“Through relentless and dynamic actions undertaken in decentralized and uncoordinated ways, thousands of people across the city and even the country have brought the forest destruction project to a stalemate”
“In the course of these events, it has become abundantly clear that adversaries of the movement do not understand the nature of contemporary struggles. Their recent wave of repression indicates that they believe they are fighting a movement from the 20th century, i.e., a two-tiered, leader-driven struggle organized around a “core” of dedicated militants and a “support base” who essentially follow their lead”
“They believe they are fighting some kind of hybrid social movement / criminal enterprise coalition, and it is called “stop cop city” and “defend the forest.” They imagine this “coalition” to function like a classical organization that can be broken down into parts through intimidation and threats. They seem to actually believe that the various acts of nonviolent sabotage against machinery, the protests outside of the offices and gated communities of the developers, as well as the canvassing and public engagement efforts somehow all emerge from a single rag-tag group of dreamers living in the woods, all of whom exclusively hail from other parts of the country”
“Only in this way can we explain the absurd Domestic Terrorism charges levied against six people for sitting in trees or walking through the park. Either they do not understand how politics has worked for the past two decades, or they have decided that it is worth it in the short term to play dumb”
"”Defend the Atlanta Forest” was recently declared a Domestic Violent Extremist group by Homeland Security. Aside from the nonexistence of such a group, this designation reveals that even higher level institutions still do not grasp the elementary facts of 21st century political life”
“Political action as it has developed in the current movement, and in all contemporary movements, does not develop primarily from collective deliberation, chains of command, or membership organizations. On the contrary, real action spreads memetically through signals, signs, and images; by narratives and events, public codes, shared references, and decentralized processes”