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Mar 1, 17

Once More, With Feeling: Bracing For March 4th in Berkeley

On March 4th, 2017 – 2 PM, at the Peace Wall in Berkeley, CA fascists are coming back. The feeling across organized circles is that this is, on some level, a trap. So come and enjoy a strategy of vigilance. Please don’t run alone after the first fascist you see, but collect yourself and take note of your surroundings. Find allies and accomplices.

There will be no platform for fascism in the Bay Area nor will revolutionaries be pawns in some neo-reactionary game. Our strength is exercised not just in our ability to respond and react but in our proactive autonomy that creates a cool, determined, collected atmosphere of safety and solidarity. May we humbly suggest not taking any bait but make collective decisions. Stay with your affinity group and resist the frogmen that come out from behind the keyboards. This is not a statement on any particular tactic – it’s a call for strategic engagement.

Some wisdom garnered from fascist demonstrations over the least few years in California suggests that some participants on their side are easily shaken and violently react with weapons. This is to say Anti-Fascists should be aware of this in scenarios in which small numbers of boneheads/frogmen walk to and from the demonstration.

What began as a direct response to Feb.  1st – a march for “free speech,” with the frat-brownshirt Proud Boys as special guests – has been completely rebranded since Milo’s fall from grace. Now the organizers of these “Marches 4 Trump” are trying to pull together a coalition of libertarians, ancaps, armed militias, brownshirt alt-right enforcers, the “patriotic” Tea Party crowd, and alt-lite Deplorables without alienating any of them.

Rich Black is the public face of the March on Berkeley. His Twitter header is a pastel ancap flag. He neglected to make the March on Berkeley Facebook event page (or its guest list) private. In an attempt to funnel every angry conservative in California into downtown Berkeley, he (or other organizers) canceled the Sacramento and Los Angeles marches and combined them with Berkeley’s. He seems very eager to simultaneously a) reassure everyone that this is not an alt-right event and b) tag Gavin McInnes begging for promotion, retweet the Proud Boys, and tag both them and the Oath Keepers in his tweets. For someone who isn’t organizing a fascist march, he sure wants all the fascists to know about it.

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Black wants his fascist cake and eat it too.

The Berkeley College Republicans, everyone’s favorite concentration of truly banal evil, will be in attendance as well. In meetings they’ve been enthusiastically hyping March 4th and are trying to get the California State Militia to show up. BCR’s alt-right and white nationalist ties are well documented and getting stronger. Jack Palkovic was spotted on BART with Identity Evropa founder Nathan Damigo. They hugged each other goodbye.

The feeling on the ground is that this is, on some level, a trap. They’re massing outside the police station. The cops are ready to protect these fascists, and they aren’t going to be hands-off this time. Camera-hungry Milo counter-protesters like Eddie Brock show up in Rich Black’s Twitter conversations. They call themselves a march, but there’s no parade route even being discussed. Their organizers claim to be working with police, militias, and the FBI. And they’re expecting antifascist resistance. They’ve been circulating our calls to action, warning each other that the spectre of antifa will be back to haunt them.

So show up and haunt these motherfuckers. Bring your friends. Give ’em hell, but be careful. Berkeley is the hill that the alt-right and their growing coalition have chosen to flounder on, and they’re only getting cockier.

We shut these fascists down before, and we’ll do it again.

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