About
Activists Eric King, Josh Davidson, and Zane McNeill put the current federal attack on trans rights in historical perspective—connecting it to repression during the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare, Black Liberation and Gay Rights Movements, the Green Scare, and solidarity with Palestine.
In September, Donald Trump signed an executive order and memorandum designating antifascist activists and progressive nonprofit groups as domestic terrorist organizations, labeling them as “organized political violence.” The Trump administration’s criteria for this designation include: “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “support for the overthrow of the United States Government,” “extremism on migration,” “extremism on race,” “extremism on gender,” and “hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family.” At the same time, the Heritage Foundation—author of Project 2025—is lobbying the government to label and target transgender people as a separate domestic terrorism category. These policies will have sweeping consequences for organizers, protest movements, and civil rights advocates.
This talk situates these developments within the FBI’s long history of surveilling leftist movements, LGBTQ organizations, and liberation activists, and explores how current policy priorities continue that legacy. It will also explore what we can learn from past struggles—how organizers not only survived but built movements under constant FBI surveillance—highlighting harm and risk reduction strategies that remain relevant today.
Additional details available at https://firestorm.coop.
Organizer
We are a collectively-owned radical bookstore and not-for-profit event space in Asheville, North Carolina. Since 2008 we've supported grassroots movements in Southern Appalachia while developing a workplace on the basis of cooperation, empowerment and equity.