Whoever commanded the Montgomery County police presence at last week’s Kavanaugh protest seems to have been replaced after all the videotaped harassment and threats. This time around, the Oct 5 Kavauagh and Roberts residential protests went smoothly, with no harassment or problems of any kind.

Both Kavanaugh and Roberts have whined publicly about activists at their homes and elsewhere calling out the current Supreme Court as illegitimate. With all the GOP cheating to steal a seat from Obama, then ram through three Trump nominees how can it be anything else?

On the 5th of October, so-called “Progressive Anti Abortion Uprisng” (PAAU) held a press conference at the Dept of Justice to decry the Federal prison time they may get for storming abortion clinics. Two pro-choice counterprotesters called out their hypocrisy, one responding to their whining about Jane’s Revenge with “Jane is watching!” The entire event was livestreamed so this is certainly true.

PAAU is infamous as the group that burglarized a DC area clinic and stole five fetuses, and whose operators may have stolen hundreds more to baptize and bury. Baptism does not sound like the sort of thing progressives would take personal risks to bring about. These are religious extremists like the rest of the anti-choice movement. The keynote speaker at their Oct 5 presser was the infamous Randall Terry, formerly of Operation Rescue and a notorious terrorist.

The reality of the situation is that cops are cops, and if they were able to find Jane’s Revenge’s operators they would likely face far more prison time than anyone ever would for clinic blockades or vandalism. Cops tend well to the right politically, and no doubt there are many cops and sheriff’s deputies just chomping at the bit to arrest women at highway checkpoints for going out of state to get abortions. These sort of cops and prosecutors will do as little to those who attack clinics as they can get away with.

PAAU screamed about being prosecuted while nobody has been caught and thus nobody prosecuted for Jane’s Revenge’s guerilla strikes. Janes Revenge however is an underground movement whose skilled operators have not given cops opportunities to catch them. The Department of “Justice” cannot prosecute people who cannot be identified or found, so PAAU’s whining about the lack of such prosecutions is meaningless. PAAU by comparison attacks clinics and harasses patients right out in the open, so naturally their identities are known. Doubtful they will face much prison time: there were a number of cases where far-right bombings of abortion clinics netted five year sentences. That is less than some in the SHAC 6 case got for running an anti-vivisection website targetting Huntingdon Life Sciences. PAAU had a lot of nerve comparing themselves to those who had to stand up to the FBI’s Green Scare.

On the 1st of October, Iranians marched in DC and many other US cities in solidarity with the hard-pressed fighters in the women’s uprising against theocracy in their home country. Local activists turned out to support them. The uprising began when security forces murdered Mahsa Amini over a veil worn “improperly.” Much like police murders in the US, this has set off a firestorm of resistance.

Oct 1 was a global day of action to support resistance inside Iran. There were marches in hundreds of cities and the capitols of many countries. Here in DC, the solidarity march was many blocks long when it set off down K st. The first target was the Washington Post. Marchers stopped there, and at that point the sound vehicles joined the protest. From there the march reversed direction, ending up at a building housing the Iranian government’s representatives in the US.

So far the protests in Iran have held their ground for over two weeks. The regime has desperately resorted to brutality and force, only to see the protests escalate. Already police and security forces have murdered over 1,500 unarmed civilians protesting the regime, children included. They have responded to protests with the kind of force Trump was only able to talk about using, but instead of stopping the protests it is escalating them. The government’s brutality is having the effect of throwing water on burning oil(fire spreads) or flour on a kitchen fire(boom). If the government murders too many people for protesting in public, underground armed resistance become safer and an insurgency may result. This is one of the standard ways civil wars get started.

Iran’s vicious and brutal morality police are a lot like the misogynistic antiabortion extremists and gaybashers who have been spreading like a plague right here in the US, and Iran’s fight today may well be our fight tomorrow. Theocracy is to the right of fascism and even monarchism, the latter being the form of government the US imposed on Iran after the 1953 proposal by a democratic government to nationalize the oil industry. Since the revolution to overthrow that monarchy was hijacked by theocrats in 1979, the regime in Iran (and its horrific torture and murder) may be as “made in the USA” as any Bible-thumping Texas preacher calling on the sheriff to set checkpoints to stop pregnant women from going out of state for abortion, and for his flock to hunt down LGBTQ folks.

As for the US’s sanctions on Iran, many protesting in Iran (some demanding nothing less than regime change) have stated that the sanctions make the regime and the wealthy stronger and are instead harming the less well off majority in the country.

The July 4 Beltway blockade. If Judge Koch thinks THIS is a traffic problem maybe a look at I-75 in FL would be educational(photo by Declare Emergency)

I-75 backed up from flood-forced closure Sep 30th. HERE’s your climate emergency in action, judge Koch! Unlike a short-lived protest blockade, this is still ongoing as this is written. Folks here are lucky to even still have their cars. Fuck off with your whining about a peaceful sit-in on a dry road that goes minutes to hours

On Sep 30th in a Rockville, MD courtroom, Judge Koch ignored recommendations for prosecutors and sentenced 13 Declare Emergency activists to 4 days in jail for blockading the Capitol Beltway on July 4. That’s right-the judge gave them jail time prosecutors were NOT asking for, on his own initiative.

Prosecutors should consider that when protesters consider a public emergency to exist, any attempt to make civil disobedience impossible may result in further escalation. In the wake of Hurricane Ian’s devastation in Florida it is no longer possible to argue that there is no public emergency!

There is a scientific consensus that climate change is making hurricanes more powerful, and Ian hit in the Ft Myers area just 2 mph short of Cat 5 strength and was one of the 5 most powerful hurricanes ever to hit the US. Tampa (a MAJOR city) barely missed complete destruction,saved by the storm hitting further south. Waist-high floodwaters were reported as far in land as Orlando.

Perhaps Judge Koch should try to drive to Sanabel Island, and determine in person whether climate change is now a public emergency. Oh that’s right-the causeway is down in multiple locations. Maybe try Ft Myer’s Beach instead, where a storm surge put houses in open water with waves on it. That is, if the judge can even navigate the gas lines, closed roads, and widespread power outages. Oh yeah: I-75 on Florida’s Gulf Coast was closed for flooding far longer than Declare Emergency could ever have kept the Beltway shut down.

more:
https://dcindymedia.org/node/3992