Month: October 2025

Compiled by Jesse D. Palmer

Before we can defeat authoritarianism, capitalism, and eco-collapse, we’ve gotta defeat the loneliness, isolation, boredom and meaninglessness manufactured by the internet, consumerism, and corporate top-down entertainment slop. Phone dependence is killing informal, decentralized, face-to-face connection that’s necessary to resist oligarchy and build a world worth living in. A great response is to get down with some experimental, DIY, radical third spaces — neither homes nor workplaces. Here’s some new ones we’ve heard about and also corrections to the list published in the 2026 Slingshot organizer radical contact list. Updates and additional info are online at slingshotcollective.org, but beware of using a computer to fight the computer — turn that fucking thing off and go to a sweaty underground concert or make your own zine! 

Pop-Hop Books Co-Op – Los Angeles, CA

A worker-owned co-op community arts and education third space. They sell new and used books and art and host events (no one turned away for lack of funds). They’re building a “new creative ecosystem that amplifies marginalized voices, supports community growth, and empowers collective good works to build a healthier, more equitable neighborhood.” 5002 York Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90042, thepophop.com

Shoe Bones Collective – Salem, MA 

Collectively-run artist space with a focus on queer creative expression and community. 28 Boston St. Salem, MA 01970. 

Page Against The Machine – Long Beach, CA

Indy progressive activist bookstore that hosts discussion groups, readings, and exhibits. “Fightin’ words for mass defiance, empowerment, and self-reliance!” 2714 E. 4th St. Long Beach, CA 90814 patmbooks.com

Current – Panama City, FL

They have a bookshelf, zines, and host art shows, events and mutual aid projects including a new Food Not Bombs. 424 Harrison Ave. Panama City, FL 32401

Criminal Records – Atlanta, GA 

New and used record store that sells comics and hosts events. 1154-A Euclid Ave. NE, Atlanta GA 30307, 404-215-9511, criminalatl.com

GWO BEAN Collective 果邊 – Hong Kong

Grassroots community spot and Sunday Organic Veggies Market 4-7pm. Open day Sundays 1-7pm.  @gwobean for location.

Fuyin-info – Wuhan, China

DIY community third space with zines, a band practice room and a copyshop / risograph printing studio that presents events. On Lumo Rd. Wuhan, China 430074 @fuyin.info

La BIM (Bouquinerie Infokiosque Mobile) – Laguépie, France

Traveling micro-bookstore / press table / info kiosk where you can find anti-authoritarian, feminist, ecologist and DIY texts as well as literature, comics etc. 13 rue du Balat, 82250 Laguépie, France labim.noblogs.org

Žalár – Bratislava, Slovakia

Radical bar that hosts events. Štefánikova 47, Bratislava, Slovakia, +421 910 212 392

1 in 12 in Bradford – Bradford, UK

Collectively operated anarchist social center that hosts events. 21-23 Albion St. Bradford BD1 2LY, UK

The Lockon – Cambridge, UK

Squatted community centre that hosts mutual aid projects, a free shop and events. 11 Fair St. Cambridge, CB1 1HA 

Rockaway Park – Bristol, UK

Radical DIY venue, vegan cafe, workshop, garden. Eastcourt Rd. Temple Cloud, Bristol

Suggestions for visiting the UK

Here’s some resources recommended by a UK comrade that don’t have physical spaces. 

• The Advisory Service for Squatters network23.org/ass

• The Solidarity Economy Association solidarityeconomy.coop

• Haven Distribution books for prisoners havendistribution.org.uk

• The National Bargee Travellers Association bargee-traveller.org.uk

• Anarchist Federation afed.org.uk

Corrections to the 2026 Organizer

• Visible Voice Books in Cleveland has moved to 4601 Lorain Ave. Cleveland Ohio 44102 216-961-0084 visiblevoicebooks.com. They host events and have a cafe and bar. “Books marginalized by commercial concerns have a home” at Visible Voice. 

• Zenda in Prague, Czech Republic no longer exists. 

• Klub Lúč in Slovakia has a new address: Mierové námestie 17, 911 01 Trenčín.

• Infoshop Malatesta in Slovakia is probably defunct.

• Hájovňa in Slovakia probably will end in autumn this year.

Projects with no public or physical space 

• The street address for Wares infoshop library in Tiong Bahru-Bukit Merah area, Singapore is secret but they would love you to reach out and visit. They have books, zines, a reading room and a gathering place. wares.noblogs.org / @waresinfoshop

• Creative Mutual Aid is an art and mutual aid collective dedicated to fostering community, connection, and support through collaborative public art events. They activate parks, plazas, and other natural gathering spaces to create spontaneous communities where individuals can express themselves creatively, share skills, and engage in acts of generosity rooted in gift economy principles. Their efforts aim to build a more inclusive, supportive society beyond transactions. They also operate a 24/7 creative request line (252-MYSTERY), where they respond directly to community needs with handmade art, city-specific resource lists, and spontaneous creative projects.

By Jose 

Zines, like all printed matter, are tree killers. A ream of paper is 500 sheets; roughly 5 lbs of paper. Only about 50% of the mass of wood can be processed into pulp for paper-making. All told, an adult Douglas Fir tree gets processed into about 160 reams of paper. The average zine is a mere 15 sheets, so that same tree could also become 5,000 zines. Each of those zines speaks for different writers and artists — punk manifestos, queer poetry, anarchist theory, and meditative thoughts from the underground. If you were a pine tree, and you could pick, wouldn’t you rather become a zine? So send us your dead trees!

Eaves of Ass #9

$6 – 28 pages PO Box 42081, Portland, OR 97242

Craven Rock is a large, hazardous stone outcrop on the eastern shore of Marrowstone Island in Puget Sound. I can only assume that’s where our author got his pseudonym. Craven Rock is not made of the local bedrock, it’s a glacial erratic, meaning like the author, it traveled there from parts unknown. I appreciate a good geology reference.

I have suspected for years that Craven Rock is a pseudonym for Joshua James Amberson of Antiquated Future. But that’s like saying Superman is Clark Kent. The truth is that Craven Rock is more real than any comic book character. I quite liked his 2019 book Juggalo Country. This is a man who has walked among the juggaloes and lived to tell the tale. As exotic as they seem, Juggalos are real, and as dangerous as a Holstein bull or any piss-drunk cowpuncher.

Eaves of Ass reports on the day to day work of temp labor at the Pendleton Round-Up, a Rodeo in Oregon that’s been operating for over 100 years. A rodeo is a dangerous place for temps: unironic patriotism, public urination, excessive drinking, and half-tame animals. But most of their time is spent guarding entrances and exits and baby-sitting the drunk cowboys and cowgirls. Management is less than supportive. He writes ‘They try to disguise their contempt for us. We don’t give a shit.” The feeling is clearly mutual. 

Letterfounder #29

20 pages – Free PO Box 392, Lewiston, ME 04243

Jessy Kendall is the founder of Letterfounder. It’s a quarter scale poetry and media zine clearly assembled paste-up —by hand. The tell-tale cut lines and stapler dents are visible like tool marks on a hewn roof beam left behind by an unknown carpenter.

In general, it’s difficult to review poetry zines, and this one more than most. Instead of an immersive read, it lightly samples Jessy’s work, and includes some works from other poets and other zines; some I’ve heard of and others not. The art and commentary is a bit random. I certainly like that. On page 17 she asks how bats poop. Jessy, fear not; they flip up and hang from their thumbs to avoid pooping on themselves. I knew a guy in college who could do the same trick.

Ear of Corn #60

12 pages – $3 foodfortunata@hotmail.com

Senor Food includes a note which reads “Enjoy the slop.” To me zines are fine literature; the artistic writing of the underground, where real, feeling humans still rip their hearts out and scrawl their true words on the skins of dead trees to share them with the world outside the forest canopy. Next to that the Cimarron Review is just mass media. The only writing I’d call “slop” comes from generative AI. 

This is a slightly slimmer issue than usual but it’s chock full of reviews. I’ve read several issues over the years and the reviews are almost always punk, hardcore or hardcore punk, maybe a wee bit of grindcore. I do wonder what Food would do if a quality klezmer album came in the mail. The zine reviews are my favorite of course. Food even reviews Slingshot, which just proves that he has good taste. 

An excerpt from my upcoming magnum Copus about my dead cat

8 pages – $6.66 instagram.com/enoladismay

Enola Dismay is famous in these parts, a former Slingshot alum. She keeps a lower profile than she used to. Her website enoladismay.com is gone, her LiveJournal abandoned, WordPress unfinished, and her Etsy store closed. Back issues of her old zine, No Gods No Mattress are unobtanium. She is a rare animal.

She sent all three issues of I Wish they’d Fix the Wires, spanning 2022 – 2023 and this 2025 gem. The zine is exactly what it says on the tin — an ode from a young lady to her adorable floof, Abigail, complete with color pictures. Her artwork, as usual, is amazing. But sincere condolences Enola D. If we were neighbors I’d make you something sugary. Baked goods solve a surprising number of problems in life. 

Rite or Riot? #46

16 pages – donation Naomistine28@gmail.com

It’s not accurate to say that Naomi is back. There should be more menace to it: Naomi is unrelenting! Naomi never went away, she has written 31 issues since I first read issue 15 in the Fall of 2022. The pace seems unsustainable but I now fear she may never stop. To the people of the future — beware.

This issue opens with an interview with her cousin Joan Stine, a formally trained pianist and Mozart fan. I read a white paper once that said Mozart demonstrated depressive episodes consistent with DSM-IV classification. Beware the music of mad men. Beside that is an interview with Lee Hoffman, her husband’s barber. She never says so but I think he’s the singer of the band Elegant Trash. Beware of barbers and anyone else who carries a straight razor.

That article is followed by music, film and zine reviews. As a proud owner of the Absolutely Zippo: A Fanzine Anthology I must say the high point is her review of the April 2025 issue. I’ll quote the conclusion. “Eggplant pulls out the big guns-his unwavering knack for telling a story that usually ends with an anecdote for community, peace, solidarity, humor and/or love.” May it never waver, but beware of men with unwavering knacks. 

I Love The Sun 

8 pages – instagram.com/oleandrsstudio

Anna Gecko sent us an envelope of Oleandr Studio zines made from an old issue of the Lansing City Pulse. It included a Post Card Journal from her mom, SB, about a Munich trip, and two of gecko’s zines: Am I Gender Fluid? and the aforementioned 2025 I Love The Sun. The latter of these is just a mini zine about the sun, purely about solar phenomena: sun spots, magnetic fields, solar flares, the solar cycle and the Carrington event. (Is anyone else hoping for a second Carrington event?) 

Her Am I Gender Fluid? Zine is adorable, color copied but the hand colored original is what shines through. She explains the gender fluid flag stripes, gender dysphoria, pronoun options, and encourages people to be safe and to try things out. It’s all warm fuzzies.

Her mother SB’s zine is mostly about a short visit to the Munich Oktoberfest event. There she drank ale and ate sausages and dumplings. She celebrates the joys of German mass transit. It’s like one of the lighter reflective moments in a Hemingway novel. I’ve been to an Oktoberfest. Like any large gathering of tourists, my advice is to leave before people start vomiting in the bushes.

The World After Amazon

231 pages / $15 or free pdf  afteramazon.world

I have on occasion met people who can predict the future. The future is bleak and people who live in the dystopian present know all about the dystopian future. Some of the Authors in the Heinemann African writers series, Chronic and Chimurenga Magazine from South Africa, The Book of Gaza collection, works of Samizdat…the list goes on. These are works which will blow your hair back. 

But there is another kind of hell out there. Amazon workers toil under exploitative management, and a level of pervasive surveillance which does not end in the parking lot. Gamified tech manipulates workers to incentivize productivity. Amazon pays consultants millions to bust unions while underpaying workers. What’s more dystopian than peeing in a bottle while Jeff Bezos naps on his mega-yacht and replaces employees with robots? 

I’m a big fan of post-apocalyptic sci-fi. I have read thousands of pages from Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, and Ray Bradbury. If you’re a sci-fi fan you already know those names. In The World After Amazon we have 13 works by largely unknown writers, each in some way inspired by their experiences working for the big box apocalypse. But this book is full of fresh voices from that special kind of fresh hell. From the post-apocalyptic now they write about a post-apocalyptic future: social change and upheaval, the fall of Amazon, the collapse of capitalism, and their dreams of a better world. 

Ozarks Agrarian News

$25 per year / 8 issues ozarksagrarian@protonmail.com

You want the longest growing season possible, but you also want to avoid a late frost. In late April I planted asparagus, rhubarb, potatoes, peas, spinach, lettuce bok choi, carrots and broccoli. It sounds like a lot but it’s just a kitchen garden, nothing like what all the hands accomplish together at Oran Mor, the home of Ozarks Agrarian News. OAN is one of those resources I might consult trying to guess why my tomatoes get blossom end rot. It’s better than the Farmers Almanac, because it’s written by actual farmers. 

I like that OAN is clearly assembled by paste-up. Beside the sections which were clearly done in a word processing program, there are pasted sections with fonts from different typewriters (at least 3), and hand-written segments which come from different hands. You can really tell that there is a community behind this zine.

When I open OAN, I’m greeted by reminders of how hyper-local it truly is. There’s a notice that someone is building a community garden, there’s a potluck at Flotsam Farm, and Crankie Fest at the Shoe Tree Listening Room, there’s also a notice of who you can call if you have a bee swarm you need removed. On another page is an admonishment to eat flowers, the non-poisonous ones of course. These are the kind of people who will survive the zombie apocalypse.

Hold That Line!

$15 – 48 pages currenteditions.bigcartel.com

Brought to you by the same fine folks that brought us the zine “A Brief and Inconclusive History of Protests on San Francisco’s Market Street” last year. Likewise, Hold that Line is also a lovely riso zine but instead of documenting protests it reprints illustrations from The Waterfront Worker, a 1930s San Francisco newspaper published by and for longshore workers.

I am reminded of an interview R. Crumb did on NPR where he talked about his influences. He said “…I took on this older ’30s, ’40s kind of thing. And I started looking more closely at these kind of Brand X, third-rate, comics from the forties that were drawn in that style by these artists that never achieved renown even among comics people. They were third-rate artists, this working class proletarian, funky, crude, vulgar – these comics were very vulgar and violent…”

Crumb was right. They are violent. The drawings are of police harassment, bosses, jail cells and cops shooting down strikers, just as he said, They are crude and amateurish; fine artists generally didn’t work the docks. So these drawings came from calloused working hands, and they look like it. But they thereby convey an authenticity you can’t get from Edward Hooper. Even if he were to be counted among your allies. 

Cavity – The Flyers

instagram.com/hook_or_crook_unlimited/

$35 – 78 pages

You know the old idiom “You had to be there”; well I was there, and like many other things from 30 years ago I don’t remember it very well. As Dan Cavity writes in the intro “Flipping through them, I was flooded with memories —some crystal clear, others more blurry…”

Except for an introductory essay, the rest of the zine is just flyers, and it’s enormous, the 8.5 x 11 pages reproduce the original 1990s flyers at 1:1 scale. The style is somewhat variable but there are many which feel familiar: scissors, Xacto-knife, glue stick, sharpie—the Kinko’s graphic design kit. (Even if Kinkos doesn’t exist anymore.)

The flyers aren’t in chronological order, they’re in Gorostiaga order, a sequence that only makes sense to Dan who published this zine. There are some band names here you’d like like Converge, High on Fire, Hot Water Music, and Avail… but also several with a rad Bay area band, Kreamy ‘lectric Santa. The internet has everything now and we can revisit these moments whether we remember them or not. 

The Scumrag #3

$2.50 – 8 pages scumbagpress.co.uk

I received a black envelope in the mail. It was vaguely ominous. This is one of the few zines I’ve received which arrived perfumed. I can’t place the scent but it’s distinctly on the front cover. I don’t know if that’s for everyone, like letters from the Zodiac Killer, or if it’s special for me. Sometimes you don’t want to know. 

Scumbag is a D.I.Y. small press in Hastings, East Sussex, England run by the poet Martin Appleby. The about section of their website ends with “NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF!” which says it all. Sometimes it is more obvious than others that we are descended from peasants and not lords. 

Within you will find poetry, prose and even an interview with the publisher of the Zine “Spinners” which honestly also sounds great. A book review opens with the line “My motto is “read books that fuck you up.” I shouted at every page. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! I want to have a sit down in Brighton and thank Appleby for putting this together. 

By Duncan Autrey

The world is scary. The problems we face are complex, our future is uncertain, and we are bound up with many people we don’t necessarily trust or understand. On top of that, our brains are wired to crave simplicity — a story that makes sense, a side to pick, a good guy and a bad guy.

Politicians and media feed that craving. They sell us simple answers to complex problems and profit by stoking fear. But the real work of freedom demands the opposite: that we face ambiguity and complexity honestly, and take responsibility for what we do next.

That means choosing to act not from habit, fear, or ideology, but from a recognition of our interdependence. We are not just isolated individuals or opposing camps. We’re one entangled system. In the U.S., even our founding motto, E Pluribus Unum, gestures at this truth: “Out of many, one.”

But how do we live that? How do we hold complexity without giving up, falling into despair, or grabbing for control?

Ambiguity and Responsibility

Simone de Beauvoir, the French philosopher and feminist, wrote about this in The Ethics of Ambiguity. In response to Sartre’s famous line — “Man is condemned to be free” — she laid out a path for navigating the tension between our limitations and our agency.

She wasn’t offering a fixed path or a new ideology. She was naming something many of us already feel: that freedom isn’t clean or individual. It’s messy, relational, and full of contradiction.

We are born into systems we didn’t choose, shaped by histories we didn’t write. And yet, we are still responsible for how we show up, how we act, and what we create. There’s no ultimate playbook. No perfect values. No fixed meaning handed down from above.

This is the ambiguity at the heart of freedom: we are both subject and object, insignificant and significant, bound and free. Each choice we make defines what we become. And because we live in relationship with others, our freedom only matters when it includes theirs too.

A Map of Habits of Freedom

Beauvoir offers a kind of existential cartography — a map of how people tend to respond to the burden of freedom. These aren’t levels to conquer. They’re roles we shift in and out of, ways we survive, resist, or make sense of chaos. Most of us carry more than one at once.

The Child

Children don’t choose their values. They accept what adults tell them is good or evil. Everything feels absolute. The child is free, but it is a freedom rooted in ignorance of our interdependence. As adults, we can carry this mindset forward, clinging to inherited truths as if they are eternal.

The Sub-Man

This is the person who tries not to engage at all. They reject responsibility, withdraw from the world, and try to live without choosing. But not choosing is still a choice — one that denies freedom while continuing to exist within systems that shape others’ lives.

The Serious Man

The Serious Man finds relief in certainty. In the face of overwhelming chaos, they grab hold of a system — a cause, a mission, an ideology — and pour everything into it. It gives structure. Meaning. Discipline. And for a while, it works.

Most of us have been here. Many of us are here now. In activist spaces, it’s easy to mistake dedication for liberation — to swap one kind of authority (state, church, market) for another (movement, theory, dogma). We call it freedom, but often it’s just obedience with better branding.

There’s no shame in this. The Serious Man is trying to survive, to make sense of the mess by holding something still. But the danger is this: when we believe our cause is absolutely right, we stop asking questions. We stop listening. We start policing ourselves and others.

The hardest truth is this: even our best ideas might be temporary. Even our most righteous projects might not be the final answer.

The way out isn’t apathy. It’s deeper freedom — the kind that doesn’t cling, but commits without illusion.

What if the cause isn’t the destination, but the conversation?

What Comes Next?

When we realize those systems are flawed — that there’s no perfect ideology, no universal truth — we can fall into nihilism. If nothing is ultimately true, then maybe nothing matters.

But that’s not the end of the road. It’s a passage.

The Nihilist

The nihilist sees through the Serious Man’s illusions, but gets stuck. They recognize that external systems are flawed, that there may be no universal truth, no perfect ideology. But instead of moving forward, they collapse inward.

From here, it’s easy to fall into disengagement, irony, or fatalism. If nothing is true, maybe nothing matters. If everything is complex, maybe nothing can change. This mindset can wear radical clothing — “burn it all down” — but underneath, it’s still despair.

Nihilism masquerades as insight, but it’s really just fear in a new form. The risk isn’t just personal disconnection — it’s collective paralysis.

The Adventurer

The adventurer has moved beyond despair. They embrace their freedom and live by their own rules. They create, explore, build, play. They don’t ask for permission, and that’s powerful. But it’s also incomplete.

This is the realm of creative freelancers, lifestyle anarchists, personal growth junkies, and edge-runners of all stripes. And while it can be liberating, it can also be escapist. They create their own values, but remain disconnected from others. If joy depends on looking away from harm, it’s not transformation.

The adventurer hasn’t yet realized that freedom isn’t just about breaking chains. It’s about choosing to be bound in care.

The Passionate One

A level up is the passionate person — someone who commits their freedom to a passion project or cause. It could be family, music, writing, organizing. They want to create change, leave a mark, do something that matters. They freely choose something, and their dedication is powerful. But their passion can become rigid. They may not realize that no cause, no matter how noble, can resolve the permanent ambiguity of life.

Without reflection, passion can become ideology all over again.

Genuine Freedom

The highest form of freedom is one that includes others. This is genuine freedom — the recognition that your liberation is bound up with everyone else’s. That meaning is co-created, and that responsibility is not just personal but mutual.

Genuine freedom asks us to act in ways that expand freedom for others. To see that every moment is a choice, and that our relationships, communities, and collective futures are shaped by how we show up.

This is not freedom as escape. It’s freedom as interdependence. This freedom is generative and self-reinforcing. Genuine freedom isn’t an answer. It’s a way of staying in the question.

It’s never finished. It has to be re-chosen, re-built, and re-lived — especially with others.

The Tyrant

De Beauvoir includes one more category: the tyrant. Someone who claims their own freedom, but uses it to dominate, suppress, or dehumanize others. They exploit ambiguity not to explore it, but to manipulate and control.

The tyrant may believe they are free, but they deny others that same possibility. They replace one system of control with another.

Where We Are Now

Look around. This map mirrors the state of U.S. culture today.

We’ve moved from childlike dependence on empire and religion to serious devotion to causes. We’ve seen waves of nihilism, cynicism, and escapism. We’ve seen adventurers building freedom without responsibility. We’ve seen passionate leaders driven by ideals, sometimes toward transformation, sometimes toward control. And we’ve seen tyrants rise, capitalizing on fear and uncertainty.

The choice in front of us now is whether we will move toward genuine freedom together.

Freedom as Practice

If we want liberation, it can’t be theoretical. It has to be lived.

We must learn to live in ambiguity. We can learn to face complexity without clinging to certainty. We can build communities where people don’t have to choose between autonomy and belonging. To be free, we need to create systems that reflect the truth that freedom is relational, not individual. Our freedom is bound up with one another’s.

This kind of freedom doesn’t come from purity or isolation. It grows through relationship — through shared work, shared care, shared risk. It’s how we resist despair, and how we keep our movements alive.

There are no final answers. But there are better questions. There are deeper commitments. There are freer ways to live.

Freedom isn’t something we win once. It’s something we practice together.

By Decay

I started the morning uneasy, torn between having to go to work and the unknown timeline of the forced closure of the sheds housing some formerly homeless residents of the “Wood Street Commons”. The sheds (a temporary housing program) started two years ago, an imposition of the City of Oakland and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) after they carried out sweeps of Wood Street Commons, the largest homeless encampment in Northern California – and one where its hundreds of residents had self-organized to resist their removal by the City of Oakland.

During the pre-shed 2023 sweeps, I was a passerby. More recently, I had returned to the site to continue distributing food and aid while working a summer teaching job nearby. Eviction notices from Oakland (dated for 5pm of July 14th, 2025) had littered shed doors during my previous week of food distribution. Yesterday, 5pm had come and gone, and once again, the evictions were delayed. The mutual aid group that showed up with food and water wouldn’t be available today and I was terrified about what might happen when the cops arrived with nobody to film or watch them.

That evening, like the one before, I helped several residents move belongings, tend to their dehydration and nausea, and process the utter helplessness they were experiencing. My fears were mostly quelled; I wasn’t alone as an observer, and members of the Wood Street Commons were there with other community members filming, moving, and supporting their neighbors. I rushed through the abandoned cabins with two of them after the police left, desperately hauling off more personal items nearly ruined by the fire that broke out earlier, tracking down the site coordinator to confirm contact information, and for a moment just… looking. Looking at the walls covered in paint, pictures, bodily fluids, lipstick, messages, dirt — all these signs of life that desperately remained. Trash piled up around makeshift porches, the “Private Property” sticker slapped on one cabin, the square of fake grass as a lawn in front of another. Out of sight and away from the core of Oakland, it would be easy enough for the city to try and bury what happened here. 

Over the last decade, police have continually pushed residents from various tent encampments towards the Wood Street Corridor in West Oakland, promising that they wouldn’t be bothered there as Caltrans enacted a brutal series of sweeps across the city. For years, residents petitioned Oakland officials for dumpsters, fire extinguishers, and basic sanitation throughout the settlement — a quarter mile of tents and vehicles tucked under the freeway overpasses of Interstate 880. Fed up with the neglect and constant fires, organizers within the community began gathering to coordinate group meetings, discuss what they needed, and plan events. By 2021, an autonomous collective of volunteers and community members built Cob on Wood: a haven of beautifully decorated (and fire resistant!) cob cabins that hosted a free clinic, hot shower, community store, pizza oven, gardens, and other community resources. As city officials sunk $12.6 million into pushing curbside communities from street to street, something permanent was beginning to solidify. 

When Caltrans eventually posted eviction notices throughout the camp in 2022, those same community members quickly secured a temporary restraining order, citing the impossibly short timeline and lack of alternative housing plans. In front of a district judge, the City of Oakland, Alameda County, and Caltrans each avoided responsibility for hundreds of lives, admitting they had nowhere left to push residents and no housing program to fill the gaps. Residents pointed to Cob on Wood, reminding the City that they had already built a self-sustaining civic center that could be expanded and given full legitimacy. Resident efforts and wisdom were ignored again, and a month later, the order was lifted with only 40 emergency shelter beds secured for the 200-300 residents. The moral rot exposed in the hearing was sufficiently concealed with a thin veneer of due diligence, it seemed. Oakland came up with a three-phase plan to tear down the encampment, and within weeks, California Highway Patrol and Caltrans workers descended upon the camp wielding threats of arrest and bulldozers. The scope of the law was “too narrow” for any meaningful change, you see. They had been pushed here for years, and now, they’d be pushed somewhere else.

The first phase targeted the quarter mile where the majority of residents had settled on Caltrans property. By 2023, they turned to the remaining members on a smaller parcel of city land to begin the second phase. The property, 1707 Wood Street, had been left abandoned since its purchase in 2007 and was now the headquarters of the Wood Street Commons, who still provided food, clothing, storage facilities, and harm reduction supplies. During this phase, the City moved some of the residents into hastily built sheds and an RV lot down the street (the rest decided to “self-relocate”), promising housing support and job opportunities. Now that people were corralled into this program, service provider Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS) could swoop in and profit off of pantomiming the work already being done by mutual aid groups. At every step, the city systematically removed people from their support systems, destroyed property, and rejected any alternative to the inhumane sweeps. What I witnessed in July was the third phase — after whittling the encampment down to 50-100 program participants, they could finally shut it down and cover their tracks. 

So… about those promises of temporary housing and transitional support. Shuffling people into temporary isolation chambers in hopes that they can be slotted neatly back into the crumbling infrastructure around us after years of trauma doesn’t work. It was never supposed to work. Capitalism relies on the threat of homelessness and instability to keep us compliant, and when that fails, they turn to state-sanctioned terrorism to keep us scattered. The cruelty inflicted on people trying to survive isn’t new or unique; it’s part of an ongoing war against community building through endless cycles of displacement. The war is escalating — troops have been deployed in Washington to “end vagrancy” while Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024) opens the floodgates for states to enforce relentless anti-camping laws. They want us to remain hidden. One would imagine this to be the end of something fragile, a final nail in the coffin as America turns the full weight of its power against the people held hostage within it. An ouroboros of destruction and expulsion coming to a bloody end. One would be wrong.

Years into the wreckage and removal of their belongings, pets, and lives, the largest homeless encampment in Northern California produced something separate from the narrative of pain and suffering detailed here. Millions of dollars and hundreds of police officers cannot undo the progress made by members of the Wood Street Commons in building and caring for their community. Each phase of evictions brought more engagement, more work, and more organizing. Through that work, people have been housed, recovered from addiction, accessed life-saving medical care, and fully joined the fight against displacement. These stories matter. We often focus on the trauma of homelessness — and there’s a place for that discussion and documentation. In this article, I discuss it to preserve a piece of history that the City of Oakland wants us to forget. I want the truth to be out there. But if we’re going to survive the onslaught of fascism as organizers and community members, our eyes need to be fixed on the horizon ahead. We need to hold onto the fact that when the state comes to knock down our spaces, we find new ones. Months after the final evictions, Wood Street Commons is still in full operation planning events and campaigns. 

While Oakland officials made excuses and fell behind in their payments to BOSS this year, members of the Commons put together the Mandela Parkway Proposal: a detailed permanent supportive housing solution. A few weeks after the July evictions, they co-hosted a Good Neighbors Assembly and brought in long-time housing activist and current Oakland city councilmember (and “Moms for Housing” organizer) Carroll Fife to discuss community needs. We strategized around the $800 million dollars of Measure W funding being dedicated to address homelessness and planned statements for upcoming city council board meetings. As this paper is being assembled, Wood Street Commons will be conducting their 4th annual solidarity bike ride from Oakland to Sacramento: a tradition they’ve used to raise funds for the community, build connections between unhoused groups, and visit state legislators to demand policy changes. Between events, they manage food distribution, medical support, press releases, and more. The constant displacement and violence didn’t destroy the community — it gave people a reason to stick together and learn how to fight back. 

We know that the price of successful organizing will always be a target on our backs, the force of the state bearing down on our movements and communities. Other groups, with projects like People’s Park in Berkeley and Camp Resolution in Sacramento, will continue to develop and subsequently be met with bulldozers and arrests. Some reach historic wins; some reach historic losses; several will have both. Even so, months or years after “defeat,” these movements are able to capture and reproduce something dangerous: self-governed safety. The more we can disentangle ourselves from the trappings of capital and root ourselves in what will inevitably outlive it, the more difficult it is to coerce us into compliance. We need to learn from this and understand that the very mechanisms they use to threaten and target us are, ultimately, the same mechanisms that give rise to coordinated opposition. 

This isn’t just about housing advocacy and solidarity movements. This is about resistance as a whole. I admit that I have no words of wisdom for what comes next — but I know we’ll face it arm in arm, covered in dust and sweat. They can’t stop us. We have no other choice.

More information about the Wood Street Commons and their ongoing work (including an upcoming documentary!) can be found at www.woodstreetcommons.org

Grassroots organizations involved in this story include: Wood Street Commons, Homefulness, Living Earth Structures, Essential Food and Medicine, Artists Building Communities, Moms 4 Housing, Black Solutions Lab, Community Ready Corps, and Anti-Police Terror Project.

By E

Why would we want to resolve conflict lovingly? One could answer is that love is the antidote to hate. Hate and the fear below it fuel fascism and authoritarianism.

Love is not something we simply feel or don’t feel or something that is. Love is a verb. Something we do, as bell hooks points out in her book All About Love.

Oligarchs, fascists, emperors, ruling elites and techno-feudalists have a set of values focused on domination, profit-exploitation, and first and foremost power. They use fear and hate as tools to get power by convincing an overwhelmed, precarious, even desperate population that they need violent protection from a dangerous, dehumanized other. As power centralizes and violence escalates, people feel even further deprived of safely relating to others.

Autocracy creates a non-sustainable, low-nurturing, and life-denying sphere of scarcity, where only those favored by those in power can be safe.

Improving our skills in lovingly resolving conflict can improve our ability to have more peaceful, connecting, difficult conversations. We live in an increasingly fractured, divided, untrusting world. Activist cancel culture is part of the problem. Let’s help each other to create ecosystems of lovingly relating with a commitment to reciprocally being in each other’s care.

Other tools and mindsets that can help are curiosity, listening and com-passion — not just empathy, as Bayo Akomolafe points out on bayoakomolafe.net.

Anarcho-capitalism, off-the-charts militarism, and run-away-climate-change hurt all of us.

Please consider having as many difficult and uncomfortable conversations as possible with people you disagree with. Can you move from being an activist by talking to people that you mostly agree with to also becoming an organizer — a person that encourages everyone to create solutions, possibilities, maybe realities that work for all of us?

The points below are from family therapist Pete Walker’s website pete-walker.com. He has also published several very resourceful books on Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) and recovery from it.

1. Normalize the inevitability of conflict and establish a safe forum for it. Discuss and agree to as many of these guidelines as seem useful.

2. The goal is to inform and negotiate for change, not punish. Punishment destroys trust. Love can open the ears of other people’s hearts.

3. Imagine how it would be easiest to hear about your grievance from others. Say how it would be easiest for you to hear. Present a complaint as lovingly and chargelessly as possible.

4. Preface complaints with acknowledgement of the good of the other and your mutual relationship.

5. No name-calling, sarcasm or character assassination.

6. No analyzing the other or mind reading.

7. No interrupting or filibustering.

8. Be dialogical. Give short, concise statements that allow the other to reflect back and paraphrase key points to let you hear that you have been accurately heard.

9. No denial of the others rights. See “Human Bill of Rights” on Pete Walker’s website or “Personal Bill of Rights”.

10. Differences are often not a matter of right or wrong. Both people can be right and merely different. Be willing to sometimes agree to differ.

11. Avoid “you statements.” Use “I statements” that identify your feelings and experience of what you perceive as unfair.

12. Stick to one specific issue with accompanying identifiable behavior at a time. Ask yourself what hurts the most to try to find your key complaint.

13. Stick to the issue until everyone feels fully heard.

14. Take turns presenting issues. 

15. If discussion becomes heated, either person can call timeout (one minute to 24 hours) as long as they suggest a time to resume. Discharge as much of accumulated charge as possible before you resume.

16. Own responsibility for any accumulated anger that might come from not talking about an issue soon enough.

17. Own responsibility for accumulated charge displaced from other hurts (transference, i.e. from other / previous relationship pain).

18. Commit to grow in understanding of how much of the charge comes from childhood abuse / neglect.

19.Commit to recovering from the losses of childhood by effectively identifying, grieving, and reclaiming them.

20. Apologize from an unashamed place. Make whatever amends are possible. Include your intention to correct your behavior in the future. Explain your extenuating circumstances as evidence that you were not trying to be hurtful.

BE CAREFUL WITH EACH OTHER, SO WE CAN BE DANGEROUS TOGETHER!

By Jesse D. Palmer

We cannot keep carrying on with normal life amidst the rapid and concentrated slide into authoritarianism. I’m not saying that I know precisely what you should do or what I should do to respond. Far from it! But everyone can do something now to disobey, defy and refuse to recognize illegitimate authority, withdraw consent, and avoid complicity. Authoritarian power is partially an illusion based on passive consent and anticipatory obedience. There are ways to push back and slow down autocrats to change their trajectory. Nothing that is happening now is inevitable.

However, time is not on our side. Week by week it is getting harder to push back as people get used to each new normal, get more demoralized, and become more afraid to stick their necks out. That’s the idea — the masked snatch teams, lethal boat attacks, kooky criminal charges, and media censorship are intentionally outrageous. Each one is a test to see how much Dumbshit can get away with. 

People are reacting to authoritarianism like they react to climate change — it’s so overwhelming, far away and hard to address that we get paralyzed, feel like we’re powerless and that it’s pointless to do anything. I keep talking to people who say they’ve stopped reading the news for mental self-preservation. Hiding out will not make this go away. There won’t be a red line when you know it’s time to do something.

I don’t want to write another doom bummer article — we’re already swimming in that shit. I’m writing because life feels wondrous, not because I’m depressed. I feel calm and determined, not scared (but I do feel scared sometimes.) Each of us decides how we’re going to spend our time. Wallowing in doom is the worst response. Not only will it become a self-fulfilling prophecy because it cedes agency to our oppressors, but because it will ruin your day with gloom and you’ll be unable to notice the awe inherent in life itself. 

Being risk-averse in this context is the most hazardous option. The thugs are not just coming for immigrants and trans people — recent executive orders defined virtually everyone who isn’t a Christian nationalist as a domestic terrorist.¹ No one escapes oligarchy. Let’s confront these jokers now while they are weaker and their power less consolidated. 

While the authoritarians are cruel, vicious, and scary, they are also surprisingly stupid. They’ve come to believe their own lies.

We don’t have the luxury of un-strategic, feel-good actions or constant infighting — we need a united front that’s smart and focused. 

Even more, we need a massive and broad-based response that goes far beyond the usual suspects. Let’s embrace pluralism and diversity for real, not just in theory, which means getting out of the radical gutter and engaging with people outside our circles. We need to give people credit for being caring, concerned and aware rather than always focusing on any point of disagreement. Everyone is a potential rebel. Let’s talk to strangers more. 

A united front requires a diversity of tactics. If other people do stuff that you think is either too tame or too militant, we can still treat them like comrades if their heart is in the right place. The bullies are using violence to provoke us so they can justify even harsher repression. Sometimes the best response to riot cops is to make fun of them with silly costumes and have a dance party, not build a flaming barricade. 

Autocrats inflame cultural and racial fears to stoke hate and justify repression. We shouldn’t fall for manufactured divisions that serve our oppressors by hating other regular working people who are being used as puppets. Let’s stay focused on uniting against the 1 percent. 

Guerrillas avoid fighting on their opponents’ terms. Despots have troops, prisons, money and giant bureaucratic structures. We have mockery, culture, leaderless, decentralized community, and the ability to slow down and disrupt normal life in subtle and invisible ways like quiet quitting, working to rule and following orders in absurd ways. General strikes in which everyone ditches work or calls in sick are enormously disruptive. Economic boycotts can target complicit businesses. It’s easy for masses of people to overload administrative systems. 

Street tactics don’t have to be high risk. Coincidental group bike rides or walking in crosswalks can tangle traffic. Banging pots and pans or playing loud music can annoy. Movements overseas have picked a color to widely display to signal dissent — what will our color be? Individuals and organizations don’t have tocomply with a depots’ priorities in advance without being required to do so. Many creative, simultaneous and diverse responses are more effective because they’re harder to crush than a single event, tactic or organization. Be water. 

If the army occupies our cities, there’s more of us, we know the terrain and they can’t be everywhere at once. Pick lots of different gathering spots and then some folks can march towards troops while others go the other direction. There are many ways to confront lines of soldiers including with silence. Logistics and transportation won’t function if locals refuse to cooperate. No bathrooms or cafes for ICE is perfect — what else can we come up with? 

Rebellion won’t work if it’s all drudgery and duty and risk. Nurturing kindness, human connections and communities counteracts loneliness, resists state power, and makes our lives more meaningful. The civil rights movement frequently sang together to overcome fear but also because singing with others is so joyful and nourishing. 

If we keep discussion focused on what people actually want rather than just the outrages of our enemies — affordability, freedom, pleasure, clean air, fairness, healthcare, security — that’s a vision that’s ultimately more attractive and sustainable than constant cycles of tension, fear and anger.

Almost everyone wants to live their lives without having to constantly think about politics. There’s a basic humanity to everyone — even MAGA people who’ve been turned towards hate. If our response to hatred is to dehumanize and objectify the haters, we’re playing into the ruler’s hands. To build a world organized about voluntary mutual aid not coercion, we have to heal division rather than dig deeper. On purely strategic grounds, we need to turn towards love. Loving people you’ve defined as the enemy is the hardest kind of love but can be transformative. 

These terrifying times may offer a springboard beyond the collapse of the american empire, capitalism and colonialism to something better.  Preserving status quo institutions that concentrate wealth while reducing most of us to joyless cogs in a machine is a dead end. 

This is a time to stay tender, sensitive and emotional, not become cold and robotic. We can still embrace all of life’s gray areas and remain open to dialogue, so we don’t end up like the totalitarians. We don’t have to live like this if we shake off the numbness and try together. 

¹ See September 22 and 25 executive orders whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions. “Common threads … include … anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; … extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

By Stu
	In Summer 2002, Slingshot published an article against the growing social dependency on cellular phones. There were no dumbphones at the time — a flip phone was only considered “dumb” not due to the supposed technological superiority of other devices on the market, but instead because of the things it fostered:  isolation, dependency on the state and large corporations, ecocide in the Congo and across the world (yes, folks were talking about this decades ago), and a lack of autonomy and critical thinking skills for whoever was unfortunate enough to get sucked into buying one.
	Today, the concept that a dumbphone would be “too much” for any consumer is widely considered laughable, if it is considered at all. Even in radical spaces, downgrading from a smartphone to something that has physical buttons and can’t access Instagram is just about the limit of peoples’ imaginations. What happened to the resistance to the steady invasion of these parasites into our lives? Have we been totally fooled?
	Well, yes. Maybe we can't be too hard on ourselves - the forces that have pushed these things on us and our communities are much, much bigger than us, and for better or worse the world has changed since 2002. The luddites of the early aughts did not have to get by in the world we live in today with its demands for efficiency, immediacy, and connectivity. Our social landscape has changed and with it so have our needs and challenges. But dammit, we’re anarchists! We are the self-proclaimed co-creators of the liberated world to come, fighting for all that is autonomous! And yet daily we sell ourselves out, sacrificing the very skills necessary to support our own individual autonomy. How will we liberate our communities from oppression if we can’t free ourselves from the most obvious and most optional mechanisms of capitalist psychological manipulation? 
	It is time for us to reimagine the tech resistance. New ways of living must be found in our current version of the techno-hellscape if our movements are to be successful. 
	Luckily, awareness of the issue is stronger than ever. People are disillusioned and want a way out, but we are all so deep in the shit that nobody knows where to start. Your ownership of a device, and its ownership over you, are all but a foregone conclusion. But there are some of us who have taken the leap of faith, and are here to tell you to fear not. It can be done! The below are a few critical learnings from my personal journey of ditching my smartphone and the journeys of others who have walked with me. This is not a guide to the best smartphone alternatives; these exist online if you look for them, but before you go shopping you must take a hard look at yourself and your needs. Everyone is different and the way is complicated. You will have to do the work, you will have to think for yourself. What a blessing!
Ground yourself in Reality
	The things we think we “need” from our phones are not only available on a laptop or desktop computer, which has little to no hold over a person once they leave their home, but in fact these things are available with no computer at all, portable or otherwise. Your neighbor who has lived in your hood for 20 years knows their way around and can give you directions or tell you where to get the best burger. CDs are available by the pound at secondhand stores or garage sales, the radios still work, and your friends can play sweeter music around a bonfire than can be found on any streaming service. The most secure platform for discussing sensitive information is in person, on a walk under the sun. And that dull, ever present itch to turn off your brain and scroll for hours on end, well, it turns out that this isn’t a need at all, but is actually manufactured by the people who make the very devices you use to scratch the itch. 
	This is the most important lesson for us to hold onto in our fight for freedom from tech* - the earth and the communities we build upon it have fulfilled our needs without the help of tech for time immemorial. This fact has not changed; it has just been obscured to us by the people in power.
Kill your Shame, for it does not belong to you
	We all know the feeling, you’re just out of an hour-long doomscroll and can’t fathom why you keep doing this to yourself. You think of all the other things you could have been doing with your time, and yet you still don’t do them because you now feel like all the life has been drained out of you. You know that things could be different, and you know that this will happen again anyways.
	It is important that we recognize our relationship to our devices for what it is - addiction. People have been shaming addicts for generations. Anyone who has been to an AA meeting or is involved in harm reduction work knows that this simply doesn’t work - shame is not an effective mechanism for inspiring action to change behavior when it comes to addiction. Instead, non-judgmental support is required to help someone build themselves up to get out of the hole they are in.
	The same is true for the way we must talk to ourselves about social media and tech addiction. Shaming yourself for scrolling won’t get you anywhere. Corporations and the many thousands of very smart people they employ have been working for decades to make the most potent dopamine-release inducers possible. They know how the human brain works and (ab)use its weaknesses to their advantage, ensuring you will get sucked in again and again. If anyone should be ashamed of your usage, it is them. Do not shame yourself for a situation you did not create. 
	Letting go of shame opens the door to love. When we see someone we love hurting themselves, we are inspired to encourage them to change. The same thing happens when we love ourselves — we start working towards change.
	Shame pops up in one other form that is important to address. When you give up the convenience that a smartphone offers, there will inevitably be times when you have to rely on those around you in ways you aren’t used to. Sometimes my friends have to buy concert merch for me because the seller only takes Venmo. Other times I have to ask a stranger for directions. I am known at work for asking coworkers on occasion to take job-related pictures for me and send them to my email.
	I have found that while some people do look down on me for this kind of thing, usually the strongest resistance I get is from myself. Needing the help of another, how embarrassing! I hate feeling like a burden to the people around me. But tell me this, what is really more embarrassing: being so bought into narratives of capitalist individualism that you are more willing to consult with an AI search bot for your problems than you are with another human being, or simply asking somebody to do something that will not take more than a minute, if that, of their time?
	The truth is that people want to feel helpful. Doing things for one another gives us satisfaction and gives us the opportunity to connect with each other on a material level.
	Strong communities are built on this kind of interaction. When someone has helped us in a small way before, we are more likely to feel comfortable relying on them in times of real distress, and they are more willing to accept the responsibility because they know us and care about our wellbeing. Communities die by a thousand cuts as we increasingly rely not on each other for our most banal needs but turn instead to our devices.
Adjust your Expectations and Embrace Sacrifice
	In our culture, no altar receives such fervent worship as that of the god of Convenience. Capitalism and its goons have turned our bodies, minds, time, and experiences into something that can be bought, sold and stolen not only by nameless conglomerates but also by each other. Every second not spent “bettering” ourselves or producing in some way is considered wasted. Naturally then, we have developed an insatiable hunger for optimizing every aspect of our lives. We trim the fat of life, even though it is the very thing that keeps us warm.
	We always take the fastest route to get where we are going, even if another way is more pleasant. We order things online instead of going to the local store and are frustrated when our goods don’t arrive promptly, despite the thousands of miles that most products travel before they get to us.
	We have come to demand this same efficiency in our relationships, subjecting each other to a constant barrage of notifications informing us that somebody would like to claim our attention this very instant, no matter where we are or what we are doing. This simply will not do.
	Killing the corporation in your pocket means undergoing a process of letting go of certain conveniences. No longer will you have the entire digital world at your fingertips at all times. The portal between your pocket and those of your friends and family will grow narrower, with fewer avenues of interaction.
	My particular dumbphone is very slow to type on (although not all of them are). Texting, to most people, is supposed to be a totally stream-of-consciousness experience. So frequently, I am asked how I can deal with the slowness, how frustrating it must be! To this I say that I am not really texting, as most people have come to understand that term. It is more akin to writing an email or a letter - an activity that requires both attention and intention. I would not whip out my pen and paper in the middle of a conversation to draft a letter to my grandmother. Not only would I not be able to divide my attention adequately for the task, but it would obviously be considered rude to whomever I was physically present with. And when I do write letters, I am not frustrated by how slowly my hand moves across the page because I am focused on the task before me and enjoying it.
	This type of expectation adjustment applies to many of the daily interactions we have become accustomed to. You will start to expect others to respect your time and attention and will expect yourself to be more intentional with your communication. You will become comfortable with the responsibility of safely navigating yourself and others through the world via memory and asking others for directions. At times, you will get lost, you will miss an invite to a party that only went out on social media, you will have days where nothing good is playing on the radio and you are forced to sit in silence on your commute, alone with nothing but your thoughts.
	Through all this, you will become a more capable friend, lover, neighbor, parent, sibling, comrade.
	Others will have to adjust their expectations as well when you take the leap; for the people-pleasers among us this can be the hardest part. Eyes will roll when you say that your phone doesn’t do pictures, can they just show you in person or send it to your email instead? Some will be bothered if your response times begin to grow longer. They will still believe that they have a right to your attention at a moment’s notice, no matter what.
	You may have to explain to these people, lovingly, that attention is a finite resource, and by reserving it you are better able to give yourself to them during the time that you spend together. Some of them will continue to whip out their phones to send a quick text while you are speaking, and you will have to wait for them to finish to make sure they heard you.
	Over time, if not instantly, a lot of these people will see that you are in fact stronger, happier, more present and more capable without the computer in your pocket and the corporations that infest it. They will become curious, even jealous. After all most of us are looking for the same thing — a way out of this horribly dysfunctional situation we have found ourselves in. Together, we can find a new way of connecting, one that is both well suited to modern life and conducive to fostering healthy, autonomous relationships with each other and the world around us.

*for the purpose of this article, “tech” is used to refer to corporate tech algorithms/platforms/institutions like social media, streaming services, and other digital "aides" rather than digital technology as a whole. Not all technology is bad technology!

By DFW Support Committee

After a July 4 noise demonstration at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, TX, to show solidarity with ICE detainees and protest ongoing deportations, there was an officer-involved shooting. Trump’s Department of Justice skewed the shooting as a terrorist ambush and 17 people were arrested on ruinous charges. Eleven face aggravated assault, attempted murder, and terrorism charges. Six others face accusations including evidence tampering, smuggling of persons, and hindering prosecution of terrorism. Almost all are charged with organized criminal activity, and the state set their bonds as high as $15 million. 

Common practices in activist scenes have been cast as evidence of violent conspiracy. The FBI alleges that use of encrypted messaging app Signal, wearing black clothing, zine distribution, and speech critical of the government are all proof of a conspiracy to ambush police. Even two defendants’ commercial printer has become evidence of criminality. 

But the state lies. We know our loved ones. They devote their free time to caring for people neglected by the state, such as those experiencing homelessness and the queer community of Dallas-Fort Worth. The state is using the people we love to demonize leftists, anarchists, and anyone it deems “Antifa” and to justify its repression of broader left movements. 

In spite of this, we are only emboldened. “No one should take you out of your home at gunpoint,” said defendant Dario Sanchez, the sole defendant released on bond. “I’ve been arrested and released three times, each one more ridiculous than the last. … I’m angry at how my life has been stolen from me. I’m not about to let anyone make me shy away from who I am or what I believe in.” 

“With these scare tactics, the government tries to constrain what we imagine is politically possible,” said Lydia Koza, wife of defendant Autumn Hill. “They put my wife in a cage because she objected to putting people in cages. … Threatening to take everything away from me has only given me more purpose than ever — to fight for justice, for her and everyone.” 

You can donate to the DFW Support Committee 

and/or write letters to defendants check DFWdefendants.wordpress.com.

By Antonio

There’s no getting around it. It’s a fucking scary time to be alive. 

Fascism is on the rise, in the halls of state power (of course), but also among “the people” (at least, certain portions of them) who are lost in the sauce of misinformation, who are taken over by the thrilling feelings of hatred that make their own miseries a bit more tolerable, and who are actively lending their hearts and minds to fascist strongman leaders. 

Those leaders, emboldened by a state apparatus set up to push elite will on the majority even in more “normal” times, are now leveraging that state to attack its scapegoat enemies (mostly migrants and trans folks at this point), while dismantling whatever parts of the state may have actually served some social good. They’re rewriting history to suit their white supremacism and macho penchant for violence. They’re cracking down on dissent — even from the most tepid liberal opposition, but of course preparing the ground for a full-scale attack on leftists, anarchists, antifascists, and anyone who actually gets what’s going on. 

In this context, the liberal institutions that we anarchists tend to oppose — but which compose some form of bulwark against the worst overt abuses of state power in the USA — aren’t even doing their nominal job. The Democrats form a sad, useless, positively counterinsurgent “opposition party”. Media agencies readily bend over to sate authoritarian concerns. University administrators hand over names of pro-Palestinian members of the university community, helping Stephen Miller and his minions target them in future rounds of legal repression. With the exception of some parts of the judicial system (including individual jurors who refused to indict a hero who threw sandwiches at the ICE gestapo), most institutions are falling in line, accepting the fascist turn, and crossing their fingers they won’t be attacked next. 

Meanwhile, the economy stands on edge, between tariff whiplash, job losses from federal cuts of many sorts and the knock-on effects of that which have yet to be fully felt, wholly bad “fundamentals” (i.e. the global lack of highly profitable expansion opportunities for capital), and the looming bubble pop and crash of the over-capitalized “AI” sector. Great for you if you currently have a job. But that may not last. 

So yeah, there’s plenty of good reasons to be freaked out. The world is always a bit fucked. But this time of ours seems unprecedentedly fucked. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned the climate crises!

For many radicals, this feels like an intolerable weight. We know things are fucked, but the litany of specifics is too much to take on. We start checking out. Personally, I’ve stopped paying as close attention to news. No more daily listens to “Depress-a-me Now!” Occasional dives into the headlines or social media feeds are enough to know: bad things keep happening. 

So, what can we do? How can we think about this moment in a way that is not demobilizing, but also not naive? How do we stay informed, but not overwhelmed? How do we take seriously the fascist threat, while also not losing hope and our own humanity?

Here I want to offer two simple ideas that — I think — can help us feel better (which is actually pretty important!) and act more effectively.

First idea: the world is complex, interconnected, chaotic, and it exists beyond the immediate stuff that we tend to see via media and our daily lives. Many parts of planet earth — beings, mountains, natural processes — couldn’t care less who is “President”: elites’ control is as total as the entirety of the planet is controllable. Upon this enormity and complexity, history advances in non-linear and surprising ways. What seems like “end times” with no way out, is not actually the end. There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the inevitable march of change. When you step outside of our narrow, present-oriented viewpoint, you see a much wider and longer story, where authoritarian power has never held on for long. 

Trump will not last. Capitalism will not exist forever. Fossil fuels will run dry. Nation states we find so horrific are only hundreds of years old! And oh-so-many asshole “leaders” who once seemed impervious to their contemporaries, turned out to not be!

Many times before history has confronted anti-systemic actors like ourselves with seemingly nonstop and unstoppable crises, end times thinking, and the prospect of no hope. Yet, in each case, the world did not in fact end¹. People struggled. People survived. Sometimes, in fact, people improved conditions through their struggles against fascism. Look at Brazil, post-military dictatorship. The Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil have been able to occupy millions of acres of land, growing food and livelihoods for their people and movements, precisely as a result of their wins against a dictatorship that lasted decades. They fought for a constitutional right to land and have (since winning that) used that law to get land and build ecological autonomy. I’m sure if you asked activists under that dictatorship if they were overwhelmed, you’d find reflections of your own current condition. But time did not stop. The military was not invincible. Brazil is no paradise now, but grassroots movements are strong, and at least they are actually punishing their last fascist strongman (Jair Bolsonaro) for his crimes! No one knew, during his reign, that such a turnabout was possible. The future is not foretold.

Surviving is important. Our own happiness is important to our ability and will to survive, and to continuing to take care of each other. It’s important to recognize our self-worth, and the power held in surviving so as to pass on our own ideas and strategies to the next generation. Our literal existence can be resistance. But to survive and to fight back, we need to take care of our own hearts.

In order to do that, I suggest a second idea: this almost unthinkable bigness and unpredictability of the world may make us feel less powerful, but it actually can help us be more effective. How? By reminding us to focus, to see where we fit in specific parts of that larger universe, and to act with concerted and thoughtful effort. 

One person cannot go to all the ICE protests, AND call their “representatives” about Gaza, AND build a mutual aid pod, AND feed the homeless, AND organize for grassroots hormone therapy or birth control provision, AND be a parent, a provider, and a musician, and a reader, and a polycule navigator, and an enjoyer of life. We simply cannot do it all. 

But we can certainly do something. And to the extent we focus, we can do it well. Especially, of course, when we do it with others. Yes, there may be plenty of bootlickers out there. But most people want freedom, and many of us will fight for it. And when we fight, we win.

In the long arc of struggle, it’s critical to remember that we can win. Winning is not certain, sure. It won’t be easy, obviously. But history is often surprising. The forces that we face seem impervious to our power, yet history is full of examples that belie that defeatist position. Leaders are assassinated — or killed by their own hubris and ambitions. Apartheid regimes get called out — and are suddenly determined to be unconscionable after being tolerated for decades. You don’t need to be a Star Wars nerd to know that empires inevitably fall. Just like it’s important to remember that workers outnumber capitalists, let’s remember that (globally) there are more people who hate fascists like Trump than those who support them, by a lot.

Rather than be distracted and overwhelmed by the litany of crimes against humanity and our future, when we find something we care about, and work on it with others, we do three crucial things at once. We refuse to give up or give in, and show others that resistance is possible. We tangibly affect our world. And we embolden ourselves, reminding ourselves that our values matter, our values exist and make sense and cannot be exterminated, and they — we — can change the world. We feel better about ourselves, we maintain a horizon that we are moving toward, and we keep ourselves alive because it feels best to keep on collectively moving toward that horizon, regardless of what the assholes do.

As Assata Shakur famously said (RIP):

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.

It is our duty to win.

We must love each other and support each other.

We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

¹ I admit that many people died and species were exterminated, but not all.

By Punch Up • Kick Down Distro

The ways we collectively respond to harm in our communities is not only a reflection of our broader values, but a critical part of maintaining cohesive and resilient movements. I know that “Cancel Culture” might feel like an exhausted topic not worth rehashing. However, years after #MeToo, sexual violence is still rampant in DIY/Punk/Activist spaces and society in general. Our personal relationships, subcultural “scenes,” and political projects are regularly fractured and weakened by acts of harm and the resulting personal traumas and social fallouts. An inability to adequately and effectively handle harm continues to be a detriment to our mutual struggle against the oppressive forces of capitalist empire and the logics upon which it is built. Cancel culture has proven ineffectual and damaging because it is an individualized response to a fundamentally social problem which relies on carceral, punitive logic. Destroying an individual does not dismantle the systems which allow harm or abuse to occur, and cancel campaigns rarely encourage going beyond surface level punishments towards root causes and potential solutions.

The police, the carceral state, and the prison industrial complex are all institutions of punishment and violence whose primary function is to uphold structures of capitalist exploitation and imperialism. Not only must we reject these institutions as such but also reject their logics, thinking and acting beyond the social punishments of excommunication and punitive models of dehumanization. We cannot reproduce the dominator model if our aim is a social paradigm free from domination. 

The idea that people who cause harm are exceptionally malicious monsters fails to grapple with how normalized rape culture is, while framing abusive behavior as an exclusively individual moral failing rather than a widespread phenomenon situated among complex social conditions. While neither gender violence nor gender expression exist on a binary, our society is founded on a patriarchal gender hierarchy, and sexual violence has been used as a weapon of domination and subjugation against women throughout history and into the modern day. Popular culture often depicts sexual coercion as normal; teaches young men that they are entitled to women’s bodies as a sexual object. An overwhelming number of young people’s sexual expectations are shaped by an unlimited access to online pornography, a majority of which portray sex as existing solely for male pleasure. Alcohol and drug use are defining aspects of social life, even within our subcultural spaces. Acts of sexual violence so frequently involve substance (ab)use. Combining a culture of excessive drinking, patriarchal indoctrination which sexualizes the female body, and a lack of education about consent are a formula for rampant sexual violence. Of course, none of this absolves anyone for harm they’ve caused, but it’s worth considering all the factors that lead to abuse beyond the fundamental “badness” of the person who perpetrates it. Likewise, while patriarchy benefits men in ways that are often invisible to them, patriarchy and rape culture are structures — a series of social relationships existing within and among other power dynamics — and power is relative. We should not equate the violent and abusive actions of socially, economically, and politically powerful members of the ruling class and the harmful behaviors of the regular people who occupy our lives. 

Public spectacles of punishment, such as social media “call-outs,” or cyber bullying campaigns are inept attempts to root out abuse in the community, one “abuser” at a time. Social media’s profit driven algorithm is fueled by reactive and simplistic moral binaries — these platforms harvest engagement by incentivizing content that instigates moral outrage. Participants in online shaming or harassment campaigns derive a sense of virtuous pleasure for being on the “right side” of a grand moral narrative.

Most punks or leftists have some experience in witnessing an “accountability process” go horribly wrong. Even good faith attempts at responding to harm are too often structured with an orientation of shame and punishment. First of all, if access to support or dignity is conditional on adhering to a “process” imposed by others, it is a form of coercion and ultimately ineffectual. Likewise, the healing of someone who has been harmed is not conditional on the “accountability” or punishment or the person who caused them harm. Support for someone who has been harmed is a markedly different, separate process from one concerning the person who caused harm. Restoration for both parties happens on different timelines and by different means according to the situation, the people involved, and their personal circumstance. 

It is not that community intervention of harm or abuse is impossible or unworthy of our efforts, but the approach, expectation, and understanding of what a “successful” process looks like cannot be an abstraction. It is essential to remain behaviorally specific, focus on realistic and manageable expectations, and practice patience with everyone involved. Mistakes will be made and should be met with reaffirmation of goals and adjustment towards them, rather than a dismissal of those involved in the process or the process itself. There is no “correct” way of confronting harm. These situations are dynamic and contextual. There are no blueprints, no easy answers, no neat categories. What is required is dynamism, critical thinking, and remaining principled in our values against dehumanization. 

While it has become one of those terms frequently misused and co-opted, “accountability,” properly understood, can be a guide for taking responsibility for harm, committing to meaningful change, and repairing damaged relationships. Accountability is not some goal to be achieved, nor is it a constant state that can be objectively defined for all people. It is a fluctuating needle on a spectrum of how much your values and behaviors align in any given moment or decision. 

Accountability must come from a place of authenticity, rather than a performance of shame. Shame only calls attention to flaws rather than building on strengths — it lets people who have caused harm off the hook for being inherently bad, essentializing that behavior and rendering them incapable of ever doing better. 

In contrast to shame, regret is a healthy response to realizing one has acted out of alignment with their values. Regret is a realization that one has taken a regrettable action, while shame internalizes that action as a fundamental part of one’s character. 

Responding to harm productively requires a basic retention of dignity for everyone involved, a willingness to engage in challenging dialogue, and opportunities for people to take responsibility for the harm they’ve caused without threatening their material safety and access to support. For people who have caused harm, the opportunity to be honest and transparent without the threat of public humiliation or the fear of dehumanization is crucial for genuinely reckoning with their harmful behavior in order to change it. If attempting to take responsibility for harm is a guarantee of social exile and public shaming, those who have caused harm will go into hiding, run away, turn to substances, and/or try to justify their behavior.

Embodying our values also means recognizing how truly damaging sexual violence is. When someone in our life causes real harm, we need to take it seriously. As friends and members of shared communities we have a responsibility to provide support, however we are capable, for survivors of abuse. Sexual violence in particular can be profoundly, debilitatingly traumatic. The call for harsh and immediate punishment is justifiable when someone has been abused, violated or traumatized. However, we cannot hope for legitimate forms of restoration or reconciliation to come from a trauma response, and punishment does not incentivize anyone to change their harmful behavior.

Consequences are to be expected when harm is caused, but that does not require punishment. Someone who has caused harm must accept the social ramifications of those actions and diligently respect the needs of the survivor. These are justifiable consequences of harmful behavior, not needlessly cruel punishments or denial of personhood, and it is important not to confuse the two. A consequence of causing harm may be that the trust and respect of members of the community is lost. That consequence becomes dehumanization when someone’s character is set in stone, when the possibility for transformation or reconciliation is denied. Likewise, reminding people that they are expected to make changes to their behavior and encouraging them to do so, does not require punishment and humiliation. It’s important to check people who have caused harm if they are straying from their commitments, or showing signs of slipping back into harmful behavior, as long their autonomy is respected and their humanity maintained.

We must identify and overcome the puritanical ideologies that are adopted from corrupted, outdated, and oppressive judicial and theological systems which rely on fixed, formulaic morality. We have to find ways to confront harm and abuse without getting lost in procedure, seduced by vengeance, burnt out by conflict or demoralized by ineptitude. We need to foster social relationships with trustworthy people where we can be honest in considering the ways we have caused harm without being subjected to cruelty or punitive judgement. Confronting harm, we have to accept the reality of the world we live in and the social context we are all subjected to while challenging the logics of punishment and disposability.

Strong communities of mutual obligation and reciprocal care weaken the potential for harm to take place to begin with. The resilience of these communities is only possible if we keep firmly intact the basic humanity of everyone, even those who cause harm. Our response to abusive behavior must be grounded in the shared fundamental belief that nobody is disposable. It is our shared responsibility to reinforce this belief, to build a collective capacity to handle harm without taking on the logics of our mutual oppressors.