🚨IMPORTANT PROJECT UPDATE:

As a research collective, we've had the great honor, and duty, of contributing to community defense at a time when fascism and bigotry has been rising at an alarming rate.

We hope that our work has increased safety and livability for the most targeted identities in the region. We also hope that our work has given pause to those who would target those identities. Our collective duty has always been to serve the communities we come from and where we draw courage, strength, and support.

We've had the great joy of seeing communities (seen as easy targets) standing up and defending themselves; people are showing up and turning back hate and bigotry with courage, joy, and determination. We, collectively/regionally, have faced many things together in a very short time: we've always stood strong and faced them together, as a community.

As a research collective, our time together is coming to an end. A lot of things have changed since our work started, a lot of what's been festering in the darkness has been brought into the light. At this point, for the most part: you know what we know.

Some version of this work should continue as long as the threats persist and look to gather strength. As we clear out of our roles, we've invited other researchers to keep an eye on the area in the immediate future. Long-term, there will, hopefully, be more regionally-local community defense research projects that spring up. We're leaving room for them to self-organize autonomously: if/when projects do come along, they will be completely independent of us. That said, we hope to leave our body of work to be drawn from, built upon, and utilized in community defense as needed.

Here's an important collection of antifascist research, independent of social media:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221128234523/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1597317831787704322.html

We encourage everyone in hate-space, fascism organizing, and/or violent, bigoted, extremism to get out now. Joining hate movements is a mistake but continuing in those spaces is a new disaster each day. It'll only get deeper and more extreme: hate is never enough. The entire pipeline is self-destructive, to both individuals and communities. Deradicalize now.

Deradicalization isn't just getting rid of items, signifiers and media that's been used to terrorize communities; that's good but not enough. Deradicalization involves leaving the movement, burning the bridges, and examining the traps that got a person so deep into it. The goal of deradicalization is both for individual improvement and also community improvement; it takes both to make things better.

Atlanta Antifascists puts out a yearly call to leave white nationalism, along with a viable path for doing so. We choose to echo and amplify that here:

https://atlantaantifa.org/2022/01/03/change-your-life-for-the-better-in-2022-leave-the-white-nationalist-movement/

Finally: love, admiration, appreciation, and solidarity to the folks inside and outside of the region who contribute to the project of community defense and antifascism.

Bella ciao, thank you for facing these tough times with us.