. Still wearing our masks, my friends and I are walking around trying to talk to others to make some kind of plan. “Can we get them out?” There is no way our resistance is going to end here—it’s not even noon. Activists, families, and local residents are accumulating around us, punctuated by groups of people wearing backpacks and masks, hoods up, huddled together, waiting to see what happens. Before long, for better or for worse, someone in a mask throws a bright blue smoke bomb right under the feet of the riot police. They immediately begin panicking, shooting pepper spray everywhere; at one point, they directly hit a woman and her child. Bottles and stones are flying over my head at the police. Sting-ball grenades are exploding all around me.
\n\nImpossibly, hooded and masked protesters surround me once again. Where did all of these people come from? To my left, four or five people are using hammers to break up the asphalt; two people behind them are throwing bricks through yet another set of windows. To my right, about 10 people are dragging police barricades into the intersection. Stones are flying past me at the police while the entire crowd chants “A! Anti! Anti-Capitalista!” It’s actually thunderous.
\n\nEventually we are pushed back a few blocks, but now teenagers are arriving on bicycles, tying t-shirts around their faces. Newspaper boxes are being set on fire, police vehicles are attacked with stones, and before too long, a limousine is engulfed in flames. Near the park to my right, a convenience store is partially looted and an overturned trashcan spills empty glass bottles onto the sidewalk. For hours, this standoff holds the police at a safe distance from the family-friendly rally two blocks away.
\n\nBy nightfall, my friends and I stop for a quick bite to eat at a cheap restaurant. When we come out, a local teenager is standing on top of a burning dumpster smoking marijuana with a ski mask on. In both directions, overturned trash cans block the intersections, the smoldering flames spitting ash into the amber lights of the adjacent buildings and “road closed” displays. Punk music is playing loudly from somewhere. Our task is complete—it’s time to leave. We couldn’t save our friends in the kettle, but the morning black bloc was not the failure it appeared to be.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/19.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/20.jpg\")
Scenes from downtown Washington, DC after nightfall on January 20.
\nIn assessing the events of J20, we can identify a few distinct questions. Let’s address these one by one.
\n\nCan we imagine the first day of the Trump era without the footage of windows shattering in DC, the smashing and burning of the limousine, the punching of Richard Spencer? Make no mistake, it was the Anti-Fascist/Anti-Capitalist March that opened up space for these iconic moments in downtown DC on January 20.
\n\nIf no one had made an open call for a concrete, confrontational action, fewer people would have arrived in DC prepared to defy the control of the police, and those who sought to do so would have had difficulty finding each other. As it was, no significant disruption occurred before the march at 10 am, and after the march dispersed, those who desired to engage in open resistance never reached critical mass to assume the offensive again. Rumors about another march never came to fruition; although an increasingly broad range of people participated in ungovernable behavior, the vast majority of it was reactive, responding to police incursions and defending territory that had already been psychologically transformed by the passing of the Anti-Fascist/Anti-Capitalist March. It’s all well and good to argue that anarchists should act alongside other rebels rather than in isolation—but when we do, we often need a way to find each other in order to achieve critical mass and take the initiative.
\n\nWe can critique the time (too early?), place (too far from the other crowds?), and tactics (too costly?), but if the goal was to legitimize and inspire direct action at the opening of the Trump administration, there was no better way than to call for confrontational action in DC. Downtown DC was the epicenter of the world’s attention: every burning piece of litter on K Street was worth a burning bank or tank anywhere else. If the blockades had been the most confrontational action that took place in response to Trump assuming power, this would have sent a message to the rest of the country that people were responding to Trump’s ascendancy with civil disobedience, not by becoming ungovernable.
\n\nIt’s possible that the airport blockades, the shutting down of Milo , the battles of Charlottesville and Berkeley, and all the other epic struggles that wrenched the US off the course Trump had set for it would have occurred even if there had not been an inspiring show of resistance in DC. But the events of the inauguration occurred at such a pivotal point in the narrative that it’s hard to imagine they didn’t play any part in shaping what others around the country expected of themselves and each other. Sometimes there are battles one cannot afford to stand aside from, no matter how great the risks, no matter how unready one is.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/17.jpg\")
Police and projectiles on the afternoon of January 20, 2017.
\nHowever important it was to take action in Washington, DC against the inauguration, our assessment of the results is complicated by the fact that by almost any measure, the march went very badly indeed. It was disorganized, dangerous, and disempowering; within a half hour of setting out, the march had been dispersed, with a large number of participants caught in a kettle. Considering how badly it went, it was amazing that anything inspiring happened in DC at all.
\n\nWho is responsible for the march going badly? There are four basic narratives addressing this question. One blames individual participants; another, the organizers; the third, the police; the fourth, the black bloc tactic itself. Let’s address each of these in turn.
\n\nCertainly, plenty of participants had never been in a black bloc before. Not all of them dressed in clothing that effectively concealed their identities. Some people have expressed frustration that property destruction began almost immediately, assuming that this prompted the police to attack the march earlier than they otherwise would have; others felt that the seemingly arbitrary choice of targets (a bus shelter, a local café) and the carelessness with which some of them were attacked (without giving customers enough warning to get away from the windows) only exacerbated the challenges arrestees faced in the courtroom without making the message of the demonstration any clearer.
\n\nRegarding property destruction, in the weeks leading up to the march, many longtime anarchists agreed that the important thing would be to stay together and present a strong, united front against police and Trump supporters, not to destroy property. It turned out that some attendees brought the opposite agenda, being prepared to break windows but scattering quickly in the face of police pressure. In the continuum between “rapport du force” and “smash and dash,” the march erred on the side of the latter. When it comes to the ambience of a march, “destructive but weak” is one of the worst combinations.
\n\nOf course, if organizers had intended for people to come with a different agenda, they might have taken more steps to make that clear.
\n\nYears ago, during the anti-globalization era, a big black bloc march like the one that took place on January 20 would have included a scouting team on bicycles exploring the streets around the march to keep up with police movements, a comms team within the march communicating with the scouts and listening to a police scanner, and a group of locals near the front who could navigate wisely through the terrain—bringing the march towards its objectives and, if necessary, to a safe place to disperse. In those days, black blocs were often organized through a series of confidential spokescouncils in which the participants agreed in advance on shared visions and expectations. So far as we can tell, the J20 march benefitted from none of these traditions.
\n\nIt’s debatable how much scouts could have helped—in a small area occupied by 28,000 law enforcement personnel, the scouts might simply have repeated “OK, this block is crowded with cops too” over and over into their radios. But the absence of any sort of guidance, communication, or decision-making structure was painfully felt, as the march repeatedly made decisions arbitrarily—crashing randomly around a city filled with targets and threats like a blind bull fleeing butchers through a china shop.
\n\nMany people were understandably afraid to do more coordinating to prepare for the Anti-Fascist/Anti-Capitalist March for fear that, in the repressive climate of the dawning Trump era, this would result in conspiracy charges. However, there are many different kinds of danger; it may have been worth it for a few people to take on more risk as organizers if that could have offset the risk that hundreds of less experienced people would end up with conspiracy charges of their own. There are ways to engage in public organizing for potentially confrontational actions that minimize your vulnerability to charges. As we enter an era of greater unrest, in which more people will be eager to participate in anarchist-organized actions, it may sometimes be worthwhile to take courageous risks in public organizing as well as in street action.
\n\nAll that said, it is possible that the police forces arrayed against the J20 march were so powerful that the march could not realistically have turned out much better than it did. If that is the case, then perhaps it was a good thing that the march immediately began destroying property and creating chaos before the authorities were able to stop it. Certainly, it does not make sense to lay all the blame for police repression on those who initiated property destruction when the police were sure to do their best to crush any group that interfered with their mission of assuring Trump a peaceful transition to power.
\n\nIf the police were bound to come down hard on the march, then we should ask if the black bloc tactic itself is to blame for our not being able to accomplish more than we did.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/7.jpg\")
Police endearing themselves to journalists and bystanders on the afternoon of January 20.
\nI have mixed feelings about the bloc on J20. The turnout to the black bloc was impressive. But impressive is relative. It’s relative to the context of the anarchist milieu in the US, which, in my opinion, had been in a state of stagnation and decline for the ten years preceding J20. Folks of my generation largely seem to have taken their anarchist politics out of street-level grassroots activity and channels it into other areas of society—academia, non-profit organizations, arts and culture or business ventures—or else quit altogether. Anarchist ideas are more popular than ever, and we’ve radicalized the left, even the mainstream left, in countless ways—but despite this, the anarchist movement has mostly stayed the same size, if not perhaps shrunk since the turn of the century.
\n\nAs a consequence of this, the grassroots anarchist movement in the US is perpetually forced to reinvent the wheel. One generation after another of 20-something anarchists cycles in and out of default leadership roles—in the sense of contributing the most time to anarchist projects and taking up the most space in anarchist work.
\n\nMy own involvement dates back to the mid-1990s. I’ve participated in organizing most of the major anarchist gatherings in DC over the last 20 years. Older people like myself, who have tried hard to stay involved, often see younger folks dismiss our experience or even respond with hostility; it can be easiest to stay out of the way and let younger anarchists reinvent the wheel. J20 was no exception. Generally speaking, there wasn’t much room for experience or strategic thinking in the lead-up to the day.
\n\nStill, experienced locals had engaged in some planning and strategy. This was undermined when people from out of town departed from the convergence point earlier than local organizers had planned and deviated from the route that locals had chosen. This sabotaged plans to hit more strategic targets, engage in clearer messaging, and bring more visibility to anarchist politics on J20.
\n\nWhen the crowd gathered at Logan Circle that morning, I saw many faces I had not seen in an organized anarchist contingent in almost a decade. It was clear that many anarchists who had avoided the streets throughout the Obama years, or at least since Occupy, felt a sense of urgency and responsibility to assert a militant resistance to Trump and the authoritarian turn in American politics that his victory represented. In returning to the streets, many on the radical left went to the ant-fascist and anti-capitalist bloc out of ideological affinity, not necessarily because they were prepared for direct action that day.
\n\nThat day’s black bloc was comprised of an equal mix of the following different demographics:
\n\nI believe the property destruction on J20 was righteous. It was necessary and beautiful. But it was not the best thing that we could have contributed to the day as militant anarchists. Or else, even if it was under the circumstances, our standards should be higher.
\n\nUnlike the property destruction in Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization summit, which targeted many of the same corporations, there was no articulation of why it made sense to target multinationals on that particular day. Downtown Washington, DC is crowded with the headquarters of right-wing think tanks and lobbyists who have played a direct role in the rise of the far right and Trump’s ascension to power. Although corporations like Starbucks and McDonalds deserve the utmost fury and destruction, it sent a confused message to our critics and the uninformed that we focused on those. I’m not saying it was a bad thing—but could the actions have been more targeted, spotlighting a more coherent anarchist analysis of power in this political moment?
\n\nIf we had delivered on that—could we have had a better impact on public discourse? Would there have been more immediate public support for the J20 defendants and less support for the prosecution?
\n\nThis brings up more questions for me. Could the bloc have employed a strategy that would have kept us in the streets longer? If we had managed to stay together throughout the day, we probably would have gained more and more participants over time. What could we have done together if we had?
\n\nHow else could we have made anarchist politics visible and accessible on J20? I’m not saying property destruction is at odds with accessibility to the public—on the contrary—but breaking things is not always sufficient, in and of itself, to convey anarchist politics in all their nuance.
\n\nIn conclusion, I think it’s important to be able to consider the events of J20 a success and a failure at the same time. Whatever resistance we can muster in the face of the assault that capitalists and the state are carrying out on people and the planet counts as a success. But it is a failure that we can’t seem to access more of our potential. Many of our shortcomings are products of a failure to decolonize our minds and rid ourselves of the mentality of the system we oppose.
\n\nAlso, let’s not underestimate how long or how deep the trauma of the J20 charges will linger in our movement. We have to bear this in mind when we discuss whether to consider the day a success. Yes, the state is to blame for the trauma and assaults. But if we say it was worth it on our side, let’s be sure we understand the full impact of the consequences.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/10.jpg\")
The spectacle of resistance: journalists gather around a fire in K Street near the smashed up limousine.
\nConsidering how much information as the state was able to gather on the defendants, can you imagine how many criminal convictions there would have been if people had not been wearing masks and the same color?
\n\nIt’s true that in many cases, prosecutors believed that they could identify the defendants even in their black clothing. But if they were not able to get convictions, this shows that the state needs more than data to target people. By creating confusion among the enforcers of authority and solidarity among demonstrators, the black bloc model served to keep arrestees safe in the worst conditions. The prosecutors wanted to use the fact that everyone was wearing the same color to as evidence of conspiracy, but ultimately, they overreached; jurors felt “reasonable doubt” both about whose face it was under any particular black mask at any given time and also about whether wearing black proved that a defendant was attempting to facilitate criminal activity. If the police had snatched 20 people and charged them with felonies, some of them might still be in prison today. Instead, the sea of black made it through the streets and the court system together and came out the other side.
\n\nLikewise, the vast majority of those who escaped in the umbrella charge were never charged.
\n\nSo the black bloc worked—this time. We can be certain that new technologies and new laws are on the way. J20 was a victory of sorts for the black bloc model, but one rarely gets to experience the same victory twice.
\n\nThe strongest argument against the black bloc model is that Commander Deville immediately identified the march from Logan Circle as “anarchists” and singled it out for repression. Deville may have been determined to attack the march regardless of what people were wearing, but it is noteworthy that he used the black bloc branding to identify the march as a legitimate target. The paradox of the black bloc is that it simultaneously provides personal anonymity and collective political legibility. The question is what kind of political legibility will serve us best: what risks are we willing to run, when it comes to being politically legible to our enemies, in order to become politically legible to potential comrades?
\n\nIn the era of doxxing and camera phones, we can hardly do without some way of preserving our anonymity in protest situations. It was prescient of the previous generation of anarchists to associate militant anonymity with anarchism in the popular imagination, since practically all who are pushed into conflict with the prevailing order will be compelled to experiment with forms of anonymity—and hopefully, in the process, to consider whether they too might be anarchists.
\n\nFor that to be possible, we have to do everything in our power to normalize anonymous collective action and set wider precedents for it. Collective anonymity should not be associated with the immediate escalation to property destruction. It serves the authorities’ interests for every black bloc to immediately commit vandalism and be surrounded or break up in flight before it can cross-pollinate with other groups. It would be better if, as in the anti-globalization days, there were regularly large black blocs that simply marched around, normalizing the tactic, assisting other groups, defending themselves as needed, and providing visibility for anarchist values.
\n\nWe should also experiment with other means of preserving anonymity that do not immediately draw state attention or identify the participants as “extreme.” It is easier to hide in numbers than in the darkest shade of black. Ultimately, our safety will derive from being part of broad, powerful, creative social movements that are prepared to support us the way people supported the J20 defendants, not from our technical skills when it comes to rendering ourselves invisible. The greatest danger that we will be isolated and contained is not that the police will race ahead of us in the streets and kettle us—it is that we will go on thinking of ourselves as exceptional, missing one opportunity after another to make common cause with others.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/2.jpg\")
A flier that appeared after January 20, 2017.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/3.jpg\")
\nI think that we can be positive about the lessons we learned via the prosecutions. Although it turned our lives upside down, we learned a lot about the way the state is and is not able to crack phones, about legal campaigns and how to get charges dropped. Over 200 strangers somehow managed to not snitch on each other. We expanded our networks to resist repression and, against all odds, we overcame in totally ridiculous circumstances to win.
\n\nAs a former defendant, I personally am still recovering from the ways it turned my life inside out and the stress and trauma of the case, but am grateful for the skills and insight I gained to support others on the receiving end of state repression. The case posed challenges we hadn’t met before and gave us an opportunity to learn and strengthen ourselves. If someone had asked me whether the action itself was worth it during the scariest parts of the case, I would have said no. But now, with the scope of the entire thing in view, I feel that it was worth it. A person’s perspective on such questions can change over time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/1.jpg\")
\nWhatever victories we won on J20 and in the subsequent court cases, they came at a tremendous cost. Was it worth it?
\n\nTo answer this question, we can’t just look at a single day of action; we have to evaluate an entire way of life, the way of inhabiting the world that led anarchists like us to participate in the J20 march and so many other actions before it. Some of us have lived through years or decades of high-risk political activity. So many of the accomplishments of a century and a half of anarchist movements resulted from people like us throwing ourselves into the unknown, entering situations in which there are no guarantees. We have to weigh all of the victories that resulted from that way of being if we are to make a fair assessment of whether the risks we took on January 20, 2017 were worthwhile.
\n\nFor other defendants, J20 was their first major action, and they were immediately subjected to an ordeal that some anarchists have not experienced in two decades of black blocs. It is easy to understand how this might put one off from participating in high-risk political activity. Certainly that was the goal of the government, at a moment when more and more people are looking to join revolutionary movements.
\n\nIf anarchists were the only protagonists of revolt, it might make sense to save ourselves for contests with better odds. But the important thing is what everyone does, not what we do alone. There are certain times and places—certain brief windows in history—when a single action can have tremendous impact. In such situations, we can humbly offer ourselves as catalysts, hoping to do our part to create situations that everyone can participate in. If our actions on J20 helped inspire thousands outside our social circles to occupy airports and stand up to fascists, they may have been worth it, even if the upshot was that we ourselves were out of action for a year or more.
\n\nWe are never going have auspicious odds going into a frontal assault on the state at its strongest. Unfortunately, there are times when the consequences of not doing so will be even worse.
\n\nFor those who were critical of the call for a confrontational march on J20, then, in place of the question of whether people should have gone to DC, we propose another question. If we are ever forced to confront the state again in the way that many felt compelled to that morning in 2017, what will we wish we had done in advance to prepare for that? How can we be preparing right now?
\n\nWe should always try to be strategic and to accomplish as much as possible with the minimum losses. But we should not blame those who called for the march for the intensity of the ensuing crackdown, nor write off an entire kind of action as “too risky.” DC police have carried out mass arrests before—during the IMF/World Bank protests in April 2000, the “People’s Strike” in September 2002, and on the night following the Inauguration in 2005. They kettled the October Rebellion black bloc in October 2007. But the charges that the DC prosecutor pressed were unprecedented. The J20 charges clearly represented a new experiment in the evolution of state repression—an experiment which, like many of Trump’s innovations, was thwarted only because people immediately threw all they had into opposing it.
\n\nThe police could also have carried out mass arrests at the blockades—indeed, had they not been stretched thin trying to police the entire downtown area, they might have done just that. Would we then have blamed the blockade organizers? They certainly could have cracked down on the black blocs elsewhere around the country the same way—in Berkeley on February 1, for example, or in Philadelphia a few weeks later, or in the various clashes with fascists that have taken place since then. Would we then have accused the organizers of those actions of an error? Those black blocs were essential in halting the spread of fascism and inspiring people around the United States to rise up. If they involved some of the same risks that the J20 actions did, we must also add those accomplishments to the list of reasons to be open to taking risks like the ones we took on J20.
\n\nThe fact is: the kind of action that can interrupt a high-security spectacle like a presidential inauguration is high-risk activity, just like the kind of action it will take to halt the rise of authoritarian nationalism and the kind of action it will take to stop the destruction of the natural world. The results of our efforts are never guaranteed in advance. Sometimes, in what seems a hopeless situation, the courage of a few people can become the power of thousands. Other times, one takes a risk and bears the consequences alone. We can analyze our victories and failures in hopes of being better prepared to identify the strategic opportunities and risks the next time around, but the world will go on changing ahead of every effort to map it and predict the future.
\n\nSome people in the US already experience more risk in their daily lives than any of us were exposed to throughout the entire J20 ordeal. Others who made the rational choice not to go to the demonstrations in DC still found themselves confronted with the necessity of supporting their comrades through the ensuing court cases and bravely rose to the occasion. We don’t get to determine the level of risk that the state subjects us to or the challenges that come our way. What we can do is stand courageously by each other throughout the worst misfortunes, facing the unknowable future together. It may hold miracles or horrors—it almost certainly holds both—but if we meet it together, we will learn more about each other and ourselves.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/4.jpg\")
Running through Franklin Square.
\nNow that the case has ended, it’s given me a chance to reflect. There are many conversations that remain to be had amongst trusted friends about what happened that day, but now that the prospect of prison isn’t hanging over my head, I’ve finally had some room to breathe. Despite all the grief of the past year and a half—I’d do it again. And I know that I will.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/12.jpg\")
Out of control police making themselves new friends on January 20.
\nBetween the Sun and the Sea: Icarus at 12th and L—A Voice from the J20 Black Bloc and Kettle on the Practice of Anarchy
\nJ20 Protest Simulator—Choose Your Own Adventure in the Streets and Courts of Washington, DC
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/13.jpg\")
Police on the receiving end of projectiles on the afternoon of January 20.
\n\n\n\n“We are often defeated. However, no matter how often beaten, we cannot forget the joy we felt during the fight. The pleasure of stretching our will power. The pleasure of trying out our own strength. The pleasure of seeing a manifestation of real comradely emotions among comrades. The pleasure of seeing the world clearly divided into friend and foe. And above all of these various pleasures, the pleasure of seeing faintly and gradually our own future and society’s future. The pleasure of seeing an improvement in our own personalities.”
\n\n-Ōsugi Sakae, 1920
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/21/11.jpg\")
Together, we would open up like an abyss, immeasurably deep, and some unknowable, uncontrollable future would pour out of us.
\nAs reported on DefendJ20Resistance.org, “Six months later, after it was well-known the indicted protestors could not have conceivably started the fire, MPD Chief Peter Newsham appeared on the September 13, 2017 episode of the Kojo Nnamdi Show. Newsham stated that the J20 defendants were responsible for the limo. Newsham has made no effort to correct this error, as it captures the attention of the public in the way that his mass-arrest orders have not.” ↩
\nWhen it comes to approximating crowd size, the conflict between police estimates and protester estimates goes back generations. Regarding the accuracy of police estimates of crowd size on January 20, we simply note that when the march was kettled at 12th and L Street, the first two officers to estimate the number of arrestees put it between 50 and 100. In fact, it was more like 250. ↩
\nDuring the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017, DC police arrested over 200 people and indiscriminately charged all of them with eight or more felonies apiece, hoping to set a precedent that would suppress street protest once and for all. Two years later, we are publishing a series of reflections on the events of that day and the court cases that followed it. In this narrative, a defendant who participated in the first J20 trial block recounts the legal strategy by which they defeated the state and passes on lessons to anyone facing a similar ordeal. The author, Miel, is a street medic who was arrested in the kettle on January 20, participated in the legal support organizing throughout the J20 cases, and continues to fight for a better world, undaunted by the intimidation of the police and courts.
\n\nTwo year ago today was one of the most significant days of my life.
\nIt was the first day of a long and trying battle for my freedom,
\nand the freedom of over 200 comrades
\nwhose futures became intricately tied with mine
\nthe moment we stepped into the streets of Washington DC
\non that cold January morning.
Street medics provide first aid and emergency care at sites of resistance and struggle. Strong networks of mutual support and care are essential to building a sustainable, long-term movement for collective liberation. Being a medic is about being careful with each other so we can be dangerous together. Providing this type of wellness support can be as much about long-term care as it is about being there in the moment. It is an ongoing process of assessing needs, offering resources, and uplifting those with whom we engaged in struggle.
\n\nHealth care is political. Medics are activists who seek to democratize health care knowledge and skills, subvert our communities’ dependence on corporate medicine, and help create the infrastructure we see as necessary to build another world. Street medics are EMTs, nurses, therapists, herbalists, teachers, comrades, and friends.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/20/0116191922a.jpg\")
\nGive Care, Take Care.
\nSpread Calm and Do No Harm.
I became a street medic in December 2016, not long after Trump was elected President. I was motivated to do this as a way of bridging my political convictions and my personal calling to help people recover from trauma. Earlier in 2016, I had attended massage therapy school in Florida and studied herbal medicine online. Practicing healing arts as a trade is incomplete without an analysis of the privileges and oppressions that intimately impact a person’s wellness and experiences of trauma. I left Florida seeking opportunities to plug into communities of resistance and offer what I had learned in accessible ways, while continuing to learn different approaches to providing care.
\n\nI was working as a Lyft driver in Colorado during the election in November. I remember vividly the interactions I had with people I gave rides to that day and the progression of sentiments expressed to me from hopeful to concerned to shocked and terrified. Everyone I picked up was upset, angry, scared, furious, confused, disappointed, and desperate for a way out of this nightmare. Unfortunately, we weren’t dreaming—this was real and this was our life now. The question was—what would we do about it?
\n\nHundreds of us took the streets of Denver that night, as occurred in cities all around the country; we came together for support and to collectively express our rage and grief as we confronted the reality that this was the world we were living in. The election was a spark, a call to action, an opportunity to connect with others who were already fed up with the oppressive conditions imposed by capitalism and who now had one more reason to stand up and resist. It was really the only thing we could do.
\n\nLarge-scale planning for the inauguration was already underway. A website went up and a call went out inviting people to Washington DC to disrupt the inauguration on January 20, 2017—J20 for short. Comrades across the country were holding autonomous assemblies, organizing locally, and preparing for a day of action to oppose and disrupt the symbolic transfer of power in the White House and the unapologetic emboldenment of white nationalist identity.
\n\nI knew in my heart that I needed to go. There was nothing holding me back. I was at a point in my life where I didn’t have any long-term commitments, I wasn’t tied down, nobody was depending on me, and I found myself not feeling concerned about what the consequences could be. I just knew it was where I wanted to be. I decided I would travel to DC not only to participate in demonstrations, but to provide care for my comrades in the streets as a medic.
\n\nPrior to my departure from Colorado, a friend and I flew to Portland, Oregon to attend a 20-hour street medic training with the Rosehip Medic Collective. I want to express deep gratitude to the Rosehips for putting together several medic trainings that winter in preparation for the inauguration. This training provided me with the skills I needed to feel confident about providing medical care at a mass mobilization bigger than anything I had ever been to before.
\n\nAt the beginning of January 2017, I drove out to the East Coast to meet up with friends who were also planning to go to DC. I assembled a medic kit and attended direct action trainings and planning meetings in the days leading up to January 20. When I arrived in DC, I attended a “medic mixer” where I found someone to work alongside as my medic buddy and a group of three other medics interested in attending the same protest. We formed a team and discussed how best we would track and tend to the needs of several hundred people.
\n\nWe had a practice run the night before the inauguration during the protests outside the Deploraball, at which we had our first opportunity to perform eye flushes with LAW (liquid antacid and water) to treat the effects of pepper spray. We discussed ways to keep each other safe in the streets and familiarized ourselves with the layout of the city and the metro system. We planned to meet up the following morning near the protest route.
\n\nI hardly slept that night. My adrenaline was pumping as I imagined what the following day might hold. I knew this day was going to be big. But as I would soon find out, I truly had no idea what was to come.
\n\nOn January 20, I met up with my medic team and we made our way to Logan Circle, the starting point of the Anti-Capitalist Anti-Fascist march. The energy was powerful as we amassed as a group of around 500 and took the streets of downtown DC.
\n\nWe have been told we are powerless.
\nBut we had power in numbers.
\nAnd despite those who seek to silence us,
\nOur voices would be heard.
We were being followed by riot cops from the onset. We would later learn that planning meetings for this protest had been infiltrated by right-wing groups working hand-in-hand with DC police.
\n\nBut we wouldn’t be silenced. While we were in the streets, we were a force to be reckoned with. It is exactly because we were powerful that we met with such strong opposition. There are not many opportunities in day-to-day life to express the deep-seated discontent we feel about the conditions under which we are forced to live. It is important to take advantage of such opportunities as outlets for our emotional experiences—which are often widely shared, even if they feel unique to us in the isolating world we live in.
\n\nTaking the streets with our comrades reminds us that we are not alone. That we are not crazy for feeling this way. That we are not the ones who are sick, it is the system that is broken beyond repair. Without these moments to provide a release, to uplift and inspire us and remind us why we continue to get up every morning and keep struggling to survive, we are left with not much more than a bleak and depressing reality day after day after day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/20/2018-11-02-21-32-30.jpg\")
\nWe were constantly on the move; there wasn’t much time to provide medical care before the cops surrounded and contained us in the kettle. I do remember stopping to flush pepper spray from many eyes during the half hour between the time we stepped off the curb at Logan Circle and our eventual capture at the corner of 12th & L, but it was in the kettle that most of the medicking happened. Over 200 of us spent upwards of eight hours trapped on a street corner with no access to water, food, bathrooms, or anything else beyond what we collectively had on our persons.
\n\nBeing a street medic that day taught me how to show up for others. I learned how to manage my own emotional state in a way that enabled me to hold space for and tend to the needs of those around me. While we were in the kettle, the riot cops attacked onlookers who had been standing across the street from us. They chased people down the street and deployed pepper spray and sting-ball grenades that made loud explosions—we could hear them but could not see the effects. With the sound of a loud “bang,” a person standing beside me shrieked and began hyperventilating. They were having a panic attack. I consciously held my own emotional response to what was going on at a distance as I offered them support and care. It was empowering to find myself feeling capable of staying present and helping spread calm despite the scene that was unfolding around us.
\n\nAs the cops began arresting people, I noticed that they were grabbing people closest to the perimeter, zip-tying their hands behind their backs, and putting them into police vans. I stayed toward the center of the group to avoid being taken in so I could continue to care for people on the outside, knowing that once I was cuffed and thrown in the police van there wouldn’t be much more I could do. At this point, we had no idea what was going to happen to us or where they were going to take us once we were taken in.
\n\nMost of my time in the kettle was spent circulating through the group, checking in with people about how they were doing, connecting with people I already knew and making new friends, offering snacks and water, flushing eyes, treating shrapnel wounds, and advocating for people who needed further medical care. We even made soft blockades for people to go to the bathroom and resorted to using bottles and plastic bags to contain our waste. We kept morale up by singing well-known songs like Baby I’m an Anarchist and Bohemian Rhapsody (though admittedly, y’all, we could really use some new songs) and using the human microphone to share communiques “from the ungovernables at 12th and L”:
\n\nFuck Trump
\nFuck all politicians
\nWith a country built on white supremacy and patriarchy
\nNo politician can serve anything else
\nThat goes for his police pawns, too
\nWe may be arrested here today
\nBut we will not be silenced
\nWe call on communities threatened by Trump to defend themselves against fascists and racists
\nWe won’t back down and we will only grow stronger
\nIf you’re hearing this, we call on you to become ungovernable
\nAnd build a new world in the ashes of the old
Well, we’re going to jail
\nBut we aren’t going silently
\nAs we’re seeing today, Trump indicates a new level of repression
\nBut the tide of repression has been rising for some time
\n2 million in prison, a new Jim Crow
\nSurveillance on your email, surveillance on your phone, surveillance in your home
\nAll governments imprison and police
\nCops love Trump, but to get rid of both, we have to get rid of the government
\nFrom the threat of white supremacists to the threat of police
\nOur safety lies in building bonds with each other, outside of state control
\nFor freedom, for anarchy!
The action continued around DC while we were in the kettle. We watched as smoke rose above buildings in the distance and learned that a limo had been set on fire a few blocks away. Checkpoints around the city were being blockaded and shut down, the Festival of Resistance was in full swing, and more and more people were assembling across the street from the kettle offering solidarity and encouragement as we awaited our arrest. The fierce resistance that continued elsewhere on the streets was a sweet reminder that while some of us had been stopped, the collective “we” would not been defeated.
\n\nWhen I was finally taken in around 6 pm, the cops zip-tied my wrists together behind my back, removed my shoelaces, and took all of my belongings from me. I spent four hours in a police van packed with seven others. We sang songs and played games to pass the time. Every one of us was severely dehydrated at this point; after much pleading, we were finally given some water to drink. The cops told us to tilt our heads as they poured small quantities of water into our mouths using tiny paper cups as you might find at a dentist’s office. They became visibly irritated when we asked for more than a few cups-full. We were transported to a precinct where our fingerprints were taken and we were finally allowed to use a toilet, our hands no longer bound.
\n\nThey put us on a short bus to await yet another relocation to an overnight holding cell. I continued to play the medic role, advocating for someone on the bus who needed medication that the police were withholding. I reminded everyone not to talk to the cops unless absolutely necessary and gave hand and wrist massages to help ease the pain caused by zip-ties, some of which were so tight that they caused long-term nerve damage. After we continued to demand water, they gave us a red sugary drink, definitely not water, and told us we should be grateful for it. We spent what was left of the night cuddled together for warmth and comfort on a cold hard floor under bright fluorescent lights with only our pepper-spray-coated clothing to sleep on.
\n\nWe spent most of the following day in an even smaller cell at the courthouse. There was a sink in our cell; it was above a toilet and the stream slowly dribbled out. We would have had to put our mouths on the metal sink in order to drink from it. We passed. A few hours before we were released, we were finally given some food, if you could call it that. Bologna and pepper spray sandwiches, washed down with absolutely nothing. Yum. I gave my rations to my cellmates and ate two mustard packets before passing out from exhaustion.
\n\nWhen we were called to appear in front of the judge, they put real handcuffs on us and attached them to ankle cuffs with a chain. We were referred to as “bodies” and assigned numbers which then became what we were called by. The dehumanizing element was hard to ignore. We stood in front of Judge Leibovitz as she charged each of us with one count of felony rioting. We were assigned counsel and released on our own recognisance: we didn’t have to post bail but were required to return for court.
\n\nWe were welcomed back into the world by a huge crowd of people cheering for us. A friend ran up to me exclaiming, “You have to see this!” and showed me the viral video of someone in black bloc punching white nationalist Richard Spencer in the face. That was exactly what I needed in that moment. There were food and drinks waiting for us and so many hugs. We were given rides to the precinct where our property was being held. We spent the next several hours trying to get our property back and documenting what had been taken as evidence. Some medics who had not been arrested were there to help; they assisted me in documenting all the items that the police had stolen. We soon learned that anyone who was arrested with a phone that day did not receive it back.
\n\nI was eventually given a ride to my housing and spent the rest of the night watching videos from that day and catching up on everything that had happened in DC while I was detained. I drove down to North Carolina the following day. Some friends, who were now also co-defendants, were holding a debrief dinner and invited me to attend. I would spend the next several months living there, in a house with three co-defendants and some very supportive friends, working around the clock on the J20 case.
\n\nIn April, a superseding indictment increased our charges to a total of eight felony charges each, including conspiracy to riot, engaging in and inciting a riot, and five counts of property damage. Some people were given additional charges such as assault on an officer and individualized counts of property damage. And just like that, we were each looking at up to seventy-five years in prison if convicted on all charges. This was a blatant attempt to criminalize dissent using prosecutorial overreach. Obviously, 200 people did not break the same five windows. The idea was to use an “aiding and abetting” theory of liability to prosecute everyone who was present in the streets that day for a few instances of damaged property. They hoped to scare us into taking pleas, intimidate us and others into inaction, and use us as an example of what could happen if you stand up to those in power.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/20/support-our-friends.jpg\")
\nOrganizing a collective defense for J20 took a lot of hard work from a lot of dedicated people, defendants and supporters alike. For many of us, it became a full-time job. It was no small undertaking to coordinate over 200 people across the country. A listserv and weekly conference calls were our best means of keeping everyone in the loop: sharing updates and motions, communicating about legal matters, making sure everyone had housing and transportation to and from DC for court appearances, coordinating in-person defendant meetings after hearings, asking questions, offering resources, and checking in with people about whether their lawyers were being responsive. It was up to each defendant whether to engage with the infrastructure we established, and we did our best to reach out to those we hadn’t heard from.
\n\nEarly on in the organizing process, we established regional networks to help defendants find each other and build support locally. There were regional J20 groups in most major cities along the East Coast including DC, Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and New York City, and then there was a group for North Carolina at large. Having had no home base prior to J20, I was fortunate to land in a place with many other defendants nearby. We got together to participate in the spokes calls, traveled across the state to visit each other, held in-person support group meetings, coordinated rides to and from DC, shared dinners, threw benefit shows, made fundraiser T-shirts, tabled at events, and even organized a black masquerade party (“Black Masker Aid”) to raise money for our regional fund and spend quality time together. The North Carolina J20 defendants became family to me. They were my core support system during that time. We continue to stay in touch to this day. I hold each of them dear to my heart.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/04/09.jpg\")
\nSpokes calls were hard. They were tedious. I don’t think anyone liked them. But they were important. Every Sunday at 7 pm, I would log into join.me to participate in hours-long conference calls with defendants and supporters from each region, discussing everything from legal strategy to finances to the most recent media articles that had come out about the case. Since every defendant couldn’t possibly be on each call, we would compile the most important notes and give report-backs to our respective regions in an attempt to keep everyone up to date. The creation of weekly news bulletins summarizing notable developments in the case helped streamline our communication, and the development of working groups helped to shorten the weekly spokes calls by adding several more meetings to the schedule—for better or for worse. We established several groups: the “PR” media team, the legal strategy working group, the political campaign committee, finances and fundraising, a medic working group, and wellness support.
\n\nOnce the court system announced the groups that would face trial together, there were calls to discuss trial strategy and logistics specific to each group and calls to coordinate between trial groups. Not everyone was inclined to participate in conference calls, so we created countless signal threads and riseup pads to provide even more avenues for staying connected. Nobody was obligated to participate, but those of us most inclined to engage with organizing efforts sometimes found ourselves on three or more calls each week in addition to the calls all of us were making to our lawyers on a regular basis.
\n\nLike I said, J20 was my full-time job.
\n\nFace-to-face meetings after each hearing in DC were crucial for connecting with co-defendants who were more or less absent from the larger organizing efforts and for deepening our connections with those we had been working with online. We held meetings at a co-working space near the courthouse to decompress and discuss the case in person. For many defendants, this was the only opportunity to discuss what was going on.
\n\nSome of our most memorable meetings took place around the hearings for trial date selection in June. Nearly every defendant had appearances scheduled that week, and we took advantage of this to facilitate several huge collective defense meetings—followed by kickball games and support groups in Malcolm X Park, outings to Nu Vegan, and adventures in Rock Creek Park. Spending so much time in DC was emotionally draining, so we did whatever we could to boost morale and help each other take much-needed space from the tense environment of Superior Court.
\n\nThere were at least six medics arrested in the kettle on J20. We came together to strategize about using the medic role as part of our legal defense in months that followed our arrest. We formed a working group that included medics from across the country wanting to help support us in the case. We came up with agreements about how we would present our legal defenses in solidarity with all of our co-defendants and in line with overarching street medic principles. We represented an ongoing struggle for street medics to be recognized—and not targeted—for providing care where care is needed. Motivated to use the strength of our medic defense to help in the larger collective defense, a few of of us decided to go to trial in November as part of the first trial block.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/20/2019-01-16-17-51-24.jpg\")
The defendants in the first J20 trial block, including the author.
\nPrior to trial date selections, the government had come out with a proposed set of groupings, placing each defendant in one of four categories based on alleged conduct and supposed affinity group affiliations. The government was intent on taking those designated as Group 1 to trial first, those in Group 2 next, and so on. The majority of defendants were lumped into groups 3 and 4, seemingly without rhyme or reason. Regardless of their motives for choosing these groupings and this order of operations, we were aware that the ones that the government was seeking to prosecute first were some of our most vulnerable comrades.
\n\nIn order to undermine their plan, we devised an early trial strategy. This strategy involved defendants in Groups 1 and 2 asking their lawyers to push for their trials to occur later than the government wanted, thereby enabling individuals from Groups 3 and 4 who felt they had strong cases and good lawyers to elect to go first. No one was pressured to make this choice. We held numerous conference calls discussing this strategy and considering the implications. This seemed like one of the best ways we could help protect each other while also turning up the heat on the prosecution. If the government aimed to strengthen its case against everyone by taking certain people to trial first in hopes of scoring easy convictions, our strategy was intended to disrupt their agenda.
\n\nWe were successful in securing the first part of the strategy: in the first round of trial selection, Groups 1 and 2 were granted trials in March and April 2018 despite the government’s wish to try them at the end of 2017. Next came the hard part: figuring out who would take one for the team and go to bat first. The seed had been planted, everyone knew about the early trial strategy, and all we could do was wait to see who would step up to the plate for collective defense.
\n\nI have vivid memories of the day I chose my trial date. I was sitting in the courtroom filled with dozens of co-defendants and their counsel, my lawyers on either side of me, contemplating what to do. We had several options of trial blocks to choose from, including the very first trial set for November, the second one in December, and several others that were almost a year away. Judge Leibovitz was going around the room asking counsel to choose what trial dates their clients wanted. I quietly raised the possibility with my lawyers that I could be part of the first trial. My lawyers were apprehensive. They were there to defend me, not to look out for my co-defendants; they would have preferred to watch the first trial proceedings, allowing others to take that risk so I didn’t have to. But they were working for me, and it was ultimately up to me to decide what I wanted to do.
\n\nMy decision to be on the first trial felt instinctual. I was there as a medic. I wasn’t being accused of any particular acts beyond what everyone else was facing—and the court had randomly appointed a very solid legal team to represent me. This was a high-profile case and one of the biggest law firms in the country chose to take on a client pro-bono. It was by pure chance that I ended up with them. Some defendants had been assigned run-of-the-mill CJA (Criminal Justice Act) lawyers, who often represented dozens of other clients simultaneously; some of them were largely unresponsive to calls and emails. Here I was with a full team of not just one but four lawyers and at least three paralegals working around the clock on my case. It almost felt irresponsible not to go first.
\n\nPlus, some of my closest friends were in Groups 1 and 2. If there was anything in my power I could do to help them, I was going to do it.
\n\nThere wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I was making the right decision. I knew that if I had made any other decision, I would have walked out of that courtroom regretting it. My lawyers were not excited about this, but they respected my wishes. We selected the November 20 trial date, which was later moved to November 15, or N15. Seven other defendants made the same choice. After court, we all met to start discussing how to prepare for the trial. These seven people became my second J20 family. Ultimately, only six of us would go to trial due to last-minute legal complications down the road, but for all intents and purposes, this core group stuck together from that moment on—through weekly conference calls, frequent court appearances and defendant-led meetings with all our lawyers, and living together during the six weeks of trial, all the way through to the long-awaited day of our verdict.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/20/2019-01-16-17-51-39.jpg\")
\nGoing to trial was its own chapter in the J20 saga. Time stood still for six weeks as Oliver, Jen, Christina, Brit, Alexei, and I sat at a table in our finest court fashion with our team of lawyers in Courtroom 203 in the Superior Court of DC. To our left sat two Federal Prosecutors: Assistant US Attorney Jennifer Kerkhoff, one of the vilest human beings I have ever had the displeasure of sharing space with, and the slightly more palatable yet equally reprehensible Rizwan Qureshi. In the jury box sat sixteen people from across the city who had been chosen to decide our fate via a several-day jury selection process at the onset of trial; and at the bench was Judge Lynn Leibovitz, known by many as “the toughest judge in DC.” Behind us, the gallery was full to the brim with co-defendants and supporters. They literally had our backs. They assured us that we wouldn’t be going through this process on our own.
\n\nTrial was an emotional rollercoaster. All of us had to put our lives on an indefinite hold, tying up loose ends and making arrangements in case we were sent to prison. We were uprooted from our homes, many of us still paying rent on houses with no certainty whether or when we would return to them. In DC, we lived in Airbnbs together with our closest support people. We had no idea how long trial would take. It wouldn’t be clear until the moment it was all finally over.
\n\nDay after long and grueling day was spent waking up early, putting on the nicest outfits we could assemble, grabbing something to eat, and taking the metro, riding bikes, or walking down to the courthouse from our Airbnbs in Columbia Heights. We would meet with our lawyers and hold little conferences in the hallway while waiting for the other cases to be called. Then we would spend the rest of the day wearing our best poker faces as we sat in that grim, windowless courtroom witnessing the proceedings of our trial unfold.
\n\nWe sat there and watched as Kerkhoff and Qureshi presented their case, stating from the beginning that none of us was being accused of actually breaking anything. They called numerous officers and witnesses to the stand and showed video after triggering video of police body cams and aerial surveillance footage from that day. They put our hacked phone data contents on the big screen, pulled our belongings out of cardboard boxes wearing plastic gloves and held them up as though they were contaminated, and presented big foam display boards with screenshots of our alleged persons at various points during the march—a series of pixelated black clad blobs that appeared just to be walking. We worked closely with our lawyers, taking extensive notes, brainstorming counter-arguments, and digging up dirt on the bombastic lead detective, Gregg Pemberton.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/20/2017-12-21-header1.jpg\")
\nJudge Leibovitz made it clear whose side she was on. After the jury had been dismissed one day, she made a ruling on probable cause in which she adamantly described us as a “swarm of bees, insects, or some kind of animal that coalesced and moved together as though pulled by a gravitational force.” She also compared the case to examples of “wilding” in which a few people beat someone up and all present parties are held responsible for it regardless of who threw the punches. This follows the distorted belief that violence against a person can be equated with property damage. She ruled that there was individualized probable cause to arrest each of us based on the movement of the “group” across sixteen blocks in thirty-three minutes, and the behavior of the “group” during that time. Although none of us were alleged to have personally caused any of the damage, nor was there evidence of our pre-existing knowledge that it would happen, she ruled that we were complicit in enabling the “riot” by not immediately leaving the protest as soon as the first windows were broken. For the six of us and many others, we were being charged on account of our presence alone.
\n\nAll I can say is, it was a good thing this was a jury trial.
\n\nOur only opportunity to see daylight in those winter months was an hour-long lunch break that we sometimes spent decompressing and socializing with comrades on the lawn across the street, but more often in the courthouse cafeteria discussing the morning’s proceedings with our lawyers.
\n\nAfter a full day in court, I would head directly to my lawyers’ office in Chinatown, where we would spend countless hours looking through discovery footage, documenting notable scenes in highly-organized spreadsheets, talking strategy, researching the government’s witnesses, and planning lines of questioning for cross-examinations the following day. Sometimes we would be there until eleven o’clock at night, doing everything we could possibly think of and then some to aid in our defense. I always looked forward to the shot of whiskey my lawyer would share with me to take the edge off after a long day’s work.
\n\nMy lawyers had me practice being questioned by them and cross-examined by a strong prosecutor in their law firm to prepare me for the possibility of testifying. This was a very helpful opportunity to understand just how nerve-wracking and difficult testifying can be. From this practice session, I concluded that unless it seemed absolutely necessary, testifying would not be in my best interest. They also prepared one of my best friends to testify as a character witness on my behalf. When the prosecution rested its case, we felt strongly that the government hadn’t met its burden of proof and decided not to have anyone testify in my defense. Putting anyone on the stand gives the prosecution an extra opportunity to ask presumptuous and leading questions in their cross-examination that could be detrimental to the overall case no matter how you answer. It is a strategic decision that really depends on the individual case at hand. It is a decision that should not be taken lightly.
\n\nWhile some of my trial co-defendants chose to bring in character witnesses to testify, none of us on trial took the stand. This was a collective decision that involved many conversations about the implications and risks that testifying posed for the group; it was also a personal decision on each of our parts to hear and respect the concerns of our co-defendants. I am proud to say that in the face of so much stress during that time, we each did our best to communicate compassionately with one another, to consider each others’ concerns, and to make choices that reflected a commitment to each other above everything else.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/20/1122171413e.jpg\")
\nOnce the closing arguments concluded and the judge gave the jury instructions, the jurors spent several days in deliberation. Although we did not have to be present in the courtroom during this time, we were required to be within fifteen minutes of the courthouse so we could get there quickly once a verdict was reached.
\n\nAll we could do was wait. We went for walks, checked out the nearby museums, read books, and took naps in the family court lounge. We had no idea how long it could be before we heard something. It was mid-December and we just about lost hope that we would receive a verdict before the court went on break for the holidays, which would mean returning in January to continue deliberations.
\n\nAnd then, exactly eleven months after our initial release from jail, on the Winter Solstice, December 21, 2017, when the earth reached its furthest point from the sun and began to move closer again, we received notice that the jury had come to a unanimous decision for every charge against each of the defendants on trial. We rushed to the courtroom and waited in anticipation as the jurors filed in one by one.
\n\nAll six of us were facing seven charges—six felonies and one misdemeanor each. The inciting charge had been deemed multiplicitous and thrown out by the judge during the Motion for Judgment of Acquittal prior to deliberations.
\n\nThe transcript reads:
\n\n\n\n\nTHE COURT: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen — or good afternoon, I guess.
\n\nI received a note from you at 11:20. It’s signed by Juror No. 11. And it says,
\n\n“We have reached a verdict on all counts.”
\n\nI’ll ask you, Juror 11, to please stand.
\n\nSir, are you the foreperson?
\n\nTHE JURY FOREPERSON: Yes.
\n\nTHE COURT: Has the jury reached a unanimous verdict on each and every count as to each and every Defendant?
\n\nTHE JURY FOREPERSON: Yes.
\n
I was up first.
\n\n\n\n\nTHE COURT: On Count 1, how do you find [Miel] on the charge of engaging in a riot?
\n\nTHE JURY FOREPERSON: Not guilty.
\n\nTHE COURT: On Count 2, on the charge of conspiracy to engage in a riot?
\n\nTHE JURY FOREPERSON: Not guilty.
\n\nTHE COURT: On Count 3, destruction of property?
\n\nTHE JURY FOREPERSON: Not guilty.
\n\nTHE COURT: On Count 4, destruction of property?
\n\nTHE JURY FOREPERSON: Not guilty.
\n\nTHE COURT: On Count 5, destruction of property?
\n\nTHE JURY FOREPERSON: Not guilty.
\n\nTHE COURT: On Count 6, destruction of property?
\n\nTHE JURY FOREPERSON: Not guilty.
\n\nTHE COURT: And Count 7, destruction of property?
\n\nTHE JURY FOREPERSON: Not guilty.
\n
Tears came to my eyes. I could barely contain myself as I waited to hear the verdicts for my co-defendants. I listened intently as one by one, Jen, Christina, Alexei, Oliver, and Brit were all found not guilty on each and every one of their charges too. The jury returned not guilty verdicts on all 42 counts. We had successfully secured six complete and resounding acquittals. What a victory!
\n\nThe energy of the courtroom lifted us up and carried us all the way out of the building. Everyone hugged and congratulated us. Reporters swarmed us for statements and photographs; our phones were ringing off the hook. We had won! The battle of J20 was far from over, but this triumph was something to celebrate. And celebrate we did.
\n\nFor a detailed account of our trial proceedings, check out the #DropJ20 Podcast Update on itsgoingdown.org. They produced seven episodes altogether, four during this trial and three more over the following six months. You can also listen to an interview I did after my trial ended on the Ex-Worker podcast, #62: Support, Healing, and Redefining Resistance—2017 in Review, Part II (timestamp 1:10:16).
\n\nOne month after our trial returned full acquittals, 129 cases were dismissed without explanation, leaving 59 defendants still facing charges. A few of those cases went to trial in the spring of 2018, resulting in acquittals and two mistrials. There was not a single jury conviction during the entire J20 prosecution. On July 6, 2018, every remaining case was finally dismissed.
\n\nIt was all over. We had won.
\n\nOur efforts for collective defense and the early trial strategy were a success. 234 people arrested, 217 indicted on a minimum of 8 felonies each, and ZERO convictions at trial. Only 21 plea deals were taken, and only one of those was for a felony. While there were other aspects of the case that contributed to the inevitable downfall of the prosecution, it feels safe to say that the early trial strategy played a big role in destabilizing the government’s case and acted as a catalyst for that sequence of events to unfold. This victory illustrates the power of collective defense and the potential that we have together. It wasn’t easy. It took a lot of hard work from a lot of people to make this all possible. In the end, it was all worth it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/20/may-14-pack.jpg\")
\nFirst, check out this article that came out soon after our arrest, Making the Best of Mass Arrests: 12 Lessons from the Kettle During the J20 Protests. I would especially highlight #5, “Don’t bring your real phone”—even if you bring a burner phone, wipe the data and destroy the sim card rather than handing it over to the cops)— #6, “Seize the chance to pass on skills”; and #7, “Care for each other.” I cannot emphasize that last point enough.
\n\nAlso, as a general rule of thumb, don’t make things easy for the cops, don’t talk to them or believe anything they say. Ever.
\n\nHere are some other suggestions.
\n\nThe narratives presented in the media do a lot to shape public opinion; they can make a big difference in influencing the outcome of a case. Working with sympathetic journalists can be a great way to avoid some of the risks of speaking in the media while facing charges. Especially when you are dealing with a political case, you have to consider the risk of being doxxed or harmed by those on the other side of the political spectrum as well as the legal risk that something you say could be used against you in court. Working with journalists who are willing to speak off the record or conduct interview anonymously or with pseudonyms can be a great way to keep yourself safe while getting the information out there in the ways that you want it to be understood.
\n\nI met some of my best friends through the J20 ordeal; they gave me the strength to keep fighting and inspired me to give it my all. Not only was I fighting for myself, I was fighting for all the comrades who were in this battle with me; and together with our communities, we were fighting for the future of dissent and resistance in the United States. Working in solidarity with comrades toward a common goal can evoke a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose; it makes the whole experience feel much more meaningful.
\n\nHow traumatic an experience is has a lot to do with the support we receive during it and in the aftermath. One thing that really helped me get through this was the relationships I built with the people who were in it with me and those doing support who had been through something similar themselves. Times were heavy for all of us, and knowing there were other people going through it assured me I was never alone. Holding space with these people to talk about how it has affected our lives and process our feelings about it enabled me to feel seen and validated my experience of being in a low-level crisis for months on end.
\n\nSo many people have to face the legal injustice system on their own. My heart truly goes out to them. I was fortunate to have co-defendants to share the experience with and seasoned comrades to\nprovide insight into the legal system, suggest how to engage with the process, and offer tools for confronting the many challenges of being a defendant. For example, I recommend A Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant by the Tilted Scales Collective.
\n\nWorking together can also do a lot to dissipate the anxiety and paranoia that someone might snitch or cooperate with the state. It was reported by the court that there were no snitches and no cooperation with the government on the J20 case.
\n\nThe period of time between being arrested and the end of trial involves constant stress. During this time, it is especially important to prioritize self-care and reach out for help. Regulating the nervous system is key to staying well. Take baths, go for walks, ride a bike, drink tea and read a book in a warm cozy place that feels safe. Remember to breathe. Get out in nature! Find a therapist or a support\ngroup or both. Start your own support group. Eat your favorite foods. Move your body! Hike up a mountain. Call an old friend. Let people know what you’re going through. Ask for support. Do something fun to reward yourself for dealing with all the bullshit. Do yoga. Find any activity that puts you more in your body than in your head and allows you to discharge some of the activation energy that builds up from continual stress. Without a release, this energy can become stored in the body, causing discomfort, tension, and even chronic pain.
\n\nWhether it was cracking jokes in the kettle to ease some of the tension we were all feeling that day, creating the spectacular musical parody “Now That’s What I Call Kerkhophony Volume 1,” or performing a ventriloquist act with a black-clad ventriloquist’s dummy called Bloc-o, defendants found ways to lighten each others’ hearts and evoke moments of joy in the face of unrelenting state repression. We tend to take ourselves quite seriously and it can be hard to look on the bright side sometimes, but finding ways to break from the unending stress of a legal process to have a good laugh can offer a much-needed release to soothe our tender hearts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/20/b.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/20/0722172333a.jpg\")
Bloc-o, ventriloquist’s dummy and all around sketchy character.
\nThe stress and grief experienced in the aftermath of a traumatic event or period of time can leave a person feeling out of control and having a foreshortened sense of future. The state was attempting to take away our ability to choose how the rest of our lives would unfold. They were threatening to take away our entire lives, to murder us slowly. At twenty-seven, facing seventy-five years in a cage meant I might not see life on the other side. And though there is life behind bars, and there does exist a chance of making it to sixty or seventy years old and getting out whole and having joyous, beautiful years on the outside, this was not their intention. They were trying to stifle and kill us. We had to come to terms with this anticipatory grief while fighting like hell to keep it from happening. Our lives depended on it.
\n\nIn a lot of ways, the year after my trial was more difficult for me than the year I spent facing life in prison. When trial ended, I didn‘t know what to do with myself. I had spent so much time solely focused on my defense and preparing for an endpoint to life as I knew it. Regardless of how implausible the charges seemed, that very real threat had been hanging over my head, preventing me from making any long-term plans or imagining what the rest of my life might look like if I didn’t spend it behind bars.
\n\nOnce I had my life back in my own hands, I found myself scrambling for something to do to fill the empty space that had been occupied for so long with organizing J20 defense. I went through intense periods of depression and anxiety. I wanted to do nothing and everything all at once. I experienced oversleeping and sleeplessness, and I wavered from being highly sensitive to dissociated and numb as the feelings and emotions of the past year finally had space to surface.
\n\n2018 arrived with a strange sense of loss, a lack of direction, a lot of contemplation, and a great deal of confusion. I was not facing decades in prison anymore, but I was facing the reality that life was rough before J20 and it would continue to be rough after J20.
\n\nI had spent the four years prior to my arrest traveling, untethered to any one physical location, unattached to where my journey would lead me, searching for a way to find meaning in this life. I rejected societal norms that encourage us to stay in one place, work a full-time job, get married, start a family, grow old and eventually die. I longed for something more meaningful than this generic cookie-cutter existence that accepts and upholds the conditions of a capitalist society. I sought to find a better place for myself in a world designed to isolate and alienate every single one of us.
\n\nYet I lacked a sense of what “home” meant or what it might look like for me. I had both found and lost “community” numerous times, and had experienced trauma and grief in a variety of forms. At the end of the day, I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. I hadn’t lived in any single place for more than six months; I felt inhibited in my attempts at fostering meaningful connections in anarchist communities due to the fact that I was seen as a transient newcomer, and people tend to be skeptical of folks who come around seemingly out of nowhere. There were people I cared deeply for, scattered in various cities across the country and around the world—and while opportunities to connect with them motivated me to keep traveling, I continually struggled to carve out space to settle and establish myself as a part of a radical community. This was one of the primary reasons that I felt compelled to go to DC in the first place. I knew where my heart was, I was certain of my politics and the struggles I wished to engage with, but I didn’t have an apparent way to translate my yearnings into action. J20 was a way in.
\n\nIt was also a way out. I had been worn down, repeatedly fighting an uphill battle for belonging with opposition coming from the very side I wished to fighting be on. I continually felt like an outcast with nowhere to go. I was tired of leaving one place just to land somewhere else and have the same story repeat itself over and over again; but I also found no good reason compelling me to stay anywhere. It was time to break this cycle.
\n\nI had no idea what to expect with my decision to go to DC, but at least I knew it would be something different. It took me out of the normalcy of struggling for a meager day-to-day existence and into an environment of direct confrontation and resistance. It was a chance to feel alive. It was an opportunity to engage with people from across the country and from all walks of life who shared my discontent and my yearnings for something more, something better. Even if this experience didn’t help me achieve my larger goal of finding a place to call home, it would at least provide me with a momentary glimpse of what it feels like to truly exist in solidarity with comrades and allow me to recharge my drained and depleted life-force energy.
\n\nThat solidarity provided me with a temporary home. It kindled a fire blazing with passion, a flaming limousine that warmed my heart and nourished the deepest part of my being. The fire burned fiercely as its flame provided light through the darkness, growing in size and intensity as one day of action became a year-and-a-half-long battle against state repression. We came together around that fire for a shared purpose: to hold each other up, to work together and fight against a common enemy, to foster relationships of support despite the government’s best efforts at tearing us apart. We kept that fire burning; we fed it with our commitment to one another and watched it grow within us and beyond as solidarity actions amplified the collective heat around the world.
\n\nThe thing about fire is that while it can be a source of power and strength, it also has the potential to burn us and everything else in its path. If we aren’t careful, it can destroy us, incinerating our spirit and consuming everything we have worked toward all the way down to the very foundations we stand upon. Internal conflicts, unequal power dynamics, the hoarding of information or access to resources, and ego-driven attempts at gaining social capital are among the factors that contributed to the gradual extinguishment of all that we had created and the quenching of any potential for continuing to carry the torch into the next field of battle.
\n\nThe flame has been smothered as this particular fight has come to an end, and with it, the dissipation of solidarity and support that up until this point had prevailed. It seems we have learned how to make fires—whether the fire of revolt or of immediate solidarity—but we haven’t yet made hearths, homes for the fires and for ourselves, where the heat can linger a while longer, offering us solace and space to heal; nor do we have circles of hearths, the basic shape of so many human communities.
\n\nThe immediate plummet of support in the aftermath was one of the hardest aspect of this whole experience. The community I had come to feel supported by dissipated as the time came to pick myself up and reconstruct a life for myself from the pile of ashes that remained. I knew that many of the people engaging with J20 organizing and support were doing so because we were directly in the line of fire, facing the barrel of the gun head-on; but part of me also believed we had cultivated something deeper than that. Once everything was over, the fallout hit hard and I found myself, yet again, feeling alone and like I didn’t belong anywhere. I spent more time in 2018 just trying to stabilize myself enough to get out of bed each day than actually recovering from the year prior.
\n\nI am still coming to terms with the loss of this collective cohesion that in many ways defined my identity for a period of time. The complexities of grief reflect disintegration on a community level, the erosion of a number of personal relationships formed through the experience, and the disappearance of some of my primary support from that time. This all added another dimension to the trauma I was recovering from and made it nearly impossible to have the capacity to take on even the most familiar stressors of day-to-day life, let alone develop healthy relationships or engage in any type of organizing or activism. The world quickly became a cold and lonely place as I came to feel more and more invisible in the absence of a conspicuous crisis to avert, and without a home community to sustain me.
\n\n\n\n\n“We grow powerful, we interrupt normality, we rise up, even sparking insurrections, and in most cases we also survive the subsequent repression, almost completely intact. But then after we’ve seemingly won, we grow increasingly upset with our weaknesses, with one another, with how ugly the world remains; we avoid staring into the abyss of how much is left to do and what we’re inflicting on the planet and ourselves, and we give up in a way. We lose one another, we move away from the fire and into the cold, alone, a million of us in nearly the exact same circumstance, yet each one alone.”
\n
This brings me to consider what “support” actually means and looks like in the aftermath of state repression and, for those convicted, post-incarceration. How can we carve out space for the grief and the emotional ebbs and flows necessary to integrate such lived experiences into our personal narratives and histories? How can we find ways to establish ongoing long-term support for ourselves and each other while we continue to come face-to-face with a never-ending influx of crises? How can we build our capacity and our resilience knowing there will never be an end to the struggle? What can we learn from this and how can we do things differently in the future to mitigate the fallout from circumstances such as these? How can we keep that fire burning from one battle to the next, allowing it to continue to nourish us, so we might cultivate the strength to stick together and build upon our greatest potential?
\n\nI hope to always carry with me the memory of warmth provided by the ephemeral flame of resistance sparked on that unforgettable day and the year that followed, so I might be fortunate enough to feel it again someday.
\n\nLet’s remember to be gentle with ourselves and with one another as we acknowledge that life under capitalism is an ongoing and inescapably traumatic experience; that we are all doing the best we can; that we all have a basic need for care and compassion on an ongoing basis; and that we really do need each other.
\n\nThe conditions in which we are forced to exist are hostile to our survival, adverse to our natural inclinations, and detrimental to our overall individual and collective well-being. This is exactly why\nmust we seek to disrupt and abolish the foundations and infrastructures that perpetuate these conditions and work to create a new world in the shell of the old.
\n\nIt is my wholehearted desire that we will find more ways to provide each other with long-term care and wellness support in the face of state repression and in the aftermath, when we attempt to put the pieces of our lives back together so we can get up to fight another day. Supporting and sustaining long-term movements of resistance takes an understanding of the diverse ways we are affected by the situations we find ourselves in and finding tools and approaches to care that help us maintain resilience in the face of perpetual class war and ongoing opposition.
\n\nThe totality of this experience motivated me to continue deepening my exploration of healing practices and expanding my knowledge of medicine. It inspired me to dedicate myself to studying the psychological impacts of trauma, stress, and grief on the nervous system and overall well-being that are so deeply tied to our identities and our experiences of privilege and oppression in this world. It is my goal to acquire the skills necessary to offer accessible health care to those who need it most while continuing to focus on building long-term resiliency in the communities I inhabit.
\n\nOn behalf of all the N15 trial defendants, I want to give a huge shout out to everyone who was there for us during trial. Our hearts are filled with love and appreciation for all our co-defendants and supporters, our friends, families, partners, housemates, and comrades who traveled to DC, who showed up day in and day out to sit in that courtroom in dashing court attire, who showed us unwavering support during those six long and challenging weeks of trial. Thank you for being there for us and for reminding us that we were not alone. We couldn’t have done it without all of you. Thanks to everyone who took or transcribed court notes, brought us snacks and gave us hugs during breaks, took us out for drinks, bought us massages, and made sure we had fun whenever possible. Thank you to the Brighter Days Collective for walking my dog for me every day while I was in court; to everyone who sent us letters of encouragement and care packages filled with sweet gifts, herbs, tinctures, zines, and more; to those who were willing to testify on our behalf as character witnesses; and to those who hosted us on breaks and helped us carve out time away from DC to take care of ourselves. A very special thanks to the amazing humans of the Pots and Pans Kitchen Collective for providing us with three meals per day, every day, giving us one less thing to worry about; and for bringing lunches to the courthouse and making it easier for supporters to continue to show up for us by feeding them as well. Thanks, too, to anyone who helped Pots and Pans by participating in meal trains, and to anyone else we may have forgotten. We also want to extend the utmost gratitude to our incredibly dedicated and hard-working team of lawyers; without them none of us would be here to tell the story of our success. We deeply appreciate each and every one of you!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/20/2019-01-18-180912.jpg\")
\nIn closing, I want to share a poem I wrote on the one-year anniversary of J20. This poem was written to all of my co-defendants and specifically to the 59 defendants who were still facing charges after the majority of the cases were dismissed. At the two-year anniversary, I am so relieved to say we no longer have anyone facing charges from that day, none of us are in prison, and I still feel as deep a connection to these comrades as I did when I originally wrote this.
\n\na love poem to my co-defendants
\n\none year ago today,
\nall of us were in washington dc.
\nwe took to the streets to disrupt the inauguration of donald trump.
\nwe stood together in solidarity with each other and every person who is oppressed,
\nevery person who is faced with living in a world where profit and hate dominate.
\nwe came together,
\nfrom every corner of these so-called united states
\nto oppose this neo-fascist regime,
\nto oppose this president,
\nand all presidents,
\nto oppose all forms of hierarchy and manipulations of power.
\nto show our strength,
\nto stand up,
\nalongside one another,
\ntogether.
\nto show our resistance,
\nour commitment to the struggle for our lives,
\nfor all life.
\nto fight for a world worth living in.
one year ago today,
\nmany of us met each other for the first time.
\nwe didn’t know each other’s names,
\nyet we knew we were on the same team.
\nblack clad warriors
\nstanding together
\nengaged in a class war,
\nin a social war.
\na war on war.
\nwe swarmed the city with our hearts as our compass.
\nwe made our messages known.
\nwe embraced a diversity of tactics
\nguided by the same principles
\nof unity,
\nof solidarity,
\nof resistance.
one year ago today,
\nwe set the city ablaze.
\nwe disrupted the inauguration,
\nwe disrupted the flow of capital,
\nwe disrupted the illusion of normalcy.
\nwe fought back against corruption, greed, and violence.
\nwe fought back against the coercive power structures
\nthat attempt to dictate how we live our lives.
\nwe showed the world that we were a threat to the status quo.
\nwe showed the world that we would not back down.
\nwe showed the world that we are not afraid.
\nwe showed the world that we are ungovernable.
one year ago today,
\nwe were met with force.
\nthe powers that be attempted to stifle our dissent.
\nthey attempted to shut us down,
\nto silence us.
\nbecause they knew we were a threat.
\nthey knew we had the potential to make change.
\nso they attacked us with their weapons,
\nthey brutalized us,
\nthey surrounded us, and
\nthey trapped us.
\nthey arrested us,
\nand they threw us in cages,
\nbecause they didn’t know what else to do with us.
\nthey may have stopped us, slowed us down,
\nbut they did not break us.
\nthey did not defeat us.
one year ago today,
\nand in the days and months that followed,
\nwe were all charged with felonies.
\nfelonies that threatened us
\nwith more time behind bars
\nthan any of us has spent living.
\nfelonies that put our lives on hold,
\nthat were held over our heads,
\nand altered our ability to have control
\nover how we spend our time.
we spent the next 365 days
\nenduring the punishment,
\nthe punishment in the process
\nof the criminal injustice system.
we also spent those 365 days
\ninvesting our time and our energy
\nin each other.
\nwe committed ourselves to the ongoing battle
\nfor freedom,
\nfor everyone.
\nwe committed ourselves to supporting one another,
\nto sharing information and resources,
\nto building our networks,
\nto expanding our communities,
\nto strengthening our convictions,
\nto continuing to struggle
\nagainst the state,
\nagainst state repression,
\nagainst all forms of oppression;
\nagainst the silencing of our voices,
\nagainst the weakening of our movement.
\nwe committed ourselves
\nto continuing to struggle
\nagainst that which seeks to destroy all that is worth living for.
one year ago today,
\nand in the days and months that followed,
\nwe created something beautiful.
\nwe formed a collective of strong, resilient people
\ndedicated to resistance,
\ndedicated to fighting these charges tooth and nail.
\ndedicated to each other.
one year ago today,
\ni found some of the bravest people i know.
\none year ago today,
\ni found strength amongst people whom i truly admire.
\none year ago today,
\ni found over 200 of my new best friends.
\nmy greatest comrades.
\none year ago today,
\nwe found each other.
\nand one year later,
\nwe have not lost one another.
while many of us are no longer facing charges,
\nmany of us still are.
\nand as we go into the next year of this battle
\nwe remain standing, side-by-side.
we are all in this together.
\nand we are not going anywhere
\nuntil all of us are free.
to the remaining J20 defendants,
\ni want you all to know—
\nyou are not in this alone.
\nyou will not be forgotten.\nyou are seen.
\nand you are loved.
\nand you are important.
\nand we will get through this,
\ntogether,
\nno matter what happens next.
with endless love and rage,
\nXx
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/20/1.jpg\")
\nThis is part of a series looking back on the events of J20 and the legal struggle that followed it. Check out the rest of the series:
\n\nAnarchist Resistance to the Trump Inauguration
\n\nWe’ve Got Your Back: The Story of the J20 Defense
\n\nBetween the Sun and the Sea: Icarus at 12th and L—A Voice from the J20 Black Bloc and Kettle on the Practice of Anarchy
\n\nJ20 Protest Simulator—Choose Your Own Adventure in the Streets and Courts of Washington, DC
\n\nFor additional perspective on how to survive the turbulent aftermath of social movements, consult our four-part series from 2013, “After the Crest.”
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2019/01/18/j20-protest-simulator-choose-your-own-adventure-in-the-streets-and-courts-of-washington-dc", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2019/01/18/j20-protest-simulator-choose-your-own-adventure-in-the-streets-and-courts-of-washington-dc", "title": "J20 Protest Simulator : Choose Your Own Adventure in the Streets and Courts of Washington, DC", "summary": "A narrative simulation based on the experiences one could have participating in the march against Trump’s inauguration and the ensuing court cases.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/17/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/17/header.jpg", "date_published": "2019-01-18T14:34:00Z", "date_modified": "2026-01-23T09:59:24Z", "tags": [ "J20", "DC", "Inauguration", "game", "black bloc", "how to" ], "content_html": "After extensive research, we’ve prepared an interactive narrative simulation—a Choose Your Own Adventure game—based on the experiences a person could have participating in the black bloc march against Trump’s inauguration and the notorious court case that followed it. Obviously, this is a work of historical fiction—we know you would never participate in a black bloc, dear reader—but we have meticulously constructed the narratives from the details of real events. We hope it will serve an educational as well as historical function.
\n\n\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/games/j20/images/header.jpg\")
\nThe simulation doesn’t reflect the story of every single protester or arrestee, nor does it systematically account for the dramatically different experiences people had interacting with the police and court system according to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and physical mobility. However, we collected narratives from a variety of vantage points, and the advantage of this format over the linear reportback model is that it allows for multiple perspectives and layers of reality.
\n\nThe game is scored along two axes—risk and solidarity. Risk assesses the degree of danger you expose yourself to via your actions in the streets and your decisions in the legal process; solidarity measures the extent to which you disrupt Trump’s inauguration and contribute to the safety of other protesters and defendants. Try playing to minimize your risk while maximizing your solidarity score; then, as a learning exercise, see what happens when you try to maximize the risks you expose yourself to. The lessons of this game may not hold true for every demonstration or court case in the future, but they do roughly reflect what happened in Washington, DC on January 20, 2017 and afterwards.
\n\nThis is part of a series looking back on the events of J20 and the legal struggle that followed it. Check out the rest of the series:
\n\nAnarchist Resistance to the Trump Inauguration
\n\nWe’ve Got Your Back: The Story of the J20 Defense
\n\nI Was a J20 Street Medic and Defendant
\n\nBetween the Sun and the Sea: Icarus at 12th and L—A Voice from the J20 Black Bloc and Kettle on the Practice of Anarchy
\n\nTo learn more about the demonstrations during Trump’s inauguration and the court cases that followed:
\n\nDefendJ20—The support website for J20 defendants
\n\nDisruptJ20—Report on the blockades that morning
\n\nJ20 Live Updates—Our live coverage of anarchist resistance during Trump’s inauguration
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/08/15/perspectives-on-the-august-12-anti-fascist-mobilization-in-dc-two-interviews-with-organizers", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/08/15/perspectives-on-the-august-12-anti-fascist-mobilization-in-dc-two-interviews-with-organizers", "title": "Perspectives on the August 12 Anti-Fascist Mobilization in DC : Two Interviews with Organizers", "summary": "On August 12, the police spent $2.6 million to enable fascists to recruit in Washington, DC on the anniversary of the Charlottesville attacks. ", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/15/header1.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/15/header1.jpg", "date_published": "2018-08-15T20:16:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:37Z", "tags": [ "DC", "Charlottesville", "antifascism" ], "content_html": "On August 12, Charlottesville fascist Jason Kessler attempted to hold the sequel to last year’s “Unite the Right” rally in Washington, DC. It did not go well for him. In the end, 2000 police struggled to protect two dozen fascists from thousands of anti-fascists and other foes of tyranny. To get some perspective on these events, we spoke with David Thurston—arts director for No Justice No Pride, a member of the steering committee of the DMV’s Movement for Black Lives, and a core organizer with Resist This—and also with an anonymous anarchist involved in organizing the anti-fascist bloc, among other aspects of the mobilization.
\n\nThe US government spent $2.6 million to force the fascist rally upon the people of Washington, DC. Let’s do the math: that’s over $100,000 per fascist for a rally that lasted an hour at most. Would the US spend anything like that to protect a rally organized by any other sector of the population? On the contrary, when anarchists and other advocates of liberation organize public events, the government usually spends millions of dollars to repress us, often breaking its own laws in order to do so. This shows what a farce the “free speech” defense of fascist recruiting drives is—this is not an abstract question of rights, but a concrete matter of the US government asymmetrically investing resources in promoting the spread of fascism.
\n\nTo put a number on it, then, the kind of “free speech” that enabled Kessler and his like to recruit someone to murder Heather Heyer is worth $100,000 per hour per fascist to the US government. Those are your tax dollars at work.
\n\nWe were especially inspired by the fierceness with which the black population of DC turned out to face down the police and fascists on August 12. We have some questions about whether it makes sense for anarchists to act separately in a distinct anti-fascist contingent when other sectors of the population are mobilizing so courageously and assertively. It might be more effective for some anarchists to seek to connect with other rebels on the street, in order to bring about an interchange of tactics and ideas. Hopefully, this is already taking place.
\n\nWe’ve seen some alarmist commentary on the clashes—for example, from the person who posted the following video. Permit us to repeat that the US government is forcibly extorting money from its population to fund the violent imposition of fascist rallies on communities that only stand to suffer from the expansion of white supremacist activity. In this context, it should be no surprise that people defend themselves from police violence.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Journo_Christal/status/1028753625483538433\n\n\n
One more topic bears mention: a few reactionary media outlets have taken this opportunity to accuse anti-fascists of being “violent” towards journalists for discouraging them from filming. This is the same thing they did last year, two weeks after the violence in Charlottesville, when the editors of various corporate media publications attempted to create a false equivalency between fascists recruiting to carry out murder and genocide and anti-fascists mobilizing in self-defense.
\n\nIn a time when fascists go through video footage identifying anti-fascists in order to intimidate and terrorize them, and far-right Republican congressmen are attempting to aid and abet them via new legislation, it should not come as a surprise to anyone that anti-fascists discourage people from filming them without permission. If these journalists are really concerned about this issue, they should prioritize helping to create a world in which no one needs to fear being identified and attacked by fascists or police just for attempting to defend their communities. Instead, several journalists have prioritized assisting fascists like Kessler in getting his message out.
\n\nRead on for the interviews. You can also head here for a history of anti-fascism in DC.
\n\nWhat were your goals going into August 12? What did you think a best case scenario would be for the day?
\n\nDavid Thurston: For the past month, I’ve been working as the arts organizer for the mobilization. My first job was to make sure the rally in Freedom Plaza and the three direct action contingents got the brilliant, vibrant, colorful, and radical banners that the 411 Collective crafted. I also co-emceed the rally with Aiyi’anah Ford of the Future Foundation—we met through the organizing around the National Equality March in 2009. I wanted to see the Nazis vastly outnumbered and I wanted to see DC and DMV activists organize around a synergy and diversity of tactics—allowing us to welcome people into the movement who may never have heard of anarchist theory, but who over time could be introduced to our praxis of non-hierarchical, anti-sectarian, and revolutionary politics.
\n\nAnother anarchist organizer: I wanted to make Nazis too afraid to come to DC. I also wanted to block their march. The former did not happen due to some last minute infighting, but the latter did happen.
\n\nOverall, I would say the action was an overwhelming success. Anarchists provided a great deal of labor in every aspect of the mobilization.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/15/1.jpg\")
\nWhat did the anti-fascist demonstrators do well? What could have gone better?
\n\nDavid Thurston: We succeeded in overwhelmingly outnumbering our opposition, marginalizing their toxic politics, and putting forward an organizing model that can be advanced upon in the future. There were a number of internal challenges and conflicts that took shape in the lead-up to A12, but for the most part, the various components of our effort worked from a space of deep-rooted solidarity.
\n\nAnother anarchist organizer: We overwhelmed neo-Nazis numerically, but because of some tactical and intelligence failures, we did not get the chance to actually confront them. But when you have thousands of people mobilizing and holding space, do you really need to escalate when the fascists are already too afraid to come out? The fact that the black bloc did not escalate when there was no reason to do so enabled us to hold space, stay disciplined until the end, and demonstrate an ability to show restraint when necessary in order to accomplish the goals of the movement.
\n\nOn January 20, hundreds of people were mass-arrested during Trump’s inauguration and indiscriminately charged with eight or more felonies apiece. How did the legacy of the J20 case influence planning ahead of August 12? How do you think it influenced those who did not participate in the planning, but came to participate?
\n\nDavid Thurston: The fact that there were absolutely no convictions for J20 defendants was probably a big factor explaining why our city’s multitude of police forces were relatively restrained. My inkling is that someone above or in the orbit of Chief Newsham realized that it was not in the city’s interests for local police to play the role of being the extreme right’s de-facto storm troopers. That said, the massive deployment of state power was obscene. My guess is that a few million dollars of city money probably went into massive police overtime.
\n\nThere may have been some folks who were afraid to come out, but my opinion is that that was probably because of what the neo-Nazis represent, and not because of anything that went down with J20.
\n\nAnother anarchist organizer: We thought long and hard about how to avoid isolating ourselves from other social movements and argued against others trying to marginalize radicals. Considering that our movement had set up the tech support, website, security, trainings, and other essential aspects of the mobilization, it was impossible to isolate us on the sidelines where we would be easy targets for police violence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/15/2.jpg\")
\nDid it make sense to call for a distinct anti-fascist bloc, when so many people turned out to oppose the fascist rally with their own ways of being militant? Why or why not?
\n\nDavid Thurston: I think it was great to have an anti-fascist bloc that could plan direct action based on the worst-case scenario of a sizable far right turnout. It was also good to have a space where the lessons of prior direct actions, especially J20, could be debated in depth.
\n\nIn practice, there was a lot of synergy between the direct action contingents and the two permitted rallies, even though the permitted rallies gave voice to ideas more in line with traditional left liberal thinking.
\n\nAnother anarchist organizer: I think the strategy of the bloc that day was to be able to
\n\nA year after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, what do the events in DC tell us about the current political situation in the US?
\n\nDavid Thurston: I think last weekend’s events make it clear that the far right is in political, ideological, organizational, and interpersonal disarray. After the debacle of Jason Kessler’s pitiful mobilization, he went on a Twitter rant attacking the rest of the self-proclaimed alt-right, calling them cowards for not mobilizing, and describing them as would-be Nazis living in their parents’ basements. While trying to get a permit in Charlottesville, Kessler managed to dox his own followers by turning over encrypted Signal threads, emails, and more to the state.
\n\nBut we can’t rest on our success last weekend. While joining a proto-fascist organization remains a marginal idea for the millions of white people who voted for Trump in 2016, specific neo-Nazi proposals and talking points—especially around immigration, border security, and global imperialist hubris—remain appealing to wide swaths of low-income, working-class, and lower-middle-class white folk in our nation.
\n\nThe radical left has immense potential to grow if we can shed the baggage of years of being fairly marginal to political debate. Anarchists need to organize creatively, finding space to work in alliance with left-leaning liberals, but also with socialist groupings with whom we have significant differences.
\n\nAnother anarchist organizer: I think the rally on August 12 shows that militant anti-fascism works. A year ago, there were 500 fascists marching in the streets of Charlottesville. This year, less than 25 showed up because they were afraid. At least on the East Coast, anti-fascism has demobilized the far right.
\n\nSo we’ve pushed back on-the-ground white nationalists… but as a movement, how do we use that strategy to disrupt other forms of organized white supremacy? How do we scale that strategy up to take on local right-wing lobbyists, local Republicans, police union officials, the Chamber of Commerce, DHS, and ICE officials?
\n\nThe fascistic turn of the United States has been a 30-year process, and there are local people with local power who are marching us there. We need to figure out how to demobilize them.
\n\nTrump did not come to power because of the “alt right”—the alt right was able to use Trump to enter mainstream politics. Now our social movements need to identify the leaders who pushed our local communities to the right, and destabilize their political power.
\n\nThe chief takeaway from this weekend is that even if we did not push the limits of the struggle, we did push a mobilization that was specifically anti-fascist. Anarchists and anti-fascists wrote the original call to action for the mobilization, provided experience, and pushed a strategy that allowed for numerous communities to come out and confront fascism.
\n\nThe most challenging dynamic we had to navigate was engaging with liberals who wanted the day to look like “Boston” [the massive anti-fascist mobilization that took place there in response to a fascist rally a week after “Unite the Right” in Charlottesville] but did not emotionally prepare for the real possibility that the fascists could have mobilized hundreds.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/15/3.jpg\")
\nDo you have any particularly instructive anecdotes to share from August 12?
\n\nDavid Thurston: My favorite moment was when the permitted march from Freedom Plaza entered the periphery of the “Rise Up Fight Back” contingent anchored by Black Lives Matter DC. They organized a block party near Lafayette to celebrate black joy and resistance, making the point that no neo-Nazi mobilization was going to intimidate them or cast a pall on the vision of black liberation that this movement was articulating.
\n\nOn a personal note, I encountered a brother named Amir who introduced himself to me at the rally. I didn’t recognize him, but Amir told me that he was one of three young black men who tried to mug me near my neighborhood in DC. Amir apologized for his actions. I was so moved and thanked him, letting him know that I wish him the best, and never wanted anyone to go to jail for something as petty as trying to take $10 from me. To see him in the struggle for a radically different future on A12 made an impact on my psyche that I have a hard time adequately explaining.
\n\nWe are living through perilous times. If we organize creatively and synergistically, radicals can lay the foundation for movements that could, within a decade or so, lead to revolutionary transformation in our country and around the world. But if we fail, the threat of global political, economic, and ecological cataclysm is immense. I have friends working hard to elect left-liberal to social democratic candidates for public office, and friends whose focus is on direct action and community-based organizing. We need to build a radical tent broad enough for all of the above if the revolutionary potential of this moment is to be realized.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/07/31/all-out-for-august-fight-fascism-but-keep-the-pressure-on-the-state", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2018/07/31/all-out-for-august-fight-fascism-but-keep-the-pressure-on-the-state", "title": "All Out for August! : Fight Fascism, but Keep the Pressure on the State", "summary": "August is shaping up to be a busy month, with a convergence of struggles against fascist organizing, the prison-industrial complex, and the violence of the border.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/31/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/31/header.jpg", "date_published": "2018-07-31T14:54:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:37Z", "tags": [ "ICE", "antifascism", "Portland", "Charlottesville", "Occupy", "DC" ], "content_html": "August is shaping up to be a busy month in the United States, with a convergence of struggles against fascist organizing, the prison-industrial complex, and the violence of the border as exemplified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). With our comrades at Submedia and It’s Going Down, we’ve prepared a short video addressing the situation, followed by a brief analysis.
\n\nAll out this August!
\nWe’re seeing a new wave of activity from the fascist movement that was so soundly beaten in the streets a year ago. Early on the morning of July 28, the Nazis of Patriot Front attacked the camp set up by Occupy ICE in San Antonio. This August, the same fascist groups that terrorized and murdered people last year are preparing to rally around the US again—everywhere from Providence and Washington, DC to Portland and Berkeley.
\n\nFascists are the street wing of the Trump agenda. We have to shut them down wherever they organize. But above all, we can’t let them stop us from standing up to the state, the chief source of authoritarian violence.
\n\n\n\n\n“These goons are of great use to the authorities. They can carry out attacks that the state is not yet able to, intimidating those who might otherwise rebel. They distract from the institutionalized violence of the state, which is still the cause of most of the oppression that takes place in our society. Above all, they enable the authorities to portray themselves as neutral keepers of the peace.”
\n\n \n
All out for Portland!
\nFor years, people concerned about the violence of immigration enforcement sought a point of intervention to take action against it. At the beginning of the Trump era, we proposed that people build on the example of the airport blockades by shutting down ICE offices. This summer, the Occupy ICE model finally took off, with occupations all around the United States.
\n\nThe movement has managed to accomplish a lot with a relatively small amount of people. Unlike astroturf movements like the March for Our Lives that rapidly became a series of promotional events for the Democratic Party, Occupy ICE has offered agency to the exploited and excluded and achieved a direct impact. This has included direct aid and solidarity for the struggles of immigrants, halting specific deportations, and delaying deportations on a larger scale. Occupy ICE has blocked the Trump administration’s policy of breaking up families and forced Trump to try to distance himself from his own policy.
\n\nIn short, direct action gets the goods: we don’t need political parties to make change, we can take action ourselves to force the state to stop what it is doing.
\n\nUnlike the top-down decision involving the FBI and DHS to clear the Occupy encampments in coordinated attacks, the Trump administration has thus far permitted cities to handle the encampments on their own, presumably for fear that centralized repression would backfire. In response, fascists and others on the far right have taken on the task of attacking the encampments themselves, following in the footsteps of DHS agents. The fascists aspire to act as an auxiliary force of repression to do what the forces of the state cannot currently do.
\n\nHowever, this strategy can backfire on those who hold state power. The failure of the “Unite the Right” demonstration in Charlottesville a year ago cost the Trump regime dearly. Likewise, the decision to rely on evidence provided by far-right surveillance vigilantes Project Veritas cost prosecutor Jennifer Kerkhoff the entire J20 case. When fascists and other grassroots reactionaries overextend themselves, their failures can undermine the legitimacy of the reigning party they hope to support. We have to see fascist attacks as an opportunity to seize the initiative in our struggle against the state.
\n\nAbove all, fascists would like us to narrow the scope of our efforts to countering their organizing; they aim to trap us in a private grudge match while the state continues to mass-incarcerate and deport people. We beat them by organizing movements that can take on the chief source of oppression, the state itself.
\n\nThe organizers of a looming nationwide prison strike have expressed solidarity with Occupy ICE, linking the fight against prison slavery to the call to abolish ICE. This has come in the form of statements from prison strike leaders in support of Occupy ICE and also recent hunger strikes in solidarity with hunger-striking migrant detainees. When prisoners unite across racial lines against prison slavery, it’s up to us to do the same on the outside.
\n\nSo in solidarity with #AllOutAugust, we encourage people to continue to organize blockades against ICE facilities; to continue to defend Occupy ICE camps and reenergize them with events, music, films, and discussions; and to mobilize solidarity around the prison strike, as well. It is easy to draw links between resistance to prison slavery and the fight to abolish ICE and the borders it violently enforces. Continuing to support the Occupy ICE camps and anti-ICE blockades is one of many ways to act in solidarity with the prison strike.
\n\nEntering into open conflict with fascists is often terrifying. Yet we hope that the movement for a world without oppression can come out of the trying events of August stronger—and that as the summer comes to a close, the struggles against borders, fascists, and police will converge in new ways and gain new momentum.
\n\nGood luck out there, dear comrades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/31/1.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/31/3.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/31/2.jpg\")
\nIn Washington, DC, at the heart of the white settler-colonial state, local communities have long defended themselves against many different forms of oppression. In the following historical overview, we trace the roots of anti-fascist organizing in DC through the first two decades of the 21st century. Like our earlier text, “How Anti-Fascists Won the Battles of Berkeley,” this text offers some important background as anti-fascists in Washington, DC prepare to confront the second “Unite the Right” rally this coming August.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/the-struggle-against-fascism-in-dc/the-struggle-against-fascism-in-dc_front.jpg\")
You can download a zine version of this article to print and distribute.
\nFascism is a pressing threat here in the capital of the so-called United States on occupied Piscataway land. Days before the first Unite The Right, the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, Nazis brandishing guns and Confederate flags rode through southeast DC, a historically black neighborhood. Two months later, in October 2017, Richard Collins III, a black University of Maryland student, was murdered by a fascist. Meanwhile, in the suburban communities around DC, police and sheriffs cooperate with ICE through 287(g) to kidnap, imprison, and deport immigrants. In plainclothes and in uniform, fascism grows when we ignore it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/26/3.jpg\")
A legacy of resistance: Washington, DC saw four days of riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.
\nIn 1982, hundreds of DC residents responded to the first Ku Klux Klan rally in 57 years. The New York Times reported on the press conference with which the Klan opened the day:
\n\n\n\n\n“Mr. Robb, raising his voice to its best pulpit level, declared that illegal aliens were ruining America. ‘When you say aliens, are you talking about E.T.?’ shouted one reporter. Another asked, ‘Will you accept protection from black police officers today?’ While Mr. Robb was coping with the press, the other Klansmen quietly disappeared to accept the police offer to escort them quietly to Lafayette Park through the back streets.“
\n
The rally lasted only 15 minutes. The Klansmen were escorted out by federal police under a hail of stones and bottles. Afterwards, anti-racist demonstrators attacked businesses, police, and symbols of capitalism. It was not the last time that DC residents showed the far right that “DC means don’t come.”
\n\nSo the anti-fascist movement in DC didn’t start as a reaction to Donald Trump. It was already present in the 1960s when black communities organized for liberation. It was present in 1991 when the Latino neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant rose up against police. It was present in 2007 when DC Anti-Racist Action confronted the Klan in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.
\n\nThe current round of anti-fascist work began during the recession, following the collapse of the anti-globalization and anti-war movements. Activists began asking how to shift from the summit-hopping model to focus on localized conflict.
\n\nThe emergence of the Tea Party generated concern, but it did not provoke an anti-fascist response. Temporarily incapacitated by Obama’s electoral victory, anarchists could only muster small pranks such as passing out signs that said “privatize military hospitals”—now a serious policy proposal of the right—and leading chants of “Tea Bag on this lawn, all day long.”
\n\nAt the time, few could read the tea leaves to see what the future held.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/26/5.jpg\")
A Tea Party demonstration.
\n\n\n\n“It took us years to climb back from the humiliation of being canceled.”
\n\n-Jared Taylor, referring to the 2010 conference
\n
In spring 2010, anarchists involved with the Self-Described Anarchists Collective (SDAC) led a research team and social media campaign to shut down the white supremacist American Renaissance conference. Anti-fascists had protested the conference for years already; in the end, a coordinated call-in campaign finally forced the conference organizers to leave DC.
\n\nHotel after hotel shut their doors to neo-Nazis as anti-fascists called around, asking if a booking had been made and beseeching the venues to cancel the conference. SDAC shut down every space in DC that fascists attempted to reserve. In the end, the conference took place in a restaurant in Virginia—yet instead of hundreds of suit-and-tie fascists mingling, their numbers were reduced to less than 20. It took the far right years to recover.
\n\nFascists were not able to regain their foothold in DC until 2015.
\n\nSmash Racism DC (SRDC) formed in response to a march called for by the Aryan Nations in September 2012 on the theme “Stop White Genocide [sic] in South Africa.” A small group of veterans of the Occupy movement came up with the name and called for a meeting to plan a community response. Held at Howard University, the first meeting brought together a mix of students, religious congregants, anarchists, and socialists.
\n\nAt the time, anti-fascists did not have an organized presence in Washington, DC. Community members largely avoided the label “anti-fascist” because few people believed that fascist activity could pose a significant threat.
\n\nThrough community outreach that included congregational organizing, public lectures, fliering, and old-fashioned door-knocking, Smash Racism DC was able to mobilize about three hundred counter-protesters against the 20 white supremacists who showed up. Activists created sit-down blockades to slow the Nazis, who were surrounded by phalanxes of riot police. It took the Nazis two hours to reach the Capitol Building. They left after 20 minutes of being drowned out by counter-protesters.
\n\nFor the next three years, Smash Racism DC existed largely as a social media presence, highlighting instances of racial and gender inequity as well as anti-fascist resistance. In fall 2015, anti-racists confronted a Confederate flag rally, seizing flags from fascists and ripping them to shreds inside Union Station.
\n\nBlack Lives Matter protests emerged in DC during the Ferguson uprising. At the high point in fall 2014, protests took place at the end of every workday; one shut down the 14th Street bridge. Black-led organizers organized to end the formal practice of MPD’s jump-out squads. Organizers led campaigns to implement the NEAR (“Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results”) Act in hopes of reducing police presence.
\n\nThen, in spring 2015, DC’s sister city Baltimore went up in flames following the police murder of Freddie Gray.
\n\nThe struggle against police is intertwined with the struggle against fascism. Every day, police act as an occupying army. In DC, the city’s police gun recovery unit openly wore white supremacist symbols at court. Members of the same unit were caught selling weapons in Southeast DC. As we noted earlier this summer, MPD has committed three murders since May 2018.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/26/1.jpg\")
\nEven after Trump announced his candidacy, few people in DC took the threat of fascism seriously. Yet white nationalists were openly organizing in Towson, MD, while towns like Frederick, MD elected sheriffs tied to white nationalist movements. Fascists around the US were emboldened, as evidenced by Gamergate, Blue Lives Matter memes, and Islamophobic demonstrations at mosques.
\n\n\n\n\n“On Halloween, the 31st of October [2015], the neo-Nazi American Policy Institute (NPI) [sic] Convention met at the National Press Club. Many well-known white supremacists were in attendance. To get in, they had to run a gauntlet of anti-racist protesters who not only called them out on their racism but also sprayed them down with Silly String.”
\n\n-DC Direct Action News
\n
On the evening of the NPI conference in 2015, white supremacists outnumbered protesters 10 to 1. This was ominous: in the past, small numbers of anti-fascists usually outnumbered Nazis by at least 3 to 1. This time, white supremacists were able to threaten anti-fascists without fear. At one point, an NPI attendee kissed the swastika on the anti-fascist banner.
\n\nBut the alarm bells had been sounded. Some in the activist community realized that the era of neo-fascism had begun. In Greece and other European countries, the far right had been expanding for over a decade, with fascists like the Golden Dawn Party gaining seats in the government. DC anti-fascists set out to learn about their new enemies in the US.
\n\nThe fascist Matthew Heimbach had visited Europe to witness some of the tactics that European fascists were using. He began to circulate ideas within the League of the South, and later founded the Traditionalist Workers Party. Richard Spencer, a wealthy fascist whose family received millions of dollars in subsidies from the US government on account of owning plantations in Louisiana, spent a fortune trying to build the “alt-right” brand and turn it into a right-wing street movement. Milo Yiannopoulos taught fascist fanboys how to out trans women on Twitter and use the #UndocumentedAndUnafraid hashtag to call ICE on Dreamers.
\n\nA few months later, on March 5, 2016, the NPI organized a mini-conference at the Reagan Building in DC. Anti-fascist organizers, anticipating a growing fascist presence in DC, focused on building coalitions to draw a larger crowd of protesters than had previously come to NPI actions. With roughly 100 protesters, they succeeded in holding territory at the event. Between a rally with speakers and a line interfering with white supremacists as they entered, protesters utilized a diversity of tactics that set the stage for more actions later that year.
\n\nEndorsed by former KKK leader David Duke and others in the growing “alt-right,” Trump’s candidacy caused a rise in fascist organizing and attacks. For Richard Spencer and the National Policy Institute, this was a sign of their movement’s success and legitimacy. When Trump won the election, nooses were hung at American University and in a black neighborhood of DC.
\n\nIn response to Trump’s victory, thousands took to the streets the day after the election and held rallies and marches throughout that week. The following Friday, anarchists organized a rowdy night march that blockaded I-395, a major regional thoroughfare. Two weeks later, hundreds participated in direct action trainings.
\n\nThe NPI planned to hold a dinner November 20, 2016, followed by a two-day conference. However, the venue cancelled following a call-in campaign organized by Smash Racism DC. Protesters then followed the Nazis to a Maggiano’s Italian Restaurant in the suburbs of DC, where fascists had booked a room under a fake name. Protesters stormed the building after the fascists entered, to cheers from ordinary restaurant customers. The next day, hundreds protested outside the conference itself. When a Nazi attacked one protester, anti-fascists knocked the fascist down and protected his target, sustaining no arrests.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/26/2.jpg\")
Demonstrating against the so-called “Alt-Right” in DC, November 2016.
\nAt the time, Richard Spencer was courting the media as the face of the “alt-right.” When conference attendees were seen making Nazi salutes at the Maggiano’s dinner and the NPI conference, this received national media coverage, confirming the protesters’ message that “alt-right” was a rebranding of fascist.
\n\nAs Trump’s inauguration loomed, the challenge of responding to increasing fascist activity compelled people to form the DC Anti-Fascist Coalition (DCAC, later changed to DC Anti-Fascist Collective) to provide an ongoing organizing space for anti-fascist action.
\n\nThe DCAC organized a protest against the Deploraball, a fascist ball at the National Press Club on January 19, 2017 celebrating Trump’s Inauguration. Over a thousand people were in the streets to decry the Deploraball as “alt-right” media personalities, “men’s rights” activists, and other Trump supporters came out of the ball to sneer at protesters.
\n\nFascists in attendance, such as Vice Magazine founder and right-wing personality Gavin McInnes, threw punches at protesters before fleeing behind police lines. This sort of coordination between police and fascists has become all too familiar in the months since.
\n\nPolice used pepper spray and tear gas on protesters and threatened to kettle them, foreshadowing their tactics the following day. The action ended in a black bloc march that enabled protesters to exit the scene and disperse safely without arrests.
\n\nThousands of people from all walks of life participated in the demonstrations against Trump’s inauguration on January 20, including Black Lives Matter, Mijente, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), climate justice activists, indigenous leaders from Standing Rock, anarchists, socialists, communists, LGBTQ people, feminists, and more. The day of resistance began with demonstrators blockading almost every checkpoint into the inaugural parade. Later that morning, flying squads intervened when Alex Jones, Richard Spencer, Bikers For Trump, and others attempted to pass through groups of protesters. Many of the stands at the inauguration remained empty.
\n\nThe tension heightened as the Anti-Capitalist/Anti-Fascist march tore through the business district of downtown DC. Frantic police scrambled to respond, ending in the mass arrest of over 200 activists. While the official march was broken up within an hour, street confrontations in downtown DC lasted well past nightfall. In the ensuing chaos, one enterprising individual punched Richard Spencer as he tried to give an interview, producing one of the most popular memes of the century. A limousine torched nearby became a nationwide symbol of anti-fascism.
\n\n10,000 people marched in DC at the Festival of Resistance. Over 5000 people participated in the blockades, and several hundred took part in the Anti-Capitalist/Anti-Fascist march. Numerous other cities also held demonstrations against Trump under the banner #DisruptJ20. The Women’s March the next day was the most widely attended protest in US history to date.
\n\nFollowing J20, DCAC focused more on outreach, education, and providing security at other actions.
\n\nWhile dealing with the immediate aftermath of J20, anti-fascists bravely confronted Richard Spencer on two occasions. The first was the evening of April 8, 2017, following Antifa Unmasked, a day of workshops including black-led anti-fascism, anarchism 101, and a discussion on the black bloc. That day, Richard Spencer planned his own gathering in front of the White House, presumably thinking that anti-fascists would be busy. On the contrary, anti-fascists mobilized to confront Spencer and his flunkies there, chasing Spencer for blocks as he fled, frantically searching for a taxi to take him to safety.
\n\nThe next week, at “Antifa Unmasked Part 2,” participants discussed security culture and legal solidarity. Once again, Richard Spencer held a demonstration in front of the White House—smaller this time. Counter-demonstrators were not able to respond in time and instead decided to go to his home in Alexandria. Old SHAC chants were brought out of retirement: “Richard Spencer, we will fight, we know where you sleep at night!”
\n\nPolice quickly responded to break up the small noise demonstration outside of his home. Anti-fascists stuck together and withdrew without arrests. Despite the warning from police, this was not the last time that anti-fascists went to Spencer’s home to hold him personally accountable for right-wing violence.
\n\nAs deportations ramped up, anarchists organized for May Day in solidarity with immigrant workers. Hundreds of immigrants went on strike. Restaurants all over DC shut down in protest of racist immigration policies. Demonstrators marched on restaurants that didn’t shut down or were accused of wage theft. DC organized two contingents—one led by a coalition of immigrants, the other by a collaboration between the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the DC Anti-Fascist Collective.
\n\nOn May Day 2017, the anti-fascist contingent also confronted and contained “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, effectively ejecting him from the march. In the following weeks, when a small group of MAGA-hatted Nazis interrupted Alexander Reid Ross’s discussion of his book Against the Fascist Creep at a local bookstore, anti-fascists sounded the alarm once again and more allies quickly arrived to chase the Nazis out of the venue. Anti-fascists in DC also played roles in anti-ICE, Black Lives Matter, No Justice No Pride, and Kurdish solidarity actions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/07/26/4.jpg\")
May Day 2017.
\nIn July 2017, DC anti-fascists joined in protesting a KKK march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Soon after, on August 11 and 12, a large DC contingent joined in the dynamic protest at the Unite the Right rally. As anti-fascists and anti-racists marched to celebrate the cancellation of the gathering, neo-Nazi James Fields Jr. drove his car through the crowd, killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others. A large medic team from DC was on the scene to respond after the attack and helped to organize mental health services afterwards.
\n\nThe tragedy in Charlottesville had far-reaching effects. The next day, as thousands around the world mobilized in solidarity with Charlottesville, DC anarchists, anti-fascists, members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and the IWW marched on Richard Spencer’s home.
\n\nWhen the NPI began organizing their next annual conference for November 2017, a long-term impact of the events in Charlottesville became clear. While Richard Spencer had been courting the media the previous year as the face of the growing “alt-right,” by fall 2017 he had scaled back to work with only a trusted handful of fascists. After many years of hosting the conference, the Reagan Building finally denied him space, citing security concerns. Although a small group still loyal to Spencer met in a Maryland barn usually rented out for weddings, they were expelled as soon as the owners figured out that they were fascists.
\n\nSince then, Spencer has not been seen in his home office in Virginia. He seems to be nearly inactive here.
\n\nThe violence at the Unite the Right rally also helped to undermine Trump. When he commented that there were “some very fine people on both sides,” expressing sympathy for fascists, the statement inspired widespread disgust, even among some on the right. The subsequent departures of Stephen Bannon and Sebastian Gorka from the Trump administration were surely catalyzed by the events in Charlottesville.
\n\nIn 2018, when liberals began adopting the radical demand to abolish ICE, national nonprofits and community leaders organized several marches bringing out thousands of people. During this time, DSA and IWW members repeatedly confronted members of the Trump team at local restaurants. On two different occasions, people protested outside of the home of Stephen Miller, the man responsible for Trump’s immigration policy.
\n\nToday, DC is bracing for “Unite the Right 2.” Neo-Nazis are planning to come to our city to celebrate the anniversary of the tragedy in Charlottesville. Don’t let DC stand alone against fascism.
\n\nWe are calling on all opponents of fascism and people of good conscience to participate in international days of action and a mass mobilization in Washington, DC on August 10-12, 2018.
\n\nThis is for Heather Heyer, for the abolition of ICE, for the dismantling of borders and the prison-industrial complex, for the end of the settler colonial system. We will confront fascism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, white supremacy, and state violence August 10-12.
\n\nFor more information, go to shutitdowndc.org.
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