Torchlight: Anarchist News From Pittsburgh

February 2019 is featuring four fundraisers (and counting!) for local projects/organizations. Starting on Groundhog Day, Pittsburgh ABC is holding a spaghetti dinner and trivia night at the Big Idea to benefit anarchist prisoners Conor Stevens and Eric King.

Next up on the 10th the Big idea will host another benefit, this one a brunch for SCORCH.

On Valentines Day the Buckit Community Bail Fund will celebrate their first bailout at Repair the World. This event will be preceded by a rally at Allegheny County Jail, more on this as we get it.

And on the 16th it’s SCORCH again, with a punk rock karaoke benefit at Babyland. Both SCORCH fundraisers are to raise money for their upcoming action medic training, tentatively scheduled for the second weekend in March.

Flyers from the white supremacist group Patriot Front have been spotted in South Hills, according to the Pittsburgh Current. Apparently local residents have been tearing them down as fast as they appear, but antifascists are still urged to keep an eye out. Patriot Front is the new name of Vanguard America, one of whose members, James Fields, murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville last year by ramming his car into a crowd of antifascist counterprotesters. The group is most active in Texas, and has not been known to operate in western PA until now.

More alarmingly, Jewish alt-lite troll Ben Shapiro is scheduled to speak at Pitt next Wednesday the 14th, hosted by Young Americans for Freedom. Shapiro is a racist, trans-phobic, pro-gun, anti-immigrant Zionist author, who also speaks regularly at universities. To date he has not attracted the same attention as other alt-lite personalities such as Charlie Kirk or Milo Yiannopoulos, but he probably deserves it. Watch this space for further developments…

Thanks to Robert Bowers’ horrific massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill on Saturday, we now finally know what it takes to be charged with a hate crime in Trump’s America. Beating up a Black man in a bar while shouting racial epithets isn’t enough. Even murdering two Black people in a grocery store and telling a white bystander “Whites don’t shoot whites” won’t do the trick. But executing eleven white Jewish people in a synagogue while screaming “All Jews must die!” is apparently sufficiently blatant to spur the FBI to action, if only to protect what is left of their own legitimacy. Continue reading “Trump Unwelcomed to Pittsburgh”

The latest guidelines for unpermitted street protests issued by the Pittsburgh cops have generated a lot of outrage, but not much in the way of tactical or strategic analysis. We gave the document a quick glance to see what it might reveal about the cops’ plans and thoughts. In no particular order:

Continue reading “A Brief Look at Pittsburgh’s New Protest Guidelines”

As everyone now knows, on June 19th East Pittsburgh police officer Michael Rosfeld murdered Antwon Rose Jr. by shooting him in the back three times as he ran from a traffic stop. When a video of the shooting went viral on social media, Pittsburgh exploded in protest. Explosions are relative of course, and the riots, looting, and torched convenience stores that characterized analogous uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore have here translated to peaceful marches to block traffic. Nonetheless the current situation is a major departure from the usual activist routine that anarchists in Pittsburgh suffer through. We offer the following points for consideration.

Continue reading “Some Notes on the Demonstrations for Antwon Rose”