JOY FOR MAYOR – Welcome to Brave and Free Santa Cruz (Part 2.)

My response to Joy Schendledecker’s essay posted on brattononline

Martin Sheen visited Kathleen when she was working in the rebel held area of El Salvador. She is in the back row center between the two combatants. 

ARE THESE PEOPLE REALLY GULLIBLE FAR-RIGHT HOMOPHOBIC ANTI SEMITIC RACISTS?

One of the people Joy doesn’t “know particularly well” is Kathleen Lynch so I will share a bit about her and you can see if you think she is politically naive and would as Joy said, “employ dangerous tropes and misinformation, while partnering with people and organizations that are funded by the far-right”. 

When Kathleen was attending San Jose State University, she volunteered with the Catholic Workers sharing meals with the homeless. She became a staff person at the San Jose Peace Center and joined Scott Kennedy and others here in Santa Cruz in organizing against war. She was arrested protesting the nuclear arms race outside Lawrence Livermore Labs, spending two weeks in Santa Rita Jail. She also spent time incarcerated with others from the Abalone Alliance protesting the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station. 

Kathleen joined Peace Brigades International and moved to El Salvador, spending 6 years of the war in the zones of combat. She stood between a death squad and striking workers barricaded inside their factory in San Salvador, helping win their demands. She survived aerial bombing raids and armed assaults, secreted people out of the country to freedom and organized women’s groups across the rebel held territories of Morazán.

When she returned to the United States, she organized a patients’ union at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose. Years later she would walk precincts in the snow in Reno for Bernie Sanders, and proudly stuck a Bernie for President sticker on her car’s bumper. Kathleen has also been an active member of SEIU walking picket lines.

Kathleen was a Medical Social Worker at Good Samaritan and Dominican Hospitals during the pandemic. She taught our Food Not Bombs volunteers the COVID safety protocol. She helped COVID patients, and once Trump’s vaccines were introduced, she found herself helping the vaccine injured navigate the medical system.

Most of you know something about my history. I will share some of what you may not know about to see if you agree with Joy and share her claims that I am also gullible and would let myself be used by the far right.  

You may know that I co-founded the global movement Food Not Bombs in 1980. The movement is active in over 1,000 cities in over 65 countries. When Russia’s Special Military Operation started, our Moscow Food Not Bombs volunteers were arrested for marching for peace. A Putin linked white supremacist group murdered several of our volunteers, including Timur Kacharava in St. Petersburg as he was leaving the Food Not Bombs meal in November 2005.  So, I am not really a fan of Putin. 

This is the background of this “deplorable” who must be an anti-semitic racist homophobe. The suggestion that Brave and Free condones racism and homophobia is odd considering my history. 

What you might not know is that the Klan marched around my family’s home in Virginia with flaming torches and threw rocks at our house, because my parents stood up for the rights of our town’s only Jewish family during a PTA meeting. That same elementary school was finally forced to allow black children to attend when I was in the sixth grade, but like me they were placed in the special education class to keep us away from the good white students.

I am proud to count as good friends Black Panther leaders Kiilu Nyasha and Carol Hill. I delivered groceries to the Black Liberation Army controlled housing project at Columbia Point in Boston in the early years of Food Not Bombs. I was the director of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, the native American political prisoner, and helped Pam and Ramona Africa on the campaign to free Abu Jamal. I have worked with Food Not Bombs volunteers in Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Palestine, Turkey, and dozens of cities in Eastern Europe, Mexico, the Philippines and Indonesia. Racists always join people of color in addressing the suffering of war and poverty. 

I participated with Act Up in protests against Anthony Fauci, and the police violence waged against my gay and trans friends in the Castro. I designed the weekly full color drag queen magazine “Current News”, staffed the Kansas City’s Gay Lesbian Hotline, and like most of us I have gay and lesbian friends and family members who I love. 

As you may know, I did 500 nights in jail in San Francisco and faced twenty-five to life in prison for my work with Food Not Bombs. I was captured on three occasions and taken to a dark room, had my clothing ripped off, was lifted by my arms and legs until my ligaments and tendons tore, and was stuffed naked into a stress position cage for three days each time. 

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force sent a memo to the San Francisco Field Office on August 29, 1988 after witnessing our arrests at Golden Gate Park, claiming Food Not Bombs was a “credible national security threat”. That is a huge endorsement of my ability to organize. 

When I arrived at Chris Krohn’s recent San Francisco Mime Troupe afterparty, a dear friend and owner of Veg News happened to walk by with her brother. He had just finished reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”  He was excited to tell me that I was included in Zinn’s book. I shared that Howard and I had been friends and that he wrote the forward to my first two books. Chris Hedges wrote the forward to my last text, ‘The Anarchist Cookbook.”

On August 22, 1988 the city censored Food Not Bombs by making 24 arrests at Golden Gate Park.

NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE TO WAR AND THE ATTACKS ON OUR FREEDOMS

Again, I tell you all this in response to Joy Schendledecker’s attack against Brave and Free in Bruce Bratton’s newsletter, where she claims the group is some stealth-racist far right group made up by innocent dupes. Do you really think I am that politically unsophisticated?

Kathleen initiated Brave and Free Santa Cruz, using her decades of experience in the peace and social justice movement to inform the strategy of our local resistance to the AI managed digital prison being implemented as this phase of global centralized control. I designed the Brave and Free logo and most of our literature. 

Working class people of every background joined the group. We held a series of workshops on how to build a nonviolent movement against a totalitarian government. We asked our members to read “CANVAS:  A Guide to Effective Nonviolent Struggle”.  A group of about thirty people met at the Resource Center for Nonviolence writing our Values and Mission Statement, as suggested by what we had learned from studying the process that the activists in Serbia had used to build their nonviolent resistance movement against Milosevic, much of which was based on the teachings of Gene Sharp. 

When CodePink announced a national protest for an end to the nearly decade long war in Ukraine, the members of Brave and Free Santa Cruz agreed to participate. It was chilling to see our peace rally being hijacked by supporters of Ukrainian Nazi leader Stepan Bandera with their “Clear the Skies” signs. This particularly disturbed me because, in May 2014, I watched a livestream video of a mob attacking the Trade Union Center in Odessa, Ukraine, setting the building on fire and killing over 40 people. Some of those attacking the union hall waved red and black flags that I generally associate with left anarchist allies. So I wrote my Food Not Bombs friends in Ukraine to find out why anarchists were involved.  They responded that that was the flag of the far right Nazi group Azov and that their members had been terrorizing our volunteers for years. They said that they had a history of attacking the annual gay pride march and often assaulted the Roma community. 

The “Clear the Skies” group at our rally were proud to show me their Facebook pages with Bandera’s photo and red and black profile backgrounds. One board member of the Resource Center for Nonviolence vigorously defended them when I expressed alarm that Nazis were participating in our peace protest, and were calling for an escalation in the conflict that would most certainly lead to a nuclear war.  CodePink’s Medea Benjamin also expressed frustration that they had attended our protests. That red and black flag can still be seen in current videos and photos flapping over the graves of those killed during the war in Ukraine, and flying on the tanks provided to them by the taxpayers of America and Europe. 

While social media censors their reporting, if you look hard enough you can follow journalists like Patrick Lancaster, Wyatt Reed, and Eva Bartlett who have been reporting from the Donbas for years covering the war. 

I am currently getting 15 to 20 heartbreaking calls a morning from seniors who live in rural America, seeking food. Many express anger that we are sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, while they are down to their last can of tuna and don’t have money to buy gas for their car. This crisis is only going to become more dire.  LendingTree reported on March 30, 2023 that more than 8.07 million people in the United States were behind in their monthly rent payments. 

While nearly half of the members of Brave and Free probably call themselves progressive, we also have support of people who may have voted for Biden or Trump. Some members might be backing Trump, Robert F Kennedy Jr or Dr Cornel West. Others like myself don’t care at all about the divisive Presidential theater that was designed to pit Americans against one another, to insure we will never be a threat to power.  Brave and Free doesn’t endorse any political party or personality. We are united against the threats to our health and freedoms, bound together by our values and mission statement.  We stand against war and the increased escalation in Ukraine that brings us closer every day to a nuclear conflict. That is why we chose to hold a rally for peace in Ukraine on Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons on a city. 

Moscow Food Not Bombs is arrested marching with a banner against the Special Military Operation

THOUGHT POLICE – SUPPORTING CENSORSHIP TO PROTECT CORPORATE DOMINATION

Joy Schendledecker also attacked the website “The Last American Vagabond” where independent journalists like Whitney Webb publish their ground breaking research on the inner workings of power and the role of the mafia, finance, and the security state in building a system of control that has no allegiance to any political party or political personality. 

Whitney Webb’s two volume book “One Nation Under Blackmail” provides a detailed account of covert manipulation of our society. I can confirm from direct experience that the perspective on power that she details are accurate. We plan to show one of her interviews at our next meeting. Two of my old leftist friends, Dr Shannon Murray and Palestinian American journalist Sam Husseini both suggested I read Webb’s work, and I am pleased that they introduced me to her research.

When social media started to censor unofficial information and flooded the media with their divide and conquer propaganda, the information provided on far left sites like “The Last American Vagabond” and “The Corbett Report” provided access to information that had been silenced at the request of the state. We now know from discovery in federal lawsuits, FOIA requests and the Twitter Files that the government was able to hide experts who expressed perspectives on the pandemic, war or the economy that interfered with the agenda of the corporate state.  We have direct personal connections with the people whose websites we have linked on our website, and we know they are not supporting racists, or                         homophobic hate.  

Joy, you seem to believe that these websites are based on the dog-whistle images on unrelated ads you may see pushed by AI algorithms. You seem to be making things up to fit your ideology.  For example, it’s weird to accuse Brave and Free of endorsing a t-shirt simply because it’s on the same merchandise platform as that used by a totally different channel. Currently, I can’t access the braveandfreesantacruz.org website because our “webmaster” Commander X has disappeared with the details, and I have more important things to do. But if I could, I would add more links and sure would not remove the great links we already have.

These censors live among us. Google’s Trust and Safety team is managed by three former CIA agents. A total of 165 people from the Intelligence Community work at Google. Facebook and Twitter also have large numbers of spooks gatekeeping speech. Three years ago, everyone on the left would have been horrified by the use of the security forces to silence dissent.

Our digital history is even being rewritten. The co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, has been making some serious allegations about the manipulation of information on the platform by intelligence agencies, specifically the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Information I could find three years ago while writing my memoir has vanished.

Before 2020, those of us on the far left lived by a slogan “Question Authority.” We stood against censorship, militarism, big Pharma, mass surveillance and CIA coups. We supported bodily autonomy, labor rights, the protection of the environment, and defended our civil liberties. That seems to no longer be the case for many of our colleague, who see themselves as the “educated class” and believe that the working class are ignorant antisemitic, homophobic, racist rednecks.  

“Obey Authority” has become the slogan of the lockdown liberals.

The black, gay, lesbian, trans and Jewish members of Brave and Free Santa Cruz might not agree with Joy Schendledecker and her depiction of our organization. 

Thankfully our movement is growing in response to the increasing threats to our freedom and the very real danger of a global war between nuclear armed nations.  I encourage you to join us in what has become one of the most important times in our half century of resistance to the totalitarian policies of these global institutions. I encourage Joy and her supporters to attend one of our meetings to verify their claims.

BRAVE AND FREE SANTA CRUZ

https://braveandfreesantacruz.org/

Police arrest Moscow Food Not Bombs for protesting the war.

Peace, Love, and Dog-Whistles in Santa Cruz? 

8/7/2023 

Joy Schendledecker 

Last weekend I attended the annual Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembrance Day event at the Clock Tower, which this year (as in the past) was enveloped by a “Peace in Ukraine” rally. The Collateral Damage sculpture is cleaned and polished annually, and is an important, intersectionalist anti-war, anti-racist, universal justice symbol for the community to rally around. 

Generally speaking, this is my crowd, and the kind of event that I love: grassroots organized, small, peace-loving, intersectionalist, sometimes a little cheesy. But this year I had some qualms about attending at all, because of the involvement of one group: Brave and Free Santa Cruz. 

I have nothing against any of the individuals in this group, since (as far as I know) I don’t know any of them particularly well. I suspect that a few people that I like very much may be increasingly drawn to them as they are drawn to support RFK Jr’s seriously effed-up presidential bid or Ukraine anti-war positions that may lean towards Putin-apologists. 

I’m used to having close relationships with people that I disagree with strongly on a few issues (including Trump voters and anti-vaxxers). So I’ve been thinking hard about why this group concerns me so much, especially at this particular event, aside from my immediate turn-off due to their anti-vaxx stance. 

It’s because they employ dangerous tropes and misinformation, while partnering with people and organizations that are funded by the far-right. It makes the whole world, and our little community, more dangerous for queer, BIPOC, disabled, neurodiverse, nonconformist people. People like me, my kids, and my friends. People I love. What they espouse or endorse is also fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-social, in spite of their stated values. 

Scan the Brave and Free Santa Cruz home page and you might decide that their views are not so bad. I think there’s general consensus in our community that we support much of what they include in their vision bullet points: healthy ecosystems, free speech, civil rights, anti-war peace, and the weakening of corporate power. 

Scratch the surface and follow their links, and you might start to think: “They’re a little out there, but hey, to each their own. They’re not outright saying they hate jews or trans people.” 

Unfortunately, their foundational Mission Statement, Vision, and Values include beliefs that are inseparable from antisemitic, racist, anti-queer, trans-phobic, xenophobic, anti-abortion, and decidedly reactionary movements, ideas, and individuals. They are linked to a world-wide movement that can be incredibly dangerous. 

Central to this movement are dog-whistles–insider speak or code words and symbols that outsiders either don’t get the significance of or that can be plausibly denied when called out. 

For example, personal sovereignty in the literal sense is something that most of us can probably agree on: privacy and bodily agency are essential to our civil rights and healthcare choices. Personal Sovereignty in the context of the other words on the Brave and Free homepage is also coded to reference the Sovereign Citizen movement, which, in large part, is rooted in white-supremecy, colonialism, patriarchy, and rejection of our social contracts to live together in ways that are developed over time through community, consensus, and democracy. It is anti-communitarian and libertarian in its anti-government and anti-tax stances. 

The Great Reset is a real and troubling pro-capitalist program; the Great Reset conspiracy theory employs anti-semitic tropes and dog-whistles. 

Another event they’re holding this week focuses on 15-Minute Cities. 15-Minute Cities are a good thing: it’s how most people lived for ages, basically getting around by foot or slow transport to everything they needed in their village or neighborhood in about 15 minutes. It’s a great idea for universal accessibility and pro-social economic and environmental justice. Somehow, the 15-Minute City conspiracy theory, on the other hand, invokes the bogeymen of government surveillance, confinement, control, and scarcity. 

We have good reasons to oppose Geolitica (FKA PredPol) and I have written about them critically in the past. But I can find no link between them and the concept of 15-Minute Cities at all. 

The “News” link on Brave and Free takes you directly to The Last American Vagabond (LAV) website, an implicit endorsement of their content. Among many (MANY!) other troubling elements, in their online shop they sell this t-shirt. 

As an outsider, I didn’t get the significance of this name/image at all until I did a couple of internet searches. It’s a reference to a 2018 shooting-suicide at Youtube’s headquarters in San Bruno, CA. The shooter, cis-woman Nasim Najafi Aghdam, was quickly co-opted by the conspiracy world as a trans-woman scapegoat, the idea being that trans women are actually dangerous men. In part thanks to anti-trans fake news like this, in the US murders of trans people nearly doubled from 2018-2022. And we do have anti-trans shenanigans happening in our own county and state, it’s not just Ron DeSantis’s Florida suffering. Check out this local gem! 

I don’t want to get into an encyclopedic listing of problematic LAV partners and merch, so I’ll just flag Lift the Veil and an apparent love of cryptocurrencies. 

I’m an artist with ADHD, and I love (or can’t help) thinking outside the box and lateral thinking. But when lateral thinking falls off the edge of the earth and stockpiles weapons or tries to coup or promote hate (even laterally), I’m done. Like the Querdenker movement in Germany tipping over into the Reichsbürger movement. 

I’ll leave you with one more resource to help get you grounded: The Transnational Institute. Please, we cannot fall into hate-fuelled conspiracy theories that harm or kill people. It’s not enough to say that the less obvious discriminatory views of a group can be ignored so that we can work together on what we do agree on. It’s not enough to tolerate hate so that we’re not seen as canceling members of our community. 

We can only come together in solidarity when we are truly and proactively anti-racist, anti-antisemitic, and anti-sexist. We must call in our community members to do better if they want to collaborate with us. We must make our community safe for ourselves and all of our diversities. If a rally or meeting is unsafe for any of us, then it’s not okay to keep going; or to allow those associated with hate to infiltrate our events.