One year ago today, students established an encampment at Columbia in solidarity with Gaza. Donald Trump and his supporters claim that the camp was a hotbed of antisemitism. Anyone who visited knows that this is a lie. Who brutalized Jewish students at Columbia? The police did, to punish them for opposing genocide. The Gaza solidarity encampments that sprang up around the US in response to the one at Columbia represented the most successful voluntary collaboration between Muslim and Jewish students taking place anywhere in the world. If university administrations claimed it was necessary to destroy them in order to "keep the peace," this reveals what they mean by peace. In seeking to crush solidarity organizing and smear Jewish anti-Zionists as antisemitic, paving the way for Trump to deport students on account of their beliefs in order to suppress all dissent, the university administrations showed that centrism is not an alternative to authoritarianism, but a means of bringing it to power. Horrifically, the genocide in Gaza continues today. Free Palestine.

CrimethInc.

“It Is an Honor to Be Suspended for Palestine"

Participants offer a blow-by-blow account of the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia and appraise the tactics that the demonstrators have employed.

Even the Financial Times admits that Donald Trump is building a police state. This should give everyone a new perspective on the movement to abolish the police, which was so controversial a few years ago. Despite tremendous outcry against racist police killings, the Biden administration doubled down on promoting the legitimacy of police and channeled considerable quantity of resources towards them, all of which they will now use to impose Trump's agenda on us. The movement to abolish the police was our best hope of countering the forces via which autocrats like Trump will impose fascism. It still is. "The only possible way out of this mess is to develop the ability to wield power on our own terms, horizontally and autonomously, stripping the police of legitimacy and shattering the illusion that they are invincible. This has been the common thread between practically all the significant movements of the past several years." We said that in 2014. crimethinc.com/cwc/bluefuse

Today, Donald Trump made it clear that he intends to have people deported to El Salvador without due process, including United States citizens. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has something to say to us about this moment. “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If… if… We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more—we had no awareness of the real situation… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

"Abolish ICE" sounded like a radical demand to Democrats, though ICE itself only dates to 2003. Today, it should be clear to even the most deluded liberals that if you establish institutions for the sole purpose of brutalizing people, authoritarians will inevitably use them to consolidate power. The Trump administration is intentionally circulating photographs of dehumanized prisoners crowded into bunks reminiscent of the famous photographs from within the death camp at Buchenwald during the Holocaust. Spectacular violence is central to the fascist program, which hinges on accustoming people to spectatorship and passivity.

CrimethInc.

Sacrificial Violence and Retribution

We explore the responses to the killings of Jordan Neely and Brian Thompson as a way to understand the different forms of violence that are contend...

ICE posted—and then deleted—this advertisement on Instagram and the fascist-owned platform X/Twitter, announcing themselves as the thought police stopping ideas from entering the United States. It's not just about attacking undocumented people, or immigrants, or dissidents—they aim to prevent thought itself. If Hitler's Nazi Party were still in power today, its Instagram feed would look exactly like the ICE Instagram: a series of photographs of captured, brutalized human beings. ICE represents fascism. Resist by all means.

CrimethInc.

Then They Came for the Palestinians

How to respond to the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil and why it matters.

"Before 1914, the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914, I travelled from Europe to India and America without a passport and without ever having seen one." -Stefan Zweig Borders as we know them are a recent concoction. The passport system as we know it dates to the First World War. ICE was founded in 2003 as part of the so-called "War on Terror," a disaster for freedom in every way. These institutions are neither timeless nor beneficial nor inevitable.

CrimethInc.

No Wall They Can Build

No Wall They Can Build scrutinizes the borders that control movement around North America. Drawing on nearly a decade of solidarity work in the des...

Organizers are billing the April 5 demonstrations as the biggest protests since Trump returned to power. Great. But what's the strategy? Trump will not leave power willingly. Mere petitioning is pointless. How do you topple an autocrat? First, identify a segment of society that is not permanently committed to his reign, but whose support is essential to keeping him in power. Analyze their interests. Identify what is more important to them than keeping him in power. Think about their vulnerabilities. Next, identify a form of activity that could put that segment of the autocrat's supporters in a situation in which they will prefer to stop supporting him. Engage in that activity—whatever it takes. Repeat as needed until enough sectors of society shift their commitments. All of this occurred in summer 2020. Trump concentrated federal agents in Portland to try to show his supporters in the capitalist class that he could impose order to preserve business as usual. Because he failed—thanks to courageous resistance in Portland—capitalists did not support his 2021 coup. If we don't want to live under the autocratic rule of Donald Trump or his successors forever, we have to use direct action to break up his support base and force those who have remained passive to take a stand against him.

The fact that Elon Musk's attempt to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court failed despite $25+ million in propaganda and bribery shows that there is still a force more powerful than greed. But everyone knows that force is hatred of fascist billionaires—not support for the Democratic Party. The Democrats represent authoritarianism lite. It was their neoliberal policies that concentrated so much power in Elon Musk's hands in the first place. To abolish the structures that produce billionaire supervillains, we will have to do a lot more than vote. We will have to bring about fundamental shifts in how we relate to resources. This will require grassroots networks taking direct action.

CrimethInc.

Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace

Neither courts nor laws will suffice to halt the descent into autocracy. Massive numbers of people will have to take direct action on their own ini...

Those who seek to oppress us are not invincible. Whatever power they acquire, whatever technology they employ, they make mistakes, they overlook vulnerabilities. And they are motivated by bigotry and greed, which are not the most powerful forces in the human spirit.

CrimethInc.

EVERYBODY OUT!

Resources to prepare for post-electoral unrest—posters, primers on protest skills, and information about mobilizations around the country.

Clashes between police and protesters are picking up in Turkey following the autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's decision to have politicians from the opposition arrested. For background, you can read about the last mass uprising in Turkey—the Gezi Park uprising of 2013—here:

CrimethInc.

"Addicted to Tear Gas": The Gezi Resistance, June 2013

In May and June 2013, a powerful resistance movement erupted in Turkey around the defense of Gezi Park. We look back on the movement from 2022.