28 January 23
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Gov. Brian Kemp is doing all he can — including calling in the National Guard — to snuff out demonstrations after police killed a "Cop City" protestor
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is trying to stomp out the protests by any means necessary, charging the demonstrators with terrorism and, on Thursday, calling up the National Guard to stand by to put down any further resistance.
Last Saturday was the first time the Defend the Atlanta Forest (DAF) movement left the trees and took to the streets en masse. Outside of the towers on Peachtree, someone threw a rock at the building’s glass doors and facade; it bounced off. Another protester jogged up, nose almost pressed against the glass and started bashing away with a claw hammer — DISH! DISH! DISH! — shattering panels of glass as chaos broke out behind them. Protesters lobbed mortar-style fireworks at the front of the building, exploding in showers of colored sparks. Others dragged parked electric scooters into the roadway. As the protest boiled down Peachtree, some set two Atlanta Police cruisers ablaze and shattered the windows of a nearby Wells Fargo branch. No civilians or police officers were harmed, and building damage was largely limited to the Peachtree Towers and the bank branch.
The Atlanta Police Department responded with force, charging protesters and tackling several who were carrying a banner in front of the protest column. Those arrested were part of a new precedent in Georgia: charging those involved in any form of protest with domestic terrorism.
The terrorism charges were not the first ones leveled against protesters from the DAF movement. In two raids on the forest encampment in December and January, over a dozen other protesters were arrested and slapped with similar charges, despite many of their arrest records showing that they committed no specific crimes other than misdemeanor trespassing. One of these raids ended in tragedy, when police killed Manuel “Tortuguita” Teran, a 26-year-old who had moved into the forest full-time from his home in Tallahassee. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation claims that Teran shot first, hitting an officer from the Georgia State Patrol in the abdomen, before he was gunned down by police. The forest defenders aren’t buying that narrative, particularly as there’s no body camera footage or civilian witnesses to Tortuguita’s killing. The protesters chanted “Tortuga vive, la lucha sigue!” (Tortuga lives, the struggle continues) as they moved down the street on Saturday.
Both Governor Kemp and Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens have come down hard on the movement, saying what it’s doing makes them terrorists, not activists. “There were some individuals within that crowd that meant violence,” Dickens told CBS’s Face the Nation, adding that their crimes included domestic terrorism. “They had explosives. They burned down a police car, they broke windows at businesses.”
The charges leveled last Saturday were the first stemming from incidents outside of the Atlanta forest. Georgia prosecutors first charged protesters apprehended in the forest with domestic terrorism on December 14. “When we first heard about [the first domestic terrorism charges] our reaction was literal disbelief,” says Marlon Kautz, an organizer with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which helps arrested protesters with jail support and legal representation. “The floor kinda dropped out from everybody. There was the sense that if the state was willing to go this far, to tell these kinds of lies about protesters, and to advance these really intense charges, there’s no telling what they would do.”
Georgia’s domestic terrorism law was codified in 2017, in the wake of the Dylann Roof shootings. It states, broadly, that violent criminal action that is intended to “alter, change, or coerce” government policy can be classified as domestic terrorism, punishable by a sentence of up to 35 years in prison. Democratic lawmakers opposed the bill en masse when it was pushed through Georgia’s House and Senate, arguing it could be unfairly weaponized against minority groups and be used to quash domestic protest. Those fears, activists say, have now come true.
“We know that they’re increasing repression because we are winning,” Bullwinkle, a forest defender, who spoke using a pseudonym to conceal their identity, says. “Their goal is to scare us and to intimidate anyone new to the struggle away from ever even joining.”
While the charges and Teran’s killing have rocked the core of the Defend the Forest movement, Bullwinkle and other protesters tell Rolling Stone that they’re not backing down. Instead, the charges are part of what Kautz called a “strategic political move” by authorities.
“These charges were never designed to stick,” The Atlanta Anti-Repression Committee, an organization formed to support arrested protesters during the 2020 George Floyd Uprising, wrote in a statement. “They serve the same function that right-wing narratives of Portland as a bombed out antifa war zone served in 2020: to present an image that is so extreme that any degree of government repression is justified in response.”
On Thursday evening, Governor Kemp issued an executive order declaring a state of emergency across the state until February 9, and authorizing up to 1,000 Georgia National Guard troops to prepare to deploy to cities across the state, using the violent protests last Saturday as its justification. The Atlanta Police Department deferred a request for comment about the executive order to the mayor’s office. An Atlanta city official who wished to remain anonymous told Rolling Stone that despite its stated language, Kemp’s order was intended to pre-empt protests expected to break out this weekend following the release of body-camera footage from the Memphis Police Department’s killing of Tyre Nichols. Nichols was beaten by police and died three days later.
But as Atlanta activists note, those National Guard troops could be called upon to quash any protest. With domestic terrorism charges already on the table, the precedent is set for Georgia to repress protests with far greater legal weight than before.
“The ability to protest is a fundamental right, one that is protected by the First Amendment and one that has been a critical tool for positive change throughout the American story,” Cory Isaacson, the Legal Director of the Georgia ACLU said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “The ACLU of Georgia is dismayed by the elected officials who are taking active steps to curb this right. Militarization tactics and the overbroad use of domestic terrorism charges serve to intimidate the people of this state and silence their voices.”
It’s clear that Kemp’s legal crackdown is having an effect, but it might not be the one he’s looking for. The confluence of Cop City and another potential nationwide racial justice protest movement could make Atlanta ground zero for both protests and police brutality. Both sides seem ready for war.
“The supporters of Cop City have created a powder keg, which they falsely believe can be contained with media spin and armed repression,” the AARC said in its statement. “They failed at the former already; they have now failed to remember that the latter is more likely to create sparks than to put out fires. We should all be prepared to respond accordingly.”
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