Discussion with the two comrades from Amerika 

Topic: Trump, USA, and radical movements – resistance towards conservative fascism

Date: 26 November 2024

Transcribed using AI (and checked for mistakes) from the live audio recording of the online discussion. Be advised that mistakes may occur in the text.

Comrades presenting: 

Mo (changed name), propagandist and artist from Appalachian region

Maya (changed name), organizer from New Orleans

Komuna delegated moderator: So it’s officially recording, so we may not even need to use your name, already we know you, but maybe if you want just to present also how we maybe transcribe like who you are, maybe just also for all of us, although we’ve seen you in BAB, but maybe just give us an overview, who are you, what do you do, where are you present and what is the thing?

Mo: Yeah, I am, I have been in, you know, anarchist and antifascist organizing since I was 16, about going on 20 years now, and I have traveled a lot, mostly through America, but internationally quite a bit. Right now I am more of a propagandist, at least in terms I’m willing to talk more openly about in wherever, so I am, yeah, I’m a printmaker, and I’m in several collectives, including the [redacted name] Comics Collective, which publishes comics from trans and queer people here in America, to just get money back from the books and money to sort of get, get prisoner artwork out to the world. And normally I’m haunting sort of the northeastern United States.

Komuna delegated moderator: So, maybe before we dwell into specifics of this topic, can you maybe give us an overview of the movement in the place where you actually haunt? Like, how is the movement there? What exists? How long did it exist? We know that the anarchist movement has been like 100 years old in the US, and it used to have a really vibrant movement. We have seen time and again that it pops up in specific contexts as a force. But maybe give us an overview from a person who is part of the movement, of how is the movement there? What is it doing? How strong it is? Like, just a general overview without getting into much detail.

Mo: Yeah. I spend a lot of time in Philadelphia, where I think has one of the most interesting and vibrant anarchist movements in the United States. A lot of it is very clandestine, very just people, people doing their own thing. There’s not a lot of like, you know, quote, unquote, movement building. Just a lot of like, people, people are, I, whenever I travel, people are like, oh, Philadelphia, you guys are crazy there, right? And I’m just like, no, not really. And then I think about it, I’m like, I guess a little bit. So, it’s pretty cool people there, especially take anti-fascism very, very seriously. I am really proud of the fight culture there. And by fight culture, I don’t mean like, people who are just into violence. It’s people who train together for like, mental health reasons, for like, just, you know, to feel less alienated from each other.

But first and foremost, a boxing gym has formed here because Nazis in America have started these active clubs, is what they call them. And they post their like, propaganda online because they’re corny. And if you watch them, and like, I am, you know, I’m scrapped up, I can tell like, these guys don’t know shit. Like, these guys are like, that’s not how we throw up on stuff. That’s not how you dig. And, um, so people have gotten together and have just trained Muay Thai together for quite some time. And that, um, I think has spread. I think that lots of other places have had the exact same idea, you know what I think. Um, I’m biased, but I think Philly’s doing it the best.

And, um, we’ve had a couple of, um, smokers, which are just like, you know, meetups. Everyone has like, friendly bouts with each other. Um, a bunch of, bunch of anarchists who are good at fighting, good at technical fighting, will get together and, um, have some, have some bouts together. And honestly, it’s one of the most fun and, um, inspiring, like, anarchist events I’ve been to in forever.

So, yeah, it feels pretty cool. And historically, um, for American anarchism, it was very important. Um, if anyone, um, knows about the, like, the Galleanists [1], um, and they were just sort of like propaganda of the deed, early, um, you know, early 20th century, um, anarchists who, who did, did bonkers stuff. Lots of them were located in, uh, Philadelphia, though they went back and forth. And our, our beautiful, um, anarchist bookstore that has been there for a long time, The Wooden Shoe, uh, supposedly harbored, um, some of these people before it was an anarchist bookstore in, in the basement. Um, whether that’s true or, true or not, um, I leave to the historians, but I liked it. I liked it like so.

Komuna delegated moderator: Okay. Thank you for this overview. Uh, but you mentioned, uh, the Nazis being organized, uh, on top of having a really, uh, strong history of anarchism, USA has a really strong history of, uh, racist organizing, uh, racists organizing, and, uh, if not, uh, explicitly calling themselves fascists, they were fascists in a lot of things like KKK or the racist movement, but also now with the proud boys and this type of, uh, groups. How strong are they in the United States, the street movement, uh, currently, and what challenges does the movement actually experience when it comes to this? I’m trying kind of to build a baseline of talking like street before we go up to the higher ups and how that goes down again.

Mo: Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like I can, the higher ups is all conjecture. I can speak more to this, to the street. And I was thinking about this, of like, you know, it’s weird to talk about America, like, the mentality of America certainly influences the type of racism we have here. I have a Jewish friend who was talking about the type of anti-Semitism we have here is so, so corny and flat. It’s just like, you could never get to European levels of anti-Semitism where it’s just like, oh, they drink baby’s blood, they do the insane theories, and they’re just like, oh, they control the banks.

But we are like, you know, like most every nation besides Iceland, we founded this place on genocide and built it with slavery. And I think something that’s very unique about it is that it was founded and, like, the water that you swim in here is highly individualistic. Everything is rugged individualism. You cannot depend on anyone else. And the fascist movements or right-wing movements that are aligned with them really show that in interesting ways.

In the 90s, they had their shit way more together than they have now. There were Nazi gangs that were robbing banks and had compounds in the woods where they all gathered, they all planned assassinations. They planned going to steal money to finance the fascist movements. And after Timothy McVeigh [1] went and bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, it sort of fell apart a little bit because there was government repression, and a little bit because I think maybe some of them got scared. Because along with individualism comes a lot of cowardice as well, in my personal opinion.

So what we’re seeing now with the Proud Boys, with the fascist movements, the thing that is worth worrying about is, knock on wood, they keep eating each other, and the organization just cannot get off the ground. But to understand America at all, you have to understand that everyone has a gun and is insane.

Member of the audience in Komuna: Okay. Rock and roll, I guess? No worries, by the way, we do the same here. Just saying. Our guns just have, like, eagles on them. Yes. [people laughing]

Mo: And there’s so many of them that I think it, like, you know, this is a different avenue that maybe we can get into later about defense of anti-fascist things against guns and gun violence. But those organizations eat themselves, but they are politically ascendant, so they could become very useful to groups like the Proud Boys—things that are organized.

What is really worth worrying about, and something that you can’t really plan for, is lone wolf attacks. And that’s kind of been the case for a very long time—just some ambitious fascist building a bomb in a truck, or just going… we’ve got mass shootings every week here, many of them right-wing motivated, or just somebody has their routines. 

Maya: There was a mass shooting in my neighborhood last week at the second line, a jazz funeral parade.

Member of the audience in Komuna: A funeral?

Maya: Yeah.

Komuna delegated moderator: I love how randomly this fact just slides into the conversation. Yeah, my neighborhood last week, like, Jesus, fuck.

Maya: It’s normal.

Mo: Yeah, it’s pretty…

Maya: Especially where I live. It’s pretty normal.

Mo: When we… and like, traveling internationally, and being like, oh, people don’t have this here. Oh, we’re… oh, you just are traumatized, like, at least a little bit, being in America. It’s kind of always on edge for that. That’s just regular, not really having to do with fascist organizing.

But yeah, we have to sort of plan for the people who are organized, who sort of train together to go out to fight together. The first Trump term really emboldened a lot of these people to go out and start fights. And I’m proud to say most of the time they got the shit kicked out of them, but not every single time. There were some tactical defeats on our part.

And now it’s very hard to say. I think we’re more well organized, and it’s hard to say where their morale is at. The day after Trump got elected, in Philadelphia, a bunch of Fash-adjacent—at the very least—people started dragging around Western Philadelphia, which is mostly Black queers, where most of the people who hate fascists tend to be organized. Those in Philadelphia fucking hate fascists.

They tried to have a little march and got the shit kicked out of them by regular everyday folks the last time they tried this. And they did it for an hour, just drove around shouting slurs. And by the time all the anti-fascists got organized and got down there, they had fucked off.

I think they know they can show up, do a little incitement, but then run away before shit gets too scary. But we always have to be prepared for someone who is really ready to take it to the next level with a gun, or just go… who knows how violent they’re willing to get.

Komuna delegated moderator: You mentioned, in passing, that these groups were emboldened by the first Trump election. And maybe I would open up this specific thing. Because these kinds of fascist groups, although they have their own agenda, it’s different when they have political backing, right? And you said that they were emboldened.

Maybe, starting from this point—Trump got re-elected. What does that actually mean for the movement and for the whole U.S. society? What is the feel? What’s going on in the streets? What’s going through the heads of people in the movement?

Mo: We don’t know. And it’s tough to say. I hate to say it, but a lot of people seem pretty demoralized. And maybe that’s not even the right word, because we all kind of expected it. Like, they were running on “we’re gonna maintain norms,” and if there’s one thing you can tell, it’s that anyone fucking hates the norms here.

Like, if racism is not a deal breaker for people, they’re just like, “I don’t know, at least it’ll be something different.” The first Trump term was kind of a surprise. Though after the first hour, I was like, “Of course this is the conclusion of America. We are a clownish nation and we needed to elect a clown.”

This time, I think that on both sides the energy has waned. I think everyone is pretty disillusioned. Not everyone, but there’s a general sense that the excitement for making resistance movements is gone, and even the excitement for “our guys are in power” is gone. A lot of hardcore freaks are excited about it, sure, but it’s tough to say. He’s not in office yet, and we’ll see what happens.

Last time, people were already like, “We’re gonna go to D.C. on his inauguration. We’re gonna disrupt the whole thing.” There were ambitious plans. Some people rushed—it was a very ambitious black bloc that really fucked shit up. A lot of them got kettled and went through a protracted legal battle, but eventually most of them got a decent payout because it was bullshit.

That planning started the day after he got elected. I’m not hearing a lot of that this time. I think people are seeing the failures that happened in the first Trump term. The so-called “resistance,” which was mostly liberal-based, was pretty embarrassing in my opinion.

You know, it’s cliché to say, but the Democrats leaned so far right that in classic American decadence, we have a one-party system masquerading as a two-party system. The general public is like in a trance. So it really is up to radicals now. And the radicals are taking it seriously and making lots of plans. But they’re more generative and proactive now, whereas last time it was more: “let’s fuck shit up, let’s make this as hard as possible for them.”

This time, we’ve realized they’re going to gut all these things that help people get abortions, get trans healthcare, house refugees, and help homeless people. So now the fight is more grounded in building real support. And I’m excited about that—but it doesn’t feel as big. It doesn’t feel like we have as big of a push. Hopefully that changes in January when he’s actually in office and starts ruining everything.

Komuna delegated moderator: Can you tell us, for people who maybe don’t know the context, what is at stake now with the new Trump presidency?

Mo: What’s at stake? Off the top of my head: abortion rights. It seems like it’s going to be a very anti-anyone-with-a-uterus regime. Trans rights especially are going to get fucked, because that’s the new “other.”

Though I feel like they lose a lot of people with that—like, even folks leaning right tend to be like, “Who gives a shit? Live and let live.” Maybe they think it’s weird, but it’s not their business. It’s the real freaks who care enough to try and deny people the right to live that way. But they don’t need approval to do it—they’re going to try anyway.

The biggest concern—and probably some day-one shit—is mass deportations. Likely targeting people who came up through our southern border. I suspect there will be anti-Arab sentiment like we saw post-9/11. Maybe we’ll do something like that again.

Also, our homeless crisis is bonkers. For all obvious reasons. Those are the first four things that come to mind.

Maya: Yeah, those are huge. I also wanted to echo the general statement—since this recent election, most people I know, and definitely speaking for myself, we’re all just like, “Well, yep, saw that coming. What else do you do?”

Guess I’ll just keep digging my bunker like I was already doing. Yeah, whatever. And there’s quite a bit of fighting on the left, even among close circles.

Sorry—I woke up to come do this. [laughs]

There’s a lot of back and forth even in my own group chat, like some are freaking out—and to be fair, most of them are trans—and the rest of us are like, “Should I feel more strongly about this?” Because I kind of feel nothing.

That’s been the general sentiment: “I guess I should feel surprised or freaked out or like something’s going to change…” but we’re so jaded now it’s like, “Yeah, more of the same little shit.”

Mo: Yeah. And I just said numb, and I’m like, that’s not really the right word. At first, someone being as openly fascistic as Trump was, was terrifying. But we’ve had like ten years of this guy. He’s normalized, whether we like it or not. Fascism is normalized here.

The first Trump term was mostly corporate graft and backbiting. Trump is… it’s too bad he’s a monster worthy of that, but he’s also funny. And I think that’s why—if he gets elected—no one expects material change. So they’re like, “Who’s the fun guy? The TV guy? I want to watch TV.”

But this time I feel like he has people around him who are loyal like dogs, because they want to enact fascist agendas. And Trump has lost his vetoes. Before, he was a drama queen who always threw people out too early. Like some guy wouldn’t even get his plan together to invade Iran before Trump would be like, “I didn’t like his cat—he needs to go.” Bye-bye, honey.

This time he has flatterers who will do anything. People with a real ideological agenda. Trump’s ideology is narcissism—which fits really well with fascism. But he just wants to be America’s special guy. He doesn’t want to do the work.

As an aside, I thought this election—before Biden dropped out—was like a Greek myth. You’ve got this political creature for 200 years who finally becomes president when he’s drained of his soup and doesn’t know where he is. And then there’s Trump, who I don’t think even wanted to win. It was a vanity project that gave him connections.

He often talked at rallies about how he missed his old life. Like, “These beautiful trucks—do you think I’d get in one of those and drive away? I loved my old life. I don’t want to be here.”

He didn’t want to be president. But he didn’t want to be a loser even more. And now he’s not. It’s one of the biggest American comeback stories in history.

Sorry—I forgot the question…

Komuna delegated moderator: No, no, no worries, we were enjoying it, but we kind of do see the appeal of this kind of clownish persona that is coming out on TV and doing all the jokes. A lot of people don’t take him much seriously. As you said, he even doesn’t want to do the work, actually. But then again, he has around him warmongers, like the one who you said wanted to hit Iran—was this Bolton, John Bolton—and he was removed.

Now he has all these Zionist friends and all these people in the government, like Robert Kennedy and Elon Musk, who will—whatever the weird department he is. So he’s, although he also has this kind of, let’s say, clowns around him, these are people who will have actual power to actually do really damaging stuff, right? So…

Mo: Yeah.

Komuna delegated moderator: There’s some agenda that runs around him, or is he just improvising? Like, whoever just keeps him there will just do this?

Mo: There’s this guy, Molebug [3], who is like a kind of a proto-fascistic weirdo blogger who is very involved with Peter Thiel [4], who has billions of dollars and like, whatever. He is now, I feel like, playing a huge role. He’s very in with JD Vance, who—God, I just want to see that guy get run over by a fucking steamroller. I’m so mad that he is happy at all.

But yeah, he has these people. At first, I think he was staffing his cabinet with people who were vying for power. But with a guy like Trump, he sees them as threatening. These people are—hmm—most of them, Elon Musk is a husk, he’s just a husk filled up with bad memes. And most of them are, but they have real power now. They can do real damage. But there are real ideological people who know how to play Trump.

Hopefully, they fuck up somehow. But the first time, you know, Bolton would try and push for a war with Iran, and I feel like Trump would see himself not respected or whatever, and he would get fired immediately. Now he’s got all these hardcore Zionists who are pushing for a wider conflict in the Middle East.

And the one thing you could say about the first Trump term was that it wasn’t as internationally destructive as a Democratic presidency could have been. I don’t think we’ll have the same luck this time—especially with the situation outside, ongoing in Palestine, and geared up to spread outside of Palestine’s borders as is. But, I don’t know, that remains to be seen. I really hope not. That is the extreme. It’s all bad, but that’s world catastrophic.

Maya: I mean, there’s a lot of shit floating around, but people—I don’t know how serious it is—but there’s a lot of rumors where Trump is like, “I’m the last president ever. We’re getting rid of elections,” and shit like that.

Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’ll probably be business as usual, to be honest. But I feel like it’s just going to get weirder. And I do—I don’t know, like I said earlier—I felt really jaded about the whole thing. And I think a lot of my friends do too. We’re all just kind of like, “Yup, this again. Okay, well, you know.”

Komuna delegated moderator: Yeah, do you think that this kind of—I’ll just say this feeling of numbness—maybe comes from this idea that the first term, everybody was kind of apocalyptic towards this? Like, “Oh, we have this first kind of clearly right-wing person coming into power in the United States,” so everybody got along to this.

But most of the people survived—at least—I mean, things continued to be more or less not good, but still shitty at the same rate. And then you had Democrats who just did the same thing. Like, I don’t know, deportations that were just covertly under the rug—maybe not as pompously and massively as Trump wants to say.

And now with the second chance, maybe it’s the same shit like before. We did survive this. But does this feel a bit different than the first time—not for the movement, but for Trump’s term? Can you expect that he actually will go on and push forward for some things that in the first term seemed unlikely? But now—you mentioned—the wider war in the Middle East, or mass deportations, or cutting the rights of trans people?

Mo: I think definitely. I think shit will get a lot worse.

Maya: Yeah. I just think that it is going to make a difference. It is going to make a difference, even if it feels right now like we’re all kind of shell-shocked and just being like, “Okay, it’s this fucking song and dance. We’ve done this before. We know this one. Everybody get in position.”

But last time, it was like all my friends were like, “I’m going to quit smoking and start running and do parkour and buy land in Canada or whatever.”

Mo: And there are still people doing that. But it’s not… yeah. I think we’re all having a trauma response to it, where we’re just trying to protect ourselves from like, “Well, what did you expect?”

But there are people prepping for what may come. What they’re able to do is still in question. They have a majority. They’ve got the trifecta in American politics—but it’s a slim majority.

But like, you know, Democrats—there’s an argument to be made that a lot of shit got worse under Democrats. I’m not going to equate the two, but they’re both bad. The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy. You can never have too many enemies.

But yeah, Trump’s rights—I think—are going to come under attack. I think mass deportations are going to be attempted. No one’s really talked about how they plan to implement that and—

Maya: I have some thoughts on that. Yeah. I was doing some reading.

Mo: It could be very, uh—you know, I don’t think it’s going to look like any fascist movement that’s ever happened before, but as a shorthand, it could be very Gestapo. Just, you know, any vaguely brown person in America might get shipped across the border.

Maya: So—counterpoint. The way—I mean, you probably know this—but the way that deportations work is that you can only deport someone to a country that will accept them. Right?

So if they are coming from a country that’s not under enough political pressure—one that doesn’t need to cave to the United States—they can reject the deportation. They can just say, “That’s too bad.”

So what I’m anticipating, in response to a lot of that—even though many countries will still be under enough political pressure to accept deported refugees—is a big uptick in domestic internment camps within the United States.

I think we’re going to see a lot of Japanese internment-style, infinite prison camps. Camps that are styled like the American prison industrial system—where you incarcerate people and then extract their labor for cheap or free.

America’s the best at it.

Mo: America number one, baby.

Maya: Yeah. Woo! We are number one!

Mo: I’ve thought of it in sort of the same way that, as I understood it, you know, that these are part of a sort of warehouse on the islands off of Albania, right?

I was hearing—the refugee crisis in the Balkans—a lot of people are sort of siloed off to islands on the coast of Albania.

Komuna delegated moderator: Actually not, not outside of the coast. It’s actually within Albania, in a territory that was given to Italy that had full-on extraterritoriality. But the whole process is being sabotaged—put in parentheses—by the Italian courts. They have invested millions of euros, and they had a staff of 100 Italian police officers and everything. And it’s failing miserably. So at least that’s good news.

Mo: Excellent. That is… I mean.

Komuna delegated moderator: But yes, in principle, yes. There’s this idea of sending people to these countries, and it’s kind of in no man’s land.

Mo: Yeah, I think my comrade here is right that that’s probably what we’re going to see. The mass deportations will not… they’re going to get a couple steps into it. And it all depends on the deal with Mexico, or wherever they’re going. That’s a whole different thing that I don’t feel especially qualified to talk deeply about.

But they’re also talking about how we need to go to war with the drug cartels in Mexico, which would require the Mexican government—and they’ve never been involved at all.

Audience member in Komuna: Reagan did. It didn’t work.

Mo: Totally. Yeah, but you know, this time, totally for sure. These people are way more competent. And that is something that gives me a little bit of hope—these people are pretty incompetent. I don’t think they have a well-thought-out plan. So it won’t run smoothly.

But in a way, that’s a little bit worse. It’s more unpredictable. There are a lot of fault lines, a lot of chinks in the armor that we could exploit in those situations if people are brave enough and proactive enough. But yeah, it’s way more unpredictable. I don’t think they know what they’re going to do yet or if it’s all talk.

I was just talking before we got on this call about how maybe, with the tariffs and things they’re trying to do, the economy is probably going to crash if they really go through with it. And maybe they see that as a good thing. Maybe that’s the intention. Maybe they do want to do our Great Reset. We really, really don’t know. We know what we can start preparing for, but the specifics—we’re all still in a holding pattern.

Maya: Yeah.

Komuna delegated moderator: If I can just go back to one thing again—this idea of numbness. In the first term, there was this big movement that happened in the streets when Trump got elected. The fights with Proud Boys and these right-wing groups in the streets. There was Charlottesville, if I’m not mistaken, that happened. Then you had the Black Lives Matter movement that exploded all over the place.

So coming from that, we entered the Biden era—again under the Democrats—and then you had the pro-Palestinian movement that happened. So it kind of seems from the outside that there is a tendency for people to organize and do things.

But in your opinion—now what you’re saying is there’s this numbness happening—is there any potential of things escalating with these movements? Or have things shifted, things have died down, and something else needs to happen or be created? How do you see this trajectory of movements having momentum and then dying down?

And now, what can we expect with a new Trump term? And did anything change during the time Democrats were in power?

Maya: I think the feeling of numbness or apathy that a lot of us are experiencing—especially those of us who lived through this with Bush, too—where people were like, “Ahh,” and then we got a sort of, in retrospect, kind of beloved buffoon liberal presence.

But I think that at least for me, and among a lot of my friends, this is a pretty normal trauma response. And I think that for some people, that’s probably just going to be how it rolls. But for many others, it’s a coping mechanism that has the potential to be transformed into something energetic and useful and political.

Right now, everybody’s just kind of in shock and going, “Oh boy, here we go again.” A lot of us are so burnt out that we’re just like, “I can’t freak out about who the person is right now. I just can’t.”

Is it important and will it make a difference? Yes. But tomorrow? Not really. Day after? Probably not so much. As time goes on, once he’s actually inaugurated and can be more forthright with his intentions, we can make an actual risk assessment—which we can’t really yet. I think that will spark people to action.

I don’t think this numbness is permanent. I’ve seen that in comrades who are older. But at least in my case, it feels very much like a protective response. It’s temporary.

Mo: I think some of it is just, “Well yeah, what did we expect?” Those of us who were surprised by the first Trump term are just like, “Well yeah, of course this is going on.”

We need to kind of accept that every option is a bad option. Coming out of it, we had four years of Biden—basically the Crypt Keeper, without the humor of the Crypt Keeper.

Maya: Do you guys have the Crypt Keeper over there? Do you know what the Crypt Keeper is? Yay!

Mo: Um, but we’ve got, like, yeah, a lot of shit was pretty wrong there. I think it’ll change culture, it’ll move every single party rightward. And the thing that I think they will really accomplish could be boiled down to just vandalism of any sort of safety net that people have in America—they’re just going to dismantle it at a federal level.

The things that they’re able to get done, with the out-and-out fascistic intent that they are telegraphing to everyone, remains to be seen. Another thing that I run into when I talk to European comrades is, I want to impress how big the United States is. If we were to put it on your part of the world, it would stretch from the middle of Kazakhstan to the western coast of Ireland. It is massive. Controlling an area like that is, I think, impossible.

I think that America erupting into civil war, rather than being under a fascistic rule, is way more of a possibility. But yeah, they’re going to dismantle whatever they can to save money and enrich billionaires.

Maya: Oh, yeah. Say goodbye to food stamps. Say goodbye to public healthcare. Say goodbye to free birth control, even. Say goodbye to Planned Parenthood. Gone, gone.

Mo: All of it. It’s probably fucked, and no one has any trust that if a Democrat got into office they would bring any of it back. It’s just going to get worse and worse. But the one thing I will say is that while there is a numbness, and people are having their trauma responses, people are also planning.

People have been planning all throughout Biden’s presidency, continuing projects that began during Trump or before. There are people already manufacturing hormones for trans people if that gets messed up. There are re-emergences of things like the Jane Collective.

Maya: There’s DIY abortion. There’s all kinds of stuff.

Mo: The squatting culture here in America is a lot harder than in some places.

Maya: Yeah, what squatting culture?

Mo: Yeah, we got a little bit of it. But there are people talking about trying to unite with refugees to house them. People are trying to figure out solutions. Whether they’ll be successful or not, I’m glad they’re trying. The thing that gave me the most hope during the Trump presidency was how many people showed up when Nazis came to town.

Liberals, who would normally finger-wag if there was a Democrat in office, would walk up to the Black Bloc and say, “Thank you so much for being here.” There was a general understanding that this was necessary. The attitude around militancy shifted.

If I’m seeing numbness or shell-shock from anyone, it’s liberals, not necessarily radicals. Hopefully, once Trump gets into office again, people will come back around to realizing that sometimes a Nazi needs to be smashed with a brick. Sometimes a cop car needs to be torched. And we won’t have these yelling matches at protests anymore. A lot of people now are like, “We don’t engage with that. Fuck you, we don’t care what you think. What stakes are you playing with?”

Do you really think we can debate fascism out here in the streets? The most promising thing I saw was the uprising after George Floyd got killed. It was the biggest uprising since the 1960s in America. Some call it a failure—I very strongly disagree.

I have a different understanding of what success means. I’m not very invested in saying, “From this we get XYZ political reform.” That would have been nice, and that’s the only way to get it—pressure from the wild motherfuckers out there saying, “If you don’t give us what we want, we’ll burn the whole city down.” And they’re smart.

Kids are smarter now. It wasn’t anarchists or communists.

Maya: It was teenage cat girls! Yeah! The furries! I’m not even joking!

Mo: During the uprising, in Philadelphia for instance, it wasn’t the mainstream radicals—it was people whose lives are political by nature. Young Black kids leading this shit, fucking shit up. They know the stakes, and they’re not concerned with optics or positive programs. They’re like, “Fuck this. What do we have to lose?”

And after all that, this is a generation of kids who fought with police and watched them run away. Time after time, the cops ran because they recognized the kids’ power. We’re going into a second Trump presidency with people who’ve put skin in the game and know how easy it is to make cops run and grind society to a halt.

The greatest betrayal of that movement was all the socialist organizers.

Maya: Oh my god, it literally always is.

Mo: Yeah, the fucking swoopers who were wrong.

Maya: Fucking DSA.

Mo: Fucking DSA. Fucking PSL. All these fucking traitors who took all this momentum to make a membership drive for some nonviolent bullshit. We could’ve really gotten some shit done. People were saying, “We’ll defund the police, do whatever you want, just stop burning shit down.” If more shit got burned down, maybe we would’ve kept their goddamn promises.

So yeah, we’re going into this with kids who know their power. That gives me hope. I’ve got “what did you expect?” feelings, but I’m going into this scared yet hopeful. Not because of people who’ve read Kropotkin, but because of people with lived understanding. My neighbors. The people who talk to their neighbors.

The day after Trump got elected, Philly kids heard about Nazis around and said, “Okay, we’ll hang out, and if they show up, we’ll kick the shit out of them.” Kids just started looting corporate stores. They’re like, “This country elected Trump again, we still haven’t gotten reparations. Fuck this place. I’m gonna get some free shoes. And if Nazis show up, I’ll show them how we do it in Philly.” That gives me a lot of hope.

Maya: That’s what’s going to keep this shit at bay. A lot of us feeling jaded—it’s not powerlessness. It’s just like, “Hey, so the tunnel we were already digging, we’re just going to dig it a little longer, okay?”

For me, a lot of people wondering why I’m not freaking out—it’s because we were already building infrastructure to survive. We already live in informal economies and communities. Everyone I know is a career criminal. We’re drug dealers and hookers. We already take care of each other. We already have protections in place. We have a world built. Now we just have to double down.

We can shift. The pressure is more intense. But the reality hasn’t changed that much. The project of survival—we’ve already been working on it for years.

Mo: Yeah. That’s a great point.

Maya: It doesn’t make a difference to most of my Black trans friends. They live in a squat the police can’t touch anyway. Things are fucking dangerous…

Mo: And if you know revolutionary history, you know the revolution is fomented first by the dispossessed, the criminal class. A lot of us are just like—it’s that scene in the movie where the guy in the noose turns to the other and says, “Huh, first time?” So I’m looking at people like, “Did you expect something good to happen?”

Maya: That’s it. In my close community, a lot of us are sex workers. Sex workers are always on the front lines. We’re indicator species. They test shit on us before they test it on who they consider real citizens.

When we lost Backpage, the FBI seized all our tools. We’ve been creating ways of survival on the margins. So if you live in a cul-de-sac in Glendale, your shit may or may not get rocked. But for us, we’re already fighting to survive. And this doesn’t change that much.

Mo: We’ll see how much it changes. But it’s like—just another day in my beautiful America.

I can’t really speak to what this will mean internationally.

Audience member in Komuna: Bad.

Mo: Bad. But in the USA, we have a pretty good idea—it’s also bad. Maybe we’re all accelerationists now, whether we like it or not. Maybe we’re all nihilists now.

Komuna delegated moderator: You just mentioned, and this is my leading end question. For us outside the U.S., the U.S. is of particular interest because it is an empire. When the U.S. sneezes, we feel the stink of the breath.

You see how important the U.S. is here. We even have Bill Clinton in the central square, on George Bush Boulevard of all places.

So in this sense, what would you want us to know—those of us outside the U.S., especially in the Balkans, since now you know the region somewhat? What do we need to know about what’s going on there? Is there anything we should prepare for, do, or think about?

Mo: I guess the obvious answer is the massive role we play in the genocide in Gaza. There’s been some very brave action taken against that here, but it’s not militant enough, not organized enough to stop this huge goddamn war machine.

It’s an international issue to try to stop this. But yeah, it’s careening closer and closer to a wider global conflict. That is very frightening—it should be frightening to everyone. It’s very frightening to me and all my comrades here, especially because we’re in the heart of the Great Satan.

We hold a great deal of responsibility for not throwing our bodies on the train tracks of this horrible machine that’s leading us all to death.

Maya: For me, my first thought is kind of like what we are already doing and part of why I and I came to Kosovo, which is just networking. Networking, networking. Find your comrades. Find them in different countries, on different continents. And like, to me, having that serves a dual purpose. It serves one, like, I don’t know, let’s just imagine, I don’t know, something happens and [redacted name] is like, I need to get to fucking New Jersey. What the fuck am I going to do? But guess what? You already know someone in New Jersey, problem solved.

Mo: You know somebody in Michigan who knows somebody in New Jersey.

Maya: Totally. Creating these nodes, like, I think, you know, I’m an American and we sometimes love to be self-deprecating. No, I’m an Irish Catholic. We love to be self-deprecating. The American helps a little bit with it. But we are not, we’re very, we tend to be self-obsessed people and I think internationalism is the only way to go. So, like, yeah. Also, connecting across borders is extremely important in any way you can. Online, going to book fairs, just like traveling around.

Pen pals. Ah, but also another thing about that… tactically, I prefer the model of many affinity groups and many small actionals to one large group. I mean it’s more realistic and I think it’s a safety issue. I had this when I was in Greece recently, when I was like, okay, why is everyone at this one place instead of like four people over there doing one thing, four people over there doing another thing, four people doing another thing, because that’s what has shown time and time again, at least in the United States, that’s what works. The police can only be one or two places at a time.

Mo: Yeah, you get five people going wild in a different park.

Maya: Yeah, shit popping off all at the same time that a little head spin around like the exorcist and they start puke.

Mo: It does not matter how many cops they’ve got. Like a decentralized insurgency—is it possible for an empire to defend against them?

Maya: You can get a helicopter around up a big group of people or whatever the fuck, like they’re bumping up a little low or something, but like you’ve got little nodes popping off here, there, here, there, here, there, especially if they don’t know where to look. It’s one of the best tactics that we have as anarchists is fear.

Mo: Yeah, we want to make fear change sides. We get a lot of—and like Americans do, right, like get a lot of shit for our lack of militancy and people do need to understand like how deep the repression is here. You hit a cop with a brick in France, you’re going to get a week in jail. And here that, you know, you gotta get a good, you’re like, yeah, but—

Komuna delegated moderator: So if you hit the cop, hit it properly.

Mo: But, yeah, a lot of people are like, why aren’t Americans more militant? That’s a really fair thing. I mean, should be, but you’re looking for the spicy stuff. You’re looking for the riot porn. You’re looking for the big, everyone goes marching and everyone gets wild there. People are getting wild. People are militant. It is just shit. People are not talking about it.

Maya: You can’t talk about it for a reason. We don’t—we cannot talk about it.

Mo: They don’t broadcast it and it’s tactically sound to not do it, but there are—but people are putting, they’re putting skin in the game and their courage is on display every day out here.

Maya: And that’s what we were talking about when we went to that party at that terrifying building—the youth palace or whatever. And we were sitting with the Dutch motorcycle kids who I love and, you know, they were like, oh, we didn’t know there were anarchists in the U.S.

Mo: And I was like, oh, it hurt me so bad.

Maya: It was painful. But on the other hand, I was like, I know so many people doing so much bullshit that I can’t talk about any of it. And so I was just like, you know what, good, good, in some ways. Like, I think there’s—it’s a double-edged sword, right? Because you want certainly people—you want some amount of visibility to say, hey, we’re out here, it’s happening, we’re resisting, and y’all are not alone. But you have to have a certain amount of stress in collusion and OPSEC. Because that’s the name of the game. You know, like, I can’t—yeah, I was like, of course I haven’t heard about the coolest shit I’ve ever heard of happening in fucking Pennsylvania because no one can hear about it.

Mo: And it’s like, for propaganda purposes, not great for, you know, growing just a little respect for the noble American anarchist. It’s not great, but it’s pretty—it’s necessary. We’re in the heart of the great Satan. We gotta do what we gotta do.

Maya: Yeah, big brother’s watching.

Mo: Big brother’s watching always.

Komuna delegated moderator: From me, I have no specific question that I’ve kind of prepared and helped improvise during this, but I think if anybody wants questions, Aaron online or anybody here, feel free to talk, or you can also ask us questions.

Member of the audience in Komuna: Um, I mean, I think it’s kind of weird because I was in Berlin in October for the first time, and I had a watermelon sticker on my wallet. A person next to me saw it and said, “Oh yeah, get rid of that because they might check your wallet.” And right afterwards, when I came back, Germany had completely criminalized any type of pro-Palestine protest or even any visible solidarity—basically anything will get your ass detained. And I was not ready to get detained by Hans, the German guy or whatever. Definitely a Hans. No queer German is detaining me ever.

It was just such a weird experience. And then it got me thinking: in Kosovo, even us, as a country, we got kind of declared for Israel or whatever. One of my friends started wearing a keffiyeh around the university—she literally wears it in public—and we had this one guy swear at her, but then nobody else said anything. So it’s kind of like, I guess we haven’t reached the point where Zionists are very public here—except for politicians.

Not to mention that Trump has really unfavorable foreign policy plans for Kosovo, especially because of how he’s like, “I’m not going to involve the Americans in foreign conflict anymore.” And you know what that means for us. If he goes through with that plan, we’re going to have really big problems with our neighbor in the North, who’ll be like, “finally!”

So I guess my question is kind of: do you think we’re also prone to becoming completely numb to this—any decisions made? Kosovo unfortunately is still a place that has to rely on the U.S. for a lot. So what would you say… like, hope?

Mo: How Kosovo will do… I think Kosovo has a lived experience of shit going really sideways that Americans are only dimly aware of. I mean, it sucks over here, and it is kind of a gun-soap nightmare, but—

Maya: We have not had the same kind of war in our lifetimes.

Mo: We haven’t. We haven’t been Balkanized ourselves. But I don’t know… America has a tendency to fuck up the rest of the world—unless Daddy China comes in and puts this buying dog out of its misery. Save us, President Xi. I don’t know. We’re just going to have to see what the foreign policy is. We’re already deep in every other country’s business; that’s just par for the course. I don’t know if that’s going to uptick or down.

Member of the audience in Komuna: I mean, I guess something that [name redacted] can also chime in on—because I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with the news—but one of the biggest fights going on in Kosovo right now is whether we should implement sex education in schools. Which is a whole other problem in itself, and [same name redacted] can comment more since they’re a teacher.

But there’s this guy, a member of parliament, and he’s completely against it. He’s all about “protecting” family values. But the thing is, if we knew how to do it healthily, we’d be more keen to keep families together. His entire argument is based on very fascist, right-wing ideologies—heteronormative purity culture. Like, “Albanians need to keep the purity.” And Roma people? Who cares, right? That sort of ideology. Even if it gets implemented, the government’s not going to do anything to extend it to racial minorities in Kosovo, who are literally a big part of the population.

Mo: And it’s such a big part. A way that they try to deny anyone who’s queer is by attaching this weird groomer narrative.

Maya: Right. Like, you’re a pedophile. Which is funny because Trump is literally a pedophile—

Member of the audience in Komuna: He’s a convicted rapist.

Maya: Almost a prerequisite to get into the White House.

Mo: Yeah. But with that whole sex education issue—of course it’s necessary. These people oppose it because they think it’ll stop molestation from being exposed. Like, the kids might learn what molestation is.

Maya: You don’t get to have the “good touching versus bad touching” talk if the whole talk is “no touching.”

Member of the audience in Komuna: Exactly. We haven’t had anything explicit said yet about queer people or non-straight communities. But even the debate framed it like: if you don’t allow this, people won’t even know what STDs are. And these people—seriously—they’re this close to bringing in an Imam to speak on this shit. Like, the same guy probably has given STDs to more people than anyone else. And it’s not just about recognizing if you’re being assaulted or molested. It’s about understanding disease prevention too. But their attitude is like, “Why would you want to talk about disease? It’s natural to want to have kids.”

Mo: You gotta—but only when you’re married.

[The following part was cut as it’s more informal discussion between comrades.]

 [1]  a group of Italian anarchists insurrectionists in the United States, named due to the following of teachings of Luigi Galleani

 [2] a bomber that blew up a US federal building in Oklahoma (known as Oklahoma City Bombing) killing 167 people

[3] Curtis Guy Yarvin, known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug, a fascist right wing blogger

 [4] Peter Andreas Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir, also known for his fascist right wing libertarian political stances