On 10 March 2025, Unity of Fields interviewed a comrade from People’s City Council Los Angeles. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. You can learn more about People’s City Council and follow their work at x.com/PplsCityCouncil and instagram.com/peoplescitycouncil.
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Unity of Fields: What’s good, comrade? Unity of Fields loves the work you do with People’s City Council and has been watching it for quite a while but the last big thing that y’all were covering besides the fires were the student walkouts in East LA and across LA in general. There has been a recent uptick in activity on university campuses after the retreat from the spring uprising, but we’ve all noticed that there’s still a disconnect—and this has to do with the fact that the universities that have really popped off in New York have been bougie private schools—but there’s a disconnect between the university student movement and this more grassroots situation that popped off in LA. This isn’t really a question but I’m just opening up the conversation, I’m interested in your experiences on the ground for the LA walkouts.
People’s City Council: Yeah. I would say that the student walkouts that we saw in Los Angeles in February were entirely organic and led by high school students. And I think that’s part of the beauty of it, that they decided to take action and then started to organize walkouts in their communities, starting in East LA and they would march from East LA to City Hall. It was around the same time where very large anti-ICE protests shut down the freeway and there was a standoff with the police. And then the next night there was another large protest and hundreds of people ended up getting kettled in a tunnel. That’s one thing we try to tell people, NO TUNNELS! Don’t go! That’s one of the easiest ways to get kettled. But it was kind of this sudden flare of energy hitting the streets and high school students in LA decided to just organically start organizing around it. And I thought that was special. It had a very rebellious nature to it. When I was out and saw some of the protests downtown by City Hall, there was graffiti all over the place. There were mini street bikes and fireworks and obviously street vendors. And so it was all of these things that don’t come with a traditional manufactured rally. It was just kids hitting the streets and going out and walking out. And it was just great to see. It was truly an organic movement.
UoF: Right. You could tell it was organic because it did not have the kind of manufactured, top-down slogans, all the ANSWER Coalition pre-made posters…it also had this true mass quality where you had amerikan flags next to black anarchist flags. Obviously, I fucking hate amerika but to me this was indicative of the fact that it was not captured yet. It was totally just the masses on the street, which more sectarian people don’t really like. They’re like, “no, well, it didn’t have the correct politics right away, so therefore it’s bad and wrong.” Well, no, actually, that’s a true representation of where the migrant youth are at. And I think that if you are interested in some kind of ideological vanguard, which I am for better or worse, this to me is an opportunity to do political education, to agitate and to help them organize, to help support their self-organization and develop their lines on imperialism. I do believe that migrant youth in Southern California are going to take on a huge role as leaders in this new sequence of organization, our job is to support this in every possible way.
Another thing that I found really beautiful about the student walkouts is it was another echo of ’68, and I think a lot of people have forgotten this, there were massive student walkouts in ’68 in East LA.
There have been all of these geographic resonances with ’68, Columbia and Chicago DNC and East LA and I don’t want to fetishize ’68 or anything like that, but what’s interesting is that a lot of the same political contradictions are also coming up. A lot of the same schisms and internal movement struggles. The re-emergence of Third World Marxism as a real fighting force, the question of militancy and its necessity. The reality of the oppression of internally colonized people, specifically migrants, indigenous and Black people, and the eruption of guerrilla fighting in the Third World all happening simultaneously. It’s a tremendous amount of energy and it’s requiring us to really take sides and fight. And I don’t know, it’s a bit overwhelming to try to respond to that here after years of hegemonic social democracker nonsense. People might find this nuts but I think revolution is on the table, we have to be ready to intervene and make something out of this instability. We can’t afford to lose again.
PCC: Definitely. I think that it is important for us to let the students know about the history of walkouts in 1968, these students that were leading the protests were starting in East LA, so the community there was really sharing the history of 1968, the Chicano walkout movement—you know, tens of thousands of people were in the streets, but in the sixties in LA there was also the Watts Rebellion.
So the sixties are kind of foreshadowing what we’re experiencing now. But, also, there’s this history of walkouts in Los Angeles, not just ’68, but in 1994, tens of thousands of LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) students walked out to protest this Proposition 187, which was targeting undocumented immigrants. And then in 2006, tens of thousands of students also walked out and staged blockades and blocked traffic across four freeways. Understanding what the students in LA are doing is part of a lineage—there is a history of LA students taking radical action and and we are trying to get that information out there and tell them. “This has been done before and you’re part of this history,” we want to help them appreciate that.
And like you were saying before, it’s not up to us to dictate what the youth’s organizing looks like, but instead to help and encourage them and support them in their organizing. But the youth have autonomy to organize on their own, and they believe that they took action on their own without anyone telling them to do so. And so how do you support them without really dictating what they should do? And that’s part of, I think, our whole part of the process, or our role in the process.
UoF: Yeah, I was going to ask something about that. I really appreciated the narrative work that y’all did during the Student Intifada, and it was clear that you weren’t interfering in the organizing, but still doing a lot to politicize them in a way that was a really good model and honestly something for us to learn from as well. I listened to the podcast episode y’all did about the UCLA battle and I thought that was the best narration of what happened at the UCLA encampment that I’ve heard to this day.
If you could expand on your interactions with the students, not even just at UCLA. I remember the content that you were putting out for Cal State LA, too. Even when students weren’t putting out their own messaging, y’all were doing a lot of narrative work that I thought was really powerful and got a lot of traction. I’m interested in how you were positioning your org during that moment.
PCC: Yeah, this whole thing comes back to being “outside agitators,” but the students and the youth appreciate us and want us around. Because when those zionists came to confront and attack the encampment every single night, they knew that we had their back and that we had other people coming to support them, and we’re not just going to let them be attacked. They ended up getting seriously attacked the one night. However, they did defend the camp and they held strong for hours and hours. That’s not directly related to your question, but I’m just trying to give some background
UoF: And people don’t realize how prolonged it was. A lot of people, I think, reduce what happened at UCLA to the one night of the battle but it was every single night that the zionists were attacking…throwing the backpack of lab rats, the banana incident. It wasn’t just a one off event. So that’s a really good point about mobilizing for the students, and I think that y’all definitely to do that well.
PCC: Every night, zionists would come and try to tear down the encampment walls and they would play loud music and all of these things. And also UCLA students were facing attack from so many different angles. You had the school administration that was certainly not on their side and also willing to let the zionists attack them for five hours. But if you were watching the People’s City Council feed, you would’ve seen the night of the attack coming..it was just waves and waves of attacks every single night, and you knew the school wasn’t going to step in. And so the students were facing that down. And also the school was calling in the pigs to attack and raid the encampment the next night after the big battle.
It’s overwhelming, but you have to be brave. That’s one reason why we were able to be effective in working in collaboration with the students, we’re staring down these monsters and being brave. And the students themselves and the community that showed up for them decided that’s what they wanted to do, when they made the decision that they wanted to hold it down and not vacate camp, and they’re going to fight for their right to remain there, that was a decision they made on their own. And it’s the duty of the rest of us to support them in that.
UoF: Of course, we’re talking in the context of this week, Palestinian grad student Mahmoud Khalil being kidnapped by ICE and targeted for his pro-Palestine activism at Columbia. Two million people signed his petition, there are rallies planned in many cities, he has a court appearance scheduled Wednesday, and a lot of people are truly outraged and they’re realizing that petitions and rallies are inadequate when a comrade has been kidnapped by the state. For the same reasons that high schoolers were popping off in LA to protest ICE, we think this repressive escalation, DHS kidnapping a participant in the Student Intifada, could give the movement the potential to politicize and agitate around repression and really to break free of this restrictive mold that has been imposed upon us by NGOs in the broader solidarity movement that want us to frame Palestine as only a single issue and not really talk about settler colonialism here in the US or policing or ICE beyond just paying lip service to “interconnectedness” in our rally speeches. How would this “interconnectedness” actually materialize into our strategy? I’ll leave it there if you want to speak to that at all, the limitations of framing Palestine as a single issue, how y’all as a more local group have managed to connect your other on the ground work to Palestine, what it would look like to have a broader Intifada here that isn’t just on the campuses, that’s bigger than 2020.
PCC: I think that’s a two or three part question. But I guess I’ll start with the connection to 2020 and Stop Cop City. In 2020, Trump sent out DHS to kidnap Black Lives Matters protesters in the streets in Portland. Trump also ordered US Marshals to kill anti-fascist Michael Reinoehl in his home in the summer of 2020. US Marshals killed Winston Smith in Minneapolis in 2021. Biden gets elected and the building of Cop City in Atlanta is announced, and the movement to Stop Cop City springs up, and the proliferation of cop cities across the country is in response to 2020.
The state wants to be prepared for this intifada. The state wants to crush and repress anyone taking action. And all this goes back even further to Ferguson 2014, and the Black Power and Civil Rights movement in sixties. There’s a longer historical lens, however, in the more immediate term 2020 and Stop Cop City foreshadowed where we’re at. On the question of connecting Palestine to local issues, we can talk about LA in a second, but building Cop City in Atlanta, they also said that that was a place where the IOF would come and train with American police. And there’s already these programs where American police go to Israel to train with IOF. Atlanta Police already have the the GILEE (Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange) program. And LAPD has also gone to Israel to train with the IOF. They’ve also traded techniques on surveillance and use of drones to track people and use of surveillance to track people. And actually, LAPD uses israeli technology to monitor social media. And so there’s that explicit connection that people should make, it’s not just the single issue of Palestine.
Also, our tax dollars are not only funding the genocide of Palestinians, our tax dollars are funding this explicit connection between the American police and the Israeli military. And so that’s one way to look at it. And we (PCC) have been subject to state surveillance! The sheriffs have been posted up outside our home and LAPD was investigating our community space. They’ve targeted us for our abolitionist anti-police work. Also, a lot of our comrades are doing work with unhoused people in LA. The state has monitored that kind of activity and surveilled [and targeted] the people defending sweeps and stopping the city from throwing unhoused people’s things away on a weekly basis. Unhoused people are subjected to not just the sweeps, but the violence of police officers.
These police officers are going and getting trained and trading Israeli techniques and then coming back and using it against our people, and they’re using it against poor people. Black people are significantly overrepresented in the unhoused population. I think Black people are 8% of Los Angeles’ population but make up 34% of the city’s unhoused population. I guess this is kind of a belabored point of drawing the through line of the violence of the police state.
UoF: Yeah, everything you’re saying is definitely what we as Unity of Fields have been trying to push, because the reality of the situation is that Palestine is not a single issue. There’s a hundred thousand examples of why it’s not. But I think that there is a liberal ideology that is grafted on to Palestine that says there’s a possibility of doing a safe pro-Palestine organizing. There’s a possibility of doing something that is just targeting israel and skirting the reality of US-led imperialism. And it is obvious that this is impossible. The repression that the universities are inflicting on people who have been agitating on their campuses is indicative of that, people think divestment is this meek demand or something that can just be written on a piece of paper, but when taken to its conclusion, divestment is a massive blow to the university system..it’s clear with the amount of repression that the movement is receiving on this front that actual divestment from israel is a demand that the university system extricates itself from militarism altogether.
The university system actually cannot handle that, especially after the sixties and after the fall of the kind of golden age of the university as this place of upward mobility, it got gutted and gutted and gutted. And the university became more structurally dependent on the military-industrial-complex. So now you’re at a point where Palestine pushed the issue and made the system reveal its true face. Palestine is the tip of the spear, and what it has done is open up this can of worms where people here are saying, “we desperately need an anti-imperialist movement with teeth.” The state hates that, obviously, which is why they’re trying to crush us. And it should be noted that they’re targeting those who are public facing, which leaves those who have tried to conceal themselves in a safer position in this moment. But regardless, they’re trying to crush it all. And it’s not because Palestine is a single issue, but because Palestine reveals the deep economic and ideological ties of higher education in the imperial core with genocide across the global south, and of course, policing in the United States of America.
What I’m trying to say is that reality is telling us who our enemy is and reality is saying something radical but I don’t think our theory has done the best job of keeping up with what reality is trying to tell us. If that makes sense.
PCC: You’re saying that our enemy is the ever evolving omnipresent state, that there’s just not one particular enemy?
UoF: Well, I would say that our enemy is the United States of America as the leader of global imperialism, and that any attempts to obfuscate that have been very dangerous to us. To bring it back to 2020, we saw the capture of that moment. We all saw it in real time. It began as this very revolutionary perspective, or at least insurrectionary perspective, “the police cannot be reformed, they have to be fucking destroyed.” And then over time, it became defund the police, blah, blah, blah, this, that, and the other. And I have a lot of things to say about that and the degeneration of the ideology that came out of 2020. But I think we see a similar line struggle right now. From October 2023 until this moment, you have two different camps. You have the camp that is “pro-Palestine” on the level of moral obligation, this will not get us far. It ends up as a politics of victimhood and guilt and self-abnegation. The solidarity that flows out of this perspective is actually quite weak, it does not create political subjects that understand themselves as intervening in history. It is pacifist and always trying to appeal to the morality of our enemies. Of course, our enemies have no moral conscience. Our enemy is a thousand little Hitlers on ‘roids. Needless to say, this is not the stuff of revolutions and frankly, it is going to get people killed for unnecessary shit. On the other hand, you have the camp that is anti-imperialist and pro-People’s war. What we are saying is that we are engaged in war against this entity that is not only killing people in Palestine, but killing people here and across the global south. We have always been in a state of war but now we are fighting back. Jonathan Jackson said we are fighting on the side of the Vietcong. We say: we are fighting on the side of Yahya Sinwar.
It’s pretty obvious that these two camps are nearly impossible to reconcile. These are two very different perspectives. One is reformist, moralistic and siloed into a single issue and the other one cannot be contained because it is international and the majority stands with us. Sorry, I’m kind of going off, but…
PCC: No, it makes sense. And also I think understanding who our enemy is, and also the extent of what the enemy is planning to do, these people straight up want to fucking kill us, and they don’t care about the rule of law. And so that’s up for the people for how they want to respond, but we should be honest about what we’re going up against and the reality of what they’re willing to do to us. And again, yeah, like we said, there’s these examples in 2020 where they killed left wing activists, they killed Tortuguita in the forest, and that is the extent that they will go. And this is no hidden secret as far as what they did in the sixties, to bring it back to that, and how they disappeared, killed, jailed, all of these revolutionaries. And so I think accepting that and accepting the moment that we’re in…the threat is the United States, and we shouldn’t seek to reform it, but also these people that this more liberal defense of what’s to come, are we actually prepared for that? And are actually these liberals, nonprofits going to feed people to the wolves? And it should be obvious to everyone at this point that the people seeking reform and pushing reform are the ones that are going to get us killed.
“…it should be obvious to everyone at this point that the people seeking reform and pushing reform are the ones that are going to get us killed…”
UoF: Well said. Absolutely. And this ties into a lot of the organizing around the Student Intifada, and I’ll just speak frankly about it. I think it’s important to be critical. There is a pernicious idea that these university administrations can be reasoned with and what we’ve learned is that they cannot be reasoned with, they’re going to collaborate with the fascist state, they are colluding with them. Again, they are little Hitlers on steroids, you cannot reason with them. Why would you try to reason with an entity you’ve just accused, correctly, of committing a holocaust? It makes no sense.
Anyway, they’re going to collaborate with the fascist state to the bitter end because these universities are an arm of the fascist state. So there’s an idea that, “oh, we can negotiate in good faith with the administration” and what comes with this idea is a lie, a lie about safe space and academic freedom and these institutions being hypocritical when they are really totally aligned with their true mission. Many in the student movement have come to believe a delusion, frankly, that being a public facing figure is solely a matter of virtue and bravery and honesty, not a strategic necessity. It’s led to a lot of dangerous mistakes and failures and in some cases, opportunistic careerism.
We are seeing that people who try to reform the institution and speak to it on its own terms are targeted because they have made themselves known and vulnerable to them. No amount of begging the enemy has provided safety, in fact, the opposite is true. All of this blows up the idea that reformism and middle of the road fence-sitting keeps people safe, it actually doesn’t. And also, this is a thing that came out of the sixties, and it was a big debate even in the Panthers, and it was one of the reasons why they split. One camp thought that they can do a kind of above ground mass movement thing when the state was trying to kill them. And the BLA camp was like, “not everyone has to be clandestine, but there needs to be that kind of underground infrastructure because it’s clear what the state is ready to do and indeed, already doing.”
There is an important lesson here. Being honest about the stakes. If we’re living in a lie while the state is doing this, then it’s going to be one person detained by DHS after another, after another, after another. And we just can’t afford to do that. Those are our comrades despite whatever disagreements we have. But it’s on us, it is the duty of the rads, to turn anti-reformism into a revolutionary culture. It protects people more, I guess is what I’m trying to say, if that makes sense.
PCC: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s an important piece that in this zine and publication of what we’re putting out about the culture that we are trying to breed and that we’re trying to grow culture of non-cooperation or a culture of shutting the fuck up. But we should also attempt to explain to people why we are saying this. Well, things become much more difficult for you when you are in police custody. And so we should be thinking with every action, every step that we take, how do we prevent our people from becoming in police custody, both on an individual level and on a community level? And that doesn’t mean just this liberal know your rights, but it means that with every action you take, you should be thinking about how the state is going to come after you and you should be thinking that the state is attempting to gain information on you. They’re looking for sources and ways to gather information on you, whether social media or others around you, people, school administrators, things like that. And so you have to think, how do you protect yourselves as far as if they are collecting things, data posts on social media, why are they collecting those things? They are attempting to gather images of people that are there to build and include in profiles. And so when you’re masked and blocked up and protecting yourselves, you are protecting yourselves from that further surveillance. You’re never ever going to get out of anything when discussing or engaging with police. And so it should be a culture for us of non-cooperation with the police, whether it’s about us or a community, no matter what, because they are trying to get us, they are trying to imprison us and they’re trying to kill us. There is no working with the state. And so building that culture of shutting the fuck up, but actually understanding why are we shutting the fuck up? Well, because they’re trying to kill us.
UoF: We’re at war.
PCC: They’re trying to imprison us. We’re at war, right? Okay, if you want to discuss this, the Palestinian resistance is not trying to get caught when they are out in battle. They are not handing themselves over to the enemy. We should not hand ourselves over to the state under any circumstance. We should do whatever we can to prevent ourselves and our comrades from becoming in-state custody. And we talk about this quote, be water. And I think that Palestinian resistance is, they may not explicitly say it, but “be water” is a thing that they embody because they are not trying to get caught in battle. They are moving through the fields and through tunnels becayse they’re at war. They’re not trying to get caught. And so that’s a way to conceal themselves. And there is that kind of similarity of, okay, if we’re taking lessons here, that is something that should be on the top of our minds.
UoF: Totally, totally. I really strongly agree with everything you’re saying. I think a lot of people on the ground are feeling it too, particularly because of how draconian the crackdown on campuses has been, there’s just way more attentiveness to surveillance. It’s the classic thing of the repression of the institution building a more sophisticated resistance amongst the people who are there trying to fight because they can’t continue doing the same old shit. But there also has been another interesting contradiction that kind of counteracts this point that we’re making–the question of resistance speech, which is something different than action on the ground. Our movement, at its core, is about ideas and ideology. It’s like Fidel says, “I only want to fight as a solider of ideas.” We have to be clandestine and move like water on the ground, but we also have to be bold in our politics and our thinking.
I’ve found there’s a slippage or something, where we conflate needing to be secure with needing to lie about our political orientation or obscure the stakes or something like that–that we should dilute our politics to keep us safe. But this defeats the whole purpose of doing dangerous things. The dangerous things that are being done are being done out of a real political commitment, a commitment to internationalism and revolution. And in my mind, we shouldn’t hide those things. We shouldn’t apologize or be ashamed of our line or water it down at any point ever. We should figure out ways to say what must be said and evade censorship. We need to be able to do what Mao says, move with the masses like a fish in the sea, but still push a really militant, radical revolutionary politics, the correct politics. This is another thing that the Palestinian resistance does really well. Like yes, they have their clandestine military operations, but also the guerrilla is motivated by the idea of absolute liberation of the people. They are guided by Islam, by their commitment to God and the masses and the destruction of zionism and US-led imperialism in the region. Their writing is poetic and uncompromising.
Like you said, people need to shut the fuck up, but not only shut the fuck up, they should understand why they need to and about what. Something we’ve talked a lot about is whether our politics command our tactics or our tactics command our politics. Are we doing things for the sake of doing things, practicing militancy to feel more militant than everyone else? Or are we understanding the historical through lines that our work right now comes from and what our actual revolutionary base is in this country and how to mobilize them?
I think a lot of this really gets to anarchism versus communism. And that’s something we’ve progressed on a lot as we had this moment where we were working closely on the front lines with anarchists during the height of the encampments and in the aftermath. And then realized there were these fundamental political contradictions about the national question in the US context and about being upfront about what we really believe. And also this fetishization of tactics with no politics. It’s like Bernie Bros who want to throw Molotov cocktails. They want France, we want to destroy France.
PCC: Thank you. It’s making me think. Okay, so, we can potentially think about them as different things, be water and shutting the fuck up is directly related to action, and then the ideology and the narrative building around that. That is your propaganda and your comms. And I think you all understand that given the work that you’re doing and what you put out, you’re attempting to find that balance of what to do. I think for us, we’re always thinking about how to reach the masses. And to your point about anarchists versus communism, I think we’re at such a point that we should ask ourselves, who is taking action right now?
UoF: Emphatically not communists for the most part, we sense this is changing though.
PCC: Well, exactly. And I think we need people who theorize and understand and are well versed in these subjects. But also as we’re seeing in this discussion about these high school students taking action, they weren’t well versed in theory before deciding that it’s time to act and go out there. And I think similarly to the UCLA students, they found that they wanted to take action, and in the midst of taking action, they were confronted with the severe violent arm of the state. And people may not have perfect politics, and we may not be a hundred percent aligned, but as we move forward, it’s like who is really taking action? I think that right now, to form a united front on the left requires more action than theory.
People are brave when they see others be brave, and people will stand up and fight when they see others are willing to sacrifice. And so I think it’s breeding a culture of who’s willing to sacrifice, who is willing to throw down and give something. They don’t need to have perfect politics. We need people who are willing to sacrifice. And I mean, liberals aren’t going to be there anyways, so it’s not going to be a discussion of will liberalism seep in and whatnot, but yeah, let’s propel people to act and then we can ideologically sort it out. And that’s more anarchist, right? That’s not exactly aligned with Marxist-Leninist, whatnot. And I don’t know, I think that’s a big discussion, but are we at a point where it truly matters? That’s just my personal perspective like that.
UoF: Yeah, there are parts of that I don’t necessarily agree with but the general gist of it is aligned with the concept of the unity of fields. It’s not unity for unity’s sake, like you’re saying, it’s unity in action, unity in resistance. Which side of the barricades are you on? And only through taking action together will the new ideology be produced, because the revolution here is going to be unlike any other revolution that’s ever taken place.
PCC: Indeed.
UoF: This is kind of an aside question, but what role do you think the fires played in precipitating the student walkouts, if any? How did they contribute to the students’ politicization?
PCC: The fires were definitely politicizing because in LA there has been this people’s infrastructure that has been building for years, especially since 2020. Our mutual aid networks have been established and growing. And then in the face of the fires, it’s exactly what we’ve been saying and warning about in regards to the establishment, the democratic party’s inability and failure and capitulation to rich people, cops and whatnot. That was evident and people could see that, and people could also see that mutual aid was able to get up and running immediately for folks impacted by the fires. And people were getting a lot of their information from social media, traditional media still has a stronghold, but due to the left’s ability to grow its networks over the past few years, our information was being shared widely across social media. And so there was a kind of inherent politicization, that just through sharing PCC or mutual aid LA’s updates about the fires, you’re also getting our politics involved with that.
We are in service of the community first. That is our backbone, whether through action or whatever. And then through that service, our ideological framework comes through more, but being that place of information for people or being able to highlight or mobilize, the politicization comes with that. In relation to the walkouts, there’s just the attention on what is happening in LA and the urgency of the moment, and that people do understand what has been brewing and what’s been happening. The student walkouts started in East LA but it was wide across the city and the county within days. And I think that those students know about what happened at UCLA last year. Those students know what happened. Their brothers, sisters, cousins, fathers, mothers, uncles were out in the streets in 2020. And there’s this breakthrough of culture and people in LA are ready to go out in the streets. It may not be enough. It may not be enough at this point, but it has been slowly growing.
UoF: That’s so cool to think about the high schoolers having watched the battle of UCLA and then going out in the streets to launch their own protest and beat up fascists.
PCC: Exactly. They saw that, and they’re directly connected especially being close in age with the college students. UCLA held it down for as long as they could, and the community hella mobilized to support them, and they really did put up a fight against the police for five hours. They even made LAPD vacate and retreat from the camp after LAPD entered the encampment! And that was huge news. That was so fucking sick. And in that moment, in the moment of them kettling the police people in the encampment may not have known that this was possible. However, a few people said, we’re going to get these motherfuckers out of here, decided to organize and take action. It didn’t matter what the ideology of the people taking action was, they decided, “we are going to move like this and if we start moving like this, we’ll be able to make the cops retreat.” And so that’s kind of like in reference to what we’ve been talking about, people inspiring others by taking action. They were able to kettle the cops and make LAPD retreat from the encampment. And then another police agency tried to eventually raid the encampment, but it went on for hours. These people, these students and community members held the cops off for hours. And I think that is truly something that they will remember. And we will all remember for a long time, it was a real fucking struggle. I’ve been out in the streets for not that long, for over a half a decade, and I truly have never seen anything like that. And I spent a lot of time in the streets in 2020 and saw a lot of rebellious and revolutionary action. It was unreal.
UoF: Yeah, I think that image of the battle of UCLA is really seared in all of our minds. I cry thinking about it, honestly. I remember watching it from my tent at a different encampment. Crying, crying. “LA is resisting!” Really heroic and beautiful stuff. I wont go on too long about it. Any last words?
PCC: Let me think…I guess I’ll say that we have faced serious surveillance and repression here in LA.
Also, I think this situation with Mahmoud is highlighting the importance of staying out of police custody or not getting put in police custody call. I know some of you have done time, I was arrested twice in 2022 and I had charges hanging over my head and I was placed on diversion for a year. And in that time I was being investigated by the California State Bar. So that lasted for two years, and it got resolved at the end of last year in October. I’m actually a lawyer now. But I’m growing into a role of discussing with people when taking action that we need to think about everything that comes with taking action. You are not just going out to a singular protest. You are a target of the state when you go to take action. They’re trying to come after you. They’re gathering information on you via social media, your networks, all of those things. I think Mahmoud was unmasked and a negotiator and easily identified. And that is scary, actually scary. It should be scary to people. And we want to protect people from being abducted by the state. And so it’s not like this cautious ideology where we are afraid of taking action. It’s like we have to be serious about what comes with taking action. I am a public face and I put myself out there and I’m targeted for that. And you should just know the risks of what comes with that. And I hope that comes through in this interview.
UoF: Yeah, absolutely. Building your degrees of separation with everything. Knowing the stakes and acting accordingly. This is a great note to end on. Thank you so much for your time, we are looking forward to publishing this.