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Welcome to it could happen here on Garrison Davis. This is the show where we talk about how everything is kind of falling apart and how we can sometimes put it back together. Joining me is as my my dear dear collaborator and friend, James Stout. Good morning, James.
Good morning Garrison. That's very kind of you, Thank you.
And we got a very special episode here today. We are talking with four people who have put together a new book by AKA Press called No Parseran. We're gonna have kind of a little bit of a like a group discussion about anti fascist history and this kind of this the state of anti fascism in the past few years. I know, this is how I kind of got started
with radical politics growing up in Portland, Oregon. You see Nazis marching around in your street and you're like, oh, well, this is obviously a problem, so much a problem, do something about this. And stuff has changed a lot the past the past few years. I mean, like the anti fatist movement that I got kind of that I kind
of got into only twenty eighteen. You know, it's very different now, and it's I don't know, these types of things live on through like oral histories as well as you know, books, and I think it's really cool to have these types of conversations. So joining us today is Shane Burley, Emily Gorcinski, Michael Novic, and Darryl Lamont Jenkins. Greetings everyone, I'm going to hand it over to Shane and you can kind of talk about the book.
I guess, yeah, Thanks Scarrison, Thanks James for having us on the whole crew of us. Yeah, this book was something came out last year, but we had been working on it for about four years. I'm starting in twenty eighteen. I was drunk with Kim Kelly and New York and we thought it'd be really great to put together something with all of our friends. And what do you do with a big group of people. It takes like four
or five years to pull off. But really the idea was trying to do something that was bigger than what had been written about anti fascism at that point, which was shockingly narrow. What people understood it as of just a few movements, mostly very recent history, and so much wasn't being included in that conversation. So the idea was, how can we build out like a much bigger picture of this by including as many voices as possible. So we ended up getting a couple of dozen folks together
that had different takes on it. Some talking about tech, some talking about deep history, some talking about anti fascism in their countries, o their continents, and so in general, the idea was to make it feel like a discussion between people who either know each other or should be like in some kind of comradeship with each other. So that was sort of where it came together. I think
with this conversation. The way we were thinking about this is I want I wanted the opportunity to talk with basically my friends about their history a little bit, and so I asked three folks that had a really long history with doing organizing work, and so I thought it would be cool maybe if we go through talking to them a little bit about their prehistory or their early
history organizing. And Michael, your history goes back the furthest as you know, we know, so I thought we could kick off with you and then talk with Emily and then Darryl just kind of getting into your background. So how do you get started in movement work? I actually I should say first, when did you get started in movement work.
Well, yeah, so I sometimes felt a little bit of a dinosaur. I was born in nineteen forty seven, so the fascism in power was a fairly recent reality in my life. My father was a immigrant from Poland. I came here in the thirties. Most of his family was destroyed in Biello Stoke. They had uprising there similar to the Warsaw Ghetto r Almost everybody was lipidated in that process.
So there's a family history there for me. Also obviously grew up in the shadow of you know, the US atomic bombing of Rosa Manakasaki and the US incarceration of Japanese Americans and concentration camps, so you know, those are realities in my life. I've lived in a you know, orthodox Jewish immigrant working class family and neighborhood in Brooklyn, which is now dominated by extremely right wing forces. Borough Park. It's one of the bastions of probably you know, neo
fascist Republican prosionists. But somehow, when I grew up there that was not the case. Anyway. I got involved in politics in the sixties and you know, student movement stuff, anti war stuff, and at Brooklyn College, which when I was there, it was free public four year college part of the City University System in New York, and I
was actually eventually elected student body president. They had liquidated the student government earlier when you know, people opposed the Korean War, and we had a struggle to get you know, for student rights and anti war stuff and so on, and we succeeded in getting student body elections for offices
for the first time in about a dozen years. But you know, as part of all that anti war and anti police brutality and other stuff that was going on in Brooklyn at the time, and then we raised the question of the fact that Brooklyn College was ninety eight percent white, white in a borough that even then was you know, majority black in Puerto Rican, and suddenly all the student support we had had for all the other struggles cops off the campus and you know, avy up
the campus and so on, and we got you know, dean of students fired and other stuff. But as soon as we raised the question of opening the campus up and having open admissions to the City University system and a special emissions program for black and Puerto Rican high
school students, most of our students support have oporated. And for me, that was an object lesson that unless you're you know, consciously organizing about internalized and institutionalized racism, everything else you do that is you know, progressive or anti imperialist or anti war is kind of a house of cards or you know, castles made of sand. And in particular and raising those issues, we discovered that there was
a fascist element down the campus. There were people who formed the Early Jewish Defense League in Brooklyn who were primarily anti black. And also there's a group called the youth what is it, Young Americans for Vitom YAF, which was like the youth wing of the National Review, right wing Republican formation, and they were pretty openly fascistic in
their politics. So, you know, it became a question that if you were doing you know, anti racist and anti war an anti capitalist organizing, you were going to face not just you know, a struggle against the force of the state, but that there were reactionary elements within particularly white society, and I think because of set the colonialism,
you know, there's a mass base for that. And struck by the title of the show just say, I don't know if people are familiar with the book, it can't happen here, but Obviously your title is a reflection it could happen here. I think it has happened here. For one thing, I think the fashion has always been an
element of US political culture because of settle colonialism. You know, I mean definition of fascism is that it's bringing the methods of rule of the colonies into the metropol But the US is a settler colony, and therefore there are colonized people inside this country, you know, always have been, and so fascistic elements of you know, slave labor, genocide, you know, land theft, all the rest have always been part and part of that is also creating that mass
base within the settler population that supports you know, that leadership. So anyway, I think that that you know that both those personal aspects and that consciousness, and so I came in contact with, you know, the very radical forces in the Black Freedom Circle. Back then, the Black Panther Party is very active. There was one of the people in
the Black Student Union joined the Black Panther Party. You know, it's a period of very fascist attacks and the Panthers had formed the National Committee of the Combat Fascism and had an analysis that you know, the US was fascistic, and you know, George Jackson at that time said, you know, fascism is already here, and I think he meant it, you know, literally, And so that's part of the perspective I've carried through for you know, I don't know what that is sixty years now close.
To Yeah, I mean, I think really quickly, I would like to hear kind of what your experience was with forming John Brown. Where did the idea come from? Because I think for a lot of a lot of people are thinking of recent anti fascist American anti fascist history that ends up being kind of a starting point for a certain kind of no platform tactic. So how did you first kind of develop that? What brought you in?
So, yeah, just to say, I was, you know, coming out of the movement as I did, I moved from New York to California because there was a strong There was a newspaper called the Movement, which was the newspaper basically of friends of Snick. It was the people who left Snick when Snick adopted a black power analysis and said that white people who were involved should go organize in the white community. And there was a you know, kind of a I was part of a Working Class
Organizing Collective in Hayward, California. Eventually, out of that I got connected with, you know, some of the people that later formed Prairie Fire Organized Committee. I was in a group in the Bay Area called the June twenty eighth Union. It was a gay ends, pro socialist, anti imperiallests, pro
feminist collective of mostly people of European decent. And we went to what was called the Hard Times Conference, which was put on by Prairie Far Organizing Committee in Chicago, and it turned out that there was secretly an effort by the weather underground to come up from underground to create a new communist party, and they serviced that at
that conference. But there's a lot of opposition to that from across the board, from different Black liberation, American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican in Deepending, the struggled Chicago movement to all of them, you know, felt that there was a sell out of the politics there anyway. Out of that process I was part of, I joined a Prairie Fire Organized Committee eventually, and that split and then there was
a West Coast group which captained Prairie Far. The East coast formed a group called the main eineteenth communist organization, and they launched the original John Brown Anti Clan Committee, an initiative from the prisons. The organized prisoners in New York had discovered that there was an extensive network of clan claverns that were based in the prison guards and some of the white prisoners, and they asked for outside supporters to begin to expose that and deal with it
and help them deal with it. And John Brand of the Gillen Committee was formed out of that. Separately, very far on the West Coast had formed a group called take a Stand against the Klan. There was a lot of you know, that was the period that the beginning of the notification of the clan that was going on.
So this is the seventies and eventually, you know, under a challenge from particular the New African Independence movement, the Malcolm XS grassroots movement New African People's Organization which both Praise Fire on the West Coast and May nineteenth and the East Coast were connected to. They pushed for a joint organization. So at that point there was a kind of reconstitution of John Burnett the Clan Committee, and so
I was part of that and we merged. You know, there were chapters in Atlanta, Chicago, the Bay Area, Los Angeles where I ended up in New York, I think Bowling Green, maybe the couple of Connecticut, and so they were quite active in that period, and you know, street level confrontations and you know other exposures of early Neo Nazi activity and clan activity, but particularly from a perspective of conscious and active solidarity with the Black freedom struggling,
particularly the New African Independence movement, which is a very high level of unity, and over a period of time, you know, there was a struggle to broaden that out and try to be a more all embracing organization that could relate to the struggle. There were a lot of different formations at that time. There was the National Anti Clan Network, and there was a couple of others, and
there were differing politics among all of them. And you know, John Branda Clink made that time, took more of a position of pro direct action and also, as they say, conscious solidated with the Black freedom struggle as a basis for doing that work.
Anti Clan Network. I think so people kind of know that's where the Southern Poverty Law Center eventually came out of another networks of these different groups out here in Oregon. The Rural Organizing Project was sort of like a down the line there. I think it's interesting too about the found story. I was talking with our mutual friend Lisa Roth,
who was part of the founding of that. Very first iteration of the John Brown Committee was they were doing a prison organizing with Black Panthers and Upstate New York and they were writing these letters saying the prison guards are clan and they thought, you mean they're really racist, you know, obviously they're the prison guards. Yeah, And when they went and looked it up. No, the president of the prison's guard union was the Grand Dragon of the State KKK, and they.
Were actually he had a position within the prison system as the head of the sort of education activity educational activities in the prisons, and was using his formal position within the prison system to organize white prisoners along with the guards into clan clamorance.
Which seems like a total That was sort of a validation with the centerpiece of John Brown being that cops and clan have that kind of collaboration, because that was their kind of the founding like lesson of that organizing.
Sure, the blue by day, White by night, and a lot of those slogans come out of that period, and you know, I think it is you know, it's related to the later the aar A line that you know, fascism is built from above and below that there's you know, elements within the state that are operating independently, but there are also state forces and then they're you know independent, Yeah, so called revolutionary fascists that claim to be opposing the state, but we're not really.
Well, I think to fast forward a little bit, quite a bit, Emily, I don't remember when we first met each other. Obviously it was probably shortly after Unite the Right happened. But how did you first get drawn into organizing? Did you have a long history before that happened, or were you just part of getting involved around the ramp up to that now?
I think, you know, compared to the other folks here, I'm sort of the summer child of the of the group, right, I don't have a super long history in organizing. I think that, you know, I came to anti fascism before Unite the Right happened. I work in the tech industry and sometimes sort of around the gamer Gate era, I started noticing how white supremacist the tech industry had become.
Right, it was.
Sort of this nexus for a lot of this strongly libertarian, strongly supremacist mindset. It was sort of the worst of that meritocratic ideal that a lot of us had to experience in university and in our workplaces, and it just seemed like it was getting out of control. And that was kind of at the same time that we were seeing a lot more women come into the tech industry, we were starting to see a lot of changes in the space.
And then there was sort of like this this.
Vacuum left by gamer Gate, as that all sort of died down, A lot of this sort of energy needed to go somewhere, and so I started speaking out against some white supremacist organizing that was happening at conferences and things like that. And I think the first wake up call for me happened when some folks that are are linked to Milo Yanapolists put together a list of of SGW social justice warriors and this was journalists and activists and people who were speaking out and I somehow made
that list. And I realized, after you know, looking at this and seeing what was going on that being a political being sort of just somebody with an opinion, wasn't you know, there was no way to be that wasn't a defense against what was coming. And so I just sort of looked inside and said, well, if this is the way it's going to be, like I'm going to fight back, I'm gonna I'm going to figure out what to do.
I didn't really have a lot of organizing ties.
They didn't really have a network, so like every other person, I just you know, shouted at Twitter and somehow that worked. The irony of this all is that all this was going on, I was starting to do you know, digital activism, using my tech skills to try to shine.
Light on things that were wrong in the.
Federal government and the Trump administration and things like that, and I really just wanted to step away from that. I kind of had like I went to Prague after Trump was inaugurated. I wanted to like, you know, clear the air a little bit. I didn't like the fact that I was on this hit list that was put together by people who have like a couple of handshakes away from.
The president's desk. So I went to Europe.
I went to Prague and I cleared my head, and when I came back, I said, you know what, I'm going to just focus on local activism. I'm going to
focus on the issues that are in my community. I knew that we had things going on with our local low income housing space, we had a lot of you know, stuff around the statues that was coming up in town, and I didn't really expect, like it was kind of random that Unite the Right was you know, destined for Charlottesville, and so all of the work, all of the organizing that I had started to do that spring, and that where I guess that winter in that spring started to
pay off, as you know, as Charlottesville became the target of all of the neo Nazis. So I think it was sort of I don't want to say it's it's fortunate, because it's not really the greatest, like it's not a positive thing that that's what happened. But I guess that I am lucky that as I came to this awakening, it was happening you know, before and not after, and that I was able to use the network that I was building, the audience I was building in order to
help like back. So yeah, I guess that's that's sort of like, I don't know that I would have been, you know, as much as dedicated as I was if it wasn't for that very personal sort of experience. And I look back at that like I'm kind of embarrassed by that. But you know, we all have our own paths.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And I think, you know, there's something interesting about that year in advance of the Unite the Right, where where different groups were testing the waters a little bit, and how that was their ability to ramp up in the area, but it was also the anti fascist ability to ramp up, you know, So talking with Mimi and other organizers there, like those earlier events like the earlier Clan rally that happened like you know, months earlier, or
kind of those that early flash mob that Richard Spencer led that gave people the opportunity to build up the base. So how did you kind of shift to focusing on that first? I guess how did you hear about Unite the Riots, this big kind of like target event, But what was the steps along the way there?
Yeah, I think one of the things that really that I really tried to do that year was to use the experience I was having traveling to try to understand the history of movements that were against you.
Know, great state powers.
Right when I was in Prague, I spent a lot of time reading about and looking into and walking through the sites of where the Prague Spring took place, and where the Deil Revolution took place, and how these groups of people were able to overcome this massive amount of state violence and still be successful. And when Richard Spencer first came to town that first flashbob is now called Charlottesville one point zero.
I was in Berlin at the time. I woke up to see what was going on.
And it was, you know, I think again just sort of these you know, the universe coming into alignment. As that was happening, there's also this big anti Nazi demonstration
that was happening in Berlin. So I took that opportunity to go and learn about what anti fascists are doing in other countries and other localities, how they are organizing, how they spread their message, and so I think that, you know, as I learned about all of this going on, what the first thing that I tried to do is just look around and say, what can we learn from people who have been here before? Who have done this before and have this in their living memory, and that's
what I tried to take back to Charlottesville. And then, you know, I think it was after that trip. I was in Berlin in May. I came back for that trip. I joined in the anti fascist march almost as soon as I got back, and that's when we had heard we've learned about the two rallies, the July eighth KKK rally and the August twelfth Unite the Right, And at that point, like from that moment, it was just like every waking moment of my day was spent organizing for those for those rallies.
It's the sort of effect that just circumstance sort of speeds people's capacity to do it, and that maybe even maybe capacity is not the right word, they're kind of understanding of what it takes to do that work. So I was interviewing a number of the rabbis in the area,
and these were not super political folks. These were not people like from some activist synagogues wh were mainline synagogues, but they connected with a number of faith leaders from the historically black churches, both of which were saying, okay, we're both going to be targeted here, and there's no there's no institutions coming to help. Really, there's no one
we can count on here. So they created those collaborative spaces and really pretty complicated and effective organizing models having no experience doing it because of that hyper intense space, which I think is in a way that's why those circumstances have such an important effect on it. So how did you basically plan those couple of weeks in advance?
How were you thinking about it, and what was the kind of groups you were working with these like networks that were coming together formal organizations.
Yeah, I think there were a bunch of, you know, organizations on the ground that I connected with. Certainly we had a local chapter of Surge showing up for racial justice and they were doing a lot of organizing. And there was the Anarchist People of Color APOC. They were a great group of people that we connected with and
that I connected with. And it also happened that I started dating somebody who's also connected to the local anti fascist scene at the time, so I sort of brought into all of these circles through that relationship as well. And so I think that sort of all of these things combined really made it clear that we had a small but very knowledgeable base of people that could organize.
And I think that one of the things that we did exceptionally well in the lead up is because we had such a small core of people who don't who didn't really have, you know, a breadth of experience, you know, in doing this, we were able to compartmentalize really well.
You know, some people were focusing on, you know, what.
Are we going to do with the you know, the clergy collective, and how are they going to organize?
What is their action going to be?
And we had a media collective and that was where I put most of my energy. And so I think that we had these different groups of people that focus on different things that helped us unblock ourselves from the grander, sort of more theoretical, more abstract way to respond. We didn't have the time to debate over tactics, we didn't have time to debate over the ideology of anti fascism, what the right thing to do was, or what the
best thing to do was. We really had to focus our time on what do we have time to do? What can we achieve given the constraints that we have and with those sort of constraints, I think that maybe we left some good actions on the table, but what we came up with I think was fairly effective.
Do you think that it carried those community folks together through and after the event. Do you feel like those community ties were still there?
I think some of them are and some of them are not. There are certainly community times that have broken. There was a lot of pressure that built up. There were differences of opinions that we set aside and hoped to resolve afterwards, and those did not necessarily get resolved
in some cases, some interpersonal issues, some interorganizational issues. I remember at one point there was a decision that was being made, driven by a couple of the organizing groups, that they would not support anyone that was going to be armed, and this was a tension point between those groups and groups like Redneck Revolt that were coming armed to help support anti fascist rallies, and that like that is something that still you know, affected me pretty well
because I was being targeted because of how present I was in social media and Twitter.
And things like that.
I needed to have an armed security detail, and you know, that created a lot of a lot of tension I didn't have legal like I had legal support pulled away from me. I didn't have legal support until until November of that year, when noise of a.
Lawsuit started happening.
So I think that some of those things did create some tension that led to fracturing of community, but some things actually really did tie the community back together and kept it close even as we have drifted apart and moved into different you know, different cities, different countries, different states, whatever.
I think it's a bit of both. You know.
There's one of the founding members of Rose Head Antifa said something that kind of stuck with me, which is that a lot of people will look to anti fascism as a way to rebuild the left or as to build this big mass united left. But that's not actually what's being demanded of the situation. The situation is very pretty straightforward, is to basically destroy this opposition of people.
And how you do that. I mean, you can have considerations about how they bring in the community and try and align with other groups, but in the end, there's other decisions are being made, and so people often get disappointed when that ends up being what those projects actually are. Now, Daryl, you were down there right right correct, that was there. You're everywhere when we're there, I try to be.
I think one of the things about Charlottesville that was really important is that we saw it coming, and we had seen it coming months, probably even years before it even happened. Hell, we saw it before in my case, because one of those everywhere places I had been was in York, Pennsylvania about twenty years prior, where you had somebody from a group called the World Church Creator. He was He was a local from World Church to the Creator that invited the leader of that group, Matt Hale,
to hold the public meeting at that local library. It was a tactic that that particular group had and what that resulted in was about out three hundred neo Nazis coming to York, PA, about three four hundred anti fascists coming out to oppose them. And you pretty much saw a parallel of Charlottesville. As I said, up to an including a this was January twelve, twenty twelve, and up to an including a someone driving into a group of people and no one pat no one died, no one
was killed, hurt. Pretty bad. I think the only reason why he served two years was because one of the people that he hit was a cop. Now we fast forward to Charlottesville, and ironically, I saw the person that organized things in York represented Vanguard America at Charlottesville.
And.
Two days prior, we MI for One People's Project had a little bit of a pot cast where we basically said that after everything that was going on in Charlottevielle prior to Charlottevield one point oh, Charlottesville two point zero, and then this whole Unite the Right thing was happening, where it was just making a big production out of
having this event. We pretty much were resigned to the idea that this was going to be the so called rights ultimate in the sense that this was going to be what sent everybody, you know, realizing how bad things can get. You know it's going to be bad. We expected it to be bad. I went to Charlotteville armed, and I think really it was one of the first times that I ever did strap up when I went
to one of these things. When everything went down, I mean, prior to everything going down, I was just basically, I think, videotaping everyone cracking jokes. I was playing happy Warrior because you know, you see this all before up to and including the fighting. The fighting is there, I mean, that happens all the time, even that massively, I'm used to it.
What I wasn't used to.
Was when someone was murdered, when someone was killed, because that's never happened, and that that actually freaked me out. It Actually I actually got really pissed off when that went down, and I think a lot of us did because because if we recognize this ourselves, if we who have been on the front lines all these years recognized that this was the direction that was going in, we also recognized that we had the ability to do something
about it beforehand. That's one of the reasons why the Aco you got into a lot of trouble because they were busy trying to protect the free speech of everybody in all the neo Nazis there and insisting that they were going to be in that park because that's where they wanted to be. And when everything went down, a lot of people just looked at the ACO and said, could you at least recognize just how dangerous they was trying to make the situation ACOU I believe will no
longer represent groups that insist on holding armed rallies. I think that was one of the things that they had said that they were one of the changeups. And even with the whole discussion about their freedom of speech and saying it was a matter of the free speech, people's attitudes were just like, Okay, fine, that's a given, But
couldn't you let them get their own attorneys? Why do you have to keep defending the worst of society in the name of a free speech that frankly doesn't seem to be afforded the rest of us whenever we are opposing them. That's the attitude that a lot of people had, and it was really the last straw. Charlotteville was really the last straw, and people really got on a different
footing and dealing with fascism. I was used to people trying to pull all the stops and trying to defend the quote unquote defend the freedom of speech of not just the fascist in our society, but the right in general. So every time I would criticize somebody on the right, somebody would try to say things ranging from we have to respect their freedom of speech or we should just ignore them, you know. And I hated it whenever it was and when it was combined the best way to
fight hate speeches with more speech. You use the more speech, Well, why don't you just ignore them? That stopped after Charlottesville. All of a sudden, people started saying, Okay, we need to start doing something about this group. That's why you saw forty thousand people in Boston protesting against the fascists up there when they tried to hold a rally maybe
a week or two later. You know, that's why you saw websites like the Daily Stormer get you know, yanked out of yanked out of the mainstream, and now they're sitting on the dark web. That's why you saw people disowned their family members because they went to this rally. We are seeing people being not just James Field's but others being held legally accountable for what they did in Charlotteville. And all of those individuals are fascists. All of the
individuals were white supremacists. We realized that we had the ability to do something, and we started doing something. Unfortunately, we stopped after Trump lost and people tried to go back to that whole just ignore them routine, and within months we got January sixth, and that was when they tried they ratcheted up again about how we're going to really curtail the right and all and all that we
but now that just became rhetoric. We're here again because you're starting to see a lot of the rumblings with the attacks on the trans community. Basically conservatives across the country are primarily trying to essentially do something to the rest of the country. I mean, you heard that when you go to the SEAPAC meeting, the Conservative Political Action Conference a couple of months ago. All they did was talk about things they wanted to do to America.
You know.
And this is what we have been fighting all our lives. This is what we have been warning about all our lives. And while anti fascism has essentially become mainstream, there is still a lot more work that we have to do in order to basically see all that work bear fruit. And that's some pretty much the deal.
Yeah, that forty thousand person kind of response to a Proud Boy rally in Boston just a couple of weeks after Unite the Right, it was one of the most common sense kind of moments and it totally dwarfs into them. I mean, forty thousand people will do it whatever they want, right forty thousand people will stop any kind of small march, even a large one, and so the lesson was learned then it seemed to be forgotten immediately.
And they're perfect example of that because that group that they were protesting went on to become Super Happy Fun America. They're the group that are now pushing the straight Pride rallies and they are really in the forefront of all the anti trans anti LGBTQ plus activity, And of course some of them got arrested in at January sixth, so they pretty much built up their stock since then, but so did we, and it's just a matter of using that stock. Who's going to use that stock more effectively?
Yeah, I think it was really interesting how you centered this, like this shift that happened among people who went previously involved in anti fascism, from this kind of near liberal understanding or maybe even liberal understanding of the sort of struggle against fascism being one that could take place in the open, with free speech being the most important thing that's at stake, and one that moved like in a moment right when I Nazi killed Heather Higher.
Two.
There's a ton more at stake than we thought, and I think you're right that we've gone back, like right, we've gone back to the previous understanding, which I think is what everyone kind of a lot of people, I guess they felt like they could vote for Joe Biden and then it was done, like it had disappeared. And I'd be interested to hear all of your insights, with all your experience in the movement and like what needs
to be done. I guess to keep that organizing going as worrying this kind of nadir or thermidor of like anti fascist organizing in the US.
If I could offer something from maybe a little bit of a longer view, you yeah, you know, Darrell talked about somebody being killed and that never happening before, but of course it has happened before. And so nineteen seventy nine there was a Death of the Clan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, and people were attacked and killed by an alliance of the Clan and the Nazis with you know,
the ATF had people in one and the forget. I think the FBI had people in the other and were instrumental in bringing the two forces together to attack the anti Clan group and several people were killed in that, and then the same thing with aar in Las Vegas, Lynn S Newborn, a black tattoo artist, and Darren Shirsey.
It was actually I think a sailor, active duty sailor who were in anti racist action in Las Vegas were executed and killed by neo Nazis there, And so I think there is a history of that that we need to be aware of, but also that that there's ups and downs and lulls in both fascist organizing anti fascist organized. One of the things that happened after the seventy nine killings is that Ronald Reagan launched his campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the scene of the killing of shor
En er Chaineyan Goodman on a state freights platform. And while he was president, you know, I brought in Pat rob Pat Buchanan and you know, went to Bittberg. So there's a long history of the state, you know, playing foot seet with these people, and I think we should recognize that, but also that there are going to be ups and downs in in both fascists and anti fascist organizing, and you know, just see that that. I think the
longer range perspective that is important to understand. The other thing I did want to take a little exception to is the idea that the role of anti fascist is to destroy fascists, and I think that I don't completely
agree with that analysis. I think that it's critical that actually anti fascists forced to see themselves as part of a revolutionary transformation of the society and its entirety, and that the ability to actually reach an organizing people has to do with making it clear that fascists are not providing an alternative to what's wrong with the society, although they claim to be, and that we are, that we're part of liberatory and you know, self determination elements, anti
colonial elements, you know, support for sovereignty of indigenous people, you know, support for LGBTQ people's rights and all those things that have a positive aspect of a way to reorganize society in a different way than the fascists are putting forward. And I think that that is critically trying to sustain a base and build a base by you know, having a positive you know, one of the things that I've been doing for many years, I published Turning the Tide,
which you know, started as a little zine. We were sending it to other chapters of Anti Racist Section and also went to the prisons, and you know, eventually we changed the subtitle of that to the Journal of Intercommunal Solidarity, in the sense of saying, Okay, it's not just Anti Racist Section, it's not just anti fashions, but what are
we ford? You have to have a positive if you really want to organize people, you have to have a positive sense of what they're struggling for, not just what they're struggling against.
Yeah, Michael's right, Greensboro did happen. I was really referring to in recent time. It wasn't. It was the first time for myself to be at a rally and not see anyone and see somebody get murdered. But yes, Greensboro, November third, I believe, nineteen seventy nine in North Carolina, that happened, and all the clan members had actually gotten away with it. They did not. They were found. They cleared them. Meanwhile, recruiting state court and federal court both.
Their claim was that they were not They were brought up in civil rights judges in the federal court and they claim they weren't against black people. They were just again communists, and that right, there was something that even family members when I first heard of Remember, I'm a kid at this time. I'm sitting there listening to family members basically laugh about the situation because all they saw were clan and communists and they were just had the
attitude of just let them kill each other. And that was actually a line that was said, don't. I don't know which family members said it, but that was a line that stuck with me since I was a kid and at the time I wasn't really politically a student. I just that's how I recalled that situation, and with Dan and Spit the Las Vegas murders that that is a different situation, however, because that wasn't the rally they sought them out. That was basically on the off time,
so to speak. Yes, and we've seen that before, most certainly Luke Cerner from Portland, for example. I mean, he said, but he's a quadriplegic because somebody came after him.
The German police intercepted one. When Adam often came to Germany, they tried to get me. I don't know if you know about.
I think because I have been fairly public, I've been docked and tracked down by fascists and several different occasions in different places that I lived in. You know, we've had armed patrols that you know, at various points that you know. It's clearly you know they do try to target people as well as you know, attacking mess action.
Emily, you've gotten it as much as anyone I've ever seen in terms of dosing and harassment and targeted attacks and threats like that.
Who are you referring to? I think you Oh, I think we've all gotten it bad.
I don't. I don't think that there's any there's no competition.
Here contest who has the most death threats on.
I did want to just jump back real quick to the thing that you were mentioning Michael about. You know, building anti fascism needs to be about building, and I think that there's two there's two sides to this. I like to talk about, like the breaking work, which is what a lot of the street anti fascism is about, right, Like, sometimes Nazis come marching into your town and you have
to break that. You have to stop that, you have to confront that, and you have to do things to make it so that they don't want to come back into your town or any other towns like your town, and I think that that's breaking work, you know, the work of cracking down Nazis, docsing them, exposing them, whatever, that's breaking work. I think that in the last few
years has become more high profile for various reasons. But I think that as we're looking at you know what you were mentioning therel like the anti trans legislation, the rise of the political far right in government in power, we do need a different solution. I'm not saying that you can't go out and like intercept Ron DeSantis's motorcade and like punch him in the face. I am saying it will probably end very badly for you if you try to.
Do that, right, right, So maybe what.
We actually also need is to try to build those alternative structures that are not reliant on the state right.
You know, when we see these these.
Trans bands coming in like it's a horrible thing. But the only thing that actually comes through my mind is we have more tools, more resources now to create the
networks of support than we've ever had in history. A lot of our energy should be pouring into supporting those networks, supporting that that care supporting that mobility and that freedom of movement rather than just trying to run up against this brick wall that is this Republican you know behemoth that is moving you know forward into into all of our rights. Like we're not going to face it down head on. We need to go around it in some way.
And I think that that going around it is going to require that building, that community, that sort of redevelopment of those alternative structures. So I think it's so important to have that as well.
Big thanks to Shane Burley for setting up this conversation. The second half of our talk with Michael Novic, Emily Gorcinski, and Daryl Lamont Jenkins will be coming out tomorrow. We'll talk a bit more about the modern state of anti fascism and what things from the past might help inform us in the anti fascist struggle of today. See you on the other side. It could happen here as a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could happen here, updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot com, Slash sources, Thanks for listening.