New Orleans, LA: Community Routs Racists via Revelery

“Of course, no-one showed up to help, leading one pro-confederate to dramatically knife the “Kool Konfederate Klub” patch off his own jacket on live video”

If you know nothing else about New Orleans, know that even its anarchists are intensely provincial. We don’t like anybody telling us what to do, but we reserve special detestation for people from outside New Orleans trying to assert control over our communities.

We also really super-duper hate racists!

Lately New Orleans city government, bowing to pressure from the tireless grassroots community organizing of the Black-led “Take ‘Em Down NOLA” group, agreed to remove a few of the city’s many statues glorifying white supremacy and white supremacists. Of course the shitty neoliberal mayor has tried to claim credit for this initiative, as politicians always do with anything positive, but the impetus to remove these hateful monuments comes from decades of grassroots political organizing by people of color.

As word of this development spread, a passel of paid protesters and misguided yahoos from other worlds – Oklahoma, Mississippi, Mandeville – began camping out at the foot of the slavemonger Jeff Davis’ statue, to “defend” it from the community that had rejected it. Oh reader, we tried with these dummies. We tried dialogue, we tried heckling, we tried burning their ugly belongings, but they just didn’t get the message.

So on May Day, we ran them off entirely.

https://twitter.com/Pontchartrain/status/859220611725492225

The real powers behind the monuments, old Uptown white racists, weren’t the peons out there waving Confederate flags; the kitshy camped-out monument defenders were nimrods from nowheresville. Most were just sad randos with opinions. A few were opportunists, people of color who crowdfund their lives by rolling from town to town and lending their nonwhite credibility in support of racist iconography. It’d be hard to argue that’s any more inherently demeaning a way to make a living than what most of us are obliged to do under capitalism, nobody’s knocking the hustle, but on May Day, all the assholes with confederate flags just had to go, goitered Gomers, “goyim-know” goons and grifters alike.

A whole heapin’ helpin of us rolled up to the Jeff Davis monument Monday night in a sizable military transport the illuminati lent us from a nearby FEMA Camp (note to right-wing readers: that line is something those of us whose lives aren’t unbroken continuums of benighted misinformed misery call “a joke”). We arrived waving pretty red-and-black flags and a couple way prettier entirely-black flags; the truck was festooned with banners that said FUCK OFF NAZI SCUM in generously-sized lettering, to make sure there was no misunderstanding our position.

“As word of this development spread, a passel of paid protesters and misguided yahoos from other worlds – Oklahoma, Mississippi, Mandeville – began camping out at the foot of the slavemonger Jeff Davis’ statue, to “defend” it from the community that had rejected it.”

The crowd of anti-monument folks was unprecedentedly big even before we arrived, but it continued to grow all night. We serenaded the now-terrified monu-morons at length, and also began cooking food and just generally partying, since our sinister shadow-shielded strategicians had after deep analysis come to the conclusion that a) having fun is good and b.) these pro-confederates really didn’t merit seriousness. They simply weren’t legitimate actors, not even the class enemy, just a bunch of dumbfucks with guns attracted to this lapidary loser-magnet.

Boy, they really had a ton of guns, though! They were armed to the teeth, which by the way is how so many guns end up in the hands of New Orleans kids: racist paranoiacs buy expensive guns because they’re scared, kids steal them, and then kids shoot each other over bullshit. It sucks.

Anyway, we partied down. Some of the anti-confederate attendees had been lured by the promise of karaoke, and karaoke there was! We only got partway through one song (“Head Like a Hole”) before the pigs shut us down. Since we’d rather die than give them control, we were obligated to finish it as a capella choir. The karaoke, despite its brevity, was superb.

With karaoke off the table, we returned to our previous overtly anti-confederate playlist.

Despite the crowd being 85% just respectable citizens who dislike racism, the Monument Defenders were absolutely pooping their reenactor britches with terror. Their livestreams tell the story, begging their viewers and followers to show up, and “Bring guns! Bring guns!”

Of course, no-one showed up to help, leading one pro-confederate to dramatically knife the “Kool Konfederate Klub” patch off his own jacket on live video, a hilariously emo gesture of how betrayed he felt by the non-arrival of what he’d been promised was a rock-solid brotherhood of supporters. Dumbass learned too late: solidarity is and will always be wholly alien to the right wing.

These pathetic, deeply isolated self-hating losers yelp about “loyalty” and “FAMBLY” constantly, like Dom Toretto with tourette’s, but when it comes down to it they’ll never have each others’ backs. They’re paralyzed by fear and listless with alienation… because fear and alienation are the wellspring of their (deformed, incoherent) politics! Profound loneliness, terror of the perceived “other,” and an inchoate desire to be part of something meaningful: while one can be sympathetic to these shortcomings, what it means in practice is that all the “3% militia” and “Proud Boys” and “Patriot Bikers” and other effectively nonexistent internet fantasy clubs they assign themselves amount in the end to nothing, or more exactly, to a half-dozen LITERALLY SHAKING out-of-state livestreamers sobbing “Send reinforcements!” into their iphones while a crowd of 200 surrounds and jeers them.

Mark it: This, forever, is the fate of the alt-right who venture offline.

Hemmed in by the crowd, the monument defenders retreated onto the actual monument itself, clambering up its sides like treed cats, albeit with precisely none of a cat’s virtues. If only that dead stone shithead atop the monument could have come to life, to give them orders or succor! But alas, Pygmalion’s white supremacist remained cold unfeeling stone, unmoved by either the neoconfederates’ tears or the eggs and pies we lobbed to provide the (notably ungrateful) monument defenders supplemental nutrition. Tossing them foodstuffs seemed only fair, since we’d already communalized the coolers, chairs, chicken and big yummy casserole they’d abandoned on the lawn in their doomed attempt to retreat up Jeff Davis’ actual asshole.

After a little while we joined them on the monument, notwithstanding the firearms they were brandishing, and because they seemed unfit custodians of their flags, we took those away and burned them. It was a chilly night; we needed warmth. The cops got more and more antsy!

Here is a partial list of things the New Orleans police deemed more dangerous than the loaded firearms these idiots were waggling around (within 1000 feet of a school zone – tsk tsk):

1. Karaoke
2. A BBQ grill
3. A red-and-black flag
4. Someone trying to convince the police that the monument defenders’ weapons were dangerous (he was arrested)

As item number four indicates, New Orleans police REALLY don’t like to be bothered. NOPD are violent, they’re dangerous, they’re amoral, they’re dishonest, they’re under-trained, they’re illiterate, they’re shitty in a hundred ways, but they are also supremely, extremely lazy. One of the ideas du jour flitting through the rightwingsophere is that NOPD were given a “stand down order.” A stand down order seems to be one of those talismanic pseudo-military phrases that far-right facebook freaks tend to seize on and parrot, like “false flag” or “crisis actor.” Joke’s on them… with New Orleans police, standing down (or “sitting,” as some call it) is a time-honored way of life, it’s getting NOPD to stand up that requires repeated direct orders from a supervisor.

Wellllll I could go on and on about what fun we had, but what matters is the outcome: once they’d gotten the police to guarantee them safe passage, the confederates gave up and surrendered their statue, abandoning their posts like the cowards we know all authoritarians and bootlickers to be, since if they had spines, they wouldn’t be authoritarians and bootlickers.

NOPD obligingly created a police cordon through the laughing, singing, mocking crowd for the monumental losers, who shuffled dejectedly away to their trucks, back to their boring, empty ahistoric lives. They’d tried to play at doing something meaningful, but their lack of analysis and their absolute misunderstanding of their position (they thought they had friends or supporters who would venture offline) sabotaged them fatally.

New Orleans has awful infrastructure. The white supremacists’ vehicles must have hit some very sharp-edged pot-holes on the way over, because when the Confederate Dunces loaded up into their trucks, they found their tires had been slashed! Ay dios mio. In the little space before they accepted this and rolled noisily off down the street on their rims, they got to witness New Orleanians smashing and destroying the remaining shrine of candles and fake flowers these nobodies had laid at their stone idol’s feet.

With the fascists run off, the party continued long into the night. Some racist monuments got redecorated. It’s New Orleans. It was May Day. We like to have a good time.

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