Anarcho-Communists Arrested in Georgia

Anarchist-Communists Arrested in Georgia

By Mark Schwendau

Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) staff attorney Thomas Jurgens was among almost two dozen of the rioters arrested following a violent attack on police at a proposed training site of the Atlanta Police Foundation’s facility, located a few miles south of the city. SPLC attorney Jurgens has previously served as a legal intern in Dekalb County’s public defender office and as an assistant public defender for the 9th Judicial Circuit Court of Florida, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Some 23 were charged with Domestic Terrorism as The Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI) is the charging agency leading the investigation. More arrests may follow as some 35 “agitators” were seen involved in videos posted online. The GBI reports the group may be international. A list of those arrested suspects published by the Atlanta Police Department (APD) Monday revealed only two from Georgia. The majority hailed from other states with came from other countries.

The list of those charged thus far reads as follows:

Three suspects – Ayla King, Alexis Paplai, and Timothy Bilodeau – are from Massachusetts. There are two from Arizona: Samuel Ward and Max Biederman. From New York, there are Mattia Luini and Priscilla Grim.  Another pair – Kayley Meissner and Grace Martin – are from Wisconsin.  Kamryn Pipes is from Louisiana. Maggie Gates is from Indiana. Ehret Nottingham is from Colorado. Victor Puertas is from Utah. Amin Chaoui is from Virginia. James Marsicano is from North Carolina. Emma Bogush is from Connecticut. Luke Harper is from Florida. Colin Dorsey is from Maine. And Zoe Larmey is from Tennessee.  The only suspects with Georgia addresses are Thomas Jurgens and Jack Beaman.”

The Atlanta Police Department stated that the demonstrators “changed into black clothing and entered the construction area and began to throw large rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks at police officers.”

Videos online start off showing a couple of law enforcement officers near construction equipment on the site with a horde of people just beyond a fence, mostly wearing black and black masks who then breach the fence. These people then advance on police driving them out of the fenced compound they termed “Cop City,” and ultimately, the construction equipment is set ablaze by the protesters. The construction site is an 85-acre parcel of land in DeKalb County’s South River Forest.

The incident began after a concert held by protesters in a nearby adjoining forest turned destructive as festival-goers began uprooting sections of the construction site Sunday. “Music is not a crime; protest is not a crime. The first amendment doesn’t go away when a single person sets a fire,” the Atlanta Solidarity Fund tweeted following the events of that day.

Another group, Defend the Atlanta Forest, then denounced law enforcement who labeled protesters “violent agitators,” insisting the 35 individuals arrested were “but peaceful concertgoers who were nowhere near the demonstration.” Videos posted online to prove that untrue.

Atlanta police chief Darin Schierbaum told reporters Sunday: “We continue to see a number of individuals not from Atlanta, Georgia, that are present tonight undertaking criminal activities to destabilize the construction of a fire and police training center.” Environmental activists have protested the construction of the training facility for months, citing the need to preserve the broader forest with concerns Atlanta’s law enforcement has been “militarized.” But the city-states the training center “will support high-quality, community-oriented training for police, fire and E-911 personnel.”

In January, a protesting climate activist, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (“Tortuguita”), was killed during a violent confrontation when police were working to remove protesters. Terán shot at an officer causing law enforcement to return fire and kill him. Terán’s mother, Belkis, dismissed the police version as fiction, insisting that her son was not violent.

“I will go to the US to defend Manuel’s memory,” Belkis, who lives in Panama told The Guardian news source at that time. “I’m convinced that he was assassinated in cold blood.”

Following the youth’s death, environmental activists, including members of Antifa, descended on downtown Atlanta, shattering windows, destroying a police car, and vandalizing property. Of the six individuals charged with domestic violence in the aftermath, five of them came from out-of-state.

Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp condemned the demonstrations in January, stating in a tweet, “Violence and unlawful destruction of property are not acts of protest. They are crimes that will not be tolerated in Georgia and will be prosecuted fully.”

Activists maintained that there was a difference between their tactics and how they were portrayed in the media. Again, the videos do not lie. People can see with their own eyes and destruction of property and violence against law enforcement officers trump any cause of a protest.

Some are now calling for a full investigation as to who is behind these protests, encouraging the GBI to follow the money trail and infiltrate the organization to determine who is behind these two related protests. The people of Atlanta are saying it is high time to utilize the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. That act offers the legal tools to gather evidence, establish new penal prohibitions, and provide enhanced sanctions with new remedies for dealing with the unlawful activities of organized crime.

Copyright © 2022 by Mark S. Schwendau

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Mark S. Schwendau is a retired technology professor who has always had a sideline in news-editorial writing where his byline has been, “Bringing little known news to people who simply want to know the truth.”  He classifies himself as a Christian conservative who God cast to be a realist.  His personal website is www.IDrawIWrite.Tech.

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