From shutitdowndc.org:
Mass Mobilization Against The Alt-Right in Washington DC, August 10-12 from Matt Brown on Vimeo.
We are calling all anti-fascists and people of good conscience to participate in international days of action August 10 through August 12 and a mass mobilization in Washington DC.
This is for Heather Heyer, ICE abolition, open borders, dismantling the prison industrial complex, and ending the settler colonial system. We will confront fascism, antisemitism, islamaphobia, white supremacy, and state violence on August 10-12.
Our lives were forever changed on August 12, 2017, when neo-Nazis, KKK and militia members, and Alt-Right trolls from across the US and North America converged on the town of Charlottesville, Virginia.
White supremacists lit torches and attacked students as young as 17 last year while the police looked on and did nothing. The next day, people bravely confronted hundreds of armed racists. In the ensuing confrontation, one person gave her life, and many more were scarred forever. Tens of thousands immediately took to the streets. Suddenly the world would never be the same.
Now the white supremacists want to come back. On August 12, 2018, the Alt-Right will hold “Unite the Right 2” in Washington DC in front of the White House at Lafayette Square. Jason Kessler, Richard Spencer, and the Trump Adminstration are all implicated in the murder of Heather Heyer. The Alt-Right relentlessly harass and threaten people of color, women, sex workers, trans and non-binary people, and the undocumented.
Their rallies are all public displays of violence and calls for genocide. They are Brian Trainer and every killer cop. They are the ICE agents. They are the prison system that breaks up families. In Portland, DC, and Philly, the movement grows. We occupy ICE offices, confront racism, antisemitism, islamaphobia, xenophobia, and white nationalism.
Other Calls to Action
For the CrimethInc. international call to action
In Charlottesville: Community members are mobilizing to show that anti-racist, anti-fascist resistance continues regardless of whether Nazis actually show up. Join and support them on August 11-12.
Inside D.C.
Jason Kessler will find no rest, no refuge, no respite. Communities in DC will unite against hate, borders, prison, and the vision of Unite the Right.
Outside D.C.
If you can’t make it to Washington DC on August 10-12, take to the streets wherever you are. We call on our comrades to organize demonstrations and other actions for the night of August 12. Occupy an ICE office, shut down a police station, or demonstrate at the home of a local racist, ICE agent, or prison profiteer.
Outside the United States
If you are living outside the US, you can take action at US embassies, borders, or other symbols of colonial power. Our allegiance is not to “making America great again,” but to all of humanity and the planet.
Signed,
“Att röra sig i nazistiska kretsar har helt enkelt konsekvenser.” That’s Swedish for “Moving in Nazi circles simply as consequences.” It comes from the announcement from Anti Fascist Action (AFA) Research that the Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR) plans to have a rally in Stockholm on Aug. 25, which just so happenes to be the same day that the Strike Back Network – Defending Strike Rights will be in the streets as well protesting the government’s restrictions on striking workers. According to AFA, NMR will bring out Nazis and the like from Sweden and all over the Nordic Region to march on Kungsholmen, and the permit is for 30 to 30,000 persons. AFA will be out to document every last one of them that come out and plan to put them on blast in the future. So yeah, in Sweden, being a Nazi will have consequences.
During the Civil War, Tennessee was the last state in the Confederacy to vote for secession, Union soldiers from the south came from Tennessee more than any other state, and Johnson City, Tennessee in particular was a Union stronghold. One would not think that given its history of White supremacy since the war, up to and including now, and it definitely strikes funny how despite the fact that the latest Confederate monument came down at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC, the White Supremacist League of the South decided to protest that and other monuments to their lost cause going on the trash heap 200 miles away in Johnson City!
In a statement on their website, LOSer President Michael Hill called for a rally in Johnson City, condemning Chapel Hill’s “radical leftist students, including elements of Antifa and Black Lives Matter” as well as “law enforcement standing around watching as these terrorists demolished public property with impunity.” Johnson City Manager Pete Peterson confirmed through a spokesperson that the group has expressed an intent to hold something there, and do not need a permit, although city staff has “had conversations with them about doing so in a location that will help us best ensure public safety.”
But when people come out to counter this group, dialogue might not be the order of the day. After all, the LOSers made a deal with Charlottesville, VA to essentially not come back after their participation in the violence of last year’s “Unite the Right” rally. And they also were good for attacking people in Shelbyville, TN when they held a rally there in November. Needless to say, Antifa is already sounding the alarm for this little event.
League of the South planning a rally in Johnson City, TN on September 29! Archived source: https://t.co/baC6lgw5pi LOSers don’t know the South stopped fucking around since October 1859 (at least). #FWS pic.twitter.com/zRUPw41LrU
— Stop the Next ‘Unite the Right’ (@stopthenextutr) August 21, 2018
More info as it develops.
When you want to defend the right to keep and bear arms but you keep working with neo-Fascists and people connected to White supremacists to do it, everything you do becomes about the fascism, not gun rights. That’s what Kent State Alum Kaitlin Bennett is about, attempting to sneak fascism into some light of respectability by hiding it behind the 2nd Amendment. And that is what she is going to do in September when she brings her Open Carry rally to her old campus. Now it’s a little hard to support this particular rally when she is bringing people to campus that actually run afoul of everyone else’s rights and have been about the will to take them away through their own violence. Among the speakers Bennett has announced have been Joey Gibson of Patriot Prayer, who has spent the past year holding rallies in the Northwest that devolve into his group attacking people, often unprovoked (one of his rally participants, Jeremy Christian, later allegedly killed two men and injure a third when they tried to stop him from racially harassing two teenage girls on a train and is currently awaiting trial), Millie Weaver, a correspondent for Infowars, who founder is Alex Jones, a guy who keeps “predicting” a second civil war if we are successful in taking Donald Trump down, and Ryan Fournier, who counts White supremacist James Allsup among his friends and routinely rails against Hispanics and Muslims. So IF this rally goes down, that is what folks will be dealing with, not the open carry thing, since a lot of leftists despite what has been the case in the past actually don’t have a problem with that.
That IF is put out there for a reason though. Kent State has issued a statement saying that unless Bennett’s rally isn’t sponsored by University student group, they will not sanction it. “Kent State University has notified a recent graduate that she must cease and desist from advertising a planned rally on campus because she has not registered the event and obtained the approvals required by university policy,” the statement reads, also noting that counterdemonstrators also received the same communication. Kent State is not really big on boneheads coming to their campus to play games with it. Earlier this year, they shitcanned White supremacist Richard Spencer when he proposed a May 4 event, that date coinciding with the anniversary of Ohio National Guard shootings that killed four students during anti-war protests in 1970. But Bennett still plans to hold the event so it remains to be see if this Open Carry rally actually does happen on campus.
In the meantime, we strongly urge Kaitlin Bennett to start pulling away from the Nazis and Fascists if she truly believes in the freedoms she says she cherishes, otherwise, as said before, her advocacy for guns will be seen as nothing more than a smokescreen – that people who really believe in freedom will see right through.
From Ocean State Against Hate:
“Resist Marxism,” the fascist front group started by Kyle Chapman, has announced another rally for October 6th, despite being roundly rejected by the community at their last attempted event. We, a coalition of anti-racist, anti-sexist, pro-LGBT, anti-fascist, socialist, labor, and community organizers, again urge our allies in the communities of Providence and the surrounding area to come and support our effort to frustrate these fascist hate groups’ attempts to organize.
Though “Resist Marxism’s” public materials avoid overtly racist language, they are full of fascist dog-whistles and chauvinism. Beneath this legitimizing veneer, fascists from various violent hate groups have been organizing and attempting to bring fascism to the mainstream. Groups joining together using “Resist Marxism” as a front include violent “western chauvinist” Proud Boys, American Guard, and “Boston Free Speech”. These groups are closely linked, both in their origins and memberships, with more openly racist, misogynist, anti-LGBT, and anti-immigrant hate groups. Members of their group have been photographed with Nazi and fascist tattoos, and some have long histories in the white nationalist or anti-immigrant movements.
In the lead-up to the rally being held by fascist front group “Resist Marxism”, OSAH has become aware of a crowdfunding effort by Proud Boys affiliates Tusitala “Tiny” Toese and Rufio Panman to fly to Rhode Island in order to join “Resist Marxism” in terrorizing Providence and our surrounding communities. These two fascists have histories of violence and we can only imagine that they are being brought in as “muscle”. Since their first Providence rally was disrupted, we can only look at this as a provocation and an attempt to escalate the violence that fascist groups always cause. Two more fascists, no matter how big and prone to violence, will not change the result for the fascists: the united working class of Providence and our allies will not brook further fascist incursions into our communities, and we will not allow violent fascists to victimize us or organize among us.
Tusitala “Tiny Toese is a Proud Boy who has been active in the Patriot Prayer movement, mostly on the west coast. He has a record of extreme misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, and assault, and associates with white nationalists. He is ethnically Samoan, and has used this to provide cover for the extreme racist beliefs of hate groups that organize alongside and within Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer.
Ethan Nordean, aka “Rufio Panman”, of Salem, OR, is likewise an active Proud Boy with a violent record. He has been videotaped assaulting people at demonstrations, and has been interviewed, publicizing these crimes, by far-right media personalities like Alex Jones.
Both of these fascists have documented histories of violence. They have no reason to be in Rhode Island other than to commit more acts of violence against our communities. It bears repeating: these obvious provocations and indications that the fascists want to escalate violence in Rhode Island are a clear and present danger to our communities, especially people of color, women, LGTB people, Jewish and Muslim people, immigrants, and the poor and working class. Given the state’s complicity in upholding systemic white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, imperialism, and patriarchy, we know that we cannot count on its agents to protect us (and in fact they often work with the fascists, either complementarily or directly), so we reserve the right to defend ourselves and our communities, by any means necessary.
Fascist organizing is violent. White nationalist attacks have been on the increase for years, as have other hate crimes by fascists. We do not intend to be victimized by fascists, whether they wear swastikas, blue masks, or black and yellow polo shirts, or whether they hide in plain sight. We encourage anyone opposed to fascists and the dangerous rise in fascist organizations locally and across the world, to join us in shutting down this fascist rally.
We urge all community members who join us on October 6th to refrain from collaborating with law enforcement either before or on the day of the counter-protest. Police are not our friend, they are not here to protect us, and they will attempt to prevent the community from defending itself.
Fascism is an existential threat to already oppressed and targeted communities. To oppose this threat, we must reject and oppose all its facets:
- White supremacy in all its forms
- Misogyny and violence against women (including trans women) in all its forms
- Violence against immigrants and workers in all its forms
- Capitalist imperialism in all its forms
- Settler-colonialism in all its forms
- Directly affected communities must always be at the forefront of all aspects of our political work, including anti-fascism.
- Fascism cannot be debated, it cannot be coddled; it must be smashed aggressively and efficiently. A community’s ability to defend itself, by any means necessary, is crucial to combat fascism.
The Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA) is an anti-Muslim group that has been putting on hate rallies around the UK. At their rally in July, they attacked trade unionists and a Muslim woman bus driver. In September, they marched with the neo-Nazi National Action, as well as the English Defense League (EDL) and the British National Party (BNP). When they tried to attack counter protesters, three of them were arrested.
Brighton Antifascists are mobilizing people against this latest march and will have two meetings leading up to the 13th, one on Oct. 4 at the Brighthelm Centere and another a week later at Brighton University.
Fresh from harassing the woman who might be the first African American woman to hold a Governorship in the history of the United States, the Nationalist Liberty Union is saying on their Facebook page that they will be participating in a “Build the Wall Rally” being put on by the South Carolina Conservative Action Council (SCCAC). That group once got the attention of Mother Jones, who noted in an article about them that a newsletter affiliated with them, Conservative Action Report, is known for articles with headlines like “Is Barack Obama a Muslim?” and “Blacks and the Confederacy—the story the leftist mass media will never tell” (mostly because the story is bullshit), as well as write op-eds that refered to then-Gov. Nikki Haley by her birth name, Nimrada Randhawa, as they attack her for her “Stalinesque” decision to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds after the Dylann Roof mass shooting in Charleston. NLU mouthpiece Paul Lovett loves defending the imprisoned Creativity Movement Matt Hale, who was given a 40-year sentence in federal prison for conspiring to kill a federal judge, so you know he’s a special piece of work! Some locals are aware of this little annoyance coming to their town, but not many.
The National Socialist Movement (NSM) is planning to march on Little Rock Arkansas, and while they are trotting out the pretend genocide in South Africa (by the way, how ironic is it that nazis are saying shit like, “We must avoid our children facing the horrific reality of being a hated and despised minority that is steadily pushed towards extinction”?) as a reason for them to step out, in truth it’s a regular thing that they have one big rally in the spring and another in the fall. This also might be Matthew Heimbach’s first time at a rally as a NSM member. And we are told there might be a new logo on their flags, but that remains to be seen.
There is counterdemo being organized around this as we post this, and we will provide contact info as soon as it is available.
In today’s political climate one cannot predict much, but we are still going to say not to expect the neo-fascist Proud Boys running around trying to play their games over the next year or so as much as they are now. After the fight at the Republican Club recently, they became the crew that everyone wants a piece of, and everyone will have their piece, you can bank on that. Even the right-wing New York Post – which is owned by News Corp, which also owns Fox News, who once employed Proud Boy founder Gavin McInnes – called them out as a “far-right hate group” in an article about right wing activists harassing Nancy Pelosi during a visit to Florida because someone in the crowd of activists beating on the windows repped the group.
Well, Philly is going to get their shot at them. A Facebook event page is up for something called the “We the People Rally” which is being organized by two groups, Patriot Events and Sports Beer and Politics, whose own Facebook page has two Proud Boys as administrators. As of now, the page is particularly benign with a disclamer saying the following:
We at Patriot Events and Sports Beer and Politics do not condone the use of violence by any party at this event. This event is to allow the people to make their voices heard. Any violence, racism, or display of hate by any group or individual is extremely prohibited. Any group or party violating these conditions will be removed from this event immediately.
The hosts, planners, security, speakers or their affiliates, members or family will not be held liable for bodily injury or personal damages to anyone in attendance. All civil claims, attorneys costs for the aforementioned will be paid by the claimant.
There is a reason for that. Just before the Proud Boys made asses of themselves in NYC, they were boasting on this page that they were going to come to this event with the purpose of fighting people:
After NYC, these postings were scrubbed from the event page, but too late. Somebody already saw them. This is what people will be mobilizing against, despite the usual tapdancing from the organizers that they don’t condone violence and be vigilant against it. Folks are used to that tapdancing and are not buying into it. The Proud Boys also are good for the “I’m not racist” routine and their supporters point to their members of color. Well, they repped at both Unite the Right rallies in Charlottesville last year and Washington, DC this year, the DC outing featuring a Hispanic Proud Boy. So folks stopped giving them quarter, and are going to do something about them before they really cause innocents to be hurt.
This specimen of stupid we are dealing with here calls himself Jovi Val, but his real name is Jovanni Valle. He is one of those Proud Boys that all of a sudden wasn’t one when he is called out for publicly associating with something that makes them look bad – like Nazis – but still is supportive of the Proud Boys. That’s what happened to Valle after he joined another former Proud Boy named Jason Kessler as he held his second “Unite the Right Rally” in DC on the anniversary of his first in Charlottesville, VA that after a massive riot ended with the death of Heather Heyer at the hands of James Fields, Jr., one of the neo-Fascists Kessler invited there. According to reporter Ford Fischer, Valle wants to hold a rally somewhere in Washington, DC in Lafayette Park – the location of that “Unite the Right Rally 2” event last summer – in support of those he says are “the men and women who put their lives on the line for freedom and liberty.” And who might those men and women be? Well, they would include Fields, now serving the rest of his worthless life in prison for the murder of Heather Heyer, the members of the Rise Above Movement, for going around the country assaulting people who aren’t down with their brand of neo-Fascism and was in Charlottesville, and of course, the Proud Boys who were arrested for attacking antifa in NYC while their founder (but doesn’t want to be called leader) Gavin McInnes was inside the Manhattan Republican Club mocking the killing of a Socialist leader in Japan over fifty years ago. The poster is a load of laughs, as it displays people wearing MAGA hats falling victim to – among other things – police. When you are through laughing, you can read the thread below:
So I was just sent this graphic and informed that right wing activist Jovi Val plans to have a rally at the White House in early January to support nationalists – including both Proud Boys and Charlottesville attendees – who are in jail. pic.twitter.com/MbX0VSi2Wm
— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) December 14, 2018
For the record, with all the hell coming down on the Proud Boy’s head, they are distancing themself from this thing. They are publicly saying that they have absolutely nothing to do with this rally and do not want to have their name associated with it. And the Hispanic Valle responded in a Dec. 17 two-hour YouTube rant saying that he had “distanced” himself from the Proud Boys – which he says was about giving White men a voice in politics – because making a Black man as their leader made them “self loathing whites”, and that they are “not a White Nationalist group…anymore!” There’s a lot of giving away the store in that video, including where he notes that one of those Proud Boys arrested in NYC has a Confederate Rag tattooed on his arm that the group won’t let him display (16:46 timestamp), so we have to post it here!
He is still supporting those Proud Boys during his rally, and is making no bones about the fact that he believes White Nationalism is “a beautiful thing”. So if you see him in DC on Jan. 5, that’s what he is going to be defending. This one is going to be about the corniest thing you will ever see. Valle is good for that.