Hello Lovely People Of Richmond!!
We are hosting a house show for Virginia’s finest Nerve City Friday May 17th!
The show will be held at The Wingnut we will keep you updated on time of the show. But this doesn’t happen everyday SO COME OUT!!!!
http://www.myspace.com/nervecity
“A small portrait of the Richmond, Va based Wingnut Anarchist Collective between February and August of 2011” by Ethan Silverstein of Boston, MA.
Roses On My Table from Ethan Silverstein on Vimeo.
Check out this movie our friend put a lot of work into! Keep in mind that not everyone in this film is still a Wingnut resident, or necessarily supportive of all Wingnut projects. Clearly a 20 minute film can’t capture the complexities of our lives. Things aren’t always sunshine and roses. But we hope that everyone in this movie is doing awesome anarchist things and having a great time doing them!
8 new books today in the Library!
The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner
The Monster Stick and Other Appalachian Tall Tales by Paul and Bil Lepp
Tales of the Badia Bedouin folk tales from Lebanon by Rami Zurayk
The Living Dead by John Joseph Adams
Bayou City Secrets by Deborah Powell
Classics in Lesbian Studies by Esther D. Rothblum
Midlife Queer by Martin Duberman
and
Instead of Prisons by the Prison Research Education Action Project
Come by and check these books out! Browse our whole collection online at http://www.librarything.com/home/thewingnutrva
We now have 1 inch Wingnut buttons, you can get one in red and black or green and yellow. A dollar if you have one, but if not we will give you one for free! On the literature table at the Wingnut!Show your support of the Wingnut Anarchist Collective with a button sure to confuse and maybe even blind!
The Richmond Police Department and the City of Richmond have dropped their lawsuit against us.
Yay?
Sorry, I guess I’m not as excited as I should be. This is the best possible thing the RPD could have done… for themselves. Why? Because it puts this situation out of the public eye as quickly as possible, and allows them to attempt to save face before exposing themselves to even more public ridicule and calls for the resignation of Chief Norwood. (Not from us – we’d like to give him a “Best Anarchist of the Year” award for drawing so much attention to anarchist projects happening in the city. Thanks and keep up the good work!)
But there are some other subtler and more interesting things to take into consideration when looking at the RPD’s decision to drop the case. The court documents we were provided with claimed that the manuals and protocols we had recieved through FOIA “jeopardizes and endangers Richmond’s Police Officers and citizens,” yet one of the statements made to the media in regards to why the case was dropped was that the state didn’t want to “waste resources.”
If there’s one thing cops are good at, it’s protecting other cops. If the reasoning behind the lawsuit actually had anything to do with keeping the pigs safe, there is NO way it would have been dropped just because it might be a little difficult to win. The speed with which this case was dropped really just cements the fact that this case was a politically motivated attempt to intimidate a dissident group into turning over documents that we had received through THEIR OWN BEAUREAUCRATIC PROCESS.
Norwood claims that his objective in filing the lawsuit was to get the documents back quickly, but doesn’t even wait for the initial hearing date. Did he expect us to see the legalese, the statements saying they wanted the documents back, and come rushing to his office crying “OH PLEASE DON’T SUE US, WE’RE SO SORRY!”
WE
ARE
NOT
AFRAID OF YOU (more…)
On Wednesday, August 4th, the Conspiracy Tour made a stop in Washington DC. They aren’t stopping in Richmond, so the only opportunities for folks from around here to see them without traveling TOO Far were last night in DC, or tomorrow night in Carrboro. I’d say it’s worth the drive, especially if you’re involved in any way with anarchist/anti-authoritarian projects and are unfamiliar with the scope of state repression that has been coming down on our heads in the last ten years or so.
The presentation began with a brief puppet skit about what conspiracy charges actually are. Basically, someone can be charged with conspiracy to commit a crime if there is planning to commit a crime, and any action is taken in furtherance of that plan, EVEN if the crime is NEVER COMMITTED. Normally for a conspiracy to exist, more than one person has to be involved, although there are some cases (such as Scott DeMuth’s) where the state will simply INVENT co-conspirators as “unknown persons” in order to charge an individual with conspiracy.
After the initial puppet skit, there was a brief history of state repression in America, discussing such topics as the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and the recent “Operation Backfire” and including information about how these programs gather their information.
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