From Georgia’s August 2023 indictment of members of the grassroots movement Defend the Atlanta Forest, in which prosecutors charged more than sixty individuals under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, originally designed to combat organized crime.
Defend the Atlanta Forest is an unofficial, Atlanta-based organization that is made up of three primary ideologies. The first is an anti–law enforcement ideology that promotes the narrative that all police are violent. The second is the protection of the environment at all costs. As stated by the group on social media, “No cop city. No Hollywood dystopia. Only forest.” The third is an anarchist ideology.
Some of the major ideas that anarchists promulgate include “collectivism,” “mutualism/mutual aid,” and “social solidarity,” and these same ideas are frequently seen in the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement. “Collectivism” is the idea that individual needs are subordinate to the good of the whole society. Individuals are expected to sacrifice personal income, personal liberty, or personal property if it benefits society as a whole. Emotional and personal support is offered through letter writing campaigns and encouragements of “solidarity.”
Communication among the Defend the Atlanta Forest members is often cloaked in secrecy using sophisticated technology. Members often use walkie-talkies while in the forest. On the financial platform Open Collective, one member registered as “Mouse,” another as “Earthworm,” and a third as “Spud.” “Spud” would later change her username to “Danny.” Defend the Atlanta Forest also uses written documents, known colloquially as “zines,” to advance anarchist ideas. These zines have been located throughout the forested areas. The zines paint the media as its enemy: “You are a carnival freak for Homo Journalisticus.”
The forested area had a rudimentary bathroom where a toilet seat was attached to four vertical plastic poles to emulate a very basic toilet. It sat above a crude hole in the ground so that a toilet user’s waste would fall into the hole. In themes consistent with anarchy and anti-police sentiment, a painted sign titled the bathroom and toilet as 9/11 memorial. Defend the Atlanta Forest documented a general profile of the person that is desirable for the violent movement: “Someone who has enough anger about the state of the world to compel them to act.”
