Fight Back News Service is circulating the following statement by the Climate Justice Committee of Minnesota.

The Climate Justice Committee (CJC) resolutely condemns the recent felony RICO indictments of 61 Stop Cop City activists in Atlanta, as well as the refusal by the Atlanta city government to count the 116,000 petition signatures to put Cop City on the ballot. These blatantly anti-democratic and criminal actions by the Georgia Attorney General, the Mayor of Atlanta, and Atlanta elections officials will not go unanswered.

Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr, who issued the RICO indictments, is making an open attempt to criminalize solidarity. With these charges, the state of Georgia is seeking to set the legal precedent that actions such as sharing money for camping supplies constitutes participating in a terrorist conspiracy, that running a bail fund constitutes racketeering, and that handing out fliers with the names of murderous police officers constitutes felony-level intimidation. In fact, the only terrorist conspiracy at play in Atlanta is that between the various government agencies, lobbying groups, and multinational corporations who are doing everything in their power to intimidate activists out of exercising their legal rights.

Adding insult to injury, A.G. Carr also had the audacity to stamp these RICO indictments with a date that is all too familiar to the people of Minneapolis: May 25, 2020, the date of George Floyd’s murder. Carr made clear the political reasons for this date in the text of his indictment, stating that the origins of the Stop Cop City movement can be traced to the popular uprisings of 2020 in reaction to the police murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, and countless others around the United States.

Here, the Attorney General has made an admission to what activists have been pointing out all along – that the plans to construct Cop City began as a direct reaction to the nationwide movements of 2020. This proposal for a state-of-the-art urban warfare training center was born out of the cops’ and corporations’ fear that the next time the people unleash their righteous anger, they will be substantially more organized and difficult to repress.

Their mistake, though, is that the repression of the Stop Cop City movement – jailing protestors for days on end, routinely violating protestors’ constitutionally protected free speech, and now flagrantly subverting what little remains of the ordinary democratic process – is having the opposite of its intended effect. Not only are the people getting more organized, their numbers are growing and they are becoming more determined to win.

The CJC sends its unconditional solidarity to the defenders of Weelaunee People’s Forest. In response to this latest wave of repression, we have donated to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, and highly encourage others to do the same. Funds can be donated at www.atlsolidarity.org. It is only with a mass campaign of nationwide solidarity that forest defenders can continue the fight until Cop City has been stopped.

Stop Cop City! Justice for Tortuguita and all stolen lives!

#MinneapolisMN #MN #CopCity #CJC #PoliticalRepression #Environment