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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/club-q-lgbtq-armed-self-defense/">theintercept.com</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Why Queer Communities Are Welcoming Armed Anti-Fascist Protection</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Natasha Lennard - November 29, 2022<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2022/11/GettyImages-1443421175-Club-Q-Leftist-Right-Wing-Violence.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1024&h=683" alt="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)" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="261"></p><p class="gmail-caption"><font size="1">Police crime tape surrounds the scene of the mass shooting outside of Club Q on November 21, 2022 in Colorado Springs, Co.</font></p><font size="1">
</font><p class="gmail-caption"><font size="1">
Photo: Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images</font></p></div><div><p><u>Over the weekend,</u> the paper of record’s editorial board <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/26/opinion/republican-party-extremism.html">described</a> a “chilling preview of what the future might look like if violence from the right begets violence from the left.”</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/04/drag-queens-targeted-us-far-right">commonplace</a> form of fascistic intimidation that’s hardly news.</p>
<p>Instead, what concerned the Times about this event was that the armed
fascists were met and obstructed by armed anti-fascists, who had been <a href="https://twitter.com/elmforkJBGC/status/1596689728601870338">asked</a> by members of the local community to provide security for the brunch.</p>
<p>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.”</p></div><div><p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p></div><p>Oppressed
groups and their allies have time and again seen guns as necessary
defensive tools. This has been true at key points in the <a href="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">history of Black </a><a href="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</a><a href="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.</a>
— 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 <a href="https://libcom.org/article/queer-ultraviolence-bash-back-anthology">queer militants</a>
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.<br></p><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2022/11/GettyImages-1245038132.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90" alt="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)" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="261"></p><p class="gmail-caption"><font size="1">Mourners visit a makeshift memorial outside of Club Q on November 23, 2022 in Colorado Springs, Co.</font></p><font size="1">
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Photo: Chet Strange/Getty Images</font></p></div><div><h2>History of Self-Defense</h2>
<p>Debates about violent and nonviolent protest, and what constitutes violence at all, are <a href="https://evergreenreview.com/read/anti-fascist-practice-and-impossible-non-violence/">well worn</a>.
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.</p>
<p>The late political scientist Cedric Robinson highlighted in his epic “<a href="https://files.libcom.org/files/Black%20Marxism-Cedric%20J.%20Robinson.pdf">Black Marxism</a>” 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.</p>
<p>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, <a href="https://www.adl.org/education/resources/reports/dark-constant-rage-25-years-of-right-wing-terrorism-in-united-states">over</a> 85 percent of extremist killings are attributable to far-right actors. A separate New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/26/us/guns-protests-open-carry.html">report</a>
last weekend found that at 700 armed demonstrations since January 2020,
77 percent of those openly carrying guns were right-wing.</p>
<p>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.</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>The far right has made clear their commitment to eradicate trans people, either through violent law or extralegal violence.</p></blockquote><div><p>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?</p>
<p>Groups like Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club — which is one chapter among
many anti-fascist John Brown Gun Clubs in the Redneck Revolt <a href="https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/co-conspirators/john-brown-gun-club-redneck-revolt/">network</a>
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.</p>
<h2>More Guns?</h2>
<p>To say that armed community defense is necessary and justified is not
to say that there are not difficult questions around the issue.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://efsgv.org/learn/type-of-gun-violence/domestic-violence-and-firearms/">murders</a>, that women who keep guns in the house to defend themselves against abusive partners are killed with those very weapons.</p>
<p>Then there is the notion that teachers should be armed to defend against school shootings, which is <a href="https://giffords.org/lawcenter/report/every-incident-of-mishandled-guns-in-schools/">belied</a>
by the facts: The more guns brought into schools, by teachers or cops,
the more dangerous gun-related accidents there have been.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/11/19/metro/kyle-rittenhouse-white-supremacy-privilege-self-defense/">justification</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p></div></div></div></div>
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