IGDcast – It's Going Down

On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we speak with Benjamin Case, organizer and author of the new book, Street Rebellions: Beyond Violence and Non-Violence. During our discussion, Case speaks on conversations with participants from a variety of contemporary movements about how many are leaving behind rigid ideologies such as pacifism, and imagining revolutionary strategies which embrace more nuanced and holistic approaches to building power and deepening social struggles.

With the streets heating up again and those in power trotting out well wore attacks on combative movements, we hope our discussion continues forward our ability to grow and build the capacity for grassroots change in new and dynamic ways.

More Info: Street Rebellion: Beyond Violence and Non-Violence on AK Press

photo: Mike Von via Unsplash

Over the last few months, residents of the Wood Street Commons, a self-organized community located in Oakland, CA have organized protests and filed lawsuits, in an attempt to stop their eviction and push the city to grant them access to public land. After a series of massive sweeps throughout 2022, remaining residents face another round of displacement on January 9th, only days after a monster storm has rocked the bay area.

https://twitter.com/caroncreighton/status/1567918678800478208

For over a decade, hundreds of residents have lived in the sprawling encampment off of Wood Street in West Oakland, creating a self-organized community known for its communal infrastructure made out of cob. As one report wrote:

Hundreds of residents and their individual and shared compounds span Wood Street from 18th to 34th Streets in the shadow of Highway 880. The Wood Street Commons, on the south side of the encampment, is on Oakland city property, while the northern portion, including the Cob on Wood community center, is on Caltrans land. The residents consider the area to be their home, although their community is not sanctioned or supported by city services. There have been persistent efforts by the City of Oakland and Caltrans to clear them from the space, in which makeshift homes, RVs, and cob structures are interspersed with vacant vehicles and scattered, illegally dumped garbage. Community members throughout the encampment have rallied together to create a loose government model in an effort to prevent their own eviction.

There is increasing need for such communities, as houselessness is exploding across Oakland and the wider bay area in the face of a massive housing crisis and the ongoing pandemic. As Prism Reports wrote:

In the past 10 years, Oakland’s houseless population has doubled, having grown by 1,000 people since the start of the 2020 pandemic alone. With over 5,000 unhoused people, the City of Oakland recently received $5.6 million dollars of Homekey funding for transitional housing acquisition and rehabilitation, totaling $55.5 million in State Homekey funds since 2020 intended to house Oaklanders. However, according to organizers at Wood Street, the city’s solutions to the housing crisis are not enough, exacerbated by the continued economic inequality that hits Oakland’s most vulnerable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtbjQ51NvDg

As Wood Street resident John Janosko, also featured on this podcast, wrote in The Mercury News:

Wood Street Commons supports those who have no material resources, no place to go, no hope. We are a 24/7 resource center with shared infrastructure for water, power and security, as well as a free store, health clinic and communal bathing and kitchen facilities.

For many years, Oakland police have been telling the city’s unhoused residents that they would be left alone if they moved to Wood Street. Now officials are telling us we must leave and have already begun the process of evicting the community’s 300 residents. It is impossible to overstate how devastating this loss of home and community is. And it does nothing to remedy the homelessness crisis. With nowhere to go, residents have no choice but to re-establish their camps nearby.

In fall of 2022, evictions of the Wood Street community began, as Caltrans and city workers destroyed homes, communal dwellings, and residents personal property and belongings. In response, protesters set up barricades and faced arrests, as supporters and residents attempted to stall the waves of sweeps.

https://twitter.com/caroncreighton/status/1582389232579928064?s=20&t=K3L94zK9rrBW0FwdERBrGQ

In mid-October, members of the Wood Street community set up a protest encampment in front of city hall, as more encampments were established on Wood Street, only to be swept by law enforcement. Other residents who were displaced by previous sweeps moved into another section of the Wood Street encampment that still remains squatted on land owned by the City of Oakland, which is currently threatened with eviction, starting on January 9th.

As cities across the US crackdown on encampments and people living in their vehicles, the need to build collective resistance to this displacement is needed, now more than ever. Leaning from and supporting the struggles of the Wood Street community hopefully will aid us in developing this capacity.

More Info: Donate here. Get updates on Instagram here. Check here for Wood Street Commons main page.

photo: Wood Street Commons

On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we present a special on the ground conversation with a group of folks on the border of the so-called United States and Mexico in southern Arizona. In the last few weeks, a motley crew of local residents, anarchists, progressives, and environmentalists have converged and set up a protest camp, facing down construction crews and freezing temperatures, in the face of an attempt by former Cold-Stone Creamery CEO and soon to be former Arizona Governor, Doug Ducey, to place a “wall” of used shipping containers along the border. According to the Associated Press, the project has cost $95 million, and “comprises about 3,000 steel containers.”

As the Intercept wrote:

Doug Ducey…has transformed a remote section of rugged desert into what looks like a junkyard. Along the way, he has set the stage for an unprecedented legal showdown with the feds. In a lawsuit he filed three days before the installation began, Ducey admitted he had not received authorization for the project but was proceeding anyway.

The governor’s actions create precisely the sort of state’s rights and border security confrontation the Biden administration would be inclined to avoid less than two weeks from the midterms. The situation has left environmental advocates racing to stop the project, which cuts through a corridor that is designated as critical for endangered jaguars. The environmentalists’ options, however, are limited.

In what is clearly red meat for the Republican base, Ducey has cited increased border crossings and the trafficking of fentanyl as justification for the trash wall’s construction, despite the fact that most drugs are brought in through established points of entry, not the desert. Ironically, while the wall itself is filled with holes and is easy to slip through or climb over, it remains a looming threat to migrating wildlife and the existing watershed – to say nothing of the horrific impact that US border policy has on migrants attempting to cross.

As National Geographic noted:

…the barrier will…block critical wildlife corridors for diverse populations of animals, including endangered jaguars and ocelots, along with mountain lions, black bears, coati, mule deer, and javelinas.

Despite the federal government declaring the wall illegal, local residents and activists grew angry in the face of continued inaction, spurring a small group of locals to mobilize. Moreover, the legal chaos surrounding the project has created a situation in which law enforcement has been largely hands off the anti-border activists who have been resisting the continued wall construction over the past several weeks.

https://vimeo.com/780630213

As Unicorn Riot reported:

Since Nov. 29, a loose collection of locals, environmental activists, hippies and migrant solidarity workers have been putting their bodies in the way of the machines. They have successfully delayed the work crews for a week and a half, who had been rushing to drop as many shipping containers into the wilderness as possible before Arizona Governor Doug Ducey leaves office in early January.

What began as a tentative experiment in disruption, escalated to a full-fledged encampment earlier this week. When workers switched to night shifts so they could work unimpeded, blockaders started camping on the site to keep watch.

This struggle is only part of a much larger chorus of ongoing resistance to border militarization and construction; against both Trump’s wall, Biden’s continuation of many of Trump’s policies, and the very existence of settler-colonial borders on Indigenous lands. As of this reporting, the protests have been successful in completely halting the continued wall construction and represent a success story for a direct action campaign and self-organization in the face of government bureaucracy.

According to new reports:

Arizona agreed Wednesday to dismantle a wall of shipping containers at the Mexican border that critics said was an expensive, ecologically damaging political stunt…Now Ducey, who leaves office early next year, will have to get rid of the 915 containers from the Coronado National Forest.

In an agreement reached Wednesday with the federal government, Ducey’s administration said it will “remove all previously installed shipping containers and associated equipment, materials, vehicles, and other objects from the United States’ properties on National Forest System lands within the Coronado National Forest.”

Don’t let the trash wall hit you on the way out!

Last month, antifascists and members of the LGBTQ+ community, mobilized against a group of TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists), holding events across the US, under the banner of “Let Women Speak.” While these rallies were small, drawing only a few dozen and opposed by much larger crowds, they also brought out far-Right anti-trans activists and members of fascist groups like the Proud Boys. This far-Right/TERF crossover highlights a growing alliance that’s been building over the past few years, as anti-trans radical feminists have built relationships and begun to work openly with everyone from far-Right media personalities like Tucker Carlson, right-wing think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation, and even open white nationalists.

Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) Member Kara Dansky on Tucker Carlson Tonight

These alliances are creating a growing cross-over in the streets, as we saw with the violent clashes in Los Angeles last summer, when both TERFs and far-Right activists organized protests outside of a local spa, following a flurry of anti-trans conspiracy theories. Moreover, some TERF groups such as WoLF, or Women’s Liberation Front, have also become involved in pushing for anti-trans legislation and even working to elect Republicans.

Members of WoLF Speak on an Anti-Trans Panel Put on by the Right-Wing Heritage Foundation

As the Washington Post reported in 2020:

Mainstream progressives have long shunned the organization, calling it a discriminatory, right-wing group disguised as feminist. But the Women’s Liberation Front, also known as WoLF, has found an increasingly influential platform by teaming up with conservatives who disagree with their support of abortion rights and the “reproductive sovereignty” of women.

WoLF’s leaders have become frequent guests on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and at Heritage Foundation events. The group received a $15,000 grant from the Alliance Defending Freedom to help fund a legal fight against the Obama administration over transgender bathroom policies. It also filed an amicus brief in one of the most consequential Supreme Court cases of the year, arguing that sex-based discrimination protections in the workplace should not apply to transgender people.

Now, WoLF is even helping shape legislation in places like South Dakota, which last month became the first state to advance a wave of state bills nationwide banning medical interventions for transgender youth. Kara Dansky, a WoLF board member from the District, plans to travel to South Dakota on Monday to testify in favor of the bill in a Senate committee hearing.

…members of WoLF, many of whom are lesbian, claim they are the victims of exclusion and “cancel culture.” They say they’ve been kicked off Twitter, excommunicated from social circles and fired from jobs for expressing their views on gender identity.

As a report from Trans Safety wrote:

A recent submission to the UN by WoLF in collaboration with the Christian Right anti-LGBT rights organization “United Families International” showed the breadth of trans-Atlantic collaboration between religious fundamentalists and feminist activists (and the aforementioned Deep Green Resistance).

Another report from Workers’ Liberty went even deeper:

In 2017, our own newspaper highlighted WoLF’s collaboration with another evangelical Christian group, Focus On The Family, in opposition to including trans women in Title IX (legislation against sexist discrimination).

That same year, WoLF contracted Zachary Freeman and his Imperial Independent Media to do their fundraising. Freeman is a director in the anti-abortion Family Policy Institute of Washington. He is known for his efforts to get the names of workers in a foetal tissue research lab released, so that anti-abortionists could target them for harassment.

Keen-Minshull is a special advisor to WoLF’s board. In 2021, Keen-Minshull talked about travelling to the US before the 2020 election and advising Republican strategists to focus on anti-trans agitation as a campaign issue. She argued that Trump was a lesser evil compared to Biden, because of the latter’s support for including trans women in anti-discrimination law. She called on (cis) women to put aside the left-right divide and abortion rights, in favour of an alliance against trans rights – which she believes “destroy” women’s rights. Keen-Minshull justified this alliance on the basis that if forced to choose, she would rather see women subjected to a “conservative family unit”, forced to wear “uniforms” and do housework.

Ironically, as we discuss on this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, in many ways, WoLF is in fact a front group for Deep Green Resistance (DGR), which is an organization founded by authors Derrick Jensen and Lierre Kieth. In the 2000s, Jensen was a popular writer who critiqued industrial civilization and his books such as A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe, were popular in anarchist circles. In 2011, Jensen, along with Kieth, most known for her book, The Vegetarian Myth, published Deep Green Resistance, which called for the bringing down of industrial civilization and the creation of a political vanguard led by DGR which would work in concert with an underground, guerrilla resistance movement.

Clockwise from top-right, white nationalist Keith Woods speaks with Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith on “Louder with Crowder,” Derrick and Lierre speak alongside white nationalist Keith Preston, Richard Spencer and Kieth Woods

Anarchist currents and publications, such as Earth First!, were very critical of the politics of DGR and also rejected the group’s attacks on trans people, as many mobilized to push DGR out of movement spaces and events. As the Institute for Anarchist Studies wrote:

While DGR provocatively addresses many pressing social and ecological issues, its opportunistic, loose-cannon theoretical approach and highly controversial tactics leaves it emulating right-wing militia rhetoric, with the accompanying hierarchical vanguardism, personality cultism, and reactionary moralism. By providing a negative example, DGR does us the service of compounding issues into one book. Take it as a warning. As we grasp for solutions to multiple and compounding social and ecological crises, quick fixes, dogmatism, and power grabbing may grow as temptations.

DGR’s organizational body (distinct from the book, but modeled after it) leads us to agree that they have been rightly accused by former members of acting like a cult rather than as part of a larger movement. They seem much more interested in lionizing their leadership than in taking direct action.

Our ultimate conclusion is that DGR’s goal of “civilization’s” destruction through “underground” attacks against infrastructure manifests both an ideological and strategic misdirection, foreclosing the potential for participatory democracy and direct action as it veers into intellectual dishonesty and irreconcilable political contradictions.

Last year in Portland, Oregon, a friend who is an Earth First!er, trans activist, and professional doula was “outed” on a transphobic website linked to DGR, forcing her to flee town due to fear of both personal and professional reprisals. This is in keeping with the tactics proposed by Keith since at least the late-1990s, when she published an article in the RadFem newspaper, Rain and Thunder, calling for taking “direct action” against trans women attempting to use the ladies’ restroom.[13] We take violence seriously enough to call DGR’s bluff on their oscillating ethical apparatus of concerns regarding violence.

Members of DGR and by extension WoLF, have gone on to make connections with the far-Right and white nationalists. Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith have been guests and been interviewed on a variety of far-Right publications and livestreams. These include the white nationalist website, Counter-Currents, the white nationalist Keith Woods, who works directly with Richard Spencer, and both Jensen and Keith have appeared on a far-Right YouTube channel along with Keith Preston, known for speaking at white nationalist conferences.

Former Deep Green Resistance activist Jennifer Bilek

As Gizmodo reported:

An episode [of Deep Green Resistance’s YouTube show]…featured blogger Jennifer Bilek, who, on Facebook, said she’s “often wondered why so many of the men involved in the transgender/transhumanist agenda are jewish,” positively citing a video by Keith Woods, a frequent guest on white nationalist Richard Spencer’s livestreams…Jensen had appeared on Keith Woods’ podcast in 2020.

Jensen hosts a separate radio show, Derrick Jensen Resistance Radio, with a similar pattern: alternating between interviews with people working on various environmental issues with figures who hold famously transphobic views. Some of his recent guests have included Graham Linehan, a former TV writer who was permanently suspended from Twitter for “hateful conduct” and has compared transgender youth medical care to Nazi experiments.

Jensen also hosted [WoLF and DGR member] Kara Dansky (as did The Green Flame), who recently appeared on Tucker Carlson, claiming that trans health clinics were “eugenics centers” and saying that “words like gender identity don’t have any meaning.” Dansky authored a book titled The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls and has publicly identified herself as “#TeamTERF.” Though appearing on the podcast episodes uploaded to the DGR YouTube channel, neither Linehan nor Dansky appear to have any public association with environmental causes or efforts.

Clockwise from top-right, Lierre Keith and Posie Parker, Lierre Keith (left) and Kara Dansky (right) and other members of WoLF on panel, Posie Parker speaks with white nationalist Jean-François Gariépy, Posie Parker speaks with ex-Trump official and ultra-nationalist troll Sebastian Gorka

One key link in this crossover has been Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, who also goes by “Posie Parker,” a long-time member of WoLF, and also a British anti-trans activist. Parker, along with Lierre Keith, played a leading roll in putting together the recent anti-trans ‘Let Women Speak’ rallies. Parker has also built extensive links with the far-Right, praising activists like Tommy Robinson, appearing on livestreams with white nationalists, and taking photos with Proud Boys.

https://twitter.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1592035685363601409?s=20&t=ZMRDkE8AaV6RRfdjQALIEQ

As Jezebel wrote:

Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (or TERFs) have in recent years partnered with right-wing groups in the United States in an effort to rollback and restrict the rights of trans people, and in particular trans women. And if an interview with a prominent British TERF and a well-known white nationalist is any indication, some are now also attempting to build alliances and find a sympathetic audience for their bigotry among white nationalists. This isn’t new or particularly surprising, but it’s disgusting all the same.

Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (better known as her pseudonym Posie Parker), who is known in the United Kingdom for her strident anti-trans activism as well as in the United States for harassing the trans rights advocate Sarah McBride, recently appeared on the YouTube channel of French-Canadian far-right nationalist Jean-François Gariépy. Gariépy, for his part, believes in the need for a “white ethno-state” and regularly features the noxious Richard Spencer on his show. And while the two, during the 80-minute interview, debated and disagreed about women’s role in the family and gender disparities in the criminal justice system, their anti-trans bigotry united them.

As anti-trans hatred continues to be a rallying cry for the far-Right, we should be on guard for elements on the Left who are attempting to make common cause with fascists, far-Right political parties, and white supremacists.

More Info: The Mechanisms of TAnon, The Mechanisms of Tanon: Where It Came From, The Environmental Movement Isn’t Ready for Transphobia

On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we speak with someone from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief about autonomous responses in the wake of Hurricane Ian, which rampaged through the Caribbean and slammed into the coast of Florida in late September of 2022. During our discussion, we talk about both the response from the State to the crisis and from autonomous mutual aid groups which mobilized in the aftermath of the storm.

https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1590634308825673728

Throughout our discussion, we talk about how groups like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief were able to set up a mutual aid hub, activate autonomous supply chains which brought much needed materials to communities in need, and set up mobile relief efforts that were able to go into impacted poor and working-class communities that were often looked over by the State and groups like the Red Cross.

https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1581151678622883841

During our conversation we ask what lessons others can take away from these efforts, how autonomous mutual aid efforts have grown since the pandemic and past relief efforts, and how we can extend these windows of communal solidarity into everyday life.

More Info: Report on Hurricane Ian relief efforts from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, MADR on Twitter, interview with MADR from 2018 on It’s Going Down, round-table discussion on mutual aid and disaster relief organizing on IGD here.

photo: @pinkknightpress

On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we again speak with antifascist author and researcher Shane Burley, editor of the new book from AK Press, “No Pasarán! Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis,” which features interviews and essays from a wide variety of antifascist thinkers and organizers.

During our discussion with Burley, we look at the current political terrain as the midterm elections loom and the Republican party doubles down on its far-Right associations and culture war talking points. We then switch gears and talk about localized antifascist resistance, and how our struggles need to continue to grow and expand in this period marked by crisis and increasing instability.

As working-class anger builds over inflation, far-Right violence continues to escalate, and the Democratic Party offers no real alternatives to the present order, Burley argues that the need for movements from below to organize is greater than ever.

More Info: Shane Burley on the It’s Going Down podcast here, here, and here and No Pasarán! Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis from AK Press.

On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we speak with author and educator Robert Ovetz about his new book, We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few, which offers up a historical analysis of the world and people who produced the Constitution and how it was designed to protect property, slavery, and colonial-ruling class domination, not help facilitate the ‘will of the people.’

First looking at the so-called “Founding Fathers” themselves, who like George Washington, were some of the richest men in the colonies, we map out the class interests of the original framers and how these interests were informed by the slave trade and systematic theft of Indigenous land through settler colonialism.

We then talk about how the Constitution was designed not to facilitate the democratic control and organization of society, but instead to keep power in the hands of an elite class. As one of the founding fathers John Jay stated, “The people that own the country ought to govern it.” Throughout this discussion, Ovetz argues that moreover, the Constitution was designed so that by and large it would be difficult for the majority to change it, thus preserving and protecting capital and property.

As the Constitution remains for many the yardstick of freedom across much of the political landscape, we hope that this conversation re-frames the discussion in ways which allow us to rethink how a different world might be constructed outside of the confines of the settler-colonial project and capitalist social relations.

More Info: We the Elites on Pluto Press, Robert Ovetz on Twitter and Robert Ovetz on It’s Going Down talking about insurrectionary working-class history.

photo: @ECWJAX on Twitter, Tattoo by Omar Cruz

Joined by guests from CrimethInc. and beyond, on this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we discuss climate change, while looking at the events that unfolded over the summer: massive wildfires, record setting heat waves, catastrophic flooding across Pakistan, historic hurricanes, and floods which knocked out infrastructure and water access in cities like Jackson, Mississippi.

We start off by looking at current anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles as well as growing mutual aid and disaster relief projects, along with formations like Extinction Rebellion and the climate strikes. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each of these forms, as well as evolving land struggles such as the fight to Defend the Atlanta forest. We then switch gears, and talk about how we can better build solidarity with those in the majority world on the front-lines as well as with migrants and refugees caught between borders.

As the impact of climate change continues to accelerate faster than ever previously thought, we need to think and analyze the current terrain and also work to build our material capacity to act and organize, as we prepare for a future that remains uncertain and terrifying.

photo: Matt Palmer via Unsplash

On this episode, we are joined by members of Unity and Struggle, who discuss their recent analysis piece, Big Brick Energy, and look back on the nation wide uprising that kicked off following the police murder of George Floyd in May of 2020.

https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1550542980016066560

We discuss what the media got wrong with the revolt, the role and impact of conspiracy theories from both the Right and the Left, and the State’s attempt to crush the uprising with everything from Democratic recuperation, city wide curfews, to sending in the national guard. We also look at the very real limits that the rebellion hit after sweeping across the US in 2020.

https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1457092218338955265

We end the episode by discussing the major lessons that can be drawn from the rebellion, how we can bring new people into our movement and struggles, and how we can continue to incorporate this knowledge into our day to day activity as we move forward in rapidly changing times.

photo: Brett Weinstein via Flickr, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0

On this episode of It’s Going Down, we speak with Rhiannon Firth, author of Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action, about the growth of autonomous disaster relief efforts, grassroots anarchist initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic, and collective responses to climate change, both in the UK and in the US.

https://twitter.com/RhiFirth/status/1552748417021100032

During our discussion, we map out attempts by the state to both recuperate and contain mutual aid movements and focus on the need for radicals to not dilute their politics. We look back at historical examples such as Occupy Sandy and recent responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and ask how these experiments can influence the coming terrain impacted by the realities of climate chaos.

More Info: Rhiannon Firth on Pluto Press and Twitter and Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action.

Photo: Restore_the_Rock / flickr