[News] Why Queer Communities Are Welcoming Armed Anti-Fascist Protection

[Anti-Imperialist News]

theintercept.com
<https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/club-q-lgbtq-armed-self-defense/>
Why Queer Communities Are Welcoming Armed Anti-Fascist Protection
Natasha Lennard - November 29, 2022
------------------------------

[image: COLORADO SPRING, CO - NOVEMBER 21: Police crime tape is still
surrounding the scene of the shooting outside of Club Q on November 21,
2022 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. An attacker opened fire in a gay
nightclub late Saturday night killing five people and wounding at least 25,
officials said. The club said the suspect was subdued by patrons and
Colorado Springs police said he was taken into custody and hospitalized for
treatment of his injuries. Colorado Springs police Chief Adrian Vasquez
identified the suspect as 22-year old Anderson Lee Aldrich. (Photo by Helen
H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)]

Police crime tape surrounds the scene of the mass shooting outside of Club
Q on November 21, 2022 in Colorado Springs, Co.

Photo: Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

*Over the weekend,* the paper of record’s editorial board described
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/26/opinion/republican-party-extremism.html>
a “chilling preview of what the future might look like if violence from the
right begets violence from the left.”

The event that precipitated those fears at the New York Times offices in
Manhattan? A would-be showdown that never was at a Roanoke, Texas,
restaurant’s family-friendly drag brunch. An armed far-right group,
including Proud Boys and self-identifying “Christian fascists,” turned up
to harass brunch-goers — a sadly commonplace
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/04/drag-queens-targeted-us-far-right>
form of fascistic intimidation that’s hardly news.

Instead, what concerned the Times about this event was that the armed
fascists were met and obstructed by armed anti-fascists, who had been asked
<https://twitter.com/elmforkJBGC/status/1596689728601870338> by members of
the local community to provide security for the brunch.

In the end, no one was hurt in this alleged portent of political violence
and the restaurant owner’s son, a performer at the drag brunch, thanked the
anti-fascists of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club for “keeping us safe.”

Just a week had passed since the Club Q massacre, which left five attendees
of an LGBTQ club dead, when the Times decided to draw an equivalence
between the fascists who threaten LGBTQ-friendly spaces with guns and the
anti-fascists with guns who volunteer to defend those spaces — a new low in
bothsidesism.

For as long as marginalized and minority communities have been threatened
and imperiled by armed white supremacists and fascists — a violence
foundational to this country — they have been condemned for taking up arms
in self-defense.

It is a profound mischaracterization of the history and principles of armed
community defense to suggest that armed anti-fascists and anti-racists are
engaged in escalatory political violence that is worthy of the same
condemnation as the fascists they confront.

Oppressed groups and their allies have time and again seen guns as
necessary defensive tools. This has been true at key points in the history
of Black
<https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/03/civil-rights-movement-history-the-long-tradition-of-black-americans-taking-up-arms-to-defend-themselves-against-racial-violence.html>
struggle
<https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/03/civil-rights-movement-history-the-long-tradition-of-black-americans-taking-up-arms-to-defend-themselves-against-racial-violence.html>
in the U.S.
<https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/03/civil-rights-movement-history-the-long-tradition-of-black-americans-taking-up-arms-to-defend-themselves-against-racial-violence.html>
— formerly enslaved marronage communities, Black civilians in the late 19th
century who blocked jails to stop lynchings, and the Black Panthers, who
were originally named the Black Panther Party for Self Defense — but also
among the queer militants
<https://libcom.org/article/queer-ultraviolence-bash-back-anthology> of
Bash Back! in the late 2000s. Yet the decision to take up arms in community
defense has consistently been decried as escalatory and extremist.

[image: COLORADO SPRINGS, CO - NOVEMBER 23: Mourners visit a memorial
outside of Club Q on November 23, 2022 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. A
gunman opened fire inside the LGBTQ+ club on November 19th, killing 5 and
injuring 25 others. (Photo by Chet Strange/Getty Images)]

Mourners visit a makeshift memorial outside of Club Q on November 23, 2022
in Colorado Springs, Co.

Photo: Chet Strange/Getty Images
History of Self-Defense

Debates about violent and nonviolent protest, and what constitutes violence
at all, are well worn
<https://evergreenreview.com/read/anti-fascist-practice-and-impossible-non-violence/>.
It’s important to note, though, that the presumption that armed community
defense serves to escalate violence is simply not borne out in U.S. history.

The late political scientist Cedric Robinson highlighted in his epic “Black
Marxism
<https://files.libcom.org/files/Black%20Marxism-Cedric%20J.%20Robinson.pdf>”
that
even in slave rebellions and marronage communities, there was no doubt a
reliance on armed physical violence to ensure escape and sustain freedom,
but there was a remarkably small number of retributive killings of white
enslavers.

In the past century, too, white supremacist, far-right deadly violence in
this country has so dwarfed the number deaths caused by Black, Indigenous,
and queer armed struggle that talk of mutual escalation is obscene. In the
last 30 years alone, over
<https://www.adl.org/education/resources/reports/dark-constant-rage-25-years-of-right-wing-terrorism-in-united-states>
85 percent of extremist killings are attributable to far-right actors. A
separate New York Times report
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/26/us/guns-protests-open-carry.html> last
weekend found that at 700 armed demonstrations since January 2020, 77
percent of those openly carrying guns were right-wing.

These numbers aren’t incidental but reflect something inherent about how
white supremacist, anti-LGBTQ ideology operates: The goals are
eliminationist. This is what makes the “bothsidesing” so horrifically off
base: The far right has made clear their commitment to eradicate trans
people, either through violent law or extralegal violence.

The far right has made clear their commitment to eradicate trans people,
either through violent law or extralegal violence.

It is amid this larger picture that the Times wondered about a “chilling
future.” With queer communities quite aware that police are more likely to
harass them than help them, would it truly be less chilling to imagine a
future in which armed right-wingers are met with no serious opposition?

Groups like Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club — which is one chapter among many
anti-fascist John Brown Gun Clubs in the Redneck Revolt network
<https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/co-conspirators/john-brown-gun-club-redneck-revolt/>
nationwide — will not end the anti-trans, white supremacist violence of the
far right. By showing up, though, they can at least give pause to the
would-be assailants of these embattled communities.
More Guns?

To say that armed community defense is necessary and justified is not to
say that there are not difficult questions around the issue.

It’s an understandable impulse to fear that the more guns on a scene, the
more likely one is to be used, resulting in deadly violence. It’s a tragedy
at the heart of all too many domestic violence murders
<https://efsgv.org/learn/type-of-gun-violence/domestic-violence-and-firearms/>,
that women who keep guns in the house to defend themselves against abusive
partners are killed with those very weapons.

Then there is the notion that teachers should be armed to defend against
school shootings, which is belied
<https://giffords.org/lawcenter/report/every-incident-of-mishandled-guns-in-schools/>
by the facts: The more guns brought into schools, by teachers or cops, the
more dangerous gun-related accidents there have been.

The proliferation of guns in the U.S. is intolerable, exceptional in its
deadly consequences, and has always been organized around white supremacy —
from various historical moves to bar Indigenous or Black people from owning
guns, to the first federal “gun control” law in 1968, which was part of a
massive crime bill that endowed police forces with military-grade weapons.

There’s every reason to be wary of the misuse of “self-defense” as a
pretext for violent action — it has, after all, been the legally accepted
justification
<https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/11/19/metro/kyle-rittenhouse-white-supremacy-privilege-self-defense/>
for centuries of racist killings. Yet it is not the armed anti-fascists who
are initiating the potential for gun violence in these instances; they go
where the armed fascists go. And the fascists with guns, political support,
and consistent police allegiance are turning up at restaurants, libraries,
night clubs, school board meetings, and polling stations because they want
to expunge whole marginalized communities from public life — by threatening
them with a gun’s barrel, if not killing them with a spray of bullets.

So-called moderates can rely on tired tropes about violence begetting more
violence. But such a stance, usually held from a comfortable distance,
refuses to see that the fascist violence targeted at LGBTQ existence — and
the lives of Black people — seeks to be annihilating and total. Thankfully,
there are braver anti-fascist forces willing to stand in the way.
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