This list does not include the local fascists that were outedHERE and HERE
Torchlight has received the following report from The Mildred Harnack Appreciation Society, an antifascist research group in Pittsburgh. We have edited the report for spelling and formatting, but it is otherwise unchanged.
NOTE: During the editing process we inadvertently left out Erin Lambert’s Myspace link, which has now been restored. Sorry about that…
Two weeks ago The Mildred Harnack Appreciation Society released a dossier on Lettia Suchevich, a neo-Nazi tattoo artist recently featured in City Paper. As lovely as it would be if Lettia was the only fascist in Pittsburgh, as with any vermin, for every one you see there are dozens more creeping in the darkness. As part of our ongoing effort to expose white supremacists in the area, we present the following report on Lettia’s neo-Nazi friends at Blood Eagle Tattoo and their associates.
Please bear in mind that this is nowhere near a complete listing of white supremacists in the Pittsburgh area, or even of those associated with Blood Eagle and Lettia. We have found many others whose politics we cannot yet confirm, or who we have not yet identified as living near Pittsburgh. However, the information we have makes it clear that there is a sizable community of neo-Nazis in Pittsburgh, centered around Blood Eagle Tattoo, and affiliated with a neo-Nazi gang called Atlantic City Skinheads (ACS). Philly Antifa has this to sayabout ACS:
The Atlantic City “Skins” have been around since the early 1990’s, when publicity generated from appearances on talk shows like Oprah and Geraldo led to a boom in Neo-Nazi bonehead gangs forming. Unlike most of their contemporaries, ACS is still around. Their members have been involved in countless assaults at bars and show venues over the years. Some of them have been imprisoned for murder and hate crimes. They have strong ties with the NJ state prison skins. ACS avoids political activity because it draws unwanted attention and interferes with their fun. Nevertheless, they are a very real threat. While they are based out of Atlantic City, several of their members live in the Philly area and others come here frequently for shows and events.
MHAS has found AC Skins members scattered around the country, including, as we are about to show, Pittsburgh.
Warren E. Meikle, Jr., pictured here, is the lead singer of neo-Nazi hardcore band Aggravated Assault. Warren is also a long time member of Atlantic City Skinheads. He has a Facebook account under the name “War Jameson” here. Warren is featured in a 1993 video of an Aggravated Assault show, which we strongly suggest watching with the sound turned off and a barf bag handy. Video here.According to Philly Antifa, Warren is “de-facto head of ACS since their leader Bryan Bradley died in 2011“. Originally from the Atlantic City area, Warren now lives in Pittsburgh’s Stanton Heights neighborhood. He was born on July 25, 1971.
Lettia Suchevich Meikle, pictured here, is married to Warren. She was recently featured in a City Paper article on local women tattoo artists. The piece included a picture of Lettia wearing an Aggravated Assault t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up far enough to expose a swastika tattoo. Lettia’s dossierwas publishedin our previous report.
Erin Lambert,pictured herewith his shirt off, sports a large swastika tattoo on his stomach, and a Celtic cross on his right shoulder. He owns Blood Eagle with his wife Amber Lambert. Erin’s email address is leftystattoo@hotmail.com. His Facebook account is here, where he proclaims himself “High Emperor” of Blood Eagle. He lives in the Polish Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. UPDATE: Erin has a Myspace account also.
Amber Marie Lambert (maiden name Jury), pictured here, is Erin’s wife and co-owner of Blood Eagle. Her Facebook account is here, but may be deactivated soon. She is friends with the other neo-Nazis named in this report, as evidenced by their Facebook activity. Amber lives in Stanton Heights at the same address as Warren.
Luke Jason Goodrich, pictured here, has an Othala Rune tattooed on his neck, a neo-Nazi symbol. The Anti Defamation League’s entry for the Othala Rune can be found here. Luke is a friend of Warren and Lettia’s,pictured herewith them and Brenda Byerly (entry below) in a bar on New Year’s Eve (Luke is third from left). Luke was born on September 23, 1969 according to Westmoreland County court records. He is from Greensburg, PA and now lives in Polish Hill with Erin. Luke’s Facebook page ishere.
Brenda Byerly, pictured hereand in Luke’s picture above, is Luke Goodrich’s partner. She too is friends with Warren and Lettia, shown with them and Luke in the group photo above. Brenda is also shown here in a group photo that includes two as yet unidentified women in Skrewdriver t-shirts (second from left in back, second from right. Brenda is in the center wearing red lipstick and a black cap.). Skrewdriver is an infamous neo-Nazi band whose ADL profile can be found here. Brenda’s Facebook page is here. She lives in Greensburg, PA.
Kimberly McNerney Joyce is the woman pictured with Erin above. Her Facebook page is here. She is Facebook friends with Luke, Brenda, Amber, and Erin. Kimberly works as a bus driver for the Upper St. Clair school district.
Blood Eagle Tattoo is located at 406 S. Craig Street in Oakland. Their phone number is 412-956-3364. Their email address is bloodeagletattoo@yahoo.com, and their web site is at bloodeagletattoo.com.
ERRATA
Erin and Luke, the two who live in Polish Hill, were likely responsible for the recent rash of fascist stickers therereported on Torchlight. We will publish their address, and those of the other fascists in this report, as soon as we have absolutely confirmed it.
Blood Eagle has recently been attempting to buff their public image by holding fundraisers for the PGH Equality Center. We have informed the Center from whom they have been accepting donations.
The Facebook links might not work if you are not logged into Facebook.
Originally published by Torchlight, a Pittsburgh anarchist news project.
Dozens of fascist stickers were spotted in Polish Hill early Saturday, apparently put up Friday night. This action follows the appearance of fascist tattoo artist Lettia Suchevich in City Paper on Wednesday. Suchevich’s husband Warren Meikle is reportedly the lead singer of Aggravated Assault, whose stickers were among those found. All the stickers were removed in short order, but Polish Hill antifascists are advised to keep their eyes open for any new ones.
The images after the jump should serve as a guide to what to look for:
The Celtic Cross above a row of skulls is the symbol of Atlantic City Skins, a major skinhead gang on the east coast
This one’s a little obscure, but you can see the hammer and sickle being stomped by a boot.
Over the next few days, we’ll be publishing pieces to highlight the work of some of the groups participating in the Cutting Class counterinfo network. We hope this will provide some clarity on where our crews are coming from and how that affects the way we have organized this project.
We also hope that these interview questions can provide a template for other autonomous groups to distill a collective understanding of their context and projects. If your crew finds these questions useful, write up a summary of your conversations and send them our way as a form of introduction! Cutting Class can be your platform, and we’d love to publish an interview with your crew and start collaborating—not just around CC but also with any other projects that these introductions might incite!
Today’s featured crew is the Filler collective from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Introduce your crew: what are some projects you working on, how long have you been around, where are you based, etc etc.
FillerPGH is a zine distro and counterinfo crew currently based in Pittsburgh.We’re basically just an informal collective of punks and writers who run a distro and claim the name Filler whenever it’s convenient.
Filler started in 2012 as a punk/hardcore fanzine, but has since grown into a platform for local anarchist scenes to share news, analysis, and other counterinfo. We write, design, and distro our own zines, and we usually table with cool zines from other projects too. You can visit our pdf archive and read or print our zines here. Our three most widely-distributed zines are The Relevance of Max Stirner to Anarcho-Communists, Destroy Gender, and For a University Against Itself.
Most of us currently go to / have graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, and so a lot of the content we get is affiliated with the autonomous student network and other youth crews. That being said, we’ve been actively trying to make the project relevant/useful for anarchists outside of the campus bubble.
The Big Idea is an anarchist collective that provides space for exploring radical ideas and putting them into action. The collective aims to foster a culture of resistance and mutual aid that celebrates individual and collective autonomy. Plus we have coffee and free wifi.
SCAM is a relatively new project that grew out of conversations between individuals from the Big Idea collective and the (now-defunct) Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition. SCAM is not an organization, it’s just the name for a specific (1) autonomous forum, (2) social media platform, and (3) anarchist network – meaning that anyone who participates can use the SCAM “brand” to suit their own project’s purposes. The forum uses a spokescouncil model that’s meant to be a space of encounter to encourage mutual aid and coordination, and is in no way a decision-making body.
Nightshade is a two–year–old anarcha-feminist collective dedicated to providing physical, digital, and written safer spaces for women and queer people, as well as engaging in direct action against the heteropatriarchy. Nightshade collective members hold monthly meetings and at least one community event per month. This month, Nightshade is hosting a benefit partyto raise money for Survived and Punished—a collective that supports people wrongfully incarcerated for protecting themselves against domestic abuse. Not all community events are parties. Last month, Nightshade hosted two events—a reading of “The Secret Joy of Accountability” by Shannon Perez-Darby from the zine-turned-book, “The Revolution Starts at Home” and a facilitated discussion called ’Let’s Talk About Sex…Work’ to initiate conversations about sex work from a feminist perspective.
What are some challenges you’ve faced (internal or external)?
Pittsburgh anarchyland is currently recovering from some serious repression and burnout. Over a year of consistent militant actions resulted in ~30 felony arrests. Two comrades served several months in prison (hit us up if you want to throw some $$$olidarity their way) and a few more are still tied up in legal battles. By the summer of 2017, state repression dovetailed with existing internal tensions, and the subsequent burnout was real.
In the coming weeks, Filler will be publishing a longer piece(s) about this through several projects, including Cutting Class. Here’s an *ahem* exclusive sneak peak:
“2018 marks five years since the resurgence of an autonomous radical youth movement at Pitt, three years since the Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition officially began flying black flags, two years since the organizations and crews affiliated with the autonomous student scene posed a real collective challenge to the populist-left’s monopoly on dissent, and over one year since the first coordinated Disorientation Week.
That first Disorientation Week sparked the brief and brilliant dumpster fire we refer to as “the” autonomous youth scene: a transient (yet genuine) expression of a collective “we.” At times, it felt like it was our first real glimpse of community, militancy, trust, repression, betrayal, and (attempted) accountability. It’s a declaration of “we” that weighs a bit heavy on the tongue these days.
Ten black blocs, 30-something arrests, and over a hundred felony charges later, it’s difficult to remove ourselves from the collective identity that “we” have developed over the past years’ struggles. The “we” used here is shorthand for the web of chance encounters that deepened as the autonomous youth scene grew. Filler most definitely cannot speak to the experiences of everyone in Pittsburgh’s autonomous youth scene. Consider this our contribution to a growing mythology of closure, a burial ritual for our own lingering nostalgia, a call for multiplicity.”
This resurgence in the local anarchist scene has broken down both social bubbles and social scenes.We’ve learned that we need more than the usual cycle of escalation and repression if we wanna rep the yinzurrection. We’d like to think that projects like SCAM and Nightshade (especially the second issue of their zine) reflect a broader learning curve in the Pittsburgh youth scene. To quote “PSSC is a SCAM,”
“[PSSC] originally began collaborating because we were sick of wasting our time seeking legitimacy through the dead-end channels provided by the Pitt administration and their police. But as much as we liked to position ourselves as inhabiting a space somewhere outside of Campus Life and its toxic social institutions and useless reformist activism, we now realize that we were merely carving out niche spaces within it […] Despite our best intentions, PSSC became an umbrella organization that assimilated (and sapped energy away from) the independent formations that comprised it. And so rather than continue to work together as a student coalition, we decided to re-prioritize our individual projects, crews, and organizations. ”
Photo: autonomous youth bloc turning up on election night on Pitt’s campus.
Read the report-back HERE.
What are some short and long-term objectives your crew has been working towards?
Counterinformation is communication, and communication is an end in itself. We’re not going to save the world (not that there’s anything about this civilization worth “saving”), but we might be able teach each other how to survive through the love and rage that grows in resisting it.
What do you think some of the major limits / major untapped possibilities for radical campus organizing are today?
Over the years, Filler has provided a platform for a variety of student voices. The only way to honestly discuss that question is to include them in the convo. We’ve compiled a selection of quotes from some of our personal favorite pieces below, which are divided into three broader themes:
Seizing and Repurposing University Space
The “Marketplace of Ideas” and Social War
Solidarity is a Weapon
TL;DR = There’s no unified “lesson” to take away, but one recurring thread is that students who work through the University framework end up compromising their politics. We have seen one too many radical organizations get recuperated after becoming / affiliating with University-sanctioned organizations. While organizing through the University can provide material benefits (beyond just funding and space), we think student crews should dedicate most of their organizing efforts to autonomous projects that operate outside the established University channels.
Not surprised at the administration’s routine disregard for student voices, we decided to continue our occupation of University space. Excited, scared and pissed, we brought flags, posters, zines, coloring supplies, books and snacks to a student study area on the second floor of the Cathedral of Learning. We sat down with confidence and declared that we were occupying the space. With comrades new and old, we plastered the walls with fliers, flags and art. We used the space for everything our teachers scolded us for doing in school: we shared food, played games, held political discussions and worked through interpersonal conflicts. After writing space agreements for our self-governance, we felt more at peace than we ever have walking the halls of our University.
An occupation is the realization of the threats we make through disruption. To occupy is to strike, to remove a material place from capitalist time and space, to derail alienated activity and ride its inertia off the tracks, to rip open latent contradictions in the fabric of consensus reality. When we occupy, we create a base from which to launch new negations, but more importantly a subjectivity that is actively experimenting with new forms of life.
Disruption, negation, experimentation, occupation — the suspension of routine and rhythm, the conversion of a thousand plagiarized, angst-ridden zines into something terrifying and new: the insurrectional desire to experience unmediated forms of life here and now, to live communism and spread anarchy. […] Elaborating insurrectionary potential requires more than blockading the flow of relations conducive to capital; it is a process of reorienting relationships and shared spaces towards the creation of new and transient collective realities. In other words, we must constantly recreate a “we” that isn’t a lie. […] Seriously, though. I sure as hell wasn’t radicalized after hitting up some student group’s meeting. I’m here because I’m still chasing the high from that first punk show in a squat house basement, that first queer potluck, that first renegade warehouse party, that first unpermitted protest, that first smashed Starbucks window.
Incite, Conspire, Diversify
Photo: Our generation’s first autonomous student bloc at Pitt Click HERE for the first report-back.
In the past two weeks at Pitt, we’ve shared ghost stories around campfires that we sparked with stolen electoral campaign signs from all political parties. We’ve cried in front of strangers and cheered each other on as we took turns shouting down the Pitt College Republicans outside of the library. We’ve kicked racists, sexists, and queer-phobes out of Halloween parties with both intelligent arguments and the occasional fist. We’ve graffiti-bombed racist propaganda and flipped over the tables of pro-Trump canvassers. We’ve seen glimpses of the future that’s offered to us, and then stumbled into an alleyway to piss all over it.
“We” don’t necessarily remember all of these stories, share a political disposition, or even know each others’ names. “We” is just a name for this sudden, transient inclination towards defiance, or some shit like that. Filler has heard a lot of inspiring anecdotes over the past few weeks, but we’ve also noticed that the far-right students at Pitt have monopolized the narrative over what is happening. On Halloween, we heard about yet another entirely spontaneous action and decided we’d try our hand at unpacking the situation. “We” don’t speak on behalf of anyone except those that resonate with our interpretation of their actions. To our friends we don’t yet know: keep turning shit up!
It hasn’t been until now that we can put names and faces to some of the sources of hate at the University of Pittsburgh. In the past few weeks our collective of anti-racist, anti-fascist friends and organizers have been compiling various screen shots and other evidence that ties members of the Pitt College Republicans and alt-right publication Polis Media to disturbing memes, jokes, and genocide apologia as well as r*pe joke including ones targeting some of the most vulnerable members of society – children and incarcerated persons.
We are queer and trans. Our existence clashes against the gender binary, and its crushing grip which polices our bodies and threatens our safety. The ways that we live—relate to one another, dress, gesture, and dream—are all in inherent subversion to that binary, which seeks to classify, erase, separate, and homogenize us. In turn, we fight for spaces free from gendered expectations, places where we can function and thrive in peace. […]
We will not be fooled – Pitt is a blatant and knowing enemy in our fight for trans-liberation. […]
Nightshade beckons the University to respond: Why are you, University officials, holding this basic need of your trans*queer students hostage?
What a shit show it would become if you were denied safe access to bathrooms…
Nightshade supports the autonomous actors taking matters of trans-liberation into their own hands. We should not need to assimilate to normative gender presentations in order to use the bathroom, and we stand against anyone who forces that upon us.
In the neoliberal university, the valorization of free speech norms and student choice allows students to feel political as long as they don’t step out of bounds. Note the ever multiplying number of politically oriented student groups, each centered on a specific set of goals that are not meant to overlap and instead provide a safe outlet for the desire to be political. These organizations can be housed in student government organizations, and you can be as radical as you as want as long as you don’t act in such a way that would significantly disturb the status quo, which is a strange shift when put in contrast with previous student agitation centered on questions of radical political change in the university structure.
[As soon as the disruption of the transphobe Reverend Scott Stiegemeyer began], self-appointed “peace police” within the body of “protesters” sprang into action, demanding that we sit down and continue to take Stiegemeyer’s bullshit while our trans siblings die every day through murder and suicide.
Those who stood up to oppose us played directly into the hands of the Reverend’s ilk. By presenting themselves as the “respectable” LGBT community, they took the side of the Reverend and the cops against those who were not willing to be silent in the face of the war against our trans bodies. They forget the war cry of ACT UP’s fight against AIDS during the 80’s and 90’s: Silence Equals Death. Only those “allies” who are not directly threatened by hate speech against trans people and the violence against us it engenders have the option to remain silent without potential deadly consequences. […]
Instead of joining our mutual enemies in attempting to snuff out our rage, we’d prefer you to accept our methods as equally valid to other forms of struggle so we can all take on our adversary in our own ways. We see you as potential accomplices in our liberatory project, and would much rather fight beside you than against you.
And I’d do it again. […] I would be astonished if either [cop] believed “disrupting a meeting” was an actual crime. The intention with which they bandied the phrase about was likely an attempt to make us fearful enough for our individual futures that we would comply with the questions they asked us about each other. Upon arriving at the station, my friend and I were led into an interrogation room. In an hour-plus conversation, the officers offered up such gems as “the Constitution is dead” and a lecture about my disrespect for the men and women who died defending my right to speech, the latter of which rang as hollow as the former did true while I sat handcuffed to a wooden bench for talking at the wrong time.
Photo: Trump visits Pittsburgh Click HERE or HERE to check out two report-backs from this action.
The line goes through the door as the rush peaks. I walk over to the cooler, put my back to it, and slide down. The AM sees me and immediately gets red in the face screaming at me.
“What is this? A fucking strike?!”
“I guess so!”
Five minutes of back and forth screaming and the area manager agrees to rehire the mother she fired an two hours ago. Unfortunately, none of my coworkers joined in. Some thought I was absolutely out there to risk my job, some later thanked me and started talks of something bigger…
We are deeply saddened and angered by the murder of comrade Scout Schultz by Georgia Tech campus police. As a small crew of radical queer youth and accomplices, we recognize that Scout could have been any one of us. We too struggle daily with and against our mental health; we take these actions as part of that struggle. We will continue to answer the calls to fight in Scout’s memory, one of which reads:
To anyone who is enraged, grieving, or who stands against the police and the murderous system they protect, we call for actions in solidarity with our fight here in Atlanta. To anyone who is fighting for liberation: in the coming days, fight with Scout’s name on your lips, on your banners, and in your hearts.
The University of Pittsburgh is full of snitches, from the tough-guy RA who takes his job too seriously, to the bigots who knowingly out queer folks and put them at risk. We’re sick of seeing good kids get expelled, arrested, or otherwise screwed over because some holier-than-thou bootlicker decided to fuck up someone’s life; because some snitch reported a graffiti artist, or tipped off a Pitt employee about a darknet mail order, or called the cops on students for flyering and promoting events without a permit, or chose to be an asshole of an RA and actually conduct a random dorm search, or ratted out a student who stole the textbooks they couldn’t afford…
Want help dealing with a rat? Send the Didn’t See Shit Crew an email detailing the nature of the incident (no incriminating details, please!), the informant’s motive, and your desired course of action. We will work with you to figure out how to best discourage this sort of toxic behavior, support any folks who are facing legal or school repercussions, and, if necessary or requested, facilitate retaliatory dialogue.
How can folks support your work?
Submit content, distro our zines, critique our zines, talk shit on/with us, email us your juicy intel, give us money – fillercollective [at] riseup [dot] net
Submit to the spectacle and follow us on social media:
Any closing thoughts / reflections from your crew’s conversation?
When we first came to Pitt, we had to reinvent the wheel when it came to spreading anarchy, and we made a fuckton of mistakes along the way. We’re stoked to be connecting with other youth projects, and honestly should have tried to sooner. We’re also stoked to hash out some ideas around intergenerational infrastructure and communication, because there’s always the possibility that Oryx and Crake accurately depicts the whole “no global future” collapse: the University is both a gatekeeper to the means of survival and an enemy as formidable as the state, and will be for the rest of the forseeable futures / protracted collapse.
And never forget that cringing is an affective bond, because maybe the real insurrection was the friends we made along the way 😉
Today, March 8, 2018, marks International Women’s Day, and across the globe millions of women and gender non-conforming people are showing up in solidarity with one another—many folks taking part in an international strike, rejecting capitalism as a means of liberation from the patriarchy. Actions ranging from strikes and protests to rallies and meetings have been reported in Spain, Kenya, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, and countless other locations around the United States and world. Nightshade is keeping an active eye on these various movements, and stands in solidarity and excitement with them as those involved continue to fight for their demands, big and small.
Particularly, it is important to remember the roots of International Women’s Day, which originated in 1909 as International Working Women’s Day, and its direct relationship with labor movements. While massive attention was drawn to the Women’s Day march last year in DC, marked by a sea of stunningly-gendered pink pussy hats, along with it came critiques of white-feminism and other organizing strategies which neglected to honor the voices of women of color and trans-women, and neglected to address the position of incarcerated women, poor women, and other women marginalized on multiple axes, in relation to capitalism and white supremacy. This year, however, Women’s Day falls right amidst the Teacher’s Strike in West Virginia, where, like in many states, 75% of teachers are women. According to Tithi Bhattacharya, an organizer involved with the International Women’s Strike,
“the core strength of [the teacher’s strike] lies in the fact that it is vast majority women, and because women play a very significant role bridging the gap between the workplace, the home and the community, when the teachers went on strike, a vast portion of the community was immediately galvanized in support of the teachers. So churches came out, community members came out, because women are not just teachers, they’re mothers, they’re church members, they’re breadwinners in their family. So they sort of form this astonishing bridge between the workplace and the home, making visible both kinds of labor.”
Compensation for unpaid or underpaid labor, whether in community organizing, emotional/care work, teaching, or elsewhere, is demanded on this day by women worldwide. The failure of current structures, whether on an institutional scale or in the household, to provide due credit, compensation, and support to women and gnc folks is a direct result of the interplay between capitalism and the heteronormative patriarchy. As demonstrated bya recent crackdown on sex-work and strip clubs in New Orleans, neoliberal privatization and gentrification, also known as “(re)development,” goes hand-in-hand with violence against women and trans- people, particularly those already in close proximity to gendered and sexual violence.
It is true, and has been shown by all of the recent strikes and acts of feminist resistance, that capitalism cannot function without the exploitation of women and gnc folks. And until that exploitation ends, we will not be free. Beyond this, Nightshade also stands in solidarity with those demanding an end to all violence against women and gnc people–the physical and sexual assault, the policing and gendering of our bodies, the repression of our minds and spirits. Every year when this day comes around, we are as sick and tired of being oppressed as any other day. We recognize that our fight against capitalism is a feminist fight, it is an intersectional fight, it is a queer fight. And we also understand that the worlds we build together, here and now, are crucial to the then and there of our imaginations, to our liberated futures which connect us to so many feminists past, present, and to come. We realize that the end to violence does not come without ceaseless practice of healing, defense, accountability, and learning new ways to be with one another. This requires ongoing work, where we hold each other with care and bravery, and move towards a world beyond patriarchy and all other forms of dominance.
As March 8th comes to a close, we encourage you to show love to the women and gnc folks in your life, not just today but every day. We mourn those who have been stolen from us so far this year by acts of gendered violence, and will continue to fight like hell for the living. Remember that this fight does not end when the spotlight disappears: this month Nightshade is holding a queer dance fundraiserwhere all proceeds will go to Survived and Punished, a collective which supports survivors of domestic violence criminalized for defending themselves, and we hope to see you there!
On March 7th, the PittsburghCity Paper ran a cover story featuring Lettia Suchevich, a local fascist and tattoo artist.
“Women Ink” profiles 16 women who are challenging the male-dominated tattoo art scene in Pittsburgh. It could ostensibly be a pretty cool article… if it weren’t for the fact the authorknowingly and deliberatelydedicated a significant portion of the piece to a fucking Nazi.
City Paper is a free, widely-available publication that often caters to the anti-capitalist politics of the subcultures it draws its content from. After anti-fascists contactedthe paper’s staff to demand an explanation, they did the right thing and removed the article from their website. This morning they even published a “sorry yinz, we goofed” statement, which admirably details more than the editor’s own failure to identify a prominent fascist symbol and individual.
The City Paper statement outlines how writer Kat Rutt doctored photos to remove a swastika tattoo, but did not conceal less-overt symbols like the Celtic cross. In “Women Ink,” Rutt presents Suchevich and her tattoo shop Painted Lady Tattoo Parlor (please feel free to leave a review on the facebook page) as if they symbolize women’s empowerment. Suchevich’s inclusion in the piece cannot be written off as an innocent oversight, especially when even a quick glance at personal facebook pagereveals her involvement with the fascist movement.
Rutt remains unapologetic, as demonstrated in CP‘s statement:
“My article, “Women Ink”, published by Pittsburgh City Paper, is about women in the tattoo business. I did not talk to any of the subjects about their personal politics. The story is about women’s success in a historically male-dominated industry. […] I stand behind this article 100 percent, went to great lengths to put it out in the world, and am forever grateful to all the women who shared their stories with me.”
This is Nazi sympathy. Rutt hides behind white feminist discourse to justify her deliberate glorification of a Nazi, using one form of oppression, patriarchy, to legitimize another.
This is the same sentiment that the Democrats mobilized in their latest attempt to siphon widespread anger into the pacified, dead-end political channels offered by capitalist democracy. If fascists act as oppression’s right hand in the streets, then white liberals like Kat Rutt act as the left hand.
We, the Filler collective, hope that CP will take further action to undo the harm they caused in printing the March 7th issue; that CP will prove to the city that they will not let their paper be an advertising service for fascists, nor a platform for nazi-sympathizers.
City Paper, it’s time to recall the March 7th issue. Get that Nazi shit off our streets.
We’re already throwing your papers in the trash anyway.
Please contact us if you have any intel, articles, etc that you want to submit to Filler.
Names, addresses, phone numbers, and other potentially interesting, publicly-available information:
***
Pittsburgh punx, don’t forget where we come from!
Don’t respect something that has no respect / don’t sympathize with something that has no sympathy / don’t understand something that has no understanding / Don’t give them their freedom, because they’re not going to give you yours / FUCK NAZI SYMPATHY
Photo: Our generation’s first autonomous student bloc at Pitt
