Anarchistcook’s Weblog

8/7/2023 Joy Schendledecker  – <schendledecker@icloud.com>

This is the post I am responding to:

Peace, Love, and Dog-Whistles in Santa Cruz? 

Last weekend I attended the annual Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembrance Day event at the Clock Tower, which this year (as in the past) was enveloped by a “Peace in Ukraine” rally. The Collateral Damage sculpture is cleaned and polished annually, and is an important, intersectionalist anti-war, anti-racist, universal justice symbol for the community to rally around. 

Generally speaking, this is my crowd, and the kind of event that I love: grassroots organized, small, peace-loving, intersectionalist, sometimes a little cheesy. But this year I had some qualms about attending at all, because of the involvement of one group: Brave and Free Santa Cruz. 

I have nothing against any of the individuals in this group, since (as far as I know) I don’t know any of them particularly well. I suspect that a few people that I like very much may be increasingly drawn to them as they are drawn to support RFK Jr’s seriously effed-up presidential bid or Ukraine anti-war positions that may lean towards Putin-apologists. 

I’m used to having close relationships with people that I disagree with strongly on a few issues (including Trump voters and anti-vaxxers). So I’ve been thinking hard about why this group concerns me so much, especially at this particular event, aside from my immediate turn-off due to their anti-vaxx stance. 

It’s because they employ dangerous tropes and misinformation, while partnering with people and organizations that are funded by the far-right. It makes the whole world, and our little community, more dangerous for queer, BIPOC, disabled, neurodiverse, nonconformist people. People like me, my kids, and my friends. People I love. What they espouse or endorse is also fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-social, in spite of their stated values. 

Scan the Brave and Free Santa Cruz home page and you might decide that their views are not so bad. I think there’s general consensus in our community that we support much of what they include in their vision bullet points: healthy ecosystems, free speech, civil rights, anti-war peace, and the weakening of corporate power. 

Scratch the surface and follow their links, and you might start to think: “They’re a little out there, but hey, to each their own. They’re not outright saying they hate jews or trans people.” 

Unfortunately, their foundational Mission Statement, Vision, and Values include beliefs that are inseparable from antisemitic, racist, anti-queer, trans-phobic, xenophobic, anti-abortion, and decidedly reactionary movements, ideas, and individuals. They are linked to a world-wide movement that can be incredibly dangerous. 

Central to this movement are dog-whistles–insider speak or code words and symbols that outsiders either don’t get the significance of or that can be plausibly denied when called out. 

For example, personal sovereignty in the literal sense is something that most of us can probably agree on: privacy and bodily agency are essential to our civil rights and healthcare choices. Personal Sovereignty in the context of the other words on the Brave and Free homepage is also coded to reference the Sovereign Citizen movement, which, in large part, is rooted in white-supremecy, colonialism, patriarchy, and rejection of our social contracts to live together in ways that are developed over time through community, consensus, and democracy. It is anti-communitarian and libertarian in its anti-government and anti-tax stances. 

The Great Reset is a real and troubling pro-capitalist program; the Great Reset conspiracy theory employs anti-semitic tropes and dog-whistles. 

Another event they’re holding this week focuses on 15-Minute Cities. 15-Minute Cities are a good thing: it’s how most people lived for ages, basically getting around by foot or slow transport to everything they needed in their village or neighborhood in about 15 minutes. It’s a great idea for universal accessibility and pro-social economic and environmental justice. Somehow, the 15-Minute City conspiracy theory, on the other hand, invokes the bogeymen of government surveillance, confinement, control, and scarcity. 

We have good reasons to oppose Geolitica (FKA PredPol) and I have written about them critically in the past. But I can find no link between them and the concept of 15-Minute Cities at all. 

The “News” link on Brave and Free takes you directly to The Last American Vagabond (LAV) website, an implicit endorsement of their content. Among many (MANY!) other troubling elements, in their online shop they sell this t-shirt. 

As an outsider, I didn’t get the significance of this name/image at all until I did a couple of internet searches. It’s a reference to a 2018 shooting-suicide at Youtube’s headquarters in San Bruno, CA. The shooter, cis-woman Nasim Najafi Aghdam, was quickly co-opted by the conspiracy world as a trans-woman scapegoat, the idea being that trans women are actually dangerous men. In part thanks to anti-trans fake news like this, in the US murders of trans people nearly doubled from 2018-2022. And we do have anti-trans shenanigans happening in our own county and state, it’s not just Ron DeSantis’s Florida suffering. Check out this local gem! 

I don’t want to get into an encyclopedic listing of problematic LAV partners and merch, so I’ll just flag Lift the Veil and an apparent love of cryptocurrencies. 

I’m an artist with ADHD, and I love (or can’t help) thinking outside the box and lateral thinking. But when lateral thinking falls off the edge of the earth and stockpiles weapons or tries to coup or promote hate (even laterally), I’m done. Like the Querdenker movement in Germany tipping over into the Reichsbürger movement. 

I’ll leave you with one more resource to help get you grounded: The Transnational Institute. Please, we cannot fall into hate-fuelled conspiracy theories that harm or kill people. It’s not enough to say that the less obvious discriminatory views of a group can be ignored so that we can work together on what we do agree on. It’s not enough to tolerate hate so that we’re not seen as canceling members of our community. 

We can only come together in solidarity when we are truly and proactively anti-racist, anti-antisemitic, and anti-sexist. We must call in our community members to do better if they want to collaborate with us. We must make our community safe for ourselves and all of our diversities. If a rally or meeting is unsafe for any of us, then it’s not okay to keep going; or to allow those associated with hate to infiltrate our events.