Filler Distro || Pittsburgh Anarchist News, Analysis, DIY Publishing & Distribution

Originally submitted to It’s Going Down

Report back and perspective from an uncaptured participant of the Anti-Fascist contingent that confronted Trump supporters in Pittsburgh 04/13/16.

Western Pennsylvania has a split. There are those who seek a better existence for all. Dreamers, who see possibilities beyond the Giant Eagles, condo developments, politicians, the gossip of the nightly news on what black person did what. They saw a way out of the cyclical grip of unchallenged rhetoric, the pounding narratives that regularly kill people because of identity, religion, class, gender. Such deaths are often not seen as murder because the structural institution of white supremacy and capitalism have shielded them from contest with an intentionally despicable education system and apathetic, individualistic culture.

A pervasive discourse that makes exceptional the wealthy white man above all has plagued this region. To live in this land is to be ruled by this marker, to see ones self in contrast to this and make every opportunity to find validation and security alone. Class unconsciousness and racism make for an easily manageable population by politicians.

That is the provincial. The way out was to meet together.

As news that the evangelizing force that has been encouraging and emboldening Right-wing politics of white convenience, entitlement and supremacy across the nation was coming to town rang, rebels across this city held a necessity to act. Like Ferguson, St. Louis, New York, Anaheim and countless other cities accomplices were found in resistance to White Supremacy.

An anti-fascist contingent was manifested as a way of locating sanity, self-defense and autonomy. A quick boisterous march to David L. Lawrence Convention Center found a visceral repulsion to organized racism. Immediately upon reaching the line of attendees flag bats and impassioned energy met the domes of Make America Great Again (the slogan worn proudly on Trump hats). Fists hit those who love to see nothing less than walls put between our brothers and sisters. That particular sinister smirk and chuckle that is given by bullies who look down at others as meager and incapable were maced away with pepper spray. On and off for three hours white supremacists were beat as the celebratory roar of the crowed reverberated off the tunnels of the convention center.

Marching bands, colorful signs, chants of “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA” tangoed with the black flags of anarchy to unleash a chaos some internet denizen would later characterize as “Feral, frothing, rabid and violent“. To me it was much more disciplined than that but still wild. Spit landed in the faces of one Trump supporter giving a Nazi Salute as others drowned him out with chants and protest placards.

The Secret Service was made to shut the doors to the event as attendees were turned away. Our movement proved capable of social self-defense. At the end of Trump’s speech the crowd exited, they were met with a gauntlet of trips and berating, more fights broke out, more police, more policing. Heated arguments cleared the air of what people really thought as civil unrest was realized.

The Trump crowd was judged by what its material actions were: attending a white supremacist rally. The only ethical response to this decision was confrontation, eviction, and to grant a denial, perhaps for the first time to those who have have the golden ticket – a wealthy white life.

The slave catchers (police) were also targeted in this attack and will continue to be as long as they continue to serve as an institutionalized oppressive force that seeks to uphold the current ruling order, lock people up, and deny free existence – which is to say as long as they are police. Each officer had a decision to make when they formed a line between the White Supremacists and the crowd of Anti-Fascists. It comes as no surprise that they chose to form and face off with rebels. They had a decision to make when they arrested three comrades. That is why they were maced and hit.

Negative actions like this are the lived act of being present with our capabilities. Pittsburghers like the rest of the planet have it within to bring closure to a traumatic era of racism, policing, class based society, slavery (in the modern form of prisons). An unknown freedom is made within this negation.

In short: Nobody has ever needed some man yellin and telling us what to do!

Past all the patriarchal call to arms of the right, the kitschy politicking of sensibility as a tool of suave leftism exists a structural reality that neither the right nor the left truly want to change; politics seek to manage our movements and life. To act with dignity and autonomy was to do what needed done. In particular some 4,500 jagoffs were dealt with.

This city is unexceptional in its white supremacy but unfuckingbelievable in its resistance.

In solidarity, love and rage,

uncontrollable /// ungovernable
One of many Pittsburgh Anti-Fascist

CW: discussion of anti-trans violence

This past Friday the 8th of April, Pitt lent its spacious dining room in the O’Hara Student Center to Reverend Scott Stiegemeyer. He is a Lutheran pastor who often uses the pulpit as a means of furthering a transphobic agenda that would see prayer and crocodile-tear “compassion” take the place of life-saving hormone treatments and surgeries that allow many trans individuals to feel at home in their own skin. Even before the event, Stiegemeyer’s crusade against the “sin” of deviation from his interpretation of the Judeo-Christian creation story by making our bodies match our minds could be gleaned from his numerous writings and interviews available online.

Thus, a large contingent of the Pitt community was deeply concerned and angered that Stiegemeyer would be welcomed by the administration to speak on campus. Around 100 transgender individuals and cisgender “allies” showed up at the event, outnumbering the rest of the attendees. Still the Reverend went on with his brazen diatribe against trans bodies based on the idea that an unseen entity has the sole right to decide who is male or female, with the ecclesiastical class as God’s gender police. Early on, Stiegemeyer told an anecdote, in rather poor taste, about a child disfigured by a botched circumcision who was raised as a girl but later decided he was a man. He seemed to imply that this story reflected the experience of most trans people; that transition is something brought about by external forces of confusion, malice, or sin. Thus he concluded that we, as trans people, were “disordered”. Quickly he amended this, saying that everyone was disordered because of original sin. And in a way he is right. All of us, cisgender and transgender alike, are caught up in the cultural disorder of enforced gender norms. But the source of that disorder is not original sin. It is something the church is far more familiar with: the patriarchy.

A small contingent of trans people and their cisgender accomplices stood up in defiance, refusing to sit in silence until the “Q&A” period. We saw that this hate speech contributed to the same internal angst and suicidal tendencies the Reverend says saddens him deeply. We raised our trans flags and banner with a battle cry of “Your God Can’t Control My Body.” Immediately 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. With at least five cops present at the event other than the “volunteers,” we decided to leave the space with a chant of “No Justice, No Peace, No Gender Police.” Though we didn’t stay for the Q&A session, our friends who remained inside told us that most of the questioners saw Stiegemeyer as the wolf in sheep’s clothing he was and asked some very pointed questions to expose his thinly veiled hate speech.

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. When our fellow queer folk call for us to be quiet, many trans people are greatly upset. 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.

Speech that can bring bodily harm is not “free speech.” Even if Stiegemeyer has no personal malice towards trans people, his de-legitimization of gender transition is an invitation for others to engage in even harsher attacks on our experiences and our bodies. Make no mistake: we trans people are in a war for survival whether we like it or not. We are dying by the hundreds and thousands. This society wants to kill us, either physically to erase us entirely, or rhetorically to be “born again” as good law-abiding cisgender men and women within patriarchy. The only way for us to survive and thrive is to transform the social landscape by dismantling patriarchal structures and ideas in our communities. To that end, we must regard the priests of patriarchy not as partners in a “dialogue” but as an enemy force to be smashed.

Nor should we allow the self-appointed peace police to colonize the trans experience that had its birth in the insurrectionary street battles of Stonewall with demands that all us angry trans folk quiet the fuck down and assimilate into the trendy bourgeois white gay male culture. The waning of the AIDS crisis from public view and the passage of marriage equality are not grounds to retire direct action as a means of queer liberation. Far from it. That time will not come until the murder and colonization of trans and queer bodies and the heteropatriarchal artifice that enables it comes crashing down in flames.

Fuck gender cops, peace cops, all cops.

Love and rage,
An angry-as-fuck trans girl

Filler received this message from a newly formed crew of radical youth living just a few hours away in Morgantown, West Virginia (you know, WVU town). We’re looking forward to hearing more from them, and especially looking forward to throwing down together when shit gets real! Check out their tumblr HERE.

Just south of Pittsburgh, in the college town of Morgantown West Virginia, the Morgantown Ultra Left Network is being formed. We have lived and worked here for some time now and have made the decision to strike out on our own. While we have had successes, we collectively made the decision to break out after many bad experiences trying to work with authoritarian leftists. At the time, “left unity” was what brought us together. Quickly that fell apart and became just another shell for old school Marxist-Leninist party building and movement stealing.

This is a new chapter for us and the Appalachian region. As we fight the rising fascism in West Virginia, gentrification in all its major cities, over bearing local and state police forces, privatization of education, and the extractivist regime, we send out a call to all fellow travelers who want to be involved in liberating Appalachia and building a better world. Our Appalachia is not romanticized: we live on colonized land, racism and the erasure of Black Appalachians continues, transphobia and homophobia is institutionalized. We have much work to do, but it’s worth it. We hope this message finds you well!

-Morgantown Ultra Left Network (MULN)

MORGANTOWN ULTRA LEFT NETWORK

It’s time for the big reveal!

There is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another… There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. 

– Gilles Deleuze

This group was born from lessons learned. The big tent doesn’t seem to work so well, it falters under the strain of bad faith and bad tactics.

Instead of speaking to our truth, we are forced to build consensus. But consensus doesn’t work in these conditions. It just leads to concessions.

Capitalism has evolved beyond the need for orthodox Marxism.  Marx is a friend and a teacher to the left, but is not its master.  The Earth has changed since the 1860s, and the left will either evolve or become just another means of control for the subjugated “masses.”

The libertarian strains of socialism have offered a viable alternative to rigid Marxian dogma since the latter’s inception and continue to do so today.

Governments lie and cheat, steal and kill, just like capitalists and racists and authoritarians of all stripes.  If any dialectic can signify the totality of history, it must be based on authority and subjugation, but this only indicates how vacuous the terms become here.

We are derided as life-stylists and petit-bourgeois, and at the same time called reformists. The work we value is put down as idealist and childish. Our values of building socialist space, being honest, and horizontalism have been abused and co-opted for authoritarian aims.

It is not possible to work and live like this any longer.

We have to venture on a new path, independent of authoritarianism and inter-community subjugation. Let us develop something new together!

By Raghav Sharma

I Got Arrested for Calling Michael Hayden a War Criminal

And I’d do it again.

On tour for his new book, the four-star general and former head of the NSA and CIA recently spoke at his alma mater of Duquesne University, a mere 20-minute bus ride from my own school. Having learned of the event just a few days prior and unwilling to let Hayden speak unchallenged, an anti-war friend of mine sought me out to help disrupt the event any way we could. There are multiple tactics small groups of activists can utilize to deny a speaker their unimpeachability: banner drops, storming the stage, silent sign-holding, Q&A session hijacking, chanting. It was these last two strategies our squad sought to employ.

Upon arriving in the ballroom, our hopes for the Q&A were dashed. Rather than employing the traditional process of providing microphones to raised hands through facilitators in the crowd after the speaker finished, Hayden’s session was conducted by having audience members write their questions on index cards before the event for his associates to filter through for objectionable content. This served to confirm what many activists — including Occupy co-founder Micah White in his new book The End of Protest — recognize: authority figures have managed to subvert nearly every form of dissent, whether as complex as a massive rally or as basic as a Q&A.

So we improvised. Rather than waiting for a readily co-optable opportunity to speak, we created a conflictual space within Hayden’s shameless recounting of his crimes to express our opposition to the man most responsible for the modern-day NSA. Surrounded as we were by hundreds of people who laughed at Hayden’s off-hand joke comparing CIA torture methods to his own treatment by nuns at a Catholic school, we sought not to convert our ideological opponents but rather to express and establish as a matter of record an attitude towards Hayden contrary to that held by his fans and admirers both in the audience and outside the hall. And for the high crime of shouting over a former government official, my associates and I were dragged out of the ballroom by men in suits who we later learned had been lurking in the back of the room.

We were taken outside the building, where I was cuffed to my friend by the assistant chief of Duquesne’s private police. We stood idly by as he and a uniformed officer discussed what they were going to charge us with. It was around the fourth or fifth time they referred to our supposed crime as “disrupting a meeting” that I realized they had nothing on us. Not for a moment did I regard what we had done as a moral crime, but the realization that I hadn’t violated the law emboldened me and instilled a degree of confidence that would prove immeasurably valuable for the interactions that were to come. Another uniformed cop joined his brother in blue and led us to the parking lot, where my friend and I were split up, handcuffed individually, and put into two separate police cars departing for the station.

I would be astonished if either man 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. After demanding ID and sitting down to fill out the necessary forms, the officers began their interrogation.

The nature of their questions followed an easily-recognizable pattern, coached in a game of good cop/bad cop so blatant I couldn’t help but grin. They would begin with abstract statements intended to get us talking. For the good cop, this meant asking us what our intentions were in disrupting Hayden. He even offered his own take on contemporary America in response to our critiques, giving rise to the aforementioned Constitutional obituary. The bad cop chose to deride us and our cause. We didn’t respect Hayden or his service, or the service of all soldiers, we didn’t respect the gravity of the War on Terror. I’ll admit: we took the bait the first few times. We engaged in conversation with the officers, who continued the discussion for a little while before lifting elements from our responses to transition into specific questions. Questions about our friends. Questions about activist groups we associated with. Questions we answered vaguely, if at all. Awkward silence. Rinse and repeat.

Before long this game grew stale for all involved. At one point a detective entered the room and asked the officers if we’d been read our Miranda rights. I urge anyone looking for a good laugh to request the video footage from the camera in the corner of the room and watch the look on the face of the officer who brought me in. After asking us in vain to submit written statements regarding our motivations, the detective told us we could go. No charges were filed but the case is being forwarded to my school’s disciplinary board and the Allegheny County District Attorney while my friend and I are now legally prohibited from setting foot on Duquesne’s campus. We were led to the door by the assistant chief of police, who pointed us towards the nearest bus stop and sent us on our way.

Having wondered my whole life what my first political arrest would be like, I left feeling an abrupt sense of negation. It was as though I had spent two hours of my life completing a closed loop. No crime so no charges, no changing the minds of any person on either side. But that was never the point. Subjectivity’s straitjacket leaves us all standing with our backs turned orbiting Truth. Can I call Michael Hayden a bad man, or Assistant Chief Sippey, or the audience applauding my arrest, when their entire lives had led them inevitably to our confrontation just as mine had?

Subjectivity also weighed heavily on me as I considered what might have happened had I dared to be daring in a black body, or had my gender identity not conformed to what was listed on the state ID I presented. Born with a level of privilege most of the world cannot imagine, I was relatively sheltered from the consequences of my actions before I even acted. I shudder to imagine the draconian punishments I would have suffered had I publicly decried as a war criminal the head of Turkish or North Korean intelligence.

But those men aren’t doing book tours. Officials of overt autocracies lack the means to subdue their populations through anything but fear and violence. The subtle strongman is a man of the people, and thus those who hide their hegemonic aspirations behind the banner of democracy must at times prostrate themselves before the public. So they give us a vote while conducting their business behind closed doors. They distort their crimes through the lens of patriotism and posit that everything is relative; that had we known what they know, we would have done the same. Loss of life and liberty becomes relative to the value of security, the moral inviolability of human rights relative to the motives of the terrorist.

Recourse to relativity cuts two ways, however, and jingoistic posturing is the only salve capable of soothing the wounds of cognitive dissonance. To deny America’s role in perpetuating some of the world’s most profound depravity is to dismiss en masse the perspectives of those whose lives are crushed under our eternal march to liberate the Earth. The emotional impact of violence remains the same whether its survivors curse suicide bombers or drone operators. On what grounds can we rationalize the fear of Afghan children gazing at a clear blue sky?

Freed from the grasp of nationalism, if we are to accept subjectivity as an objective element of the human experience, we have no choice but to combat the apocalyptic consequences of our lifestyle on the lives of so many around the world. Our struggle may very well be in vain. The opponents of liberty own the banks and the factories. They control the schools and have the press hanging at their every word. The guns and bombs and surveillance networks are on their side. But struggle is defined by seemingly insurmountable odds. To stand against ideological totality demands a competing absolute and an army willing to lay their lives on the line in service of this ideal. What the cops interrogating me feared most was that they had only arrested two of us. They fear a nonviolent coalition committed to rejecting the order police protect and making manifest a new order based not on violence and coercion but rather consensus and peace, human dignity and the potential of a species freed from deprivation and terror. And so long as the old order stands, it our duty as its opponents to stand firm, screaming at its face.

This year’s United Students Against Sweatshops conference brought some badass kids out from all over Turtle Island, kicking off Friday with the March to Take Back Our University and holding workshops throughout the weekend. USAS is working to promote collective liberation as a framework in reformist campaigns like the Fight for $15, and Friday’s march was the largest demonstration of faculty-worker-student solidarity Pittsburgh has seen in a long time.

But yinz can read about that shit in the Post-Gazette. We want to tell you about the participation of autonomous students. 

Building a Radical Youth Network

Some of us in the Filler crew called for an anti-capitalist contingent a little over a week before the march. While escalation plans were vague (and never really materialized), the callout provided an excuse for several crews to connect and collaborate. And shit, we made some damn good friends!

Two Filler kids worked through the Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition to connect with some of the old guard in Pittsburgh Anarchyland to try coming up with an escalation plan. Even though shit fell through, the stories and lessons we picked up along the away were worth the effort. Favorite story by far: back in their student days, a few folks barricaded and locked the doors in a campus building, but then slipped out before classes started. They even posted statements on all of the doors declaring that they were prepared to be arrested and would refuse all negotiations. It took the pigs nearly six hours to realize that no one was inside!

We also got a chance to connect with the recently formed Food Not Bombs team (shout out to@amidtherustpgh​!). FNB liberated some food and a shopping cart, and came to the march prepared to keep the energy in the streets. They brought a ton of dank sandwiches, fruits and veggies, and also passed out some zines explaining FNB and calling for students, workers and faculty to unite and #ReclaimPitt.

The Pitt Against Debt crew staged a sit-in in the Cathedral of Learning the day before the march, singing songs and chanting, “1234 student debt is class war! 5678 tuition freeze cannot wait!” They also released this communiqué:

On the day of the march, these crews and some other Autonomous Student Network kids (including some badass highscoolers!) formed a bloc to help take the streets and keep a banner-barrier between the crowd and the cops. As the march was gearing up, the bloc dragged police barricades in front of a couple of cop cars, opening space for people to take the streets and delaying the inevitable police tail. Some out-of-town comrades that came in with USAS also joined us in pushing radical chants, but other than that we pretty much marched in a circle as per usual.

The next day, the Student Anarchist Graduate Association hosted comrades from The Base for a presentation on anarchist strategies against the police. The ASN plugged this shit hard, and even some USAS folks skipped out on the “official” workshops in that time block to attend. Later that night, the real organizing happened at the unofficial YinzSAS party, Throwing Down to Win Ground. There’s two radical houses on the same block, and so the party was split into a rave and a punk and hip-hop show. The punk house totally lost their deposit.

Good fucking times.

TL;DR: Use any excuse available to hang out with the old guard and learn some shit, reach out to crews you haven’t collaborated with yet, and push militant vibes at reformist marches. You never know what kind of relationships (or killer parties) you’ll get out of it!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miYWMe80mtA&w=560&h=315]

(cut to 10 minutes for the first disruption)

Some brave women took the lead in standing up to MRA Milo Yiannopoulos at Pitt.

TW: This jagoff literally got Trump bro’s to applaud in order to intentionally trigger survivors of assault, said campus rape culture doesn’t exist, spewed a ton of racist bullshit, and everything else you can imagine. 

Several students left the assembly room in tears.

“2468 STOP THE VIOLENCE STOP THE RAPE”

“WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER, WE’RE FEMINISTS AND WE’LL FUCK YOU UP”

Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition statement:

We do not believe that Milo should be censored, or that the administration has any right to prevent a student group from hosting controversial speakers.

That being said, the reality of campus rape culture is not an opinion, it is daily violence experienced by 1 in 5 of our female classmates. When Milo told a crowd of Trump-bros that rape culture isn’t real, they cheered. When he told them that applause would trigger survivors of assault, they clapped, pointed and laughed at women that were crying in the audience.

We are not trying to change their minds, we know they will never admit to their roles in oppression. There is no “debate” to be had over and over again in some imaginary vacuum, racism and sexism must be confronted.

If we do not confront bigots, we have no hope of stopping their violence. You cannot ignore hate-mongers because the violence they inspire will only spread. You cannot ignore large gatherings of racists and sexists because they will only continue to normalize their discourse and build their capacity to act. Trump’s new right-wing is part of a national movement that is growing in popularity regardless of the attention we give them.

The varying types of disruptions taken on by autonomous students, Pitt Against Debt members, USASers and PSSC were not intended to silence an “opinion” but rather to let the bros in the audience know that the culture of violence they perpetuate will no longer be tolerated.

Milo doesn’t just piss us off or upset us, he is threatening people. We went there to show the racists, transphobes, rapists and sexists in attendance that they are not welcome on this campus. We will fight back, because some of our lives depend on it.

PSSC post-Milo solidarity event statement:

This past week the Pitt College Republicans Hosted speaker Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of Pittsburgh. As many of us know, Milo’s presentation was blatant hate speech that incited acts of violence against marginalized students and created general fear and anxiety amongst many members of the Pitt Student body.
Following this event, many Pitt students are wondering what to do next. How do we as students move forward after an evening of such hate and trauma?

Some students want to reform the school or the SGB to bar speakers like Milo from our University. This idea is a great way to stop inciting hate speech from reaching our campus. However, censorship is a slippery slope, and this plan of action fails to address the broader reasons for Milo’s presence at Pitt. We cannot myopically view Milo’s appearance as a result of SGB or administration oversight. Rather, we must understand Milo’s hate speech within its national, political context.

Milo’s speech is part of a nationwide movement of hatred, of threatening and murdering our brothers and sisters from marginalized and oppressed communities. It is no coincedence that students were chanting “TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP” as feminist protesters disrupted Milo’s event. Monday night highlighted a movement of hatred on our campus and in our nation that is bigger than one speaker or one student club. This is a national movement that condones misogyny, homophobia, racism, transmisogyny and xenophobia. This is a national movement that has called for it’s followers to carry out acts of violence against people from marginalized or otherwise oppositional communities. Thus, we must address Milo’s presence and form strategies of resistance based on the national context in which this event and its aftermath is occurring.

As we move forward as a student body, we need to take into account the contingency of students on our campus who are currently willing to terrorize students from marginalized and oppressed identities. What do we do as students when we see men harassing our sisters at a South O party this weekend? What do we do tomorrow when we see the police threatening our friends of color?

The administration and our SGB has given us wishy-washy answers promising that they are making changes but enusring us that change is slow to come. Unfortuantley, promises of change from our systems of governance are often more about PR and attracting prospective students than fundamentally addressing the issues that we as students have. Has anyone noticed a decrease in sexual assault since the It’s on Us campaign began? Has any trans student felt safer now that we have gender neuteral housing? The changes that the administration and SGB can offer us are important but they do not address the root reason for the hatred that is unleashed against marginalized students on this campus. The promises of “change will happen” does more to pacify us and to stop us from fighting for our needs than it does to fully address the problems we have.

With reform only going so far to address our concerns, we need to think of new ways to ensure that students on our campus are safe and able to express their identies. We must fundamentally change the way that we as students support one another. Our struggles are united in an effort to oppose the movement of hatred that Milo represents. In that regard, it is important that we stand with one another to support eachother, to provide for one another. We need to change the culture of our campus from one of apathetic disregard towards issues from marginalized students to active participation in ensuring that students from marginalized groups are respected and safe.

With this in mind, join us tomorrow night to discuss our needs and to discuss how we as students can provide for one another and empower eachother to stand in solidarity against hatred. Join us as we choose to stand in solidarity for love and care.

One of the flyers that was thrown in the air:

Communiqué distributed during the first autonomous disruption:

Ok, we get it. You disagree. Why didn’t you just ask some tough questions? Isn’t that a better use of your right to free speech?

The discourse of free speech in democracy presumes that no significant imbalances of power exist, and that the primary mechanism of change is rational discussion.

There can be no truly free speech except among equals—among parties who are not just equal before the law, but who have comparable access to resources and equal say in the world they share.

Just last month in Pittsburgh, Janese Talton Jackson was shot to death for telling a man “no.” Is a woman really as free to express herself as a man, when even a simple “no” can get her killed?

Ideas alone have no intrinsic force. Our capacity to act on our beliefs, not just to express them, determines how much power we have. In this sense, the “free speech in crisis” slogan is strikingly apt: in America, you need capital (and often times some good ol’ white cis-male privilege) to participate, and the more capital you have, the greater your ability to enact the ideas you buy into.

In a country where nearly every textbook, every classroom, and every TV-screened political debate affirm the logic of hetero-normative patriarchy, capitalism and the State, the “free and equal exchange of ideas” is a hollow gesture. Given this larger context, most dialogue around “the issues” is just a superficial repetition of foregone conclusions, based on the unexamined larger frameworks for understanding that we’ve already been given. This is what passes for “debate” in this society. It should be no surprise that its function is to keep things as they are.

What’s more, what is the point of debate if there is no sanctioned action to achieve the results of that debate? If every misogynist was suddenly convinced of the reality of sexism, would the Patriarchy suddenly crumble? We would still find ourselves in a place where our only choices lie between the endless deliberations of useless politicians, on the one hand, and the direct action of our own social forces, on the other.

So this all raises the question: What happens when the debate is over? Do we act then? But what if our acting stifles further debate? Is that bad? When do we act?

This action is in solidarity with the brave queer folx and women at Rutgers. You are an inspiration, and we send our love, rage and solidarity.

Shout out to the UNControllables at the University of North Carolina, we totally ripped off The Divorce of Thought from Deed for this communiqué.

Some Street Justice:

The Student Government Board held a forum for students to voice their concerns about the event, a blatant attempt to recuperate student anger within the conventional channels. Some reformist groups took the bait and are now attempting to force the administration and SGB to remove their neutrality clause and restrict the ability for student groups to book controversial speakers. Should they succeed, the admin will clearly use their new power to censor anarchist and other revolutionary speakers, not just hate-mongers. And it’s hard enough to secure any funding for the events that radicals book in the first place. However, the forum did at least embarrass the school and catalyze a wave of solidarity efforts.

At the forum, several Pitt Republicans mocked and photographed survivors of sexual assault as they courageously relived their trauma in front of a large crowd. In retaliation, an unknown number of hackers created fake facebook accounts for these assholes, editing their real photos as negatives and flipping them upside down, and posted their personal information online, including their home addresses and their parents’ phone numbers. The next day, flyers with the fascist assholes’ names, faces, and parents’ phone numbers were spotted around campus.

While we think this autonomous action is pretty badass, we’re not going to get that personal and repost the information.

You can read the reformist demands HERE

Photo cred goes to Cayley Dittmer!

Selected report-backs and statements from PSSC weekly updates – 2015 

Sweatshops Will Never be in Style!
About 15 people from USAS Local #31 and #123 paid a visit to the sweatshop-exploiting H&M in the South Side on Saturday [9.26]. While three people delivered a letter to the management, three others snuck up to the second floor to drop a banner that read “Sweatshops Will Never be in Style.” They then regrouped with the others to chant and hand out flyers to customers, briefly ignoring a security guard that was trying to get them to leave. Eventually they left the building but continued to chant and march around the entrance and hand out flyers.

Corporations abuse and exploit the labor of other countries, regardless of how many are impoverished or killed because of their actions. Unless we can hit them where it hurts – their profit margins – they will continue to get rich off the misery of others. People can bring about change by giving these corporations a bad public image, by disrupting business as usual, by getting our schools to stop buying from them, by extending our boycotts, and through direct action. All you need is a few friends.

***

Bah Humbug, Climate Scrooges! #FloodTheSystem 

Pitt News coverage // Footage 

Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition report-back from 10.8.15

An autonomously-organized, impromptu counter-rally pretty much chased the anti-choice/anti-woman demonstrators off campus today! That kind of ignorance is clearly not welcome at Pitt. [Some people expressed they did not want their faces to be shown, so all were blocked out just to protect everyone’s anonymity]