ANOTHER FBI INVENTED TERRORIST PLOT
December 16, 2025
Audrey Carroll, 30 , Zachary Page, 32, Dante Gaffield, 24 and Tina Lai, 41 were arrested in what is likely an FBI invented terrorist plot.
The criminal complaint against the just formed “Turtle Island Liberation Front” suggests this was another FBI invented terrorist attack and that the four people arrested were set up.
The FBI used an informant from the beginning and then added an “undercover employee” (UCE) so they could “disrupt” the fake plot they were setting up.
The timing of the arrests and massive media attention accusing the newly formed Turtle Island Liberation Front was a leftist pro Palestinian anti ICE and anti-capitalist “terrorist” group supports the Trump agenda of fear as outlined in September 25, 2025 National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) called “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”.
It seems very unlikely that the four that have been arrested would have called any such plot “OPERATION MIDNIGHT SUN” and would call themselves “Order of the Black Lotus” but one could believe the FBI would invent such a name.
It appears from the complaint that this plot was initiated by a paid FBI infiltrator and that both the informant and an FBI agent who graduated from the academy last year guided the defendants through the plot and to the site where the arrests were made. What are the chances that a bomb plot emerged naturally out of a small group chat that a paid informant and undercover agent were both passively members of?
Based on past FBI invented plots it is likely that we will learn that the “hand written” plans were drafted by the informant. The pebble in the shoe and the buying of “bomb making” items on Amazon and the photograph of the “evidence” still life that the authorities are sharing that looks like past frame ups also point to an FBI invented plot.
We saw a similar evidence still life provided by the FBI in the terrorism arrests of eight Food Not Bombs volunteers during the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis in 2008
I have direct experience with FBI invented terrorist plots FBI infiltrator “Anna” Zoe Elizabeth Voss spent time at the Food Not Bombs literature table and kitchen at St Marks during the 2004 protest at the Republican National Convention in New York City. A year later she participated as a “medic” at the protest against the Biotech industry. Zoe Elizabeth Voss, Zach Jenson, Lauren Weiner, Eric McDavid and I shared the second floor porch of a Food Not Bombs volunteers home in West Philadelphia each night during the 2005 Food Not Bombs World Gathering. The four of them traveled across the country afterwards in a car provided by the FBI to a California ski lodge provided by the FBI. The FBI raided the house arresting Eric, Zachary and Wren. Zoe Elizabeth Voss was paid over $65,000 for her role in securing Eric McDavid’s 19 year sentence on a FBI invented terrorist plot. On January 8, 2015, after he spent eight years and 360 days in prison, McDavid’s conviction was overturned after the prosecution conceded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had withheld thousands of pages of potentially exculpatory evidence.
FBI infiltrator “Anna” Zoe Elizabeth Voss
Five cooks at Occupy Cleveland were arrested by members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force on April 30, 2012 on charges of conspiracy and attempted use of explosive materials to damage physical property affecting interstate commerce.
The FBI affidavit makes it clear that the five ‘black bloc’ anarchists were swept into an FBI sting operation using an agent provocateur and an FBI Special Agent. According to the criminal complaint the FBI’s informant and Special agent spent over half a year systematically pushing the five to participate in an FBI invented plot to plant C-4 explosives on the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park near Cleveland. All five were convicted and sentenced to a decade in prison.
If the local charismatic member of your activist group asks you to join their secret organization for “serious people” in order to make bombs you must assume they work for the feds.
I have a chapter in The Anarchist Cookbook “Avoiding FBI entrapment”.
“Still it is not always possible to avoid being the target of the authorities, so take precautions to limit the damage if the state seeks to silence you. Taking actions that you can be proud of may be the most important single thing you can do. Think of the consequences of your acts. How will you feel if someone is injured or killed because of something you did? Could your actions be used to discredit the movement? Could they add to the divisions, fear, and paranoia in the community?”
The arrests of the “Turtle Island Liberation Front” for the New Years Eve plot using that evenings fireworks to hide what is supposed to be an act of political violence follows the arrest of 17 activists in Texas after launching fireworks on July 4, 2025 outside the Prairieland ICE facility. An unidentified person shot and hit a policeman in the neck. KERA reporter Caroline Love writes, “Court records don’t identify who fired the shots,” suggesting the shooter may well be working with law enforcement.
THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK
https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html
THE CURRENT STATE OF STATE REPRESSION
https://keithmchenry.substack.com/p/the-current-state-of-state-repression
THE CURRENT STATE OF STATE REPRESSION
December 12, 2025
Food Not Bombs has a 45 year history of defending human and animal rights. Volunteers have provided support for indigenous struggles, class conflicts and in defense of the environment. We stand for the rights of those without a roof to a safe place to sleep free of police disruption and violence. Of course we aren’t going to let governments interfere with the sharing of meals and literature. We will always defend the basic human right to share meals without government permission.
When the Pensacola Florida Police arrested Food Not Bombs volunteer Mike Kimberl for sharing meals after dark in Martin Luther King jr Park the day after Thanksgiving 2025 Food Not Bombs refused efforts by the city to issue them a permit. Mike and the other Food Not Bombs volunteers have been sharing meals every Friday at 6 pm in Pensacola for 14 years Daylight Saving Time or not.
Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves and his police department don’t seem to understand that they have no say in how people help one another. That’s a most basic of freedoms. People don’t ever need permission from the government to share the gift of a warm meal. Food Not Bombs agreed during the1992 and 1995 World Gatherings that we would never request or accept a permit to share food with the hunger after the San Francisco authorities used their process to try and stop our meals. If they believe that they can give you permission they also believe they can take that permission away.
Melbourne Food Not Bombs on the Atlantic coast of Florida successfully pushed back against a local ordinance designed to drive the group from sight. “We are not here to negotiate with you” one volunteer tells City Council. She reminds the council members that the City of Fort Lauderdale was ordered to pay $750,000 to the attorneys that represented Food Not Bombs after the federal courts ruled it was our First Amendment right to share meals without a permit.
Another threat is brewing against anti-fascists, anarchists and groups like Food Not Bombs that organize using anarchist influenced nonhierarchical principles.
A July 4th fireworks protest outside an ICE detention center inspired the July 22nd story on the Dallas Fort Worth NPR station KERA,“Shooting at Alvarado ICE facility, other attacks: The new normal?”
KERA reporter Caroline Love says, “Era Yousuf describes herself as being close friends with many of the defendants — including Benjamin Song, who she said prefers to be called Suzuka. Song, who was recently arrested, is accused of purchasing four guns found in connection with the shooting, according to court records.”
“Yousuf met them through protests and local activism, including the group Food Not Bombs, a nonprofit organization that distributes food that would otherwise be discarded to people experiencing homelessness.”
“Yousuf, who moved to another state recently, said she wasn’t involved with the demonstration at the detention center or any of the planning. She said her friends are not violent.”
“‘These aren’t dangerous people,’ Yousuf said. ‘They want to help innocent folks that are being kept prisoner.’”
The report also notes that “Court records don’t identify who fired the shots,” suggesting the shooter may well be working with law enforcement.
The Alvarado ICE facility shooting was highlighted by Trump and his cabinet at his October 8th White House Antifa roundtable.
Trump stated that, “In July approximately a dozen Antifa aligned militants stormed the ice facility in Texas, and then lured offices out of the building before firing dozens of rounds at police. They were. crazy, frankly. Shooting 1 Texas officer in the neck.”
During that same Antifa roundtable, Jonathan Choe, a reporter for Turning Point USA’s newsroom Frontlines, claimed that political extremism on the ideological left intersects with the “homeless drug crisis.” As evidence, he shared a recent report from the Discovery Institute, a Seattle based think tank best known for promoting the intelligent-design theory that God made everything in seven days to refute the theory of evolution.
“In many cases, the homeless industrial complex is running cover for antifa, and antifa is benefiting from American tax dollars, and they’re essentially being used as the muscle,” Choe reported.
“He then pointed to Stop the Sweeps, a franchise-like, community-coordinated campaign that aims to prevent state violence against homeless encampments.” writes Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling in an October 8th story in the New Republic.
The Stop the Sweeps protests in Santa Cruz have been focused against the local homeless shelter Housing Matters and their coordination with the city to clear the streets of the homeless around their shelter.
The suggestion that Food Not Bombs could be national security threat continued. On October 3, 2025, Fox New’s Jesse Watters aired “Antifa whistleblower BREAKS SILENCE, warns of violence,” interviewing an actor he calls Eric about how he got involved with Antifa. Watter’s starts by explaining Eric had to disguise himself to protect his life. He goes on asking, “How did you get roped into this whole Antifa thing?” Fake Eric responds, “It stared when I was young. I got in through working with different groups like the ARA, Cop Watch, Food Not Bombs and the punk rock movement.” The pretend former Antifa Eric also refers to the WTO protest in Seattle and claimed he had a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook.
On September 25, 2025, Trump issued NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM / NSPM-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence Presidential National Security Memorandum. It includes,“As described in the Order of September 22, 2025 (Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization), the groups and entities that perpetuate this extremism have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations. For example, Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin engraved the bullets used in the murder with so-called “anti-fascist” rhetoric.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered the FBI on December 4, 2025 to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” according to the Justice Department memo.
Under number 7 “Disseminating intelligence on extremist groups”
“Within 60 days of the issuance of this guidance, the FBI, in coordination with its partners on the JTTFs, shall disseminate an intelligence bulletin on Antifa and Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremist groups. The bulletin should describe the relevant organizations’ structures, funding sources, and tactics so that law enforcement partners can effectively investigate and policy makers can effectively understand the nature and gravity of the threat posed by these extremist groups.”
It might be helpful to learn that when the FBI – Joint Terrorism Task Force observed the August 22, 1988 arrests of 24 Food Not Bombs volunteers at Golden Gate Park they sent a memo to the San Francisco FBI Field Office claiming we were “a credible national security threat”. That November during the Thanksgiving holiday National Guard units across the country held domestic terrorism workshops featuring Food Not Bombs as “one of America’s most hardcore terrorist groups”. In April 2009 the US State Department gave a lecture asking who is more dangerous, “Al-Qaeda or the people sharing vegan meals in the parks?” In conclusion they believed that the people sharing vegan meals were more dangerous because they were influencing the American pubic “to support diverting military spending to education, healthcare and other social services” reducing according to them the country’s ability to fight groups like Al-Qaeda.
While several Food Not Bombs volunteers have been arrested, framed or entrapped by FBI terrorism changes in plots invented by the agency it has not slowed the growth of our movement. Each of these cases was painful for the families and friends of those targeted but if anything it has encouraged more people to participate.
We maybe entering a time of transition where those of us who have no attachment to the current political and economic system can thrive.
In crisis like this people tend to step up and help one another. The collapse frees us to appreciated the value of community and compassion over the cold techno feudal digital dystopia during the dying days of this cruel US Empire.
THE CURRENT STATE OF STATE REPRESSION
https://keithmchenry.substack.com/p/the-current-state-of-state-repression
EMPIRE COLLAPSE
December 11, 2025
Could this open a path to a future of community and compassion?
The US Empire may have run its course. The last assets of America being cannibalized by the techno-fascist billionaire class hovering around Washington DC and Silicon Valley. The vultures of Wall Street are perched to sell the top of the stock market. We could be on the precipice of an economic crash as brutal as the world suffered in the 1930s.
For millions of Americans the Great Depression 2.0 has been their reality for that last few years. There was a 32% increase in the number of Americans who became homeless during the Biden Presidency.
The month long disruption of SNAP food stamps that forced 47 million people to worry about their next meal was a wakeup call for America.
But even before the SNAP disaster Americans were struggling. I have been getting calls nearly everyday for that past four years from all over the country seeking food. Many haven’t eaten in days. Others tell me they are eating canned cat food or have only one box of cereal in their pantry. Often these are seniors who have been referred to me by a health insurance company who gave them a $100 gift card when they signed up for Medicare Advantage. When the money runs out they call the number on the back.
United Health gave the Food Not Bombs toll free number to a woman in Corpus Christi, Texas during the first week of December. She told me that the Meals On Wheels waiting list was months long, the food bank couldn’t help her because she couldn’t drive and when she called SNAP they said they had run out of money. She is typical of my dozen or more such conversations I have each day. Fortunately I was able to direct her to Tacos Not Bombs.
The economy really is a house of cards. Families forced to buy ever more expensive groceries with credit cards at 20% interest. There is little money left after paying rent.
Meanwhile AI companies are using a circular financing scheme promising each other $300 billion contracts to gin up the value of their stocks and the Federal Reserve rushes billions in overnight repro (repurchase agreement) to save banks from defaulting on their obligations. One giant economic crashing Enron style Ponzi Scheme ready to crash. Get ready.
The number of people coming to eat with their local Food Not Bombs group is already on the increase. A collapse could send additional torrents of people seeking food and material support.
When industry and businesses closed sending millions into unemployment after the 1929 crash there were no food banks, soup kitchens or established mutual aid groups like we have today. And thankfully if food banks and foundation funded meal programs are used by the authorities to force compliance with the dystopian programs of control there is already a strong and growing network of hundreds independent mutual aid groups like Food Not Bombs that will refuse to cooperate
.The closest relief effort to that of Food Not Bombs was the Catholic Worker. In response to the savage hunger around her a young woman from New York named Dorothy Day started the first Catholic Worker soup kitchen in the Lower East Side of Manhattan New York. The depression had already been inflicting pain when their first pot of soup was removed from the stove and they spooned out the first bowls of stew. Unlike Food Not Bombs they had to learn the art of the soup line when the crisis was already unbearable.
This time when all goes bust there are hundreds of experienced cooks and logistic experts are at the ready in hundreds of American cities. Volunteers that have years of practice providing the most essential gifts of food, water, clothing and companionship. They have personal relationships with those working at groceries, bakeries and a whole network of local support. Many local Food Not Bombs chapters have been active for decades.
Our network of resources and support are already well established. Volunteers understand logistics, a skill that translates into being capable of providing hundreds of hot meals and emergency relief efforts after hurricanes, fires and social upheaval. Most Food Not Bombs groups are in a position to respond.
EMPIRE COLLAPSE – Could this open a path to a future of community and compassion?https://keithmchenry.substack.com/p/empire-collapse
THE JOYS OF ANTIFASCISM
October 10, 2025
Community is the cure
The authorities might be trying to link Food Not Bombs to their threats to stamp out anarchists and Antifa.
This July, NPR’s KERN News published the story, “Shooting at Alvarado ICE facility, other attacks: The new normal?” The report included this passage, “Era Yousuf describes herself as being close friends with many of the defendants — including Benjamin Song, who she said prefers to be called Suzuka. Song, who was recently arrested, is accused of purchasing four guns found in connection with the shooting, according to court records.”
“Yousuf met them through protests and local activism, including the group Food Not Bombs, a nonprofit organization that distributes food that would otherwise be discarded to people experiencing homelessness.” The government claims that there were two shooters but only identifies Song. One defendant claims the group intended to launch fireworks outside the detention center on the 4th of July to provide solidarity with the prisoners on Independence Day. KERN reporter Caroline Love wrote, “At least one of the defendants told authorities he didn’t know there would be any violence according to court records. So far, eleven people are charged with three counts of attempted murder of a federal officer and three counts of discharging a firearm in relation to and in furtherance of a crime of violence for the shooting. Court records don’t identify who fired the shots.” This suggests that it was an unidentified government informant that fired at the police when they came out to see what the noise was about.
The Alvarado ICE facility shooting was highlighted by Trump and his cabinet at his October 8th ANTIFA round table.
Trump claimed that “In July approximately a dozen Antifa aligned militants stormed the ICE facility in Texas, and then lured offices out of the building before firing dozens of rounds at police. They were crazy, frankly, shooting one Texas officer in the neck.”
The “Soros Network” among others were listed at Trump’s ANTIFA round table as supporters of violence.
“Patel said his department is working with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “who is allowing us to map out these networks through their financial criminal activities, which has been going on for decades.”
Scott Bessent was the chief investment officer of Soros Fund Management, a $30 billion family office. After graduation, Bessent went to work at the CIA law firm Brown Brothers Harriman, then did stints at the Soros Fund, Protégé Partners, and others before George Soros recruited him as CIO in 2011. In August 2015 Bessent announced that he will leave at the end of the year—with a $2 billion allocation from Soros to start his own hedge fund.
Soros Open Society Foundation provided funding for the NGO’s that participated in the Orange Revolution and 2014 coup of Ukraine as well as providing millions to Indivisible including $9 million in 2024.
On October 3, 2025, Fox New’s Jesse Waters aired “Antifa whistleblower BREAKS SILENCE, warns of violence” interviewing an actor he calls Eric about how he got involved with Antifa. Water’s starts by explaining Eric has to disguise himself to protect his life. He goes on asking, “How did you get roped into this whole Antifa thing?” Fake Eric responds, “It stared when I was young. I got in through working with different groups like the ARA, Cop Watch, Food Not Bombs and the punk rock movement.” The pretend former Antifa Eric also refers to the WTO protest in Seattle and claimed he had a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook.
I rewrote the Anarchist Cookbook after the FBI entrapped five young Occupy Cleveland cooks including two Food Not Bombs volunteers in an FBI invented May Day bombing plot of a bridge and noticed that the federal complaint repeatedly noted that they possessed William Powell’s book which they admitted they had provided to the defendants.
All the hype about anarchists and Antifa suggests that the federal authorities might start attempting to increase their disruption of peace groups like CodePink and Food Not Bombs. Trump signed an executive order Designating Antifa a Domestic Terrorist Organization on September 22, 2025 even though there is no Antifa Organization so that can mean anyone could be a target.
After that he issued NSPM-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence Presidential National Security Memorandum.
On October 4, 2025 Trump’s aid Stephen Miller told NewsMax “Every time we make an arrest, we are initiating an investigation into the entire domestic terrorist network.”
He adds, “The president issued a national security presidential memorandum, an NSPM, making clear that it is the national security priority of the United States law enforcement to dismantle, disrupt, defeat, and destroy these domestic terror networks.”
The Trump administration isn’t only targeting organizations or groups but even individuals and “entities” whom NSPM-7 says can be identified by any of the following “indicia” (indicators) of violence:
• anti-Americanism,
• anti-capitalism,
• anti-Christianity,
• support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
• extremism on migration,
• extremism on race,
• extremism on gender
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.
So really anyone with a thinking brain and a compassionate heart.
Food Not Bombs meals are a port in the storm of these times of authoritarian threats. Building community, celebrating our independence and cultivating a society of compassion outside the drumbeat of fascism.
We can avoid being framed in one of the FBI’s plots by speaking up when conversations or jokes about getting guns, suggesting arson or other acts of violence by speaking up and reminding them that Food Not Bombs is dedication to nonviolent direct action. We aren’t passive but also we don’t support the organizing of physical attacks against people. As our name makes clear, we are food and not bombs.
The FBI has used informants to suggest bombings and other acts of terrorism in the Food Not Bombs community such as happened with Cleveland Food Not Bombs or our volunteer Eric McDavid who was framed and sentenced to 19 years for an FBI invented plot that he was not aware of believing that “Sarah” the informant was just joking.
The feds can try to cause infighting by hinting someone is an informant so it’s wise to never make such an accusation. Those making suggestions to use violence may have been encouraged by someone they keep “randomly” running into and otherwise are great and dedicated activists.
But the main thing I would suggest is have fun and enjoy all the beautiful connections we make when volunteering with Food Not Bombs.
Keith McHenry
Co-founder of the Food Not Bombs movement
Shooting at Alvarado ICE facility, other attacks: The new normal?
Antifa whistleblower BREAKS SILENCE, warns of violence
HUNGER IS NOT A GAME
May 16, 2025
When a billion people go hungry each day, how can we spend another dollar on war?
We need Food Not Bombs more today than at any point in our 45 year history. President Trump has proposed the first trillion dollar military budget an increase of 13 percent to $1.01 trillion in Pentagon spending while also proposing 22% in cuts for social services. President Ronald Reagan 2.0.
The lines of people seeking meals at Food Not Bombs grow longer month after month. American seniors call me all day long distressed that they have no food.
“I worked my whole life and always paid my taxes but now I am forced to beg for help. This is embarrassing” Jim said adding that all the pantries in his area have closed because they couldn’t keep up demand. I could hear his tears over my phone. Hour after hour calls of desperation. One has not eaten in three days. Another is eating cat food. All one woman has left is a box of Cheerios. It is heartbreaking that often all I can do is suggest they call their local 211 help line.
But nothing can match the shear horror of Israel and the United States starving two million Palestinians reducing thousands of children to skin wrapped skeletons.
On October 9, 2023, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on Gaza, pledging that “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”
Thousands of truckloads of food have been blocked for over 70 days sitting but a few miles from these desperate mouths. the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report saids nearly 71,000 cases of acute malnutrition among children under five are expected between April 2025 and March 2026. We have gone from witnessing drone video of the February 29, 2024,Flour Massacre killing over 100 Palestinians as they struggled to grab food for their families to images of starved sunken eyed children breathing their last breathe.
When Food Not Bombs started during the May 24, 1980 Occupation Attempt of Seabrook Nuclear Power Station the eight of us could not have imagined that four and a half decades later that we would have provided billions of meals with the hungry. Yet the wars would also continue. Wars of famine and wars of genocide. A billion dollars in naval forces, lost F 18 Super Hornets and US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drones lost in one month this year defending Israel’s right to exterminate the families of Gaza.
The idea that Food Not Bombs volunteers would be sharing food in Moscow, Russia would have seemed impossible in those days when we were busy organizing for protests like the June 12, 1982 March for Nuclear Disarmament where over a million protesters walked across Manhattan to the Great Meadow that day. A world without a Soviet Union was unimaginable.
Food Not Bombs started when my friend Boston University Law student Brian Feigenbaum was arrested during our May 24th attempt to stop the nuclear power station on the New Hampshire coast. We found someone who could bail out Brian and that evening as we chugged back to Boston we agreed to raise the funds needed to repay his generosity by holding bake sales.
Well that was not at all lucrative but we did have a moving company called Smooth Move and one of our customers was discarding a yellow and green poster that said, “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” It was a light bulb moment for our little collective. We bought surplus military uniforms, mounted the poster on cardboard, dressed as generals and headed out with our baked goods asking pedestrians to help us buy a bomber. We had stumbled onto an effective way to get an otherwise distracted public to hear our message.
While we were pitching our baked goods for bombers we also learned of planned protests in Germany against the deployment of the Pershing II nuclear weapons on their streets. In solidarity, Food Not Bombs and Cambridge City Council organized an October 10, 1981, march from City Hall to Draper Nuclear Lab. A tiny story in the Boston Globe that week noted that nearly 300,000 people took part that day in Bonn West Germany. Our march only attracted about 100 people but it was an important step in our campaign to mobilize for the nuclear disarmament protest in New York.
Later that month on a drizzly Halloween night Vice President George HW Bush spoke at MIT about those protests. About 3000 came out to the protest that ended with many of us dancing around a bonfire of wooden police barricades in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue.
“It is one of the exquisite ironies of our times that the United States should find itself in this position,” Bush said. ‘The Soviet disinformation apparatus is as disquieting as it is dishonest, but it has not been unsuccessful. These protesters are not only the most recent ones to have been attracted by the argument that the world has more to fear from America than it does from the Soviet Union.”
“Most of the people who turned out to demonstrate against NATO’s nuclear forces are well-intentioned men and women,” he continued. “Many of them are young, too young to have had first-hand knowledge of World War II. I don’t question their idealism.”
Even though Bush portrayed our call for an end to the cold war as naive our campaign for nuclear disarmament would play an important role in pushing President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987easing the threat of a nuclear conflict.
The Trump administration withdrew the United States from that treaty in August 2019, and Russia reciprocated by suspending its participation.
Now the US plans to deploy the Tomahawk Block IV cruise missile systems in Germany returning to the days when the Pershing missiles lumbering across the cobble stone streets. Maybe it time to launch another mass mobilization against the nuclear threat.
After we started our “bake sales for bombers” street performances the original Food Not Bombs group began organizing against the banks that were investing in the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station and were profiting from the nuclear weapons industry.
We organize a theatrical soup line outside of the Bank of Boston’s stockholders meeting on March 26, 1981. I designed a flyer to show the connections between the bank and the military contractors with a warning that Reagan’s policies and those of the banks could lead to a future where Americans would have to seek food at soup kitchens.
Our friends were invited to dress as Depression Era hobos but as we were preparing a huge sixty quart pot of stew we realized we had not recruited enough people to have the shock value of a real soup kitchen. At around midnight I went to the Pine Street Inn Homeless Shelter and gave a speech about our protest and invited them to join us. One man excitedly responded, “cool, a protest like we did in the sixties.”
Nearly everyone I had spoken with at the shelter showed up. The first man we shared our soup with responded with “God bless you,” gently bowing his head. One by one they stepped forward for their cup of warmth offering a heart felt thanks. A young business man expressed alarm that Reagan had only been in office for a month and people were already standing in line to eat. The guys who ate with us suggested we share food everyday since there was no place for Boston’s homeless to get a free meal. It is difficult to imagine now but in 1981, homelessness in America was not a thing.
That evening we agreed to give our bosses two weeks notice so we could focus full time on recovering and delivering food while preparing meals to share at Harvard Square or outside Park Station Subway Station on the Boston Commons. I was a produce worker at Bread and Circus Natural Food Grocery and had been taking the food I was discarding to the mothers at the pubic housing projects on Portland Avenue. My boss agreed to let me continue to recover the discarded food.
One morning while dropping off food to the projects the women who I had been helping pointed out that a new building had just opened across the street. The women said scientists were designing nuclear weapons in the new offices, inspiring us to adopt the name Food Not Bombs.
I moved to San Francisco in 1987 with my wife Andrea and our Afghan Hound Bear. One morning we hear news that Veterans For Peace activist Brian Williams had been hit by a munitions train at the Concord Navel Weapons Station in the East Bay. He was participating in a campaign to stop weapons shipments to the wars in Central America called Nuremberg Action. Food Not Bombs had supported Brian and the other Veteran’s For Peace activists during their fast in Boston and I was stunned by reports that Brian’s legs had been severed so Andrea and I were moved to attend the protest that weekend. When we returned home and switched on the TV to watch the news reports on that day’s rally Andrea suggested I start a second Food Not Bombs group.
We pulled together a few volunteers meeting at a Chinese restaurant on Haight Street and agreed to share our literature and meals at the entrance to Golden Gate Park at Stanyan Street. We learned that there were no free meals in the Haight on Mondays we agreed to fill that day.
A hippy looking man stopped by our meal and suggested we could get a permit from the Recreation and Parks Department. I wrote Director Peter Ashe on July 11, 1988 requesting the suggested documents. Police officers would pass by our meal each Monday and ask if we had received a permit yet and I would walk over to the parks department office to find out the progress. No one there knew what I was talking about but agreed to take a message.
On August 15, 1988 the San Francisco Tactical Squad marched out of the woods and arrested nine of us. Local photographer Greg Garr took pictures of the police blocking people from getting food. His photo appeared with a UPI story of the arrests in Tuesday’s San Francisco Chronicle inspiring outrage.
A week later a couple hundred people marched down Haight Street many banging spoons on pots while others carried buckets of stew and fruit salad or cases of produce and bagels. We set up at the entrance to the park. The police arrested 24 volunteers and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force took notes sending a memo on August 29th to the San Francisco Field Office claiming that Food Not Bombs was “a credible national security threat” even though we had just three chapters and a total of 30 volunteers.
The August 22nd arrests made CNN, the New York Times, The Times of London and several other news outlets. People started to send request for information on how to start their own chapter in defiance so I took my notes on how I formed the San Francisco group and made a flyer called “Seven Steps to Starting a Local Food Not Bombs Group.” I still mail copies out to people wishing to start their own local chapter.
The San Francisco Police made a total of 1,000 arrests over eight years. News of these arrests would inspire others to start chapters in their cities. We organized our first International Gathering to coincide with the indigenous community’s protest against the 500th anniversary of Columbus invading the Americas. The national celebration was held in San Francisco since the city had the longest running Columbus Day parade in the United States. During our two day gathering we agreed on our three principles.
1. The food would always be vegan or vegetarian and free to anyone, rich or poor, stoned or sober.
2. That each group is autonomous and uses a process of consensus to make decisions. There are no leaders, presidents or directors, and no headquarters.
3. Food Not Bombs is not a charity but is dedicated to using nonviolent direct action to change society so no one needs to stand in line to eat at a soup kitchen.
After the gathering we joined the protest at Aquatic Park witnessing the indigenous elders push the official Columbus back out into the bay as we shared breakfast with the protesters before heading to Civic Center Plaza to feed the main rally against the 500 years of exploitation.
The Savings and Loan crisis was raging that across the country that same year tossing families out of their homes. That November the San Francisco Tenants Union and Food Not Bombs held a film showing in the Tenderloin about the squatters movement in Europe to inspire our own squatters campaign.
One participant agreed to pretend to be interested in buying the decrepit old building that once housed an X rated movie theater and would ask the real estate company for a key to check it out. We also planned to sneak into the gutted hotel across the street from the Glide Memorial Church soup kitchen the night before Thanksgiving knowing that the Mayor would arrive to do his annual photo op of serving a slice of turkey to a homeless guest.
When Mayor Jordan arrived we emerged from the glassless windows hanging a banner saying “Homes Not Jails” and blasted our disdain for the Mayor’s brutal “Quality of Life Enforcement Matrix Program” of homeless sweeps.
At the same time we had moved several families into the second floor of the movie theater. According to the book “No Trespassing” by Anders Corr we had placed locks on 400 buildings left vacant as a result of the corruption of the Savings and Loans industry and we had people living in as many as 100 of those buildings.
In 2008 another housing crisis forced over 5.5 million families into foreclosure. When Obama opted to bail out the banks, leaving millions of Americans to fend for themselves, thousands of people responded to the Ad Buster Magazine’s call to Occupy Wall Street on October 17, 2008 and took to the streets. Food Not Bombs volunteers swung into action helping set up kitchens to provide for their local Occupy Camps. That Thanksgiving Obama’s Homeland Security, the FBI and local police departments started to crush the protest.
The United States wasn’t the only country suffering from the 2008 economic crisis. I was invited to speak in England in 2010 and found that the least expensive flights to the British Isles were on Icelandic Air. The airline encouraged its passengers to spend as much time in the country as you wished with no increase in airfare so I spent a week visiting the local Reykjavik chapter of Food Not Bombs. I joined them at their weekly meal where they described how the conversations at their Saturday lunches often turned to a discussion about the corruption that had resulted in their own 2008 economic crisis. At one point the weekly conversations turned into a weekly march to the Parliament Building.
I was invited to speak about the history and philosophy of Food Not Bombs at a local community center. During the question and answering period a reporter asked me how I felt about Food Not Bombs initiating the uprising against the bankers and central government. I was amazed. Food Not Bombs had initiated a movement that toppled a government.
The Grapevine Magazine reported “Ever since the Prime Minister’s so-called ‘Disaster Speech’ on October 6, where he outlined the crash of the Icelandic economy, a crowd has gathered outside the parliament building every Saturday afternoon to voice their discontent and demanding the resignation of the government, the Central Bank directors, and other key figures associated with the collapse.”
A young Food Not Bombs activist, Haukur Hilmarsson, climbed up onto the roof of the Parliament building and raised the pink pig emblazoned flag of the Bónus food chain where the Icelandic national flag usually flies. Bónus is a part of Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson’s Baugur investment empire, which owns the majority of the country’s food stores as well as most of the media, and is widely seen to be one of most powerful men in the country, and a key figure in the economic crash.
Local news outlet Fréttablaðið calculated that in the past few years after the economic crisis the Icelandic judiciary had sentenced 36 bankers to a total of 96 years in prison. All of the criminal cases are linked to the notorious crash of the Icelandic banking system in 2008.
In 2011, Iceland rewrote its constitution using a uniquely open process. It reshaped the dialogue on how a population can use available technology, consensus building, and civic engagement when reinventing the governmental processes supporting the needs of their constituents.
As the global economy faces another economic crisis possibly more dire than those in 1992 and 2008 and the horrific genocide and wars continue to kill and maim, the work of Food Not Bombs has never been needed more than today.
Our 45th anniversary is a good time to consider strategies not only to meet the growing need for food but also how to use our global network to force a redirection of military spending towards funding healthcare, education, local infrastructure and social services. I believe we are creative enough to organize a coordinated campaign to disrupt the techno-fascist seeking to implement a totalitarian digital control grid with their Stargate AI warfare and surveillance. Our freedom and humanity is at risk. The bonds we have made at Food Not Bombs can provide a foundation for this resistance. This task might be more difficult than the removal of the Icelandic government but we have every reason to try.
I will be encouraging the audience at our 45th anniversary celebration in Santa Cruz to join us in initiating another mass movement against war and austerity.
The Santa Cruz chapter of Food Not Bombs is hosting a free concert Soupstock 2025, on Saturday, May 24th at the Duck Pond Stage in San Lorenzo Park, Santa Cruz starting at high noon. This fun party features six bands, arts and craft displays, information booths, face painting, dancing and free food.
I hope you will join us in taking nonviolent direct action to not only provide meals with the hungry but to disrupt the political and economic system to force an end to the suffering. Hunger is not a game.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA – www.foodnotbombs.net
FOOD NOT BOMBS – OUR BERLIN CONNECTIONS
March 31, 2025
The New England chill was starting to warm into a pleasant spring morning in 1980. Food Not Bombs cofounder CT Butler and I coasted through Harvard Square in our old Dodge van on our way to Brattle Square to set up our daily literature and food distribution when we caught a glimpse of an addition to the square.
A new character in the theater of our Cambridge streets stood near Out of Town News dressed with a bright colored poncho depicting a Russian bear and American eagle embracing. The white bearded man balanced a pole topped with a weather balloon painted to look like the Earth. After setting up our equipment I walked over to greet our latest addition to the carnival.
He introduced himself as John Runnings and gave me a copy of his flyer about his “The Odessa Odyssey”, his plan to travel to the Soviet Union for a person to person type détente. He shared that he had bought a boat back in his home in the state of Washington with the intention of sailing to Odessa Russia. He described how he would have docked in some seaside town, stepped onto shore and greeted the first people he came upon with a message of peace from the Americans. Unfortunately the person repairing ship stole the vessel so his new plan was to board a plane in Boston for Berlin and attempt to cross the wall to meet East Berliners
He slept in his van outside the Food Not Bombs house using our restroom before heading down to promote his dream to the pedestrians of Harvard Square. After a few months he recruited the Food Not Bombs volunteers to help him in his plot to sneak onto a Lufthansa flight to the divided city.
We lifted the slight man over a plastic wall that guarded the gangway to the plane but he was never able to board a flight without a passport so he gave in and flew legally to his goal. Once in Berlin he scaled the wall banging a chuck out of its rim, walked along the barbed wired top and dropped into the GDR side where he was arrested. A website tribute to his work says, “He then became the first person in history to have gone over the wall from west to east and back to the west again, all without a passport.” The piece of wall that he hammered free on one of his 1986 walks between worlds is displayed at the “Checkpoint Charlie Museum”.
Around the same time we had first become friends with the “Wall Walker” the Food Not Bombs collective organized a solidarity march with the German people who were protesting the deployment of US Pershing Nuclear Missiles. In October 1981, 300,000 protesters assembled in Bonn, West Germany.
We marched that same October from Cambridge City Hall to Draper Laboratory where they were designing nuclear weapons. Our name Food Not Bombs comes from our learning of the lab while we were donating produce to the mothers at the public housing project across from Draper. That evening I dialed International phone operators in Germany seeking to find an operator who could pass on the message that we had a protest in the United States in support of their campaign against the Pershing missiles. After a dozen or more calls we found one man who promised to let the German Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament know about our protest.
Food Not Bombs helped organize a protest against newly elected Vice President George H Bush who was set to speak against the Pershing Missile protests in Germany. Sue Eaton and I made the first Food Not Bombs banner before the action and she suggested the fist in the logo should be purple to honor all races. A friend borrowed the car of Food Not Bombs co-founder Jo Swanson’s to use while wheat pasting posters for the rally and along the way he spray painted the popular slogan “Shot Bush First” on the wall of the MIT Student Union inspiring the Secret Service pay her a visit but thankfully her roommate who answered the door sent them away. Jo went into hiding to avoid arrest. We brought torches as well as hot food. The torches were used to start a bonfire of wooden police barricades in the middle of Mass Ave. People drummed and danced around the fire and we provided psychedelic mushrooms to all who wished to enjoy them.
George Bush told his audience of MIT alumni that, “Most of the people who turned out to demonstrate against NATO’s nuclear forces are well-intentioned men and women. Many of them are young, too young to have had first-hand knowledge of World War II. I don’t question their idealism”. He continued,”That alone really ought to give these demonstrators pause. Pacifism and Soviet ideology are as incompatible as sheep and wolves, but the latter always fashions clothing out of the former’s wool.” History may be repeating with the new US attempts to deploy short range nuclear missiles in Europe as part of NATO’s current regime change war against Russia.
On the sidelines of the July 2024 NATO summit in Washington DC, Germany and the US announced plans to deploy missiles capable of being nuclear armed. The September 2024 issue of “The Arms Control Association Newsletter” said, “U.S. Army forces in Germany will field the multipurpose Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), the Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile, and a hypersonic missile that is still in development in ‘episodic deployments’ as part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future,” the joint announcement said. These weapons will equip the army’s Multi-Domain Task Force based at Wiesbaden, Germany, which the army first activated in September 2021.” My father was stationed in the same armored unit as Elvis Presley at Wiesbaden and thus I was born in Frankfurt in May 1957 in the US occupied Luftwaffe Hospital that featured huge concrete swastikas on its cornices.
There is another Berlin connection. A cold San Francisco wind chilled the small ACT-Up rally against Anthony Fauci that I was attending in 1994 outside the Social Security office at United Nations Plaza. A friend named Michael saw me and hurried my way. “Keith, it’s great to see you. Heinke and I did a small tour to highlight your case. We even made T-shirts,” he told me. I had been framed by San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan in his attempt to crush Food Not Bombs and was facing a prison sentence of twenty-five to life.
He was excited. His partner Heinke had booked a popular Kreuzberg pub during Michael’s visit to Berlin and organized an event to build interest in my California Three Strikes case. The threat of a twenty-five to life sentence for crimes that included feeding hungry people and “stealing” milk crates must have been intriguing to a Berlin audience .
He described meeting an activist who had been sitting in the back of the bar listening to their presentation. The activist approached my friends and introduced himself as Manolo. He told them he was touched by my plight and suggested they join him in Spain. He offered to organize a couple of speaking events. Michael spoke warmly of his new friend Manolo. He was a serious radical and well connected in European circles. Michael would give me several news clippings about their presentations in the Basque country and an X Large T-shirt with “Free Keith McHenry” silkscreened across the chest at our next meeting. I felt honored. I would join Manolo on a tour of Spain and host him and two other Spaniards on a two month tour of North America that we called the Unfree Trade Tour, seeking to build resistance to the globalization of the economy by organizations like the Word Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum.
We showed the video “Fifty Years is Enough” about the impact of the economic policies that came from the 1944 the Bretton Woods Conference in the US and the intentions of those same financial vultures to expand their control. The movie showed peace, labor and environmental activists united in protest the introduction of Euro and the European Union warning it would bring in economic and environment damage to Europe. I had participated in a giant protest against the formation of the European Union organized by labor unions, communists, socialists, anarchists, peace activists and environmentalists in Bonn, West Germany and attended a two week long convention against the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. This coalition also tried to disrupt the World Economic Forum in Davos each year seeking to build opposition to the slavery and destruction caused by these globalization programs. It was shocking to return to Europe as the Euro was transitioning from the local currencies. The introduction of the Euro was already driving down wages while increasing prices. The contrast from the relative economic security of the pre Eurozone days and the financial struggles of Europeans after the Euro was heartbreaking. My friends no longer had the time to spend their days with me as they were now too busy meeting their financial expenses.
The UnFree Trade Tour featured one of our low-watt FM radio stations which let us broadcast the program over the airwaves. We shared literature not only on the threat to labor rights and damage to the environment that could happen if the policies of these global organizations were not stopped. We also provided details on how to start your own low-watt radio helping build the Free Radio movement across the US and Canada.
We proposed that people organize a massive protest against the World Trade Organization in the event that they were to hold one of their economic summits in North America. A year later the World Trade Organization announced its summit in Seattle to be held the last week of November 1999. A coalition of left groups united in a campaign to block participants from entering the summit. Since Food Not Bombs had formed the first IndyMedia Center in San Francisco during our second International Gathering in 1995 spreading the idea across the globe and by the time of the Battle of Seattle we had IndyMedia centers all over the world. An IndyMedia center in Australia had written code that let us post videos, sound, photos and text on our IndyMedia sites much like people can on Facebook or other social media platforms today making it possible to share uncensored news of the protests.
While global capital was busy tricking the public into supporting their wars and austerity plans Food Not Bombs chapters were also springing up all across the world in defiance. Food Not Bombs activists joined in anti-globalization protests across Europe, Asia and the Americas.
The Gothenburg European Council meeting was held on June 15-16, 2001, laying the groundwork for EU enlargement while addressing what the corporations called “sustainable development”, as well as economic and social issues, and external relations. The presence of US President George W. Bush at the EU-USA Summit attracted a huge crowd of protesters.
CBS News reported that “Up to 25,000 activists from dozens of anti-EU, anti-U.S. and anti-globalization groups have descended on Gothenburg. About 1,500 people appeared to have been involved in Friday’s rioting.”
The Guardian report of June 15, 2001 said “Anti-globalization protests spilled over into serious violence at the EU summit in Sweden last night as two people were shot and wounded by police apparently overwhelmed by demonstrators. Police in the southern port city of Gothenburg confirmed that two people had been shot when street fighting broke out after a day of clashes. Twelve police officers were injured and 600 people were detained.”
Gothenburg Food Not Bombs co- founder, Hannes Westberg was shot in the chest by police, suffering multiple injuries. According to a hospital spokesman, he had a damaged kidney and liver and is ‘critically ill’. Surgeons had to perform a series of complicated operations in a bid to save his life. I recall that he spent some of his time as a prisoner in a coma. I was honored to play Father Tomte for Hanne’s child on his son’s first Christmas when I visited Sweden on one of my European speaking tours.
My work against the centralization of the global economic system has never stopped. I joined a bus caravan at the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City and headed to the 2003 protest against the World Trade Organization protest in Cancun. Several Food Not Bombs volunteers from Australia had rented a house on the edge of the old town. My Mexican Food Not Bombs friends set up a camp in a park downtown where we provided meals for the protesters. The first day we shared food outside the Ritz Carlton on the beach front. That area was closed to the public soon after. Tens of thousands of us marched outside the security fences. I was less than ten feet away when Lee Kyung Hae, a South Korean farmer, scaled a fence and stabbed himself to death with a penknife while wearing a sign that read “WTO kills farmers.” A few minutes after he fell to the street the police started to toss chunks of concrete at the demonstrators. I joined a friend under the nearest car as blocks of cement rained down around us.
Our history of organizing against the exploitation by the financial institutions has been at the core of our actions from our founding. Our first soup line was a theatrical event outside the Bank of Boston’s stockholders meeting outside the Federal Reserve Bank in March 1981. The night before our noon meal I spoke at the local homeless shelter and invited the twenty or so men to join our protest. They showed to our protest suggesting we share food everyday since there were no free meals for Boston’s hungry. We handed out literature warning that the policies of the bankers and President Reagan could lead to a future where people would be forced to line up for meals at a soup kitchen. Pedestrians were surprised to see people were already queuing up for food just a month after Reagan had taken office.
That evening while cleaning our cooking equipment we made the decision to give our employers two weeks notice so we could dedicate all our time to recovering and sharing food. We all had to seek work after six months when our landlady reminded us that we has not paid rent for half a year but she was so impressed with our work that she reduced our rent from $600 a month to $400 and asked us to start paying at the first of the following month. Our humble beginnings sure have blossomed into a strong global community of compassion in an often very brutal world.
It’s been 45 years since we started the first Food Not Bombs collective after our friend Brian Feigenbaum, was arrested during the May 24,1980, occupation attempt of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station construction site in New Hampshire. During these four decades our volunteers have join relief efforts after cyclones, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and wild fires. Our volunteers initiated the campaign that toppled the banker government of Iceland, shared vegan meals outside MacDonalds on the annual McLibel protest each October and during the Millions Against Monsanto marches in May. The Anarchist Against the Wall campaign in Palestine started after the Tel Aviv chapter of Food Not Bombs has helped provide meals during a two months long Peace Camp on the West Bank. We have supported indigenous sovereignty movements in the Americas, Australia and across Asia. As a worldwide movement Food Not Bombs is in a position to initiated global days of action against the cruelty of the emerging totalitarian digital dystopia. And of course we have filled the bellies of the hungry millions of times and will do so for decades to come.
The crisis of war, state repression and poverty is greater today than at anytime in our history. Thankfully we have a global network of over 1,000 chapters to provide mutual aid, emotional support and solidarity.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 – http://www.foodnotbombs.net
FOOD NOT BOMBS IN THIS TIME OF TECHNO-FASCISM
March 17, 2025
CIA funded Billionaires publicly take control of the United States while we organize our resistance to their digital dystopian panopticon.
“…one suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted…” Peter Thiel, February 21, 2024
The eight college aged antinuclear activists who started Food Not Bombs in May 1980 imagined a time when we would need to respond to a time like we are living through today. We thought President Reagan would be the Trump of our time but thankfully it’s taken four more decades to arrive at this dystopian moment.
We could have never imagined there would be nearly 1,000 autonomous chapters of Food Not Bombs in over 65 countries when we started. But we did consider a number of strategies of survival.
If faced with the repression of a totalitarian police state our vision was to build our own communities outside the system with a focus on meeting the basics of water, food, shelter, free expression and friendship.
We had planned to coordinate days of actions with what we at the time dreamed might be a network of dozens of Food Not Bombs chapters spread across to United States. Our first multi-city action happened on October 15, 1988, when all three groups that existed at the time participated in a protest against the US war in El Salvador. The Boston group helped organize and shared meals outside the US Capital in Washington DC while chapters in San Francisco and Long Beach provided meals with those protesting to end the war in their own cities.
This vision of creating a community outside a totalitarian society was experienced in a condensed version by over a thousand people who participated in the 1995 International Food Not Bombs Gathering held in San Francisco during the 50th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This ten day event may offer suggestions on how to build a community of sanctuary from the dystopian digital prison being implemented by the DOGE transfer of the US government’s assets to this junta of techno-fascists. Programmable digital currency linked to your biometric facial digital ID connected to the internet of bodies could be our future if their plans become reality. The Stargate of electronic control and warfare.
The hours of preparing and sharing free vegan meals together built many strong friendships. Smuggled plastic buckets of stew and garbage bags of pastries and bread were quickly shared at United Nations Plaza at noon before the San Francisco Tactical Squad marched in to make the daily felony conspiracy arrests. Over 130 were cuffed for serving food in violation of a court order. We were released a day or two later in to the welcoming smiles and hugs of our fellow Food Not Bombs activists.
At a meeting of about 200 people we came to consensus that we would continue to unite around our three principles that we had agreed to during the first International Gathering held in San Francisco before the October 1992 protests against the 500th anniversary of Columbus invading the Americas.
1. The food is always vegan or vegetarian and free to anyone rich or poor, stoned or sober.
2. Each group is autonomous, there are no leaders, directors or headquarters and decisions are made by consensus and we strive to include those eating with us in our meetings.
3. We are not a charity but instead we are dedicated to taking nonviolent direct action to change society so no one is forced to sleep in the streets or seek food at a soup kitchen.
The assembled also agreed that we would never request or accept a permit from the government to share meal with the hungry. Sharing the gift of food is always an unregulated act of compassion.
Our decentralized horizontal philosophy of organizing is our strength. A strength that could save us under the current conditions.
While these meals and meetings were getting underway people started to pass through our tiny convergence center in an office we rented for the occasion on the fifth floor above one of the Off Broadway theaters on Market Street. Those staffing the office registered over 1,000 names of those who came to attend our second world gathering.
The first Indymedia Center ever was housed in that same office. We broadcast news of the gathering from a low watt pirate radio station whose antenna was mounted on the theater’s roof. That got busted after just a few days but we were also broadcasting on Free Radio Berkeley and San Francisco Liberation Radio. Stephen Dunifer held workshops on how to build your own low-watt free radio transmitter and radio station. Participants took these plans home and set up their own stations. I had the honor of being a guest on many of those stations while on tour. You can see our diagrams in the book Hungry for Peace.
By the time of the blockade of the first World Trade Organization Summit in Seattle in November 1999 there were Indymedia Centers in cities all over the world. Activists in Australia wrote code that made it possible to upload news, photos and videos of the action globally. Massive protests like the blockage of the 1999 WTO Summit rarely made the news outside the city where they were happening before Indymedia. A protest against the first war on Iraq attracted nearly a million people in San Francisco yet few outside the Bay Area had any idea this took place. People are still surprised when I tell them about the Rodney King Uprising in San Francisco and the implementation of martial law assuming that it had only happened in Los Angeles.
As part of the gathering the group Homes Not Jails invited activists to help take over the abandoned officers quarters at the recently decommissioned Presidio Military Base. The housing was in perfect condition and could have housed more than a hundred homeless vets but since it has one of the best views of the Pacific in the city they were not about to sacrifice the property to the poor. Federal police arrested the occupiers hours after we seized the buildings. Even so Homes Not Jails also occupied other housing San Francisco left empty by the Savings and Loan Crisis and was providing shelter for dozens of formerly homeless people.
The workshops on the most effective way to squat abandoned buildings were a popular feature of our gathering. There were also classes on lock picking, making giant puppets and banners, consensus decision making, vegan cooking and other organizing strategies as well as the free radio workshops.
In contrast to the drama in San Francisco there was no threat of arrest for sharing meals at People’s Park in Berkeley where East Bay Food Not Bombs hosted playful events on the lawn and powerful concerts on the stage. Terri Compost shared her skills in what could be called a Food Not Lawns garden near the stage.
The closing event was a torch light march against the death penalty. Black Panther journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal had been sentenced to death in Pennsylvania and was set to be executed soon after the gathering. Hundreds marched from UN Plaza through the Mission with torches, banging drums, chanting, tipping over a flaming dumpster outside the Mission District Police Station as we marched past the precinct. Then the parade was off to the Castro where the police kettled the procession making the country’s largest arson arrest taking over 200 people to jail.
Our ten days of skill sharing and resistance inspired many participants to return home excited to strengthen the Food Not Bombs movement, start their own radio stations, plant vegetable gardens, organize Indymedia Centers and initiate local squatter campaigns. Consider reading our book Hungry for Peace to get an idea of how to start creating an outside the matrix community in your city.
The horrors of the techno-fascists who are now overtly seizing power may feel over whelming but thankfully we have the sanctuary of our Food Not Bombs community.
After 45 years of direct action and service many of us have the experience needed to respond to these terrifying days. We are more prepared than ever to welcome another wave of Americans who could be forced into homelessness under the policies of the privatization of Medicare, and SNAP food stamps. This crisis is not limited to the United States. European governments are removing many of their social safety nets so they can fund their war with Russia and a failing global economy is sure to increase poverty around the world.
Thankfully the Democratic Party’s phony astroturf “resistance” rallies calling for more war and genocide and our vote in the midterms are slowly evaporating as their political party commits a slow suicide. The fact that the share the same agenda as those they are protesting has become all to obvious.
At the same time the Palestinian and immigrant solidarity protests are building an authentic resistance to this totalitarian coup free of Democratic Party domination. Food Not Bombs activist are supporting those actions as well as participating with Veterans for Peace, local homeless unions, LGBTQIA+ diversity rights groups, anti racist activist, labor organizations, mutual aid collectives and environmentalists to build a movement to resist the tyranny of these cruel technocratic oligarchs.
As a Great Depression scale economic crash unfolds Food Not Bombs groups are in a position to use our decades of practice to ease the suffering. No such movement was in place when the world was ravaged by the impact of the 1929 crash. The Catholic Workers, anarchist and communist collectives had to start from scratch as the calamity unfolded. Our flexibility and history of responding to major crises like Hurricanes Katrina, and Sandy, the Covid Lockdowns and the Hurricane Helene floods provides us with an advantage when it comes to making a difference at this critical time.
Along with our regular sharing of food and survival gear we are able to offer our years of logistical skills to support a wider resistance movement. Logistics are what we do week in and week out. We could even initiate our own nationwide campaigns of protest, blockades and noncooperation to this dystopian AI dominated digital war and surveillance state of control. Our creativity is unlimited.
If you are not already volunteering with a local Food Not Bombs group I encourage you to do so. If there isn’t a chapter in your community you are welcome to start a group with your friends. We are happy to help. It could not only save your own sanity it can provide the infrastructure for the change required to protect our rights and wellbeing from the techno-fascist CIA contractors, hedge fund vultures and financial institutions who are seeking to impose their will on society.
Our 45th anniversary reminds us that Food Not Bombs is capable of accomplishing amazing things. If there ever was a time when the spirit of Food Not Bombs was needed that time is now.
Food Not Bombs documentary of the 1995 International Gathering – San Francisco
SOUPSTOCK 2025
Saturday, May 24, 2025 – San Lorenzo Park, Santa Cruz, California – Visit our website to find the celebration nearest you or email menue@foodnotbombs.net
https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
HOW DID I KNOW?
February 5, 2025
By Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry
“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” Oracle’s Larry Ellison – September 24, 2024
My mother’s father John Vanderpoole Phelan slowly rowed our family’s sky blue dingy into position across the placid waters of Middle Pond a few hundred feet from our beach on Cape Cod. My 5 year old frame sat on the bow bench armed with my first fishing pole. I faced my grandfather at the stern. He picked up a fresh water mussel from a pail, broke the paper thin shell, scooped out the slimy life and stabbed his fish hook into its grey flesh. I followed his instructions, skewed my bait onto my hook and dropped my lead sinker into the still waters. It wasn’t long before there was a tug on my line.
He instructed me to snap my pole to set the hook. A heavy creature fought as I reeled it to the surface.
“Unhook him and smack his head hard on the gunnel” he explained. “You don’t want him to suffer,” he added. I looked at those big perch eyes starring back at me, slid the hook from his gasping lips and smashed it against the wooden boat.
He continued with his lesson. “One day you may be asked to kill others. This is our duty. Those you kill will have no moral ambiguity. They will just be dead but for you it will be more difficult. This is the white man’s burden.”
He would repeat this lesson in one way or another for the next ten years often adding that I was born into a genetically superior family that was tasked to defend the rewards of capitalism.
My Grampy Phelan followed the path of many in the intelligence world attending Phillips Academy, Dartmouth College and Harvard Law. He was recruited into the US Army’s Office of Strategic Services, attended boot camp in Biloxi, Mississippi, spent time overseeing the testing of Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress in Wichita, Kansas before being stationed in Burma where he directed bombing raids on Japan during World War II.
The 10 acre property on the Cape was our vacation home. My mother’s parents lived in Needham, Massachusetts in a huge two story white house with Dartmouth green shutters. My bed was down in their finished basement. I slept next to two metal file cabinets filled with the MIT formulas that my grandfather would sell to Ken Olson and became the foundation of Digital Electronics. A black and white photo hung on the wall next to my bed showing thousands of people in Burma smashing rocks with hammers or balancing reed baskets piled with stones as they toiled building my grandfather’s runway for his squadron of B-29s.
My grandfather’s first floor den was lined with 63 framed black and white photos that he snapped from 20,000 feet of his progress in the world’s most deadly bombing campaign,Operation Meeting House, the fire bombing of Tokyo.
I watched him pace under those photos arguing over the phone with General Curtis LaMay and then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara about the need to drop an atomic bomb on Hanoi. We had to “send the Communists a lesson.” he insisted. Let the world know that the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a “one off” and that America had no limits to what it would do to defend capitalism.
My grandfather taught me about how the US provoked Japan with tariffs and naval blockade and ordered the Pacific fleet to line up at Pearl Harbor to maximize the impact. He claimed that even though US intelligence knew Japan was about to attack the naval facility they intentionally concealed this from the base commander. My grandfather explained that he and his friends set up the attack “because otherwise the American people would never support a war in the Pacific.”
During those days when my grandfather was arguing the logic of a third nuclear strike his good friend Curtis LaMay was trying to convince President John F Kennedy of the logic of bombing a shopping mall in Miami and blaming it on Fidel Castro to justify an invasion of Cuba in their Operation Northwoods plot.
Grampy explained that elections were designed to divide people so they won’t be a threat to those in power. The intelligence agencies had the responsibility of placing people in positions of power making sure the correct people came to office and that according to him this included the President of the United States.
This can be achieved in many covert ways. For example their claims that the Hunter Biden Laptop was Russian disinformation to make sure Biden won or making a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini to hold the hostages at the US Embassy in Tehran in exchange for US weapons in an effort to sink President Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign.
Chuck Schumer told Racheal Maddow in a January 2017 interview, “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, so even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman [like Trump], he’s being really dumb to do this,” referring to claims by Trump that he would take on the Deep State. And sure enough the Deep State ate Trump and today we are witnessing the bitter fruits of a military dominated surveillance state free to overtly seize control of the government and confiscate its assets for their own benefit.
I spent the summer before high school living in that sweet little cubby in my grandfather’s basement while I attended summer classes at Needham High. He passed that winter.
My grandfather’s second wife held his funeral at the Congregational Church in Needham. The pastor claimed Grampy was a great and godly soul and would be remembered in heaven. I was stunned as my grandfather made it clear to me that he believed that God was a fiction and talked about his having belonged to a secret Satanic order.
When I was an art student at Boston University I had a part time job staffing Old South Meeting House on Milk and Washington Streets telling visitors about the drama of the Boston Tea Party, collecting the 50 cent entrance fee and selling post cards of the historic building.
During a lunch break I went to Boston Commons to eat and enjoy the warm spring sun. An older lady was standing on a milk crate telling a small audience of other elderly women about the threat of nuclear Armageddon and Mutually Assured Destruction. Her name was Dr Helen Caldecott.
After absorbing Helen Caldecott’s speech it occurred to me that I could use my skills as an artist to address what seemed to be the most important yet mostly invisible issue of our times.
I dropped into the offices of Mobilization for Survival in the basement of Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church to see if I could put my artistic skills to use. It wasn’t long before I was participating with the just formed Boston Alliance Against the Registration and the Draft. At first, nearly a hundred people were attending the weekly meetings but the number of participants started to decrease after a few months.
We had organized a plan where we would table outside the local high schools in the weeks before the students left for summer vacation to warn them of the potential danger of cooperating. Red Sun Press was going to give us a great price for the literature we intended to distribute. Once we were set to launch our campaign one of the leaders of BAARD announced she had spent most of our money on a first class plane ticket from San Francisco to Boston for Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and that he had agreed to speak at a rally on the Boston Commons after attending his child’s graduation at Harvard. We needed to raise more money for our printing.
Since the number of people attending our meetings was plummeting just when they were most needed my friend Frank and I called those on our phone list to see why they stopped participating. Most were disturbed about the jokes by some of the core members about “getting guns for the revolution” so we made a suggestion that we stop any reference to guns since the point of the organization was to oppose war. There was push back from the others so we agreed to take a vote at the next meeting.
When Frank and I arrived to the meeting a dozen or more people who had never attended before were there to vote against our proposal and the policy was not adopted.
After the meeting I returned to the street with a bucket of wheat paste and a stack of flyers but I was arrested before posting the first flyer. Frank was still in the office and saw the woman who had spent all our funds on the first class plane flight for Ellsberg dial up the Cambridge Police. This event is described towards the end of Brian Glick’s book “War at Home” on covert actions against the peace movement.
The shock at learning that BAARD had been infiltrated and was intentionally sabotaging our efforts at tabling and plans for the July 21,1980 protest outside the Main Post Office inspired us to start another group we called AWOL. We organized our first meeting at the Clamshell Alliance office at 595 Mass Ave in Central Square and just as it was about to start members of BAARD arrived with rebar and started attacking us.
It was very disturbing to discover that many of those who you thought were friends were likely working for the FBI. I was no longer a virgin to covert state manipulation and disruption.
I would face years of FBI, CIA, Interpol, local police and corporate intelligence operations. I have survived over 40 years of honey traps, the confiscation of all my out going and incoming mail for months at a time, elaborate smear campaigns, wiretaps, police doubles dressed as me who did crimes that I would be arrested for and the trauma of learning that an FBI agent slept with my wife while I sat in jail facing 25 to life in prison.
On August 15, 1988, the San Francisco Police arrested nine Food Not Bombs volunteer at the entrance to Golden Gate Park for sharing meals without a permit, a permit we would learn did not exist. A week later another 24 of us were arrested at Haight and Stanyan. Fifty-five more food servers were cuffed and taken to jail on Labor Day. The pressure on Mayor Art Agnos to end the spectacle led to our negotiating an end to the arrests and the creation of a permit process. I had to take the City to Federal Court to force them to comply with the process but they revoked the permit shortly after issuing it anyway and deleted the permit a year later.
That Thanksgiving volunteers wearing the Food Not Bombs button on their coat were approached by uniformed members of the National Guard as they waited for flights home after the holiday. They remarked that they had seen the Food Not Bombs logo at that weekend’s Domestic Terrorism Workshop claiming we were “one of America’s most hardcore terrorist groups.”
In 2021 as part of a decade long Freedom of Information Acts Request effort by “Property of the People” we received a document that showed that the FBI- Joint Terrorism Task Force had watched the August 22nd mass arrests and sent a memo on August 29, 1988, to the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office claiming we were a “credible national security threat.” There were only three chapters at the time with a total of 30 volunteers combined.
The San Francisco Police made over 1,000 arrest in all for sharing meals ending in 1995. I was arrested 94 times, spent 500 days in jail and as noted before faced 25 to life in prison after being framed by the Mayor’s office. I was captured three time and taken to a dark room where my clothes were ripped off, was lifted by my arms and legs until my ligaments and tendons were torn and stuffed into a tiny Stress Position Cage. I spent hours in that cold dark cage struggling unsuccessfully to stretch my legs.
A parade of Food Not Bombs volunteers have been framed in FBI invented terror plots. Connor Cash on Long Island, Eric McDavid in California and three of the cooks at Occupy Cleveland, Douglas Wright, Brandon Baxter and Connor Stevens are among the many targeted.
While I find it frustrating when people express distress or support for the actions of Donald Trump suggesting they believe he is all powerful I understand they’ve had a lifetime of messaging that suggests that things like elections and the law are real.
I believe Trump was “hired” by the Deep State to perform the needed drama designed to implement the strategies formulated in think tanks, intelligence funded university research programs, the halls at the Pentagon and Langley and corporate boardrooms on Wall Street, in London, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley.
The choice of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate signaled that the Deep State was no longer going to play nice. When the PayPal Mafia of CIA contractors at Palantir took over power of the United States on January 20, 2025, it became clear to me that things are about to get very bleak and not just the ways the liberals have been crowing about.
At Trump’s first press conference of his second term on January 21st he announced the $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project called Stargate. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son of SoftBank and Larry Ellison of Oracle introduced their grand designs as though they were the masters of the Universe.
Larry Ellison stepped to the mic, “Okay. Thank you, Mr. President. We certainly couldn’t do this without you. It would simply be impossible. AI holds incredible promise for all of us, for every American. We’ve actually been working with OpenAI for a while, and with Masa for a while. The data centers are actually under construction.The first of them are under construction in Texas. Each building is a half a million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20, and other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first location.”
“Walking down a suburban neighborhood street already feels like a Ring doorbell panopticon.” writes Kenneth Niemeyer of Business Insider after Larry Ellison spoke at Oracle financial analysts meeting in September 2024.
“We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
It appears that the United States government is about to be privatized and handed over to the techno-fascist oligarchs associated with the intelligence community. They seem to have the belief that their AI program has finally sucked up enough data that they are ready to implement a totalitarian terror state here at home and launch massive automated wars abroad to achieve their vision of global domination.
So when people ask me how I come to my unusual perspectives it is because I have nearly five decades of real world experience in the application of the grand lessons of my grandfather.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA – https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
THE FOUNDING OF FOOD NOT BOMBS – May 24, 1980
April 11, 2024
Bitter tear gas clawed at our eyes as National Guard clubs smashed against our frames. Several thousand arrived in this little New Hampshire town intent on gaining access to the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station construction site to stop the nuclear power station from going on line.
That sunny spring morning Boston University Law Student Brian Feigenbaum stood before the local media as whiffs of white acrid gas drifted in the background blurring the view of the main gate and the hundreds of State Police and Guardsmen guarding the Public Service Company’s investment.
Brian outlined the dangers to downwind Boston and intentions of the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook and our May 24th Occupation Attempt.
After several failed attempts to breech the high chain link fences hundreds of us retreated to the warm asphalt entrance outside the facility.
Brian and his friends were chatting when a half dozen riot police waded through the crowd, lifted him to his feet and cuffed him whisking him off to jail.
Brian’s friends rushed off in pursuit. We got the impression that he was picked as an example since he was one of the few of us who could be identified because of his TV appearances. In those days we never came to protests with an ID and it was common when arrested to use names like Alexander Berkman or Emma Goldman.
A substantial amount would be required to make bail. Fortunately one of us knew of a man of means who was able to loan us enough to win his freedom.
That evening as six of us chugged south in our old van towards home in Cambridge we bounced ideas on future protests and discussed possible ways to pay back our benefactor. Bake sales rose to the top of the list.
As to be expected that was not very lucrative. We also ran an informal moving company called Smooth Move. A family we were moving was tossing out a copy of that famous poster,”It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber” and we at once knew what to do.
So we headed off to the army navy surplus store in Central Square to buy uniforms. We set up again in Harvard Square with our poster and pastries but this time we brought the cardboard backed poster dressed as soldiers and pretended that we were raising money to buy a bomber. While we didn’t really make much more cash we did notice that many more pedestrians visited, giving us a chance to educate them about the nuclear industry.
Meanwhile I was delivering my unsold leftover produce from my job at Bread and Circus to the mothers at the Portland Avenue public housing projects. One morning they excitedly pointed out that the glass office building at the end of the block had finally opened, reporting that it was a laboratory that designed nuclear weapons. It was Draper Lab and sure enough they were working on the guidance systems for intercontinental nuclear weapons. What a symbol of misdirected priorities and at a time when Ronald Reagan was promising to cut social services and increase military spending. Families needing food on one side of the street while those with money were busy designing guided bombs and the idea for the name Food Not Bombs was born.
The May 24th action at Seabrook Nuclear Power Station and our inability to occupy the site led us to the idea of bringing the protests to the doorsteps of those profiting from the project. Top on that list was the First National Bank of Boston and its board members. Their next stockholders meeting was scheduled for a month after President Reagan’s inauguration on March 26, 1981 at the Federal Reserve Bank across from South Station.
We set out to organize a theatrical soup line on the Atlantic sidewalk so those entering the stockholders meeting would see a line of Depression Era hobos waiting for soup. Our message on our literature was both against the nuclear projects pushed by these bankers but also in opposition to local investment policies that created areas of neglect and poverty. The banks board was well represented by the CEOs of military contractors and would be reaping in huge profits from the new administration’s proposed increase in military spending.
The night before the lunch action we realized we had done a poor job of recruiting friends to play hobo so I went to the old Pine Street Inn to see if the men staying at Boston’s Depression era homeless shelter would be interested in joining the protest. Several remarked that they hadn’t been to a protest since the Vietnam War and expressed an interest in joining our performance against the bankers.
Our Smooth Move van sidled up to the curb below the towering silver Federal Reserve Bank. We set up our saw horse and plywood table and slid a huge pot of steaming hot vegan stew. Our supporters from the homeless shelter ambled up. I oriented the quickly assembled participants in a line along the sidewalk. One by one they stepped up to receive their cup of warmth. “God bless you,” the first in line whispered.
An angry blue hair pearls gave us the middle finder as she stomped towards the Fed doors. Another stockholder thanked us sharing she was on her way to vote on some issue facing the bank. A young businessman who had just departed one of the South Station trains stopped to speak with us expressing amazement at the sight of a soup line, “Wow, Reagan has only been in office a month and there are already soup kitchens.”
The guys and one woman who ate with us asked us to share food everyday. They had no access to food all day long until their donuts and coffee back at the Pine Street Inn. So that evening while cleaning up from the day we agreed this had to be one of the most magical days any one of us had ever experienced. Without hesitation we all decided to quit our jobs and spend our days recovering groceries, making deliveries to local housing projects, and sharing vegan meals on the streets.
Thus Food Not Bombs was born.
Forty-four years later Food Not Bombs has grown to an all volunteer global movement sharing meals and groceries in over 1,000 cities in nearly 70 countries.
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