Fight the Right

This is a bit of a different post from me today, but it fits well with No Escape’s tagline: Digital culture and its discontent. I’m, uh, feeling discontent right now. For a couple reasons.

This blog is about three things: KOSA, Project 2025, and this week’s indictment of 61 people by a Fulton Co, GA grand jury on RICO charges. These are three (mostly) separate sites of conflict in the United States where I live, but not only do I think they have far-reaching consequences for folks even outside of the US, I also believe they’re connected to each other in some pretty vital ways.

A brief synopsis of each of these things is in order, and I do mean brief, because I know I could be here all day talking about any single one of them. Let’s start with the RICO indictments, since that’s the most recent and urgent thing on the list. Basically, the Republican Attorney General of Georgia, Chris Carr, brought these charges against 61 opponents of so-called “Cop City,” a planned urban training center for the Atlanta Police Department and other law enforcement agencies that would necessitate the clear-cutting of the Weelaunee Forest to be built. It is thought by many activists opposed to the project that Cop City is specifically a response to the racial justice uprisings of 2020 and a way to better train cops and other agents of the state in the art of urban repression. The idea is, if you are the chief of a police department and you want your officers to know how to effectively kettle a crowd of rabblerousers? Come on down to Cop City.

This project has seen a lot of opposition – like, extremely widespread – since it was announced a few years ago, and the ensuing police tantrums have resulted in the death of a beloved climate activist and anarchist who went by the moniker of Tortuguita. The state of Georgia has already tried to paint many of the people it has indicted on RICO charges as domestic terrorists and money launderers, and the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” indictment itself explicitly mentions anarchism, mutual aid, and solidarity as ideas that the state identifies as evidence that because the 61 people on the list all allegedly subscribe to such beliefs, they necessarily then collaborated in an intentional criminal conspiracy against Atlanta.

From CrimethInc.:

It is hardly certain that this RICO case will succeed. But if it does, it will have massive repercussions for other social movements around the United States. Whether or not it succeeds, it marks a new low for the use of judicial harassment to target dissent. Anyone who does not desire to live in a totalitarian society should put their weight behind efforts to support the defendants and resist this attempt to set a new precedent for state repression.^[1]Collective, CrimethInc Ex-Workers. “CrimethInc. : Understanding the RICO Charges in Atlanta : A Sweeping Indictment Seeks to Criminalize Protest Itself.” CrimethInc., 5 Sept. 2023, … Continue reading

So yeah, we’ll come back to this. The second thing I’m upset by today is a congressional bill called KOSA, the so-called “Kids Online Safety Act,” co-authored by Republican senator Marsha Blackburn and Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal (as well as 42 other senators). Blackburn was recently caught on tape telling an activist from the Family Policy Alliance that conservatives should be most concerned about protecting kids from the “transgender” in our culture and, “I would add to that, watching what’s happening on social media.” She immediately plugs KOSA as a means of forcing a “duty of care” on social media platforms. She said, “This is where our kids are being indoctrinated, they’re hearing things at school and then they’re getting onto YouTube to watch a video and all of a sudden this comes to them, and they’re on Snapchat or they’re on Instagram, and they click on something and the next thing you know, they’re being inundated with it.” While her spokespeople would come out later and say she wasn’t implying that KOSA would censor trans voices or target any specific community, it’s hard not to hear the words literally coming out of her mouth and not read that intent into it.

So why is KOSA scary? We live in an age where far-right activists can masquerade as concerned parents and show up at school board meetings to express outrage that a middle- or high school has books on queer sexual health available, and be able to get those books taken out of circulation with relatively no pushback. Lawmakers and state bureaucrats can outlaw the, uh, “usage of pronouns” and nicknames in the classroom, make it impossible for trans youth to socially transition, play sports, or even access medical care. Stochastic terrorists, aided and abetted by some of these same state bureaucrats, can repost videos of queer educators, medical professionals or students simply living their lives and direct credible bomb and death threats at the institutions that let them do so unhindered (to say nothing of the individuals themselves). The one place queer people, including kids, can still go to get information and form solid community is the Internet, and KOSA would make it difficult-if-not-impossible for kids especially to access that information.

According to critics of KOSA, there are right now two chief areas where the bill would not only be a bad idea, but actively harmful to the Internet: its nebulous “duty of care” provision that could compel platforms and websites to impose age gates and proactively prevent “controversial” subject matter – like the existence of trans people – from reaching kids’ eyes; and the way it would be enforced, which would be through state attorneys general (so that each state can make its own decisions on what to let minors see on social media).^[2]Belanger, Ashley. “The Kids Online Safety Act Isn’t All Right, Critics Say.” Ars Technica, 14 Aug. 2023, … Continue reading Groups like the Heritage Foundation love this bill.^[3]Masnick, Mike. “Heritage Foundation Says That Of Course GOP Will Use KOSA To Censor LGBTQ Content.” Techdirt, 24 May 2023, … Continue reading

From Ars Technica:

In addition, many young people are engaged with “politically challenging topics like LGBT rights, gun violence, and climate change,” Venzke told Ars. If state attorneys general are “simply telling platforms to question these topics” as “the things that cause anxiety for young people,” that is likely to chill young people’s “opportunity to participate” in meaningful debates where young people have recently been vocal advocates online.^[4]Belanger, Ashley. Ibid.

We’ll also come back to this, but I have one more aggravating thing to talk about: Project 2025.

While a good portion of liberals are currently focused on whether or not wannabe tinpot dictator Donald Trump will be in prison or dead by the time January 2025 rolls around, the far right is actively planning its return to, and consolidation of, power under the next conservative president, regardless of who that might be. Groups like the Heritage Foundation, Freedom Works and ALEC have come together to pen a 900+ page policy recommendation document that meticulously details how a conservative chief executive should go about shaping the federal bureaucracy under their control in their first 180 days in office. Now this is admittedly a rather dry description of what’s going on here, and it isn’t terribly unusual for think tanks of various political stripes to put together policy documents for legislators or the President. Except this is what Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts wrote on the first page of the Project 2025 doc: “Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.” (emphasis mine.) Roberts ends the paragraph this little snippet’s from as follows: “Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.”

So, uh, it’s not really a “normal” policy document after all. From page 4:

“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

This is not the ramblings of some ex-comedy writer on Twitter who lost his wife to his own anti-trans obsession; it’s the president of the Heritage Foundation, setting the tone of a comprehensive policy document that would also seek to have the president remove trans people from the military, further destroy reproductive freedoms, get rid of DEI initiatives, and scrap Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This is a document that wants the president to command direct control over the Department of Justice and FBI. Even assuming partial adoption of this document, it’s genuinely a fascist roadmap to power consolidation.

From Dame Magazine:

The result of these actions will be perhaps the biggest power play against states rights in American history, and the threat is clear. If blue states refuse to turn on their own transgender citizens, then the federal government will do everything in its power to decapitate the leadership of those states using the Department of Justice. Conservatives are making the bet that individual district attorneys will not risk prosecution, and prison, on behalf of a tiny, despised minority. They’re betting that state governors will not be willing to risk both prosecution and a constitutional crisis over transgender people.^[5]The GOP Has a Master Plan to Criminalize Being Trans – Dame Magazine. 14 Aug. 2023, https://www.damemagazine.com/2023/08/14/the-gop-has-a-master-plan-to-criminalize-being-trans/, … Continue reading

This is all to say nothing of the concerted efforts of conservative state politicians across the country to crack down on things like queer healthcare, racial justice, and reproductive freedom. We don’t even have to bring up shit like Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters claiming that “drag queens” secretly control the state’s education system or announcing a partnership with PragerU Kids to play the media company’s content in classrooms; or Texas lawmakers’ attempts to create an “abortion border wall” at key entrance and exit points throughout the state. We don’t have to talk about Ron DeSantis’s whole, uh, deal. This shit’s enough.

Right now, the far right is making a push to take permanent power in the United States. As an ideology, it is no longer satisfied with the milquetoast push and pull of business-as-usual electoral politics; the right wants the whole pie. It goes without saying that this political machine must be denied what it craves. If it gets even a little bit of what it wants – if the RICO charges against Stop Cop City activists stick; if KOSA passes; if Project 2025 is allowed to be implemented in whole or in part – then regardless of who becomes president, the fascist upheaval that Trump started will finally win.

I have a personal stake in this, it’s true. I am a queer anarchist living in a deeply-rightward-leaning state. I am also deeply cynical of most electoral means to address this problem. Shit feels, frankly, impossible to countermand through legal channels. But I’m writing about this not to wallow in doomerism, but instead to implore us to organize, to do anything to stop this shit. It’s been time. Many folks have already begun doing so. It’s going to take a massive spectrum of responses and community-building and, yes, electoral bullshit to address and repudiate this rightward push. Diversity of tactics is, as always, necessary to get a freer, less repressive world that we want.

In the short term, what can we do? First of all, you’re going to have to do what you feel comfortable doing. Maybe you’re not an “organizer,” maybe in your area it’s scary or even dangerous to openly organize against the right as they are the ones in power, maybe just the size of the problem is too daunting, maybe you work a lot and can’t spare the amount of time it would take to mount a response. Bare minimum? Donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund to support the Cop City defendants. Call your senator to voice your opposition to KOSA. Talk to your friends and friendly neighbors about this and ask them to do the same. Find receptive areas of your existing community and try planting seeds. Maybe some of them grow. Try to connect with already-existing groups doing the work. If you’re able to do more, if you have resources or contacts or organizing experience, do what you can. You likely didn’t need me to tell you that, though.

In the long term, I believe it’s more important than ever to build and grow communities of care that can adequately confront and withstand the state. Unions, mutual aid and direct action groups, the kind of organizational networks that would indeed make folks like the Georgia AG sweat – all of it needs to be on the table to fight back against those who would eviscerate freedom in freedom’s name.