All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing Ford Fisher.
He is the co-founder and editor in chief of N2S Reports, and he really made a name for himself recently covering the different protests and the riots in Louisville, at least, especially, I think, I'm about to find out more, and also was recently censored by Facebook and got some more attention then, because that's such a separate, important issue about access to spaces like Facebook for independent journalists and that kind of thing.
And it's, by the way, F-I-S-C-H-E-R, Ford Fisher, and he is on Twitter at that handle as well.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Ford?
Hey, doing well.
And just to be clear, the outlet is called News to Share, News, the number to share, but because that handle was already taken on Twitter, the Twitter handle for that outlet is called at N2S Reports.
I got you.
Okay.
Sorry about that.
I should...
Yeah, no worries.
Have my act together better by now here.
Don't worry about it.
And in fact, you're the interview I'm least prepared for today.
I hope that's okay.
But you know...
That's quite all right.
I'm happy to guide you through the facts.
I kind of want to start with...
Yeah, I got pretty general questions to start with anyway, which is, you know, how'd you get into journalism?
At what point did you start covering the protest movements and this kind of deal?
Sure.
So I studied, actually, film at American University here in Washington, D.C., and originally had planned on working in fiction film, but just being in Washington, D.C., I got sort of sucked into the world of documentary and news.
And this kind of focus on political activism, for me, started around the Black Lives Matter era of kind of 2014 and 2015, where myself and my co-founder covered the Ferguson and Baltimore riots.
And that sort of led us into, you know, of course, in the Trump era when street conflict really evolved.
So it's been interesting in my time covering activism that, you know, when I started, it was mostly people from the left.
And when I say the left, I don't mean Democrats.
I don't mean Barack Obama supporters.
I mean people who still took issue with Barack Obama from his left, people protesting against torture, people protesting against him continuing deportations, continuing wars, that sort of thing.
And then, of course, the Black Lives Matter, people protesting against police violence in the age of Obama.
Activism has really changed since then, largely because the right, which used to not do so much street activism, really started energizing during the Trump era.
And so I've been very interested in covering and filming in a complete way that doesn't guided by my own politics the sorts of conflicts that happen out there on the street, both between protesters of various flavors and the police, as well as protesters versus other types of protesters.
And so that's been very interesting to me to see how it's evolved.
And I'm happy to, you know, detail that a little bit more as the conversation goes on.
Yeah, sure.
Well, that's really great.
And now, is it am I right that it's Louisville that you've been covering mostly lately?
I know there's still stuff going on there constantly.
Yeah, so I have been traveling to a number of places over the last few months.
I had kind of a couple of months at the very beginning of COVID where there was just almost nothing happening out on the street.
But things really popped off after the death of George Floyd.
Street activism really came back kind of bigger than it was before.
So in particular, in Louisville, over the last six weeks, I have traveled there three times now in the last six weeks.
And the reason for that is it's actually the city where Breonna Taylor was killed.
And to those who don't know, Breonna Taylor was killed in a no knock raid on the wrong house.
You know, police breached the house allegedly without announcing themselves as police.
And Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend were sleeping.
The boyfriend apparently tried to defend the home with his firearm.
And when police returned fire, Breonna Taylor died.
Allegedly that guy was charged with attempted murder of a police officer.
But that was dropped.
And the police officer who fired the fatal shots has been fired, although still not arrested.
So there's been a lot of activism in that city demanding the arrest of the cop who was involved.
And of course, so far, it hasn't been effective in making them do that.
But it has attracted the attention of basically a black nationalist paramilitary called the NFAC.
Not effing around coalition is what they call themselves.
It's an all black militia that has now showed up there twice, basically carrying long guns and handguns and demanding the same, you know, arrest the killer Breonna Taylor, sort of, or else.
So the first time that I filmed them about six weeks ago, they actually had an accidental discharge.
And on my livestream, you could see that three people were injured when one person mistakenly fired a shotgun in the crowd.
But the most recent time that they came, they marched to the Kentucky Derby.
And there didn't end up being any violence on that particular occasion.
But earlier in the morning, a right wing militia called the Angry Vikings, is what they were calling themselves, had planned to confront the NFAC and marched into the city where they were confronted by armed leftist protesters, but not the NFAC itself.
Similarly, they ended up kind of fighting, you know, there were some sorts of fist fighting, pushing around that sort of thing.
And on a few occasions, people on holstered handguns, which is a pretty big deal, right?
You know, I am very comfortable around guns.
A lot of protesters bring guns to events.
That's all fine.
But but when you're in a fight and someone holsters the handgun, like that's that that's a pretty that's a pretty escalating action.
So I was glad to see that, you know, true bloodshed was avoided that morning.
But it was a serious day.
And as I'm sure we're about to talk about, Facebook wasn't too happy about me filming it.
Yeah.
Well, well, go ahead and just they restored you for now, right?
We can save that that part of the conversation to later.
You're OK now, right?
At this exact moment, ostensibly everything is fine, but it certainly, you know, has me alarmed for the future of social media.
Right.
And that is its own huge story.
But just to stick with the situation on the ground, you're covering here is just so important.
And it's kind of difficult to understand.
So let me see if I can phrase my my question even correctly here about the time that this is going.
This black militia, the NFAC, that they are you said they had an accidental discharge or whatever.
If you could like help to characterize more or less their stance and and and how they are at these protests and as compared to.
And I don't know who else is there.
I assume there are groups of just regular people from the neighborhood kind of general just black under the banner of Black Lives Matter.
And there may or may not be.
I don't know.
But you tell me people who are actually writing and destroying property, which and or may include looting and stealing and different things like that.
And so I wonder, then, for example, about the role of the, you know, the white right wing militias that show up there.
They're presumably in the name of protecting property from from writing and looting.
But is that even going on?
Or you just have two armed groups that really don't have anything to fight about because between them is just essentially a peaceful protest or it's a complicated mess?
And I don't know at all.
Go ahead.
OK, so I'm going to limit what I'm about to say to Louisville specifically, because all.
Yeah, that's what I was asking.
That wasn't what I meant.
Yeah.
Right.
And I just so that's why I'm saying I just want to be clear to people like listening who are going to take these comments and go, no, it's different in this place than that place.
Like I'm talking just about Louisville here.
So in Louisville, after the death of George Floyd, there was a really renewed interest in this issue, especially because of the death of Breonna Taylor beforehand, which hadn't gotten as much attention until then.
So upon the death of George Floyd, there were three nights of rioting, which I was not present at because I was in Washington, D.C., filming three nights of rioting in D.C.
But so those first few nights were violent in Louisville.
But since then, Louisville has not had the same kind of, you know, people are kind of interested in Trump loves talking about and tweeting about, you know, look at look at the rioters.
I'm going to protect you from the rioters, looters, anarchists, blah, blah, blah.
That hasn't really happened in Louisville except for the very, very first three days.
But since then, there has been a lot of street activism in Louisville.
There is a very active Black Lives Matter chapter.
Tamika Mallory, who was one of the co-founders of the Women's March, has been basically living there and leading a group called Until Freedom, which is national, but has been putting a lot of focus on Louisville, specifically on the issue of police accountability.
There have been basically daily Black Lives Matter protests, as well as in south.
There's an area called South Central Park, which has kind of been a 24-7 activist hub.
I think, you know, people might, when I say that, want to compare it to like the Chazz or something.
But the obvious difference is that it's not it's not police free.
It's not like they're trying to make it autonomous.
It's just a place that a lot of people spend time as activists.
So that has also caused the establishment of, there are local, multi-ethnic, anti-police violence militias that have formed.
So I did speak to some members of a group called the Louis Hadid and the United Pharaohs Guard are the two names of these local militia groups.
And they come heavily armed, kind of styled, almost not unlike right-wing militias tend to look, but with the explicit goal of protecting protesters from the police.
To my knowledge, there hasn't been any kind of, you know, I've filmed them confronting police, but I haven't, there hasn't been any kind of like shootout or anything like that.
It's never erupted into sort of a gun battle.
Right.
But the presence of firearms, you know, I think many people would contend acts as a deterrent against police violence.
Right.
Are you going to bring tear gas to a gunfight is basically the simple way to put it.
So that has been sort of a community.
There's been an activist community forming over the last, you know, several months there.
The NFAC is a little bit less local, right?
Because they're actually based out of Georgia.
Their leader, Grandmaster Jay is from Georgia.
So it's for them, it's more like he calls on his members, let's all gather on this place in this city.
And there's really a mixed response on the ground.
The people on the ground certainly don't want the right-wing militias showing up, but they're also not that fond of the NFAC.
I've heard a lot of them criticize, you know, the NFAC is a black nationalist group, which has a very specific definition.
Their ideology is that if left to their own devices, if they could have everything the way they wanted, they actually want the establishment of a specific area of land that would be an all-black nation.
On the other hand, Black Lives Matter and most sorts of progressive activists, et cetera, they don't want an all-black nation.
They want people sort of living harmoniously, and maybe with some other views of how to do that, whether it's an anti-capitalist vision or whatever.
But they're certainly not ethno-nationalists, whereas the NFAC are.
I'm sorry, one real important point before I just forget would be, you know, the difference between these guys who are armed to the teeth, but my understanding is apparently mostly are disciplined and protest and versus people who are unarmed, but are doing, you know, the property damage and the possibly looting and that kind of thing, because that's what I think the probably the right-wing militias are worried about is that these well-armed black militias are, say, the leaders of rioting and arson and danger, and that's why they need to be so well-armed to scare them away, where possibly that is a misconception.
Even though they're well-armed, that doesn't mean they're doing anything, mostly, other than that one dummy who shot the shotgun.
Is that right?
Right.
So, again, in the context of Louisville, the only looting and property damage happened in those first few days, and that was long before the left had established their own militia.
And I'm not even aware of right-wing militia people being present at those first few days of action.
So at this point, do they have anything to fight about?
They're just proximity because they were all protesting against each other on the same day, sort of.
Kind of.
So that's why a week ago it was very interesting because they all of these different groups wanted to converge sort of because of the Kentucky Derby.
Right.
So the NFAC wanted to rally amidst the Kentucky Derby to make a point until Freedom, which is the sort of progressive group that I was mentioning, also wanted to be there at the same time to do the same kind of same kind of protest for the same reason, but not actually with the NFAC.
The right-wing militia showed up in the morning hoping to confront the NFAC because they ideologically oppose like the black nationalism, et cetera.
But they didn't.
But they didn't end up meeting physically.
They ended up meeting with basically other counter protesters.
And then that's how that fighting erupted.
To put it simply, it was confusing.
Right.
It was a long day where I don't think every I don't think all of the different groups really knew where the other groups were going to be showing up.
The NFAC was mad that that progressives had showed up in their same space.
The militia showed up in and opposing the wrong protest group and then left basically early because they were like, oh, these aren't the people we've got to counter protest.
And these guys have been here for a long time.
So we don't want to kind of take over their space.
Like it seemed like there was a lot of confusion and miscommunication.
I think I would probably attribute it to a failure on the part of kind of any of these activists to talk to the other ones.
I think that a lot of that confrontation probably could have been avoided if these various, you know, armed factions had been talking to each other before showing up.
And it seems to me that that just didn't happen at all.
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Well, look, I mean, their differences are only skin deep.
I mean, we're talking about even though the black militia, you're like, yeah, they're right wing nationalists.
Listen, I think that we can get along here, guys.
Why in the world should these people be protesting against each other or be ideologically opposed to each other at all?
Right?
It's crazy.
It bothers the hell out of me to see these guys who ought to be marching arm and arm against a state power and those who control it, maybe instead of against each other at the bottom rung.
It's ridiculous.
I think the unusual thing about the Viking militia, the right wing militia that showed up is as opposed to many militia groups who see themselves not as protesters, but as sort of just a defensive force.
And they often characterize themselves as sort of non ideological.
In this case, they came in chanting USA, USA and like waving Trump flags.
And so there is something fascinating when you have a militia group who basically supports the state.
Right?
And you have like, that's the president.
Right?
So militias often talk about, you know, our role is to kind of be a counterbalance.
It's to show that we have an organized and armed front in case the state were to be tyrannical in some manner.
But it's really interesting to then see that that in some cases, and I'm not characterizing all right wing militias this way, but in some cases, the right wing militias are pretty openly pro Trump, like they're in favor of the government that exists.
And in some cases, we'll also characterize their role as we're here to back up law enforcement, we're here to support the police.
So there actually is almost a natural synergy in some of these cases, between, you know, between one side of the of the armed factions, you know, and the state that's present already.
Yeah.
And you know, really, it just takes a few arson fires at night, those images on TV are enough to just undo, you know, as Dave Smith was pointing out, that after the, you know, the first three harshest months of the lockdown there, where the police were just acting absolutely insane the way they were treating average citizens for letting their kid play next door or whatever crazy thing, kicking them out of the park, the gun to their head or whatever it was.
And how right wingers started to remember like, hey, back during Bill Clinton, I kind of was afraid of the cops in a way or something, there was like a little bit of something there.
And then as soon as the left came out, after George Floyd, as soon as it turned to riots and looting and arson fires, there went all of that newly kind of reawakened understanding on the right about the danger of unaccountable state power.
Because after all, geez, I guess I'm lucky the state's here to protect me from the population of the other side of town seems to be the message that the other side of town is trying to send right now.
You know, and so how are they supposed to get along after that, I guess, you know.
And I think that it's natural that when you see like the the modern militia movement, the militia movement in the last 10 years was really invigorated during the Obama era.
Right.
It was it kind of happened almost parallel to the Tea Party.
Right.
After a couple of years of sitting with Obama, then these groups start kind of forming up saying just in case Obama comes for our guns, let's kind of get together all the all that stuff.
Right.
And so when when Trump happens and then a lot of the people, again, not all of them, but a lot of these militias are like, oh, actually, I think we like the guy who's leading the government.
I think it kind of makes sense that there was a power vacuum and that left wing militias would be the natural response both to the other right wing militias and to the lack of an anti state militia group.
So the black nationalism is kind of its own thing.
And that's not like it's a little bit separate and a side.
It's almost the exception to the rule.
But it makes sense that you're seeing groups like the Socialist Rifle Association, which does not consider itself a militia.
But for all intents and purposes, we're talking about an armed activist group.
Redneck revolt is more explicitly like the leftist militia.
The John Brown Gun Club is again, you know, and locally there are a lot of individual groups that I've seen.
I saw one called like the Armed Labor Coalition when I was at a protest in Georgia about a month ago, which were, you know, basically making allusions to like Marxist, you know, ideas of like armed labor.
So it makes sense to me that you would have a left wing militias pop up in response.
What will be very interesting to see is, you know, if Joe Biden were to become the president, you know, what kind of political realignment would happen among paramilitaries in the United States?
I honestly find that pretty hard to predict.
The worst danger I think would be if he thinks he can try to ban AR-15s and doesn't have anyone to read him the reality of how many of those things were already out there and how many men would rather use them than give them over at this point, because it's not 1993 anymore.
He wants to pass that same ban again.
That ship has sailed, man.
They're crazy if they think they're going to try that.
And again, I think that the left, not Democrats, but the left would have a, would have almost the same combativeness, if not more than the right that we kind of instinctively align with it.
Right.
The right has a little bit more of like, oh, well, you know, I do support the cops.
I just don't support them doing the gun control.
The left left is not fond of gun control and not fond of cops.
And so I agree with you that I think it would create a pretty volatile situation if Joe Biden were to attempt an outright ban on on on so-called assault rifles.
Well, you know, I swear I'm not a Marxist, I'm a libertarian.
But, you know, Murray Rothbard and the libertarians, we have our own class theory and it is economic based more than any other thing.
And it is just absolutely shame upon shame that you have the left right division the way you do in this country when the enemy is the national government and the most powerful business interests that control it and are controlled by it in a sort of lowercase fascist economic system that we have, that all the rest of these complaints are derivative from.
And so this is just people swinging at the branches and swinging at each other instead of striking the root when it's right in front of their face, the the corruption at the highest levels of power.
Not that we can really do anything about it.
I guess that's the other thing, right, is you can go out and actually fight a leftist or rightist on the street with your fists or with your gun where you can't even find the people with the real power to rebel against in any effective way.
And democracy sure ain't cutting it.
And so people got to lash out somehow, I guess, you know.
So I'm not going as as you know, in the context of my work, I don't tend to endorse other people's political view.
So I'm not going to say whether I agree or disagree with the stuff that you just said.
But with that being said, I think that part of the problem also is that the mainstream media really gets its ratings from this left versus right conflict.
And it doesn't really get the ratings from anything that would imply something about unity.
So to give two super fast examples, when I was in Paris, France, covering the yellow vest movement, what I learned is that the yellow vests are actually kind of a combination of what we would in America think of as the left and the right sort of versus the state.
There was a lot of right populist type people, but there was also a lot of like anti-fascist, you know, type people.
And basically, they got together to fight the cops like every weekend, you know, and try to take take down government buildings and all that kind of stuff.
I'm not saying that they were explicitly libertarian, but it was interesting to see that.
And and the reason that I bring it up is that the American media almost completely ignored the yellow vests, which, you know, it's it's France.
It's a country that has, you know, economic ties to us for sure.
Some cultural similarities, you know, as as a fellow kind of Western nation.
You know, we were very interested in the Brexit.
And yet the media really passed by the yellow vest movement because it was that unity of left and right.
Similarly, July 4th here, just I'm just talking about a couple of months ago in Richmond, I filmed a unity rally between a Black Lives Matter chapter and Boogaloo members.
So to people who don't know, Boogaloo is kind of a libertarian right ish movement that's very preoccupied with guns and sort of styles themselves somewhat like militia activists, but usually with Hawaiian shirts.
And as opposed to some militia groups who would say they're pro cop or pro Trump, the Boogaloo tend to be more libertarian, anti cop, anti Trump.
And that group held a unity rally with Black Lives Matter.
So these are two groups that would be, I think, not not precisely, but it would usually be called like left and right holding a rally together.
I filmed this event.
It was pretty interesting.
There were a lot of people kind of paying attention to this on Twitter, et cetera.
But CBS was there.
Their local CBS chapter was there.
And they covered this event by just talking.
They just called it a pro gun rally.
They interviewed a couple of pro gun people.
And then at the end of the story, which was only a minute and a half, they showed a shot of a Black Lives Matter activist standing on a platform.
And they said, as you can see, there were some counter protesters present, but it didn't amount to much.
Literally, they completely mischaracterized it.
And even in that shot, when they say there were counter protesters, you can actually see Boogaloo people holding their fists in the air.
Like even in that shot, it's a moment of obvious agreement and unity.
And the mainstream media, in my view, intentionally, at best, maybe they were lazy and didn't take the time to listen to what he was saying, like just went in and out in 10 minutes.
But they made a 90 second story that would have you believe that it was, oh, the right wing showed up to say we like guns.
And then the left wing, you know, Black Lives Matter people showed up and nothing really happened.
Bye bye.
In reality, it was, you know, armed Black Lives Matter and armed right wingers together for a rally against gun control and against police violence.
And the media completely, you know, ignored and misclassified it.
And which is worse, that they were lying or just that lazy, you know.
And by the way, I was actually in your previous answer, I was trolling through your Twitter feed and I found where he talked about the Libertarian candidate giving a talk at what you call Black Lives Matter slash Boogaloo rally.
And I wondered, geez, was this another thing where they faced off or what?
And then that was right when you answered that question was, no, this is where they're there to get along.
And then the local news refuses to admit it for whichever reason.
Yeah.
The particular one that you were mentioning, it's the same groups at the same place, but it was about a month later.
But it actually shows that unity was still there.
It wasn't just kind of like a symbolic, oh, let's get together once and they never met again.
They met again.
And then a vice presidential candidate who was going to be on the ballot in every state plus DC, you know, spoke at their event, you know, supportive of both of those movements.
You know, the Jorgensen-Cohen campaign has basically alluded to sympathies to both Boogaloos and Black Lives Matter.
I don't know which town it was in, but I saw one of these, you know, three percenters or it may have been a three percenter protest in Louisville, you know, back at the start of this.
And he says, hey, justice for George Floyd.
I'm not saying that, you know, this guy, obviously, I'm just here to protect property.
That's all.
But it's really a misconception that right wingers are racist when you got to go pretty far to the right to find people who are avowedly racist and who avowedly don't give a damn if a cop murders George Floyd in that manner.
I mean, everybody on all sides said that was wrong.
Yeah.
Including even these militia guys on the street in some cases.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I occasionally see it when I go out to these events.
And in a lot of cases, the militia tries to really like prop up like this is it's a misconception that we always nakedly support the right wing or we always support the cops or something.
In some cases, they do have people among them who some people might call instigators, but others would just say it's just bad apples in the group.
For example, at the at the one on Saturday, I would say that most of the militia people were basically taking the position that, well, we think that, you know, Breonna Taylor died unjustly.
We're not actually against people over that.
But there was one person who, you know, as counter protesters were chanting Breonna Taylor, Breonna Taylor, he was going, was a criminal, was a criminal, like whatever that means.
Um, so, you know, sometimes you will find people who show up at these events who are a little bit more I don't even know if to the right would be the right word, but like provocative or, as you put it, like, you know, some of them could be racist.
But by by and large, the militias tend to disavow that sort of thing and often kick out members that they that they that they believe like kind of flirt with that sort of ideology.
It does seem like there is kind of a division where the far right or the ostensibly racist right is mostly disinvited from, you know, militia, MAGA, et cetera, events which the left would characterize as still complicit with racism, even if they're not, you know, sort of outwardly identifying as such.
Yeah.
Well, and again, like, that's the whole thing.
People need to try to see each other's point of view and and and realize that their differences are only skin deep, but their seams go right down to the bone.
Like Homer Marge, you know, we don't have to at all.
It doesn't have to be this way at all.
And with that, I'm sorry, because I'm over time to go down to the bone.
Yeah, I'm so bad at watching the clock today for I'm sorry.
What was the last thing you said there?
Oh, I just I was making a joke.
You said Homer and Marge down to the bone.
I said with Homer, it takes a little farther to get down to the bone.
Oh, yes, that's true.
But you'd be there by now.
You know, it's been a while.
Fair enough.
All right.
Listen, great work.
I really appreciate it.
I'm going to start paying a lot more attention to it and see what I can learn from you here.
The website is news and the number to share dot com and follow Ford Fisher on Twitter as well.
Ford Fisher.
And that's S.C.H. in Fisher there.
Thanks very much.
Appreciate it, Ford.
Yep.
Thank you for having me on.
The Scott Horton Show antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com antiwar dot com Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
