Stop Cop City

Stop Cop City with Keyanna Jones
Refuse Fascism Episode 171

Sun, Sep 17, 2023 12:17PM • 57:56

Keyanna Jones 00:00

Cop City is a $90 million plus militarized police training facility to be placed right in the middle of a very Black residential neighborhood. It would destroy 381 acres of forest land and disturb an important watershed. The state is seeking to repress, not only with these RICO and domestic terrorism charges, but with the way they show up and respond to us. Officers, were talking about the fact that they were specifically going after the bail fund because it was the money of the movement and if they could stop the bail fund, they could stop the movement. What happens when they attack the bail fund? Their hope is that the bail fund would be bankrupt. If we don’t do something, Cop City will not be the end of police terror in Atlanta or in this nation.

Sam Goldman 01:09

Welcome to Episode 171 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview with Keyanna Jones, member of the Faith Coalition to Stop Cop City and organizer with Community Movement Builders. We discussed the ominous RICO indictment against Cop City opponents and the fascist assault on the right to protest.

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We can’t run today’s show without acknowledging that yesterday, September 16, marked the first anniversary of the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini at the hands of the despised Morality Police in Tehran, after being arrested for allegedly not wearing her headscarf properly. It is also the anniversary of the truly unprecedented, beautiful and brave uprising of the people that are in Iran against the Islamic Republic triggered by her murder. The daring of the women, burning their hijab and the resounding cry of “Down with the Islamic Republic!” unleashed nationwide outpourings for “Women, Life, Freedom,” inspiring people around the globe.

In Iran, widespread, vicious attacks and arrests by the theocratic government are rising with special venom toward the Jina uprising protesters, writers, artists and musicians and Jina’s family. In the face of this escalating repression, protests continue, including within the prisons themselves, underscoring the courage and determination of youth, women and others that have marked this movement. Protests erupted yesterday, Saturday, September 16, throughout Iran, to commemorate this anniversary. Jina’s father and brother were detained and warned that they would be banished to a remote village if the father encouraged people to attend ceremonies marking the anniversary of his daughter’s death.

Tuesday, September 19, there will be protests to Iran’s President’s speech to the United Nations in New York City. Love and solidarity to all rising up for freedom from theocracy. To those of us here in this country, the United States may this anniversary be a time to challenge ourselves and others. If the people under such grave theocratic repression in Iran — women who’ve been arrested, beaten, tortured — continue to enter their streets, casting off fear, prisoners of conscience launching solidarity strikes at women’s prisons. What in the world are we doing to stop the theocrats and fascists here?

We must all take note of how they are finding power in their actions in the streets; their power in each other. Let’s also be clear, the U.S. has no claim to play the role of the emancipator of women after the devastation they wrought in Iraq and Afghanistan, propping up the theocratic tyrants in Saudi Arabia, and as in this country, women have been stripped of their rights to abortion. We send our best to the people in the streets of Iran from the streets of the U.S. A link to an episode we did towards the start of the uprising in Iran is in the show notes.

Moving to today’s topic, the American Friends Service Committee has stated “The the City of Atlanta wants to build a $90 million police training facility. If constructed, Cop City would be one of the largest militarized police training centers in the country, all built by clear cutting Atlanta’s largest screen space.” We get into this in the interview, but I want to make this clear up front: Democratic Party politicians are leading the charge in constructing Cop City, and this serves fascism, but it is not somehow “Making Atlanta Fascist” in a vacuum.

We in Refuse Fascism go through a lot of effort to clarify what fascism is precisely, because we need to put up the strongest fight possible to actually defeat it — not ignore it, not slide past it, not just make noise when it affects us, but stop it. Fascism is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. What is crucial for us to understand is that once in power, fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights.

In my view, bourgeois democracy is not representative of the people nor devoid of violent coercion, but fascism is a restructuring of society, and the construction of Cop City absolutely serves fascism, while also revealing many of the key ways that the Democratic Party’s attempts to advance their own bourgeois Democratic imperialist agenda has advanced the fascist cause.

The Democratic Party’s key imperative is to maintain the status quo of American empire, an empire which has always rested on the foundation of state violence. Whereas the fascists scream “law and order” as a bludgeon against whoever they want to hurt as they literally break whatever laws they see in their way, the dominant view among the Democratic Party is that to maintain the institutions of the republic amidst rising crises, against competing imperialists, against uppity neo-colonies, against the people who live here, even against the threat of fascist takeover, they must maintain law and order at all costs. At all costs, often literally translating to increasing military and police budgets.

As horrific as that state of affairs is, the contradiction that is clear to anyone willing to see it, is that such empowered police forces are exceedingly partisan to the outright fascists. Meanwhile, this is merely background on why this is happening. As you’ll hear in the interview, to follow through with the construction of Cop City, we are seeing a full forced fascist campaign of extra legal police repression, outlawing of ideas and the simple act of organizing for the common good, criminalization of stating established facts, and the capricious rewriting of the law. DeSantis might be getting jealous.

All of this should make exceedingly clear that the answer to fascism is not constrained to any electoral map or the voting booth, but primarily lies with our collective power in the streets. And the courage and clarity we are seeing in Atlanta and in Iran should help light the way forward. With that, here’s my interview with Keyanna.

Sam Goldman 08:23

Today, as promised, we are getting into the RICO indictments against 61 people who opposed Cop City. These indictments are completely ominous, illegitimate, and a fascist of assault on legitimate and righteous protest. To help us understand what’s going on, why, and what we can do to defend those who are under attack and stop Cop City, I am glad to be joined today by Keyanna Jones. Keyanna is an interfaith leader, she’s a member of the faith Coalition to Stop Cop City, and an organizer with Community Movement Builders. Welcome. Thank you for coming on and joining us.

Keyanna Jones 09:00

Thank you so much for having me.

Sam Goldman 09:02

Before we talk about the indictments and what they represent and the repression, I feel like we have to start with what is Cop City?

Keyanna Jones 09:11

Cop City is a $90 million plus militarized police training facility that is proposed to be placed right in the middle of a very Black residential neighborhood in southeast Atlanta that is also unincorporated, DeKalb County here in the state of Georgia. It would destroy 381 acres of forest land and disturb an important watershed, the South River watershed, which is a part of the South River Forest. But the South River is the headwater of the Altamaha river system, which is the largest body of water in the state of Georgia. The land, the Weelaunee Forest, where they want to build Cop City has been designated as one of the four lungs of Atlanta — which means that we actually need that forest land and tree canopy to breathe, literally — in Atlanta, we do.

Where we stand with Cop City is that the Mayor of the City of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation seek to seize that land and destroy it. All of its vital necessary uses that we’ve had here in DeKalb County with that land for all of these years now will be gone if they were to build Cop City. And cop City is a place where there would be international militarized training in a residential neighborhood here in the city of Atlanta.

Sam Goldman 10:37

And what’s the goal there? What are they training these forces to do? As far as we can understand.

Keyanna Jones 10:46

Cop City would essentially be military operations on urban terrain. The initial plans for Cop City include a mock city that would be used for “urban warfare.” They are training police officers in a military fashion to kill our residents. What they’re also doing is they are furthering the relationship with the Georgia international law enforcement exchange. That includes training from the IDF [Israeli Defense Force], which has a very bad record on human rights.

What we see from the IDF is a myriad of human rights violations, and they kill with impunity. These are the same people that the APF, the Atlanta Police Foundation, wants to bring here to train civilian officers, not only from the city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia, but from around this country and from around the world. If it is built, Cop ?City would be the largest such training facility in North America. Think about that. We are seeking to build the largest militarized police training facility in North America. There is something to be said for that.

What we’ve seen is that the purpose of this Cop City and these other cop cities that have popped up around the nation since 2020, when there was mass outcry against police terror, the goal of these cop cities is to simply quell protest movements. What we see with Cop City is what we saw, in the 60s, as there were riots that were popping up around the country. There was a special training facility that was put in place to train our civilian police officers in military style fashion to put down these protest movements. So while the world and the rest of the nation were watching what was happening in Chicago, in the 60s, and Newark, New Jersey, what was happening in LA, there was an entire movement down in Miami that has been highlighted in the film Riotsville, U.S.A., where you will see that these militarized police forces that were trained specifically against protesters — something that’s guaranteed under the First Amendment, we decided that we needed to take police officers and get them trained by the military to put down our own citizens so that they would not exercise a right that is guaranteed under the Constitution.

Something about that just doesn’t sound right, but we see history repeating itself again, here with this Cop City and the Cup City that sprang up in New York City, in Seattle, now the proposal in Baltimore, in Chicago. There was a proposal in Hawaii, but the people defeated it. They obviously have a government that is at least seeking to be representative of the people. Because here in Atlanta, the people have spoken out in every way that they know how to against Cop City, and their voices are still being ignored by those elected officials who are supposed to represent them.

Sam Goldman 13:51

I wanted to talk more about that. Since word about this being developed came out there have been people heroically resisting it, and doing their very best — really putting their bodies on the line — to stop this from happening. I can’t tell this story if we don’t tell the story of this over two year defiant struggle that’s been waged against these plans to turn this forest near Atlanta into this massive police training center. Could you talk briefly about some of the range of voices and different people that have been part of this struggle, and the ways that people have taken action have been just as diverse as the people who’ve been a part of it?

Keyanna Jones 14:36

Absolutely. The beauty of this movement is that is brought together people from all walks of life — many people who otherwise, honestly, might not have known each other had it not been for this project. And what we’ve seen from the time that Cop City was introduced — because mind you, there was never any public appeal to say: The city of Atlanta is considering building a police training facility at this location, we want to cut down this amount of the forest.

There was nothing that went out to the public to say: Hey, this is what’s happening, what we’re considering, come and give us your comments, let us hear from you. There were no townhall meetings where it was discussed among residents of the city of Atlanta or even DeKalb County about what Cop City would entail, or the fact that they even wanted to build it and take our land in DeKalb County. So when people found out about it, literally at the last minute in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic — and as a matter of fact, the city council still was not meeting in public in 2021, when there was the 17 hours of public comment that were given — people found out about that meeting at the very last minute.
Let me make sure that I clarify that. In 2020, we saw the uprisings after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery here in Georgia, Rayshard Brooks, and also prior to 2020 numerous other individuals were murdered by police. So 2020 was a year of outcry against police terror, and against them being able to get away with it. What happened in 2020 scared the local governmental infrastructure here in Atlanta and across the nation, because what they saw was that the people realize that they have the power, and that they can use it, and if they use it, they can make things happen.

So all of these ideas about Cop City began to spring up. In 2021, without so much as an introduction, without a prior mention, all of a sudden, there is a council meeting where Councilwoman Joyce Shepherd from District 12, I believe, is introducing legislation to build Cop City. When people heard about that legislation, they immediately mobilized for the very next council meeting so that their voices could be heard. And that was in 2021, when people via zoom gave 17 hours of public comment against Cop City. And despite what the people said, their so called elected representatives in the city of Atlanta, decided to vote for this project.

What we heard from then Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was that Atlanta would become a model for the nation. So here we have the elected official who went into the agreement with the APF, and what happened after that is that people began to organize because they saw that the city council did not care what they said after 17 hours of public comment, so people got together and organized. I’m talking about massive protests in the streets. I’m talking about demonstrations outside of City Hall, showing up some more city council meetings.

Between 2021 and January of 2023, we had people who actually mobilized themselves to move into the forest to live there so that they use their bodies to protect the trees. While we had people who were mobilizing and organizing as forest defenders, sitting in the forest, making sure that there were actually people there to protect trees from being cut down, we also had organizers who are working on the outside who continued to go to city council meetings, to talk to city council representatives, to try to get some understanding as to why the people’s voices were being ignored.

In January of 2023, the first ever climate justice activist was murdered on U.S. soil. Our fallen comrade Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who we know as Tortuguita, was murdered as they set in a meditative position with their hands up; murdered for simply sitting in a tent in the forest that they want to protect. This is what we’ve been met with from law enforcement from our so called governing bodies.

We’ve been met with violence at every turn. We held a week of action back in March of 2023. We were mobilizing daily just to pass out flyers, to march around downtown Atlanta, to alert people and make them aware that these companies that they were patronizing downtown were also donating to Cop City, which is an oppressive institution. As we did that we saw police officers show up in force with riot gear. We saw over 200 police officers kettle a group of about 75 marchers as we marched through the streets of downtown.

They surrounded us with their weapons drawn. They even impeded the sidewalk so that we could not pass safely, just in hopes that someone would step off of the sidewalk so that they could charge them with something. Just in hopes that someone would bump into an officer so that they could charge them with assaulting a police officer. One of the officers tried to charge protesters with some offense one day as we gave out flyers downtown. They really tried to tell us that we could not walk on the sidewalk and give out flyers.

And we see later online, we actually did have comrades that were charged with domestic terrorism for handing out flyers — flyers that contain public information that could be obtained through open public records requests here in the state of Georgia, but simply because those flyers named the murderers of Tortuguita, that is seen as domestic terrorism. So in this movement, we have seen people show up in a very democratic way at council meetings, talking to city council members, making sure that they get the understanding of how things are moving in this process. We’ve seen that, we have also seen peaceful protests, we see people marching through the streets, we’ve seen people sitting, silently. We’ve seen people show up in the forest to simply occupy the forest, and we’ve also seen people murdered for doing so.

We’ve also seen police officers point a gun inside of a bouncy house at a music festival — a music festival that I had just left about half an hour prior. And had my children and my husband still been there, they would have been the ones in that bouncy house when the gun was pointed inside, because my two sons were not leaving that bouncy house. My husband literally had to stay there in that bouncy house jumping with them because they were not leaving.

But when you think about the fact that we have had to endure the inability to even attend a family event, a music concert, without the police showing up and exacting violence against us — police showed up. They had mothers with their children held at gunpoint against a stage as mothers begged and pleaded for the safety of their children. We had a person who was detained for running after his dog, and the officer told him that if he took another step he was going to put him down. That person is now sitting in an ICE detention facility because he was charged with domestic terrorism for attending that music festival, for trying to run after his dog, but also for being indigenous and not being from the state of Georgia.

Because what we saw at that music festival was that officers detained people, and they check their identification, and if their identification was not from the state of Georgia, they arrested them in order to further the narrative that had been put out by Mayor Andre Dickens that there were only outside agitators opposed to Cop City. What we’ve seen in this movement has been some of the most insidious planning, and the most insidious actions from Attorney General Chris Carr, Governor Brian Kemp, Mayor Andre Dickens, and all who fall in line behind them. What we’ve seen has been unprecedented. So we’ve had to show up in unprecedented ways.

So we have embraced a diversity of tactics, meaning that we have decided to come at this from every angle. Because one thing that we know is that if we don’t do something, Cop City will not be the end of police terror in Atlanta or in this nation.

Sam Goldman 23:37

I really appreciate your thorough walking us through both sides of that; the heroic resistance and the beautiful diversity of movements and methods and the murderous repression that people have faced since it started and the viciousness that has just been constant. One of the things that struck me was that earlier this summer, they went after the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. [KJ: Yes. chuckles] This is a group that my understanding is that they do legal assistance, [KJ: Yeah] and they fundraise for bail, that type of thing.

Keyanna Jones 24:15

What we see with the targeting of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund — first of all, people should understand that bail funds are not illegal. A bail fund is something that we have seen in operation in this country since the Civil Rights Movement. The NAACP established one of the very first bail funds in this nation so that people like Dr. King, and John Lewis and Ralph David Abernathy could be bailed out of jail when they were simply resisting unjust laws; when they were protesting as a redress of grievances to their governing body and they were arrested. That is what the bail funds were established for.

The Atlanta Solidarity Fund is no different. This is the same solidarity fund that was there when Rayshard Brooks was murdered and people were protesting and got arrested, that bailed them out. This is the same bail fund that is kept people out of jail since we have had uprisings due to police terror with the murders of people like Katherine Johnson, an Anthony Hill and Alexia Christian and Jimmy Atchison, Jamarion Robinson. This bail fund has protected me.

So when we talk about people being charged with domestic terrorism and RICO, and for the bail fund, particularly, initially being charged with money laundering, and I think it was misuse of funds for a charitable organization, the fact that they had people who were able to be reimbursed for gas, or lunch, as they were working for the bail fund somehow has been translated into a criminal activity. Somehow, not only were they charged with money laundering and the misuse of funds for charitable organizations initially, they are now being charged with RICO because the Atlanta Solidarity Fund is being named as a conspirator as part of this racketeering case, and all of the work that the bail fund has been doing since 2021 is being viewed as a covert act in furtherance of the conspiracy, whatever the conspiracy is.

What happens when they attack the bail fund? Their hope is that the bail fund would be bankrupt, that people would be deterred from even donating to the bail fund for fear of RICO charges. And if they can keep people from donating to the bail fund, then the bail fund can’t bail people out of jail. So that means that people who are resisting this fascist inception of Cop City would be jailed with no hope of getting out. This is what they desire. We heard after the bail fund was targeted — initially, we heard police transmission, where officers were talking about the fact that they were specifically going after the bail fund because it was the money of the movement and if they could stop the bail fund, they could stop the movement.

They literally said: We’ve tried everything, we’ve come at him from every angle. And it’s simply because people want to be upheld in wrongdoing. There are people who don’t want to be called out for doing the wrong thing. There are people who don’t want to be called out for embracing what we know to be fascism. Because this is supposed to be a democratic place and Atlanta — Atlanta, the Black Mecca, the cradle of the civil rights movement — we’re not fascists, we just want you to do what we say without question or else. Sounds pretty fascist to me.

Sam Goldman 27:53

Absolutely. And when you look at this whole conspiracy garbage, I mean, what is this conspiracy that ties these people together? It’s basically people that are defending people from, and opposing police brutality, terror, repression, and murder.

Keyanna Jones 28:09

But those are the things that keep us safe, right? So basically, what you’re saying is that it is illegal for me to want to live in safety. It’s illegal for me to want to have the right to raise my children in an environment that’s free of state sanctioned violence. It’s illegal for me to not want to worry about being killed by a police officer at a traffic stop. Because we know in this country that the majority of murders by police occur because of a simple traffic stop. Those types of statistics are the things that have moved people to stand against Cop City, not only because it is an issue of environmental justice, where you are severely disenfranchising Black people and targeting them for environmental racism.

It is also the intersectionality of economic justice that comes with that because we know that gentrification is accelerated when you place a project like Cop City in a residential neighborhood. It is also reproductive justice, because one of the tenets of reproductive justice is the ability and the right to raise the children that I choose to have in a healthy environment that is free of state sanctioned and interpersonal violence. It’s racial justice because we know that Black neighborhoods are already over policed.

The city of Atlanta is the most surveilled city in the United States. There are two schools that sit on either side of Cop City, and when you think about the fact that school children have to constantly see police, what does that do to the psyche of a Black child that they are being raised and reared in a manner that they get used to police repression. The institutionalization that happens because of traditional education is already one thing, but when you couple that with the fact that children are now being conditioned to accept police oversight and overreach in their daily lives, this does nothing but make sure that we keep padding and promoting the school to prison pipeline.

This is not okay. All of those things are the conspiracy. All of those things that we stand against are the things that the state is seeking to repress, not only with these RICO and domestic terrorism charges, but with the way they show up and respond to us. What we have seen in this movement is something that many have not seen. It honestly mirrors, the FBI surveillance and CIA surveillance of the civil rights movement. What we see is the plants that the government will place into the movement like they did with COINTELPRO. What we see is a lot of bad actors that have come together in one concerted effort to stamp out a movement that has grown beyond what they can control.

At this point, they seem to be very desperate, because the thing that they never thought would happen has happened right before their eyes, they see little grandmas who are white ladies who have always stood for environmental justice, holding hands with Black, queer abolitionists and standing for the same thing. They see all of these people from different walks of life Black, white, gay, straight, queer, trans, we have people from every nationality represented within our movement.

They see us all together. What they don’t want is for us to be together. That’s the conspiracy that they really want to quell. That’s the conspiracy that they really want to stop, is people getting together despite what their obvious differences might be to stand against a government that does not have our best interests at heart and does not want to protect us from police terror.

Sam Goldman 32:09

I wanted to move into this fascist indictment that is really focused on criminalizing political opposition to Cop City; going after liberatory radical ideas going after just the right to legitimate protests, and even truth itself [KJ: Yes], because it’s under attack in this indictment that’s filled straight up lies. I wanted to share with our listeners a little bit about what is contained in these indictments. Our listeners have heard about RICO indictments before because we talked about the RICO indictment that da Fani Willis brought against Trump and 18 others for attempting to overthrow the results of the 2020 election.

We’ve talked on the show, I believe, about how DA Willis has made a practice of using RICO conspiracy charges against music performers for the lyrics of their songs, and to charge young Black men with gang associations for b.s., but we want to talk about these RICO charges. We shared last week that the RICO indictment of 61 People — a lot is in there. It’s massive sweeping charges, but also a sweeping number of people being charged, so we wanted to get into a little bit of what the opponents of Cop City are being charged with.

My understanding is it includes charges that could bring up to 20 years in prison. It charges people who authorities claim adhere to and promote “anarchist ideas” [KJ: mmhmm], or advocate for mutual aid [KJ: mmhmm], alleges the defendants are united and cohered around “the idea that individual needs are subordinate to the good of the whole of society” as something [KJ: sighs] and “anti government, anti police and anti corporate views”. The indictment targets things like recording the Atlanta solidarity fund’s number ,if they put it on their body, or if they wrote a letter of solidarity to people who were arrested. [KJ: mmhmm] So what is in these charges? Walk us through. What do we need to know about these?

Keyanna Jones 34:17

The first thing that people need to know is that, one, you are not exaggerating about anything that you just said, because you read it directly from the indictment. But, two, they need to know that this indictment reads like my eight year old son and his friends got together to talk about somebody that they don’t like, because this is so sophomoric.

This is asinine to the point of what you just read basically saying: We don’t like people who oppose our decisions in government. We don’t like people who think for themselves; We don’t like people who realize that capitalism is bad and inherently violent; We don’t like people who understand that policing today is just as it was when it was started that police were created to protect property, and they still do; We don’t believe that people should be in the business of taking care of each other because things like solidarity and mutual aid are nefarious.

That’s basically what’s in that indictment, and it’s so immature. When I say that this is so frivolous that for those people who believe so much in their elected officials, this should make them sit up and pay attention, because in order for a governing body to pass a law — and this is the Georgia RICO statute — that states that so called co conspirators do not even have to be personally acquainted, they simply have to share a common idea, that means that if I contact someone in my book club in New York and we’re talking about ideas in a book that we’re all reading — we are all reading the same book, we have the common goal of completing the book and discussing the book — under Georgia statute, we have just committed a crime under RICO. How dumb does that sound?

There is no other way to put that in perspective. I would say that I just oversimplified it, but I didn’t because that’s literally what’s in this indictment. The fact that you are criminalizing a person for their ideas, that means that I can be charged with RICO for my private thoughts. Further, it means that I can be charged with RICO if I dare make my thoughts public and someone else agrees with me. If we do not have the freedom of expression, if we do not have the freedom of speech, if we do not have all of those rights enumerated in the First Amendment, then what do we have in this country? We have fascism.

Sam Goldman 36:55

It reads completely dystopian First Amendment-protected activities like passing out a flyer — indicted with conspiracy. You were a legal observer, you put out a flyer letting people know about bail funds [KJ: mmhmm], or you help collect funds for bail fund? [KJ: Yes] That’s conspiracy, money laundering. It really is beyond dystopian [KJ: It is.] and it’s really horrifying. One of the things that I was wondering that maybe you could give us more insight into is the connections between this indictment as a response to the beautiful uprising for Black lives that you spoke to earlier. [KJ: Absolutely]

I want to thank you for that. I wanted to loop back before I forget and say that in addition to everything that you were laying out about the connection between the date of the murder of George Floyd and what was the charges and the motivation behind it, it was also before people knew. [KJ: It had not come out.] You’re just making up garbage and at the same time that they’re making up garbage, they’re talking about people rising up against the murder of Rayshard Brooks. [KJ: Rayshard Brooks] And they had the gall, they had the gall to put in that justified murder. Justified, my ass!

Keyanna Jones 37:40

When Derek Chauvin murdered murdered George George Floyd, that is the date that is listed on the indictment. What’s interesting is that May 25 2020, is listed as the date that the conspiracy, so called, began, and it is actually true, because that is the date that the government began to conspire against its own citizens because they would dare to stand up against police murdering black people with impunity; because they would dare to stand up and say: We need to abolish qualified immunity; because they dare to stand up and say: Defund the police and refund citizens; because they dare to stand up and say: This is not right, and we won’t stand for any longer, the government began to conspire on that date.

Because what they saw was something that they were not prepared for. So they began to plan as to how they could stop these movements going forward. They began to plot as to what they could do to deter people from standing up for their rights, or the rights of others. And more than anything, they began to conspire as to how they could stop people from actually mobilizing to see the future that they envision for themselves and their families. What they want to do is make sure that not one of us shows up at City Hall again, not one of us organizes a protest or rally or a sit in.

What this government has shown us here in the state of Georgia, is that they are not all concerned about the well being of their people. They are certainly not concerned about civic engagement. As a matter of fact, they don’t want it. What they want is for us to sit back, especially here in Atlanta in the Black Mecca, they want all these Black people to sit around and look at their Black elected officials and say, oh, yeah, you go ahead and do whatever you do, because I know you’re going to make the best decision for me, when in actuality it’s exactly the opposite. They want us to keep going along to get along because they want Black people to subscribe to the saying that representation is all we need.

Well, representation ain’t enough. And you certainly don’t represent me simply because you look like me when you don’t embody the values that I have. When you don’t stand up For the people who I care about, you don’t represent me. We have this saying in our community that all skin folk ain’t kinfolk, and what that means is that simply because our skin has the same tone, simply because we share a nationality, it does not mean that you are looking out for my best interest. But these skinfolk ain’t kinfolk, and they don’t have any intention of standing with the people of the city of Atlanta.

The thing that is the most disheartening is that even after city council members said to us: Oh, it’s all these people from DeKalb County who are making the noise about Cop City — which rightfully we should, because that’s our backyard — it was literally my backyard until a couple of months ago when I moved away, because my son could not take the fact that he woke up and went to bed to gunfire — but when they said: We’re not hearing from our constituents in the city of Atlanta, it’s just these DeKalb County people coming out, so we mobilized a massive amount of Atlanta residents, particularly in our ballot referendum petition to put this project to a vote on a ballot.

Mayor Dickens said that we would never get the required amount of signatures if we did it the right way. We proved him wrong. When we first started to mobilize, the city wanted to say: You know what, only registered voters in the city of Atlanta can collect these signatures. Well, myself and three of my neighbors in DeKalb County said: Hell no. Because that’s our backyard. Where we live, we should at least be able to collect signatures, because we don’t get a vote on the Council of the City of Atlanta. We don’t have a voice.

So we went to court with them and we said: You know what, we have a First Amendment right to be able to collect these signatures because it directly affects us. And this is our way of redressing our government for grievances against them. We were granted what we asked for, the ability for anybody in the state of Georgia to collect those petition signatures from registered voters in the city of Atlanta, and we were also granted an extra 60 days in which to do so because the judge reset the clock from the date that he entered that injunction for us.

Since that day, this Cop City vote coalition has collected over 116,000 signatures that’s more people than the amount of people who voted for Mayor Dickens in the last mayoral election. We have mobilized more people who are constituents of the city of Atlanta who have said, we want a vote. So we’ve given the council and the mayor what they asked for. We’ve given them the voice of their constituents, and still yesterday, when we turned in those petition signatures, the mayor sent a memo to the clerk’s office saying that the clerk should not begin verifying signatures because those petitions should not be accepted.

We have done everything as we have been asked to do. We have followed this democratic process. We have done the things that we knew to do legally. Mayor Dickens even tried to invalidate the entire petition process. He and Attorney General Chris Carr has sought to invalidate all referenda in the state of Georgia going forward, which means that they have clearly said that they don’t believe that the people should have a voice.

So what we see right now is even though council members asked to hear their constituents, their constituents have now spoken, they still don’t want to do the right thing. So our fight against Cop City continues. These RICO charges won’t deter us. The fact that there are domestic terrorism charges against some of us will not deter us. There is nothing that they can do to stop the movement against Cop City.

Keyanna Jones 44:17

Ooh yeah, we know it wasn’t justified.

Sam Goldman 44:19

No. Not only did they feel the freedom to put it in there, but they felt like: Ooh, they’ve gotta put that in.

Keyanna Jones 44:24

Absolutely. And you know what? That highlights the importance of podcasts like this, of independent media. Because mainstream media will never tell our story correctly. Mainstream media will always go with the police narrative. Even when it’s been proven wrong, they will still quote what the police have told them or what an elected official has said. Even when it’s wrong.

Sam Goldman 44:51

You had gotten on a path where you were talking about the mayor, [KJ: mmhmm] and what the mayor has done and not done. On this show when we’re talking about fascism, we’re talking about the Republican Party, typically, that is a totally fascist party. But Biden’s condemned this right?

Keyanna Jones 45:08

Let’s walk down this road about Stacey Abrams, because see, I used to work for an organization that was founded by Stacey Abrams. They tout themselves as the premier voting rights organization in the state of Georgia. When I worked for that organization, and we brought up the issue of Cop City and organizing around Cop City and we became a part of the coalition against Cop City, Stacey Abrams wanted no part. Stacey Abrams did not even want the organization to have their logo on a flyer because it could be the link to her.

Stacey Abrams has been particularly careful that her name is not linked to anything. She does not want the organizations that she has found it to put their names on anything that they do. I was shocked when we got a statement from Fair Fight. But, then again, I wasn’t, because we got a statement as it related to exact match of signatures because this had to do directly with votes. But we know that Stacey Abrams is not affiliated with Fair Fight she’s not affiliated with New Georgia Project, or any of the organizations that she has founded. They don’t represent her. But she knows that people associate the name with her, and she has been extremely careful to separate herself from this.

President Biden has not said a word. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are the biggest disappointments known to man. They have yet to give condolences to Tortuguita’s mother for their murder. And I happen to be in New York at Baruch College for their commencement when Raphael Warnock gave the commencement address, and I had to interrupt him to ask him: What about Cop City? When are you going to talk to us in Atlanta because we’ve been trying to talk to you, and you won’t respond. Jon Ossoff, we have been calling you and you won’t respond.

There is a host of Democratic so-called leadership in the state of Georgia, around metro Atlanta, particularly, and not one has spoken out against cop city save representative Ruwa Romman, who has spoken out from the beginning and still holds the line. We have had people who have inserted themselves and make comment on different parts of this movement. They have talked about the murder of Tortuguita, after the autopsy came back that showed that they were riddled with at least 57 bullets as their hands were up.

They’ve made mention about, say, these Rico charges, but they have not once said that this is wrong. And what irks me to my very core is that the same exact match verification that people like Andre Dickens and the Democratic representatives in the Georgia General Assembly were talking about years ago that Republicans were trying to use in saying that it was undemocratic and talked about how it disenfranchises mostly older voters, young voters and Black people, Mayor Dickens and the city of Atlanta now want to use that same process in verifying petition signatures.

So what we see is a marked silence from the Democratic Party. And I need people to hear that silence and understand that that silence means that they don’t deserve your vote again. Stop voting democratic, and vote based on your issues. I am a person who voted Democratic for a long time, because I felt like in the grand scheme of things, things are just better when Democrats are in authority rather than when Republicans are. But what I have come to see in these past two and a half years, is that it does not matter if they are Black, white, or anything else, or whether there’s a D or an R behind their names, they are for themselves.

We have to be for ourselves, we have to be for each other. We cannot be committed to a party. We have to be committed to the principles of morality, and how we should live together in this world in order to take care of each other so that we can all thrive and have a promising future. We can no longer vote Democratic. We have to vote for us. Whatever that means for people. I need them to understand it and really embrace it and do it. Vote for you. Vote for the people you love, and vote for the future that you want.

Sam Goldman 49:33

I appreciate your perspective on that, and I want to just add that, in addition to the silence, the main backers of COP city have been Democratic party elected officials, [KJ: Absolutely] and that’s part of the picture. The actions by the city of Atlanta under the cover of law smack to anyone who’s looking with any clear eyes as suppression of speech [KJ: mmhmm] and what normally considered actions people use when they’re trying trying to work inside the system [KJ: mmhmm].

The latest legal attack on the movement is that the city of Atlanta has challenged and stood up, for now the certifying and counting of signatures asking for a city referendum on Cop City. After these indictments, after the stopping counting the signatures, what is the movement doing now? I know you’re not stopping, the indictments aren’t stopping you, nothing’s stopping you, but what are we doing now?

Keyanna Jones 50:24

Well, the first thing that we did was after the Mayor decided to act a complete ass yesterday, we went ahead and we filed a motion in the 11th district Supreme Court to compel a judge to rule on what the Mayor is alleging, that the petition is now invalidated because of the state of the injunction that was granted. All of this legal jargon that the mayor has tried to bring up to say: No, you can’t do this, it’s invalid.

We immediately made a motion for a judge to make a ruling on this, and to compel the city to do what it is supposed to do and verify these signatures. Because what we see is that the Mayor knows that those 116,000 signatures — more than what he got as votes in the last election — he knows that that signals that we will be successful on a ballot. So he’s trying to make sure that that doesn’t happen. The next thing that we are doing is we are continuing to fundraise for the cop city Vote campaign. People can go to CopCityVote.com, and donate because we do still have legal fees.

We are still tied up in court with these people who want to continually obstruct justice and obstruct the right of people to vote and have their voices heard through direct democracy. We also need people, wherever they are, to follow solidarity actions with the stop Cop City movement. You can follow the hashtag #StopCopCity on all social media platforms to see where we are, what is going on, what we’re doing. And what we’re also doing is we are continuing to organize in the community to mobilize people to continue to come out not only to city council meetings and speak, to contact their city council members for a redress of these grievances.

But also, we’re continuing to mobilize people for direct action so that not only Mayor Dickens, but Attorney General Chris Carr, the state of Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp, so that they know that we are not going away quietly. And we are still encouraging people to donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund — to donate, because it is not illegal. A lot of what we’re doing now, honestly, is simply educating people as to what these legal charges mean. Helping people to be comfortable with doing the things that they’ve been doing so that they are not intimidated by this latest move by Attorney General Chris Carr, Mayor Andre Dickens and Governor Brian Kemp. So that is how we’re continuing to mobilize people. And more than that, we also continue our philosophy of solidarity and mutual aid. We are still standing together in community as a community.

Sam Goldman 53:11

Thank you for sharing with us all those wonderful ways that this resistance is continuing and that people can participate in. I want to give a shout out to the people who participated in direct action just days after the indictments came out, including faith leaders, who basically put a people’s injunction out there [KJ: Yes, that’s right.] telling people working on stuff that they want Cop City to stop. And they were arrested as well, so I wanted to put that out there.

This indictment aims to truly outlaw, and would lead to outlawing, the spreading of ideas [KJ: Yes] — ideas, like believing that you should care about the greater good of society [KJ: Yes!] more than me, me, me — outlawing being anti police or anti corporations. Just these ideas, outlawing, as an attorney had noted, any organizing effort against public policies, any activities that says to the power: No, we’re not gonna do it. I think that — I said this before, but I want to underscore it for people — it makes it a crime to tell the truth about police brutality [KJ: Yes, yes.], to call out police brutality and murder by the police.

This is a fascist move by the system’s repressive apparatus. [KJ: Yes it is.] A dangerous, dangerous precedent — a dangerous precedent to use RICO laws [KJ: Yes, absolutely.] against protests. I said it at the top, and I’m gonna say it again, this is ominous shit that people need to pay attention to. [KJ: It is.] And they need to oppose it. Anyone who’s listening who has any commitment to the rule of law that is so, so put to high regard and the society — we’ve got to follow the rule of law. Okay, we went all those rule of law people to be in this fight too, [KJ: Yes] because what kind of world do we want to live in? [KJ: mmhmm, mmhmm]

This RICO indictment is aiming for a world where even having the values, the belief that you should put human life above property, [KJ: mmhmm] can get you put in prison. And if you don’t want to live in that world, [KJ: That’s no lie.] you’ve gotta join Keyanna Jones and all those who are fighting to stop Cop City. You’ve got to join them, you’ve got to defend them, you’ve got to support them, and I’m gonna put in all the links, Keyanna, that you told us.

Keyanna Jones 55:29

Thank you so much.

Sam Goldman 55:30

If there’s anything else that you want listeners to come away with, any final words.

Keyanna Jones 55:34

The only thing that I would say is that Cop City will never be built.

Sam Goldman 55:38

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us, to share your expertise, your perspective, your insight. Really appreciate it. We’re standing with y’all, and just sending lots of love your way.

Keyanna Jones 55:50

Thank you so much.

Sam Goldman 55:52

Mass nonviolent direct action has been called for November 10-13 in Atlanta to block Cop City. To learn more, visit BlockCapCity.org

Sam Goldman 56:03

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. Got thoughts or questions off this episode? We want to hear ’em. Ideas for topics or guests? Yes, please. Send them to us. Have a skill you think could help? We want to know all about it. Reach me at the site previously known as Twitter, @SamBGoldman, drop me a line at [email protected]. We’re on Threads, Bluesky, mastodon. So find us @RefuseFascism. Or leave us a voicemail — we’d love to hear from you. See the show notes for a button so that you can do so.

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Thanks to Richie Marini, Lina Thorne and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce this episode. Thanks to Deborah Sweet for assistance in research. Thanks to incredible volunteers, we have transcripts available for each episode, so be sure to visit RefuseFascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox. We’ll be back next Sunday. Until then, in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America!