Ableism at the Anarchy Fair

On November 25^th 2023, a small group of disabled trans anti-eugenicists confronted a festival of ableist violence in so called “Portland, Oregon”. This was done against libertarians posing as anarchists whom avoid taking responsibility for the violence they have perpetrated by spreading SARS-CoV-2 and its strains without mitigation. Their violence follows the logic of settlers who unleashed smallpox on the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.

The fake anarchists who organized this festival have published a statement supporting the continuation of the COVID genocide through promoting anti-masking rhetoric in a publication called Anarchy Anarchy Anarchy!. In this newspaper, they wrote that anti-ableists who wheat pasted demands of leftist spaces to require masks are the equivalent of health cops and that mask requirements are “gulag as fuck”. These are in line with common talking points that fascists in this country make in support of the COVID genocide, claiming that mask and vaccine mandates are “authoritarian” even though they directly mitigate ableist violence. The millions dead and disabled from COVID show that refusing to mask is the real authoritarianism, because it makes space lethally inaccessible for disabled people and is killing & disabling marginalized people in mass unlike mask requirements.

This narrative also obscures the true role of the police as shock troopers for reproducing all systems of oppression. It ignores how police forces across the country & globally are responsible for pushing anti-masking practices & COVID denial in their own ranks. This violence functions as a further enforcement of genocide through their systemic power, such as exposing prisoners to COVID while withholding masks, tests & vaccines, leaving them to long term disabilities and in worst cases, death.

Our original intentions as a group were to go in, burn their ableist newspapers, make our statement at the firepit and leave, without creating bodily harm or fighting anyone. Yet upon collecting the materials we were dog piled, beaten and swung at. This forced us to respond in self defense, resulting in at least two anti-maskers getting directly damaged by our attacks. The way these reactionaries resorted to bashing the disabled trans women whom confronted their anti-masking rhetoric does not compare to the lethal violence of their willing spread of COVID. Yet we found it hypocritical that the TERFs who invaded town on 11/19/2023 and many local fascists were beaten less hard than what disabled trans women received for calling out ableism in this “anarchist” space, as unfortunately TERFs and local fascist rarely are inflicted the brutal retaliation they deserve here. We believe this intense reaction against vocal disabled trans people reveal the fascist taint in these “anarchist” anti-maskers, who rarely enact that level of violence onto other right wingers. We urge people to deplatform their crypto-fascist newspaper and these ableist talking points everywhere.

We also call for people to create space to grieve the ongoing losses & deaths from the COVID genocide, as state power & its organizational control continue to push its colonial legacy from our collective memory. From AIDS activists worldwide, to the antifascists who had fought against Pinochet, disrupting public spaces to create living sites of greiving against the ongoing violence can be a powerful act to end the silence which both obscures these deaths & benefits from their erasure. We believe that it is legitimate for people to force events like anarchy fair to be locations of grieving, so the violence is not ignored and the proud perpetrators are revealed.

We are proud of resisting the COVID genocide, because to remain passive in the face of violence, or to spend our time & efforts convincing committed ableists to stop the violence, only perpetuates the reproduction of ableism. We will fight until all disabled people are liberated from the domination of ableism, and until the grip of white supremacy is destroyed by the fury of anti-colonial rebellion! We know that only in direct conflict will hierarchy begin to crumble.

For the destruction of all oppression! Long live the struggle for the liberation of disabled people!

LONG LIVE ANARCHY!!!!!!