Atlanta "Cop City" Battle Escalates
Analysis of Ongoing Clashes Reveals Many Legacy Tactics
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Since late 2021, a group of far-left self-styled “forest defenders” have occupied the site of a planned government training facility in southeast Atlanta. The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center -or “Cop City”, as the lefties (and even Wikipedia) would prefer you call it- is intended to be an $90 million, 85 acre facility on the former site of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm in Dekalb county’s South River Forest, providing firefighting and law enforcement-oriented training.
The motivations behind the occupations are varied, but essentially consist of a grab-bag of racial/social justice causes, prison/police abolition, and a dash of “settler colonialism” added in. I’m not going to break it all down because it’s mostly the usual copy-pasted lefty nonsense ported onto a new cause, but if you’re interested the remarkably sympathetic wikipedia page does list their grievances in excruciating detail.
The organization spearheading the occupation is Defend The Atlanta Forest, others involved locally include Atlanta Antifa, Unicorn Riot, Atlanta Justice Alliance, various other mutual aid groups, and with the National Lawyers Guild providing legal observers and bail support. As one might imagine considering those groups are involved, the occupation has been marked by criminal activity including sabotage and arson, and several incidents of the black bloc tactic being used to further anarchist violence at the South River Forest site as well as downtown Atlanta.
This violence has escalated significantly following the shooting death of a far-left gunman who wounded a Georgia State Trooper during a clearance operation. Despite the bullet that was pulled from the officer being matched to the individual’s gun, antifa groups have tried to claim the officer was actually the victim of friendly fire. Furthermore, after a private autopsy, leftist activists have also tried to claim that the individual was shot in the hands trying to surrender, despite the fact that gunshot wounds to the hands and upper arms being not unusual injuries in gunfights.
These anarchist groups declared a forest ‘Week of Action’ for March 4-11, with a music festival on March 5 that preceded and provided cover for a black bloc direct action attack on a local construction site, where equipment and trailers were firebombed and destroyed.
The actual attack itself was incredibly reminiscent of the 2020 Grant Park assault I chronicled in the linked substack, and it’s worth a read to get a sense of just what it takes to pull something like this off. There are similarities and differences between the two incidents, and it’s worth a compare and contrast for lessons learned.
For starters, they were both mass actions in rural settings, ensconced within a larger metropolitan area. For the Atlanta occupation this means there’s multiple relatively high-traffic avenues of approach, and any real attempt to secure these routes would inevitably result in complaints from the local residents. Even if they did it regardless, the manpower requirements to secure the perimeter of several hundred acres against this number of determined, resourceful actors would be enormous. This creates a decision dilemma: authorities either have to effectively tolerate the problem, appearing weak and leading people to wonder what use authorities are, or use effective means that the leftists can use to to claim authorities are heavy-handed and thus justify further violent action in response.
At Grant Park the authorities lacked sufficient means to stop the action, and reinforced the notion that police won’t -or can’t- effectively provide order. In DeKalb County, the authorities opted to use effective and sufficient force which lead to a mutual shooting between a police officer and an Antifa militant, and Antifa is attempting to use this effective use of force as evidence of police brutality despite severely injuring a police officer. This is otherwise known as a “no-win condition” because no matter what officers do it’s perceived as wrong.
Another complication with a rural setting over an urban one is the “kettling” tactic is much less viable. Kettling is effective at allowing a smaller, prepared force to contain a larger crowd because the urban landscape not only constrains and funnels a mob through natural chokepoints, the buildings themselves screen the movement of security forces in such a way it is much more difficult for leadership cadre in the group -such as protest marshals or Antifa affinity groups- to effectively respond in time.
In a rural area this is much more complicated. Complete envelopment of a group of several hundred people is going to require more officers than almost all departments can muster on short notice, and the sight lines outside of areas with dense brush mean the group can scatter with plenty of warning if necessary. Even if sufficient officers are on scene, the use of “interior lines” means a motivated group can likely easily overpower one part of the cordon and escape. (Black Bloc Escaping Kettle, January 2017)
Given all this, it should be unsurprising that most of the militants involved in the March 5 escaped; out of an estimated 200-strong group, only 23 were arrested. It shouldn’t be surprising that those arrested have been refused bail and slapped with serious Domestic Terrorism charges, as part of the aggressive response means the ones they do catch have to be punished more severely as a deterrence. Of course this has also been spun by sympathetic outlets to reinforce the narrative that the forest occupation is a just response to an unjust government and policing institution.
The involvement of the National Lawyer’s Guild is an intimate part of this strategy. It’s history as the literal funding mechanism, legal defense, and established overt organization to provide cover for covert elements and hiding actual fugitives from justice including far-left murderers is well-established. But what the NLG provides is a continual justification for action against police or claims of police brutality by helping transform militants into non-violent civil disobedience practitioners, raising the cost on their opposition whether private or government, and offering a familiar story for friendly allies.
This story is always that brave lawyers and their appointed legal observers are much like deputized US marshals in the Old West, dramatically outnumbered by bad people but fighting the good fight against violent, racist thugs. The NLG is even more sympathetic because these brave, deputized citizens of the legal system are presented as unarmed observers, helpless against armed thugs.
Only this narrative has been far from true. What the strategy becomes is for the NLG to station observers in strategic positions to make prosecutions harder, to witness only against one side (ask me how I know these legal observers will not report attacks or crimes committed by their side), and further embolden or even give cover for people physically close to the NLG observer to commit crimes.
It’s no coincidence either that so much of the destruction has been targeting private property. One of the objectives Antifa attempts to achieve is to not only bully specific private actors into complying with their demands via harassment and property destruction, but as I covered in my section on tactics also intimidate and condition the larger population into a mindset where the expectations -and predictable response- around supporting disfavored projects, organizations, or people is so clear that people learn to self-censor and refrain from taking action before Antifa has to even get involved.
Antifa’s goal is not violence for violence’s sake. The purpose of Antifa’s brand of low-intensity violence is to silence opposition, to put the cost of political participation out of the reach of everyday Americans. -Erin Smith, Unmasking Antifa
This is the essence of what modern unconventional warfare looks like. Many on the right will talk about waiting for the next civil war so they can pick up their rifle and “do something”, but the left already has. At this rate Einstein’s comment about not knowing what weapons World War 3 will be fought with, but the next world war would be fought with sticks and stones was perhaps wrong. The next war may not be fought at all, except in the history books, discussing how the enemy was successfully routed, discredited, and locked away without the enemy even realizing it.
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Thanks for the context.