Requiem for Stop Cop City

in depth in twenty twenty three. My coverage has tracked the trajectory of the movement as well as my ability as a reporter, But this will be my last piece on the Stop Cop City movement. Every other reporter mini series I've done on Stop Cup City was written while the movement was still ongoing and the final outcome had

yet to be fully determined. Something that set the movement in Atlanta apart was the genuine belief that this fight was actually winnable, as opposed to the many lofty aspirations of other anti police, anarchists or leftist struggles. I believe that we will win and cop City will never be built. Were common turns of phrase and not just repeated mindlessly

as a protest chant, but deeply believed. But now, six months after the grand opening of Cop City, I want to use this distance to offer a look at the whole movement, based on interviews and conversations I've had with organizers, anarchists,

and forest defenders. Analyzing the movements rise and fall and momentum, and why Atlanta is the bridge between the twenty twenty protests during Trump's first term and the current expansion of police surveillance, ice activity an increased state repression against quote

unquote radical left terrorists. We don't have enough time to retread a complete, in depth play by play of the movement's history, most of which I've already covered in previous episodes, but I will attempt to break down the movement into

a series of discrete phases. After organizers learned about the plans to build cop City in April of twenty twenty one, the movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest first took form with an opening attack phase throughout the entire summer of twenty twenty one, with tree spiking and sabotage targeting construction equipment on the east side of the forest, which a movie studio was planning to develop at the time in

partnership with local government. To quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, early stages of the movement were very intentionally defined by lots of sabotage and unapologetic militancy, just absolute this is what we're doing. This is what we're about. This is the goal. If you don't like it, that's cool, but then don't be a part of this. That was

just what we were doinguote. In September twenty twenty one, the Atlantic City Council voted to approve the land Lease Ordinance authorizing the Atlanta Police Foundation to use hundreds of acres of city owned land in the South River Forest to build cop City. After this vote, electoral strategy gets largely aeshewed, and soon after the next phase fully kicks off that fall with the physical occupation of the forest and the start of the pressure campaign's targeting subcontractors working

on the construction project. To again, quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, persistent encampment, occupation, lots of direct action happening, lots of sabotage happening, and the cops just not knowing what to do at all. Small incursions would get made, but they just had not figured out what to do about it yet. There was just kind of like free

reign unquote. For the first half of this occupation phase, the Atlanta Police into cab sheriffs seemed to be stuck in a form of paralysis, not knowing how to disrupt the forest encampments or prevent equipment sabotage. Meanwhile, the pressure campaign, inspired by the tactics of the animal rights group Shack, showed early promise in getting some contractors like Reeves A Young construction and material suppliers to drop out of the

cop City project. But after this stream of steady success from Fall of twenty twenty one to May of twenty twenty two, the police were forced to up the ante and started conducting large scale raids in the forest to remove force defenders and damage encampment infrastructure. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, May of twenty twenty two is the end of the paralysis phase for the cops. We had our first grid sweep raids where the paralysis phase is broken.

You're getting your multi agency large sweeps where they're really coming in and putting in a lot of work. That really leads up to January of twenty twenty three where Torte got killed. Prior to the police killing of Tortigita during a forest encampment raid on January eighteen, twenty twenty three, the occupation phase proved highly effective in preventing pre construction, but the killing and Tortighita essentially marked the end of

the continuous occupation phase. What followed was a period of high octane intensity. Let's call this the revenge phase. Quoting in Atlanta anarchist. You get this kind of like trading blows with the cops repeatedly during that time, and things are getting pretty fucking crazy, hitting their highest pitch at March fifth quote. During the South River Music Festival on March fifth, a few hundred people splintered off from the festival and marched to the nearby Cop City construction site.

The crowd repelled police and construction equipment was set on fire. The cops weretleated, quick swarming the area with all available units in Atlanta, kettled the festival and eventually arrested twenty three people, charging them with domestic terrorism. After the events of March fifth, the movement entered an odd limbo phase, with heightened tensions among the Stop Cop City coalition on the role of direct action and sabotage within mass movement actions.

During this period, police fortified and regularly patrolled the perimeter around the forest. Entry became heavily restricted Following this denial of operating space. The forest around the slated construction site was preemptively clear cut to both prepare for construction and demoralize the movement. But a month later, the bail fund and legal defense nonprofit the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, was raided by police and were later charged with money laundering and

charity fraud. Just a few days after the raid, the city Council approved a sixty seven million dollar Cop City funding package. The next day, organizers announced a referendum campaign to gather petition signatures to put the Cops City land Lease Ordinance on the upcoming November ballot. Despite setbacks, there was still energy going towards stopping Cop City, but it was fragmenting in ways that it hadn't really before. There was no clear consensus on the direction to take the movement.

Previous periods of shift in the movement were often marked by an organized Week of Action, which was a convergence of people from all around the country or even the world, who traveled to Atlanta to partake in a week's worth

of events, actions, and protests against Cop City. The Atlanta Police Foundation and contractors hired to build the facility the summer of twenty twenty three saw the sixth organized Week of Action, but it too was caught in this limbo phase, and without the forest as an operating zone, the Week of Action struggled to find its purpose despite the surge in movement participation around the city Hall budget vote earlier

that June. The next phase was the first to be positively determined by the police, the repression phase, which really sets in around August of twenty twenty three with the Rico indictment charging sixty one people with racketeering, arson, and domestic terrorism. State repression then evolved in the form of persistent surveillance of activists, house raids, and additional charges, which

leads to the current trial phase. Quote an Atlanta anarchist quote, I think an important aspect of this phase is obviously supporting your defendants, preparing for the potential of long term prisoner support, and also not letting the state be the one to close the book by doing this, because you don't want to let them define the narrative of this forever by getting to put their rubber stamp on the end of the trial and calling it Otherwise, the movement

gets stuck in this permanent zombie phase where we're still saying, stop cop City is this thing that's happening. When it's built, it's built, it's right there, right like. It doesn't mean that we all just go home, but it means that you're like a veteran of this battle now and there's new shit to do, new stuff to work on. Even in retrospect, people have been largely hesitant to assign blame to a specific factor in why the fight to stop

cop City fell short of achieving its stated goal. But we can track a decline in momentum which allowed the state to gain the upper hand. For nearly three years, state repression tactics failed to disrupt the growing momentum against the Cop City project. Forest raids, arrests, and criminal charges made little impact. The use of terrorism charges as a repression tactic started back in December of twenty twenty two, following an encampment raid resulting in six people being charged

with domestic terrorism. This was the first time that charge has been used in Georgia, following its adoption in twenty seventeen in response to the whitepremacist mass shooting by Dylan Roof. Just a month after domestic terrorism charges were first deployed. Tortighito was killed by police in another forest raid, but this tragedy only seemed to strengthen the resolve of the movement to fight cop City, which then only grew. Similarly, the clear cutting of the force itself wasn't enough to

demoralize the people in Atlanta. Rather, the hesitation to build on the momentum of a widely publicized direct action like March fifth provided this state in opening while the movement was stuck in limbo. Throughout this limbo phase, the movement was adjusting from intensified momentum and the high octane aspects leading to March fifth. But as the energy tapered down, the state jumped on that dip in momentum, then delta

pretty significant blow with the Rico indictment. The Rico charges in August of twenty twenty three, followed by the series of house raids in February of twenty twenty four, were a pretty crippling one to punch that stifled the momentum to our almost a complete standstill. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, A lot of people will argue their opinions about what was the stifling thing. I think some of the more

electorally or mass movement. Big tent minded people would argue that, like March fifth, takes a lot of the wind out of the sails. I think a lot of people would disagree with that, just because like you can build on the momentum of a March fifth, you can build on like a triumphant battlefield victory, it's a lot harder to build on just everyone getting more charges and also people getting their doors kicked in really early in the morning.

It's hard to build on that. Despite the Rico charges, acts of sabotage did continue, but isolated sabotage alone wasn't enough to propel the movement. After the referendum campaign was effectively nullified by the state and fall of twenty twenty three, there was a lack of willingness among its organizers to engage in serious efforts to get people engaged in mass

actions or pressure campaigns targeted against elected officials. Something multiple activists in Atlanta have mentioned to me as a contributing factor to the eventual decline in momentum during this limbo stage is a sort of failure to prefigure alternative strategies and adapt After the forest occupation became impossible to maintain, especially considering just how much weight people had put into that strategy but then did not come up with a

clear next step after the police were able to suppress that tactic by completing their ODA loops and improving their own strategies. The ODA loop is a four step military decision making model used across a large variety of professional fields,

including policing. Step one, observe, gather as much information as possible, then orient, synthesize and information with background knowledge, decide on the next course of action using that newly synthesized information, and finally act and the results of your actions should then send you back to step one. Failure to act

at all or too slowly often ends in defeat. To quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, you need contingency lines right, either things that you're willing to escalate in the current line of strategy that you're doing to make it still viable, or a complete change in strategy it can be changed in tactics to something new and exciting. Either of those are valid options. Doing both of them in the same time can be extremely effective, but at the end of the day, you have to when the cops start to

break out of paralysis. An example from any eco defense or occupation, whether in Atlanta or somewhere else, when the cops start to break out of that paralysis, you have

to escalate in some way. The occupation, the defense of it, has to escalate in some way to prevent them from feeling safe coming in or trying to, or the physical space of action to change, because now they need to recalibrate to oh, shit, like, not only is the occupation less assailable than we thought because there's been a change in tactics, but there's also a massive uptick and shit going on everywhere else, and that significantly impedes their ability

to have an ODA loop to do battle with. You can even look at the ice pickups that got a lot of attention in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were not expecting that many people just to show up. You can see when the crowd starts to hit like a critical mass of rage and getting really close to those guys that they fucking panic. They freak out, like it's very clear even just in the small amount of their faces and their movements that you can see that they were panicking.

Similar scenes have since taken place in Chicago and Portland. And I've seen this before with Bortac during the twenty twenty protests in Portland. I think anyone who has watched the Cops for Treat has seen this before. But the more the same thing happens, the more you get used to it, the more you experiment and find ways to

adapt and overcome. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, cops panic and you can see it in the way they walk like they weren't ready for that, and next time they might be, which means you have to add something new, a new spice has to get thrown in a new

flavor profile. They'll get used to pushing through crowds like that until someone hits them at the end of the day, and whether you're like confronting them on the ground or trying to get to the neighborhoods ahead of time to knock people's doors to get them out, Eventually cops will start to find ways to counteract your strategy, and eventually you will have to reshift and recalibrate the tools you are using to orient back to Atlanta, All these instances

I've mentioned amount to failing to take advantage of key moments, whether that be in the aftermath of March fifth, the seeming impossibility of continue nude forest encampments or of the city's blanket refusal to accept the results of the referendum.

In these moments, the police and the state were able to determine where battle lines were drawn, and quite literally so during the quote unquote block Cop City protest in October of twenty twenty three, where police easily repelled a protest march from even reaching the road to the Cop City construction site, and the state continued to push their lines forward with the joint fbiatf raids on activist houses in February twenty twenty four, which further stifled the movement

and was coupled with months to years long persistent surveillance and intimidation denoted by cops parked outside of homes of alleged activists, mobile surveillance, and hidden cameras placed in front

of activists homes and a local community center. One of the more frightening incidents came in May of twenty twenty four, where a resident of one of the homes raided that February woke up in the middle night to a bright light outside the bedroom window only to find a lit road flare catching the wooden railing of their porch steps on fire. One of the things I've been reflecting on regarding cop City is the way people talked about fear

as a tool. Frank Herbert's litany against fear was a common refrain to overcome the fear that this state used as a weapon. But the first time I heard fear mentioned as an offensive measure wasn't in reference to this state using fear. It was in early twenty twenty two when I first visited the forest encampment, and the anarchists talked about how the police were scared of entering the forest, how delusions of Vietnam's style booby traps demonstrated that the

cups are not impervious super soldiers. Instilling fear is a major aspect of police training. They are susceptible to emotional impulses, like all of us. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote. But while we understand our own fear, I think people often fall into the trap of not understanding that the state

is also afraid of them. Because the state feels like this monolithic machine, like this unassailable entity, that it is not It's made up of people with flaws and emotions who have the same corrozol response to being threatened that you or I do. A big part of the lessons learned from Atlanta has to be of willingness to engage with them in a way that is personally endangering. That is the single way out. They're human and they get scared.

The fear that I think had them so tight until May of twenty twenty two was a fear that manifested itself in a lot of paralysis. Fear is of normal human emotion to danger. So whether you're the most hardened swat team guy going up against the craziest eco freak in the world, fear is a normal reaction to that. But what really had them so tight was fear as a matter of them being paralyzed by it that they

couldnot find out how to move. And once they did find out around May of twenty twenty two, we really start to see things change and like they were scared enough in the woods to shoot someone to death, like they were still afraid, we were able to instill an immense amount of fear in our enemy, which is an absolutely necessary tool if you're going to be on the very nimble, small green team insurgency side of things. You have to make your enemy afraid of the dark, but

also you have your defensive strategy against fear. You would hear all the time in Atlanta, the whole let the fear wash over you and through you mantra. That was a thing that people talked about and said constantly, because you have to find a way to move through that paralysis. Eventually, and with the help of a multi agency task force, the cops in Atlanta were able to move through that fear and continue their actions. They were not totally paralyzed

by it. In contrast, the pseudo paralysis affecting Stop Cop City only set in very late into the movement as a culative result of a coordinated sequence of oppression tactics. As the movement has been winding down and transitioning to court support, something people in Atlanta have had to balance is the urge to keep Stop Cop City in this sort of unalive zombie state where you're still kind of acting like it's an ongoing thing, even though the immediate

local result is pretty clearly finished. But in keeping this kind of zombie version of the movement alive, it prevents you from actually moving on and internalizing what happened here and using that for whatever comes next, which is at this point a burgeoning police state and right wing power block.

Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, internalizing not just in terms of like lessons learned and things that you need to learn from and skill up on to keep that honed combative edge in Atlanta, but to think about fighting on a larger scope than just Atlanta. As the cops took their lessons learned here nationwide in terms of how they're doing repression towards Palestinian liberation movements towards a lot

of the way that ICE operations are currently happening. That necessitates that we also take our lessons learned here and also go to a larger scale with them. Also, if you never close the book yourself on this battle that you're a part of, which people incurred a massive amount of trauma doing at a certain point, this could just remain like an open wound on you forever if you let it. And it is probably unhelpful to keep seeing the movement to stop cop City is doing a rally here.

Like when it's built, it's there, and now we need to move on to other things. We need to move on to other things that are larger than Atlanta. There's still a police state to engage with here. You don't need the container of this struggle to justify going out and taking action against the police. And there are other things happening in Atlanta. There's vice rates happening in Atlanta

in the north suburbs of the city. Cop City is actively being enacted, and if people want to continue stopping it, they'll have to actually stop what the effects are which are now happening on a nationwide scale. An early irony of the movement was that though cop City was conceived as a training ground for police first, it became a

training ground for anarchists. As top Cup City became the first mass movement following the twenty twenty George Floyd protests, whatever happened in Atlanta would demonstrate what activists have learned from the twenty twenty uprising, as well as influence what future movements against police expansion might look like. Atlanta Police Chief Darren Shecherbaum expressed as much during the Public Safety Training Center grand opening.

across the nation and literally the globe. We were up against a playbook we had never seen at the Atlanta Police Department, and we ourselves put out the call for help, and no sheriff said no, No police chief said no. The Georgia State Patrol, the Department Natural Resources should ste by side of this department, as did the FBI and the ATF, because we all knew that that playbook was successful here in Atlanta, Georgia, it would find itself across

this country and public safety be stymied wherever we go.

protesting the Palestinian genocide. To quote an Atlanta anarchist quote, I think as a matter of reimagining the struggle that you're a part of insurrectionary struggle is often an imaginative one. And if you were part of this thing here, you are now like a veteran of the fight in Atlanta. This thing, like this specific thing that was defend the

Atlanta Forest. Top cop City is something to be learned from and valued and also moved on from and to move on from while taking lessons learned, experience gained, and connections made, and following those things through to their logical conclusion. Such that the state has as well. They have taken lessons learned from here and followed them through to their nationwide logical conclusions. We are necessitated to do that as well. That doesn't mean you have given up. It just means

that there's new shit happening. It's helpful to re imagine yourself not as just we're in Atlanta, we're doing stop Coop City, to now you are engaged in a nationwide anti fascist struggle against like a fascist police state. This nationwide focus has always been an aspect of Stop Cop City. One of the movements key slogans was cop City is Everywhere.

Organizers did speaking tours around the country to educate about the movement and thousands of people from all around the country and the world traveled to Atlanta to participate in weeks of action. The physical fight top Cop City also expanded outside of Atlanta with solidarity attacks and direct actions as a part of the tertiary targeting campaign against subcontractors

and insurance companies. This nationwide drift also happened on the side of the state, with similar police training facilities having been proposed in dozens of other cities, and the strategies of repression used in Atlanta have been copied on a national level. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, now the cops are spreading out, and their strategies and the strategies of repression, both militantly on the ground and legally, and even their

propaganda and their messaging has gone outwards from here. And so too, then must our lessons learned both in how we prepare and engage in struggle in Atlanta, but also how we make connections to the rest of the country. People who came here are now back home and will make connections to the people around them. The cops in different cities, they have big conferences. They talk to each other,

they learn from each other. There's no reason that we shouldn't be, you know, doing so with caution and security culture. Don't have your Atlanta veteran hat on. But we have things to learn from each other, and if you were here, you've got a lot to potentially teach people. Even if that was just like, here's how we fucking run a kitchen where we cook for like four hundred people in a day, or here's how we sneak around in the

middle of the night. This is a representative of the Fire and Movement Defense at a cop City trial press conference from September twenty twenty five.

they funded the training centers, they expanded the surveillance. Liberal governments like Atlantis helped pave the way for the descent of our country into autocracy.

Trump two point zero. In January of this year, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Green introduced a resolution titled deeming certain conduct of members of Antifa as domestic terrorism and designating Antifa as domestic terrorist Organization, which the measure justifies by referencing multiple instances of protesters in Atlanta being charged with

domestic terrorism. The Atlanta based surveillance company Flock Safety, gained early notoriety for their camera towers placed around the slated Copcity construction site in the South River Forest, which protesters repeatedly toppled. Flock has grown massively the past four years, with over eighty thousand quote unquote AI powered cameras in forty nine states. These cameras complete over twenty billion scans

per month. Flock cameras and license plate readers have spread all around the country and are used by all manners of agencies, including ICE, as well as Texas sheriffs, who have used the nationwide camera network to track pregnant women seeking abortions. Border Patrol has used Atlanta's local flock camera network to make over three thousand and two hundred searches

from January to November twenty twenty five. In April twenty twenty five, President Trump signed an executive order titled Strengthening and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent citizens. This order calls to quote unleash high impact local police forces, protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by state or local officials, and surge

resources to officers in needuote. It directs the Attorney General to create a mechanism to have private sector law firms provide pro bono legal events to police officers who quote unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law. This tries to make it harder for a police to be held accountable for both civil and criminal misconduct, basically extending

qualified a mus to the criminal realm. The order also calls to use federal resources to increase pay, expand training, and strengthen legal protections for police officers, as well as to quote seek enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers, promote investment in the security in capacity of prisons, and increase the investment in and collection, distribution and uniformity of

crime data across jurisdictions. The Attorney General is directed to review and remove any previous accountability restrictions placed on local or state law enforcement agencies that might unduly impede the

performance of law enforcement functions. And then finally, quote, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist state and local law enforcement. And shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized.

To prevent crime. As the police become further militarized, the

military prepares to do more policing. One of the executive orders from Trump's police takeover of Washington d C contains a section directing the Secretary of Defense to quote designate an appropriate number of each state's trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization to assist federal, state, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances, and that quote, a standing National Guard Quick Reaction Force shall be resourced, trained,

and available for rapid nationwide deployment. Later in October of twenty twenty five, the Department of Defense sent out memos to each state's National Guard mandating that each state have their own Quick Reaction forces operational by January first, twenty twenty six, with crowd control equipment and two full time trainers by the National Guard Bureau being provided to each unit. The units contain, on average, five hundred troops per state, ordered to be ready to deploy within eight to twenty

four hours. The initial portion of the Bureau training courses cover how to quote form squad sized riot control formations employ a riot baton as member of a riot control formation how to supervise a riot, slash, crowd control operation, crowd management techniques, and domestic civil disturbance training. On September twenty second, Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa as

a domestic terrorist organization. Three days later, Trump signed the National Security Presidential Memorandum seven on Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, which calls for a new national la enforcement strategy to quote investigate all participants of these criminal and terroristic conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in

criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts unquote.

The memo orders local joint terrorism task forces to quote investigate potential federal crimes relating to acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons for the purpose of political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights, as well as investigating institutional and individual funders, including employees of organizations which are quote responsible for, sponsor or otherwise aid in a bet the principal actors engaging

in the criminal conduct unquote. As previously described, the Treasury Secretary will work with Thetorney General to quote identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political violence, and shall deploy investigative tools to examine financial flows and

coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit funding streams. The memo also instructs the IRS to quote take action to ensure that no tax exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism unquote, and that the IRS shall refer organizations and their employees to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution, quoting the memo one final time, quote, Investigations shall prioritize crimes such as

the following assaulting federal officers or employees, conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to commit offense, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, money laundering, funding of terrorist acts, or otherwise facilitating terrorism, arson, violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act RICO,

and major fraud against the United States unquote. At Trump's White House ANTIFO roundtable meeting, Seamus Bruner, the director of research at the Government Accountability Institute, discussed his theory of how a network of NGOs are funding ANTIFA, and specifically mentioned stop cop City.

with these faces. In April of twenty twenty three, three activists were arrested for allegedly posting flyers identifying a police officer nected to the killing of Tortigita on the mailboxes in that officer's neighborhood in Barlow County, Georgia, about forty miles from Atlanta. The activists were charged with felony intimidation and were later added to the Cop City Weako case.

To circle back to the topic of fear, the targeting of people putting up flyers simply identifying cops or anonymous ICE agents demonstrates how the state understands fear as a weapon. That's why they did the reco charges. That's why they do the house raids. That's why they do overt surveillance where you're getting followed around by police. But they are susceptible to fear as well. Through their actions, ICE demonstrates

a high level of fear. They are taking massive steps to hide the identities of ICE agents on the ground and punishing people who attempt to identify these agents. They're complaining about being compared to Nazis and called the Gestapo. They're referencing very dubious statistics about an increase in assaults against officers, and they are afraid enough to shoot their guns at unarmed people more than half a dozen times

in the past six months. They are scared, and as evil and super soldiery as they may seem, they are indeed afraid. To quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, unless you do something to keep them afraid, eventually it will stop. Unless you change your strategy, change course, escalate in some way that shatters their ODA loop, they will break free of their paralysis and they will find a way through

their fear. So when that starts to happen, it's time to do something new and insane, because you have to keep them afraid, because, like by every moral right they should be. They should be fucking terrified to leave their homes. And if they are too a f to leave their homes, then they can't go out and do their jobs at the end of the day. That's their odor loop right there. The scale of fear as a tool of repression is always exponentially larger than this scale of physical or legal repression.

It punches well above its weight. You can look at Atlanta as a good example of this, and you can even look at some of the arrests made in response to Palestinian liberation protests. It takes black bagging six people to paralyze six thousand because it's terrifying, because it's scary, like it's fucked up, that's a bad thing to have happened to you, and like, of course, people are afraid.

Fear is one of those things that if you're engaging an anti fascist struggle, whether you're an anti fascist, whether you're an anarchist or whatever, all of us have an ethical obligation to ourselves and the people around us to push through fear as an emotion, to find ways to work with it, because it won't go away, and it shouldn't. Fear can also keep you safe. But we are necessitated by the political moment we are in to find a way to take extensive action in spite of that unquote.

Twenty twenty was a lot of people's first experience with mass protest, and some of this people then carry those experiences into Copcity. But then for other people, Stop cop City was their first experience. And now you have an even younger generation of people, the Gen Alpha terrorists, who aren't even old enough to have been involved in Atlanta.

But people are still looking at what happened in Atlanta as this bridge gap between twenty twenty and twenty twenty five, the movement to Stop Cop City as the bridge between these two different eras of uprising and resistance against authoritarianism. As the Copcity chapter closes, activists in Atlanta want people to carry on what's been learned in the contents of

their struggle onto whatever the next volume is. Because Cop City itself is in a sequence of events that have happened beyond and longer than what me or anyone involved in Cop City has been alive by generations. Cop City is not Volume one. Cop City is volume like thirty two, but at the same time it's also the immediate prequel to the rise of a nationwide expansion of police power and surveillance led by a wanna be right wing strong man.

Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, a big lesson learned from Atlanta is that it is way safer to do shit in the middle of the night than anything else. We've had exactly one arrest made over the years, an arrest that's not gone to trial. This is an alleged crime of one midnight sabotage action. Of the dozens and dozens and dozens of ursins that have happened, and this arrest happened very late into the movement. Out of the dozens and dozens of attacks that have happened, only one arrest

has been made after the fact. Another lesson learned is the difficulty of day counter surveillance and how much that requires militancy as a daily practice to again quote from an anonymous anarchist in Atlanta quote, militant anarchism as a daily practice understanding your adversary, not just as this thing that you meet on the field for twenty minutes of action and then you both go home and like call it, but that they are constantly pursuing you that you are

being like hunted for sport, and you have to evade and maneuver constantly. That security culture is a persistent thing throughout the years, that you are going to continually keep having to be a part of it and do so in a very disciplined way. Unquote. A lot of the success that stopcop City achieved was based on a willingness to take an extremely militant approach to prefigurative infrastructure, which added longevity to the combative struggle. Both were necessitated as

symbiotic elements of this same curt feature. Throughout the Cop City struggle, organizers and activists learned that if you're not always able to engage in a directly combative fight, using militancy and discipline in their infrastructural projects the same way they would in a combative engagement, helps prepare for what

will be necessary when things do turn combative. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, the state is this constantly churning machine, like it is always trying to acquire new tools and equipment and lessons, and we can't just sit still while they do this and be like, okay, Well, at some point in four to five years, a flashpoint will happen at the place that I live, and I'll go out there and I'll be like I was in Atlanta, So I'll be good because I remember how to do all that.

Because if you do nothing for the next four to five years, we're just going to be reinventing the wheel over and over again, and all the like fucked up trauma that you incurred doing that won't have been helpful at all if you don't remember the skills learned on the ground, because all skills atrophy and get weaker over time.

Looking back at Stop Coop City won't provide all the answers to solve the problems facing the country today, especially in light of the end result of the movement, But it would be a mistake to overlook the ways Stop Coop City made a legitimate impact on the resulting facility

and the political situation in Atlanta and beyond. I think there's ways of looking at degrees of success the movement had while still recognizing its obvious shortcomings, considering the fact that there is a facility called the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, but a small group of activists turned a

proposed police training facility into a national political issue. Its opening was delayed by years at at least thirty million dollars over budget, and the current facility lacks the full mock city design that it initially had, which inspired the Cop City namesake. Moving forward, both these successes and shortcomings will be internalized by thousands of people who traveled to or lived in Atlanta and joined in the movement to

stop Cop City. As Trump now signs executive orders expanding military equipment, federal training, and legal protections for police, deploys the National Guard to quell civil disturbance, and targets anti fascists, anarchists, and left wing activists or ENGOs as domestic terrorists. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, what we are seeing is the logical conclusion of our adversaries lessons learned in Atlanta, taking the things that they learned how to do here, the

skills they honed, taken to a nationwide scale. This is the logical conclusion of that. And there's a reason that they are doing that. And if they are doing that, then we should also do that. Like there's logical conclusions and escalations of the things that we learned in Atlanta, that it would be silly for us to not try and push the further, including expanding the physical and metaphysical

terrain of battle. The immediate terrain for stop Copcity was obviously the forest and now the cop City site itself, but there was also the rest of Atlanta and all the other construction sites, and then all these subcontractors around the country and everything that supplies them. This same model

can apply to, say, the Palestine protests. There's a network that exists beyond Columbia University campus that extends into the weapons manufacturing industry, which could be targeted beyond consumer boycotts, like what we saw was shack But what we saw in Atlanta, where boycotts were an aspect, but by far not the most effective aspect and in fact forcefully inflicting monetary damage, caused a much greater degree of hurt to the companies involved in the Copsity project as opposed to

the infighting caused by a walluse boycott. When reframing what the terrain of battle could entail, it is actually intimidating to think about what the reality of stopping these things might look like. And as soon as you realize that these fights go beyond a physical building. It becomes this love crafty and entity that exists everywhere, and it's unnerving to contemplate what you'd be forced to do to actually

realistically confront that. Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, it's important to not get trapped in the you know, we're doing an occupation on college campus. We're just going to keep trying to do an occupation on college campus over and over again, and the cops really good at clearing us up. But now maybe this time. And I think a part of the struggle here though, for people is when you decentralize like that, the thing that you're doing

starts to take on a much different vibe. It can be everywhere versus this is the college campus where we're doing protest. I generally think at the end of the day, it starts to feel a little bit too much like terrorismy, it starts to feel too much like an insurgency, and you see the path, you see the Pandora's box start to open up a little bit, and you back off because it's scary and that this thing will kill you.

This thing will try and kill you eventually, if you push it far enough, it will try and kill you. And I might succeed, And like, that's just the reality of engaging with fascism combatively as an ideology, it's the reality of engaging with advanced capitalism. That was the reality of engaging with the police state, one that is well understood in Atlanta and in many other places that this isn't a game. You're not gonna get anywhere, just kind of sitting on the same college campus green over and

over again, hoping for a different result. And as we've seen this year with the State Department cracking down on pro Palestine protests, just sitting there on the college green doesn't prevent you from being black bagged by the FEDS,

taken to a black site, and deported. To close the episode, in September twenty twenty four, the Georgia Attorney General's Office dropped the money laundering charges against the organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, though the defendants still remained on the

Rico indictment. Almost a full year later, on September ninth, twenty twenty five, the defense successfully argued that the State AG's office did not have the jurisdictional authority to prosecute the sixty one defendants under the State's Rico Statute due to simple procedural error in neglecting to first ask the governor if the AG's office could prosecute this case. Judge Farmer found that the AG does not have the authority to prosecute count one of the Rico indictment, the racketeering

and conspiracy charges. Without the sweeping Rico charges engulfing this sixty one defendants, just five defendants would be left with Count two of the indictment, the domestic terrorism charges, which the AG does have authority to prosecute, and Count three, the arson charge, though Judge Farmer indicated that that charge

could also be thrown out on a similar technicality. The prosecution is appealing this decision, and the defense has argued that the state domestic terrorism law violates a constitution and is far too broad and should be altered or overturned. Judge Farmer has yet to rule on this, but he's expected to very soon. Some of these sixty one defendants could face charges individually in Fulton, Indicab County, but that

remains to be seen. The referendum case is still under appeal in federal court, and the case against Jack Mazurich is still in pre trial. Just because the Copsity trial is finally progressing does not mean that movement participants are safe nowvoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchists quote, people should be very mindful going into the trial phase that that does not mean that they are safe. There is no statute of

limitations on a lot of this stuff. Like with a lot of radical movements, You're going to have to hold a lot of that shit forever. Rely on support structures, rely on your community, be careful about who you talk to. Unquote. As Stopcop City becomes history, there will be an influx of people trying to define the legacy of the movement, whether that's through podcasts, documentaries, a college dissertation, or who

knows how many books are incoming. There already has been a true crimification of the movement in certain coverage which grossly objectifies the life of Torti Guita, platforms police as more objective than movement participants, and removes autonomy from key subjects to reframe the entire movement around other public facing individuals.

To quote an Atlanta anarchist one final time quote, I think a big lesson from Atlanta and this is one that we actually still have to win at is to not let outside forces, whether that be the state or capital, define the ending. That is a scope of battle that we are still engaged with and still have to win. We need to close the book on it ourselves, need to rubber stamp it ourselves. No other entity can do that for us. It would be disastrous if they did.

Unquote this has been it could happen here, see you on the other side.