The first #StopCopCity RICO defendant's felony trial is set to begin Monday, January 7. Ayla King, a young working class activist arrested at the Welaunee Music Festival, bravely filed for a speedy trial and refused any plea deal. Their case will mean mountains for the other 60 defendants.
People in (and traveling to) Atlanta are organizing for a festival-like atmosphere outside the courthouse to support Ayla and the movement, as well as funds for court and organizing costs including food, clothes and housing for Ayla in the event the trial lasts the expected 4-6 weeks. To that end, a new fundraiser page has been made - please give and encourage others to give here: givesendgo.com/freeaylaking
If you're unable to be in Atlanta, host a fundraiser, make a care package, and raise a ruckus for Ayla and the other defendants. Our movements are only as strong as our support for targets of state repression, and now's the time to show we defend out people!
Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •If you started paying attention to the US in 1960, this sure feels like the darkest timeline. But unfortunately, purges against Black & brown people are normal US behavior.
You know what's NOT normal US behavior?
This is the first time there's been a mass movement to STOP a purge in real time.
Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •This is new and unusual. To get an idea of how weird this is, let's take a quick tour of some of the many times the US federal government has officially persecuted entire groups of people.
And what (if any) pushback there was at the time.
Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •1929-1939: the US "repatriated" somewhere between 300K and 2M Mexican Americans. No due process. The federal government removed them from the US to "stop them from competing with Americans for jobs."
About half of the deported people were US citizens.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_โฆ
mass repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans during the Great Depression
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)reshared this
Sozan reshared this.
Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Few if any Anglo Americans seemed to have a problem with this.
Mexican Americans ran the court battles, protests, and educational campaigns against forced deportation on their own. While they were struggling to keep their families together day by day.
Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •WW2: the US jails 120,000 people, who hadn't been charged of any crime, as a "precaution." 2/3 were US citizens. Many were farmers. White folks wanted their land, & got it.
The loss of so many skilled farmers dented the US food system & made it harder to fight the war.
qz.com/1201502/japanese-internโฆ
Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Some white Americans did publicly oppose rounding up their Japanese neighbors. They were in the minority & overruled.
Resistance was limited to individual efforts to tone down the impact of incarceration- tending jailed neighbors' farms while they were away, sending supplies to the camps, etc.
Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Operation Wetback, 1954: a federal program to hunt down & deport undocumented immigrants from Mexico.
Somewhere between 1.1 and 1.5 million were rounded up & deported.
And yet again, many were documented migrants or US citizens.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operatioโฆ
1950s U.S. immigration law enforcement initiative
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Public outrage over the many US citizens deported caused Operation Wetback to get its funding pulled. โฆ After 3 months & over 1 million people deported.
This was the fastest a purge ever got rolled back. But it still took people a while to notice & stop it. At the supposed peak of US unity.
Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Slavery & Jim Crow: millions of Americans held in captive labor.
Enslaved & sharecropping farm workers knew things were bad! They did what they could to push back the whole time.
But that wasn't enough. Both slavery & Jim Crow finally ended when a critical mass of white Americans decided they should. Not even the majority of white Americans. Just a critical mass. And it took us ~250 and close to 100 years to get there, respectively.
Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •The US & its preceding colonies were at war with tribes ~each year from 1610 - 1920s- 300 years.
There was more opposition from white folks than you'd think; but it wasn't broad-based, organized, or effective. We're still breaking treaties with tribes today.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanโฆ
frontier conflicts between American, Canadian and European settlers and Indigenous peoples of the Americas
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Sometimes, replacing tribes with settlers wasn't enough. The federal gov't put in the work to keep the new guys down too.
When coal miners went on strike, they sent in the National Guard. To push people back into the mines at gunpoint.
My grandma left Harlan Co so she didn't get stuck in company store debt for life.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Warโฆ
Coal Wars - Wikipedia
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •So it's frustrating to hear things like "This is the darkest timeline" and "late-stage capitalism."
Yes things suck & you gotta vent. But... do people think the US started in 1960?
We really forget our country, and capitalism, *started* with people on the auction block.
Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •When you know what the US has been about this whole time, that really puts the current moment in perspective.
We've been up to some ugly, ugly stuff. And it usually gets either silence or applause.
2025 is a whole different animal. The response has been strong and immediate. We had *preemptive* mass mobilization.
By millions of people who *aren't* being targeted by raids, jailing, and deportation. (Yet. ๐)
That's never happened in US history before. This is different.
Radio Free Trumpistan
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •@Sarah Taber
I was with you up to this point--the U.S. has NOT been about this the whole time.
What the U.S. has been about the whole time is the see-saw between the people in power who do that sort of thing and the people who give that lot the boot from time to time.
If the U.S. was all about that the whole time, there never would have been a Civil War OR an end to the Vietnam War, and this should be said. No, the U.S. wasn't born in 1960 , but it was in the 1960s that the people you describe lost power--Vietnam ended, Civil Rights were encoded into law--and it was also the time when the Republican Party morphed from the Party of Lincoln into the Dixiecrat-Kremlin Party.
But understand this: I stand with the NAACP and ACLU to make it known that we're Americans too, and we will NOT be overlooked.
Sarah Taber
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •That's why the right keeps sniveling about how they're under attack. Even while they're successfully pulling off another purge.
They're not used to getting yelled at when they blow taxpayer dollars on witch hunts, they're used to getting high-fives at the country club.
Bob Blaskiewicz ๐บ๐ฆ ๐จ๐ฆ ๐ฌ๐ฑ
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •AI6YR Ben
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •PedestrianError
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Lien Rag
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •I'd be interested in the "more opposition from white folks than you'd think" part.
RustyRing
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Otte Homan - remember Geordie
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Radio Free Trumpistan
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •@Sarah Taber
...and then there were the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots, 1943. There was more to that than just a catchy tune by Cherry Poppin Daddies--it actually happened.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoot_Suiโฆ
MooMoo the Cat
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •GhostOnTheHalfShell
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Jargoggles
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •"They're rounding people up just because of their skin color and locking them up!"
Yeah, like you said, I'm just glad people are speaking up about this in a big way because this has been happening for decades. I think one of the key differences is that they've dropped the pretense that what they're doing is "justice."
Liberals have been more than happy to lock black and brown people up en masse as long as they can run them through the system first. If someone is convicted of a crime, they're completely okay with throwing them in prison. Does "convicted" mean "guilty?" Should what they were convicted of even be a crime? We've never really had a meaningful conversation about that in this country.
But the numbers really speak for themselves. Things *were not okay* before Trump was elected. When this fascist regime falls apart, we *cannot* go back to how things were before.
Real Quack
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •American exceptionalism strikes again.
We think of ourselves as special, so anything we personally experience is the superlative, because it's happening in our present.
This is what they mean about people who don't study history.
We are not setting the benchmarks on anything except as relates to the climate crisis. Which isn't new, either, but which is demonstrably worsening.
Cardboard Robot
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Rob Hadley
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Sure you're making history.
Don't expect anyone to respect it.
Do we wish Americans Happy independence day'?
From who exactly?
From the thousands dying now abandoned by USAID, or those in Ukraine who suffer by the reduction in military aid? Or maybe from Palestinians shot by so called 'American aid contractors'? Or maybe the 132,000 trans people who will now be denied medical care?
Yeah. Happy 'Independence Day', assholes.
#happy4thofjuly #july4th
InarticulateQuilter
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •le Pรฉtomane Ancien
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Chris Real
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •I know you want to reassure people that "It's been bad like this before", butโ
Never before has a president been RE-electedโAFTER 2 impeachments.
AND an attempted coup.
Don't normalize unrest and oppression. Your good intentions are a complex form of denialโsearch yourself for this flaw before you double down.
And the "How DARE you question my intention!' defense has already been discredited.
No one should be reassured until this crisis has been ACTUALLY defeated.
Cynthia ๐ฃ๐ณ๏ธโโง๏ธ
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Tom ๐ต๐ธ ๐บ๐ฆ
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Lorask
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Cazz
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Chris Real
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •This is happytalk by deniers.
Just because the bad guys are bad, doesn't the opportunists aren't thirsty.
'Americans on Mastodon' are best served by ignoring opportunists, and their happytalking co-opters . . .
Quercus ๐กโช๐ฃโซ
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •This is a great, informed take. Not rose colored glasses but forward thinking and historically grounded. I couldn't agree more about the whole 'this being the worst timeline' being really problematic. That's a cop out; that's throwing your hands up; that's giving yourself an excuse to give up and not try. It's showing a lack of imagination, if you truly cant think of worse things. There were times during the Cold War people lived in constant fear of nuclear annihilation. It's also showing a lack of historical knowledge, especially knowing that the underlying issues of what is happening (racism, sexism) are foundational particularly to Western culture, and human culture in general. We've never actually had a reckoning with our past (or present). To think that these issues were just going to go away quietly is naive, or that somehow with education we had suddenly become not-racist. It's also not surprising that we are having a hard time forming a coherent resistance party given how much technology has changed politics in the last 20 years, and given the diversity and complexity of global problems we are facing. Let's give this issue, the rise of violent ultra-nationalism in the 21st century, its due as the complex historical problem that it is and not get frustrated when we can't solve it or defeat it in six months. But like you say, there are signs that American society as a whole, not just those directly persecuted, are resisting in ways that are novel. We are far from powerless here and I'm really tired of takes that paint us as such.
#USpol #CanadaPolitics #EUpol #resist #NoKings #Protest
@martlund ๐ฒ๐ถ๐ธ๐ช๐จ๐ฑ๐
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Burnt Veggies
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •ChatTC
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •David
in reply to Sarah Taber • • •Making history?
#usa has been making history the last 250 years, fucking every other country around the world. ๐คฌ๐คฌ๐คฌ