AMREN (Nazis) meets in TN behind heavy police protection

Long has it been said that "cops and the Klan work hand in hand." On Apr 28, police used all available strength to defend an alt-right even for the second week in a row. The American Renaissance Conference (driven out of DC in 2010) met that day in Montgomery Bell State Park in TN. Protesters had the choice of staying out of sight and sound or marching into a protest pen where all entrants were searched.

DC area activist Lacy Macauley reports via Twitter that protesters against AMREN met off-site and marched through the woods towards the building AMREN met in until encountering a police seach checkpoint. Not all those who had assembled for the initial rally participated in the march, and not all those who marched were willing to consent to a search, so some of the marchers turned back at the checkpoint. Those who did agree to enter at one point found themselves prohibited from leaving (DETAINED) while the bomb-sniffing dog searched the area.

The usual police intention with protest pens is to create a situation so tense and repressive that protesters will refuse to enter(as indeed some would not enter today in TN), thus bypassing First Amendment requirements to permit public assembly while gaining a legal excuse to beat, arrest, and in some cases draw firearms on protesters anywhere else. It does not work unless police are overwhelmingly more powerful than the protesters, and notably has failed every single time at GOP Presidential inauguration all the way back to 2001 where checkpoints and protest pens were first used at an Inauguration.

The American Renaissance Conference or AMREN is a suit-and-tie Nazis conference that met in the Dulles Airport area near DC in 2006 and 2008 but was sucessfully deplatformed and prevented from meeting in 2010. Every hotel they managed to rent space from cancelled under a blizzard of public complaints, and the previous two events had featured protesters banging drums outside the hotels by day and by night. Since then they have avoided the big coastal cities, and at least the last two years have met in Tennesee at Montgomery Bell State Park. The 2017 AMREN convention was notable for a failed attempt by a neo-Nazi to run down a DC activist with a car. The Nazis meeting today should realize they are being watched.

The Atlanta Antifascists twitter account reports"White nationalists gleeful about police targeting anti-racists at #AmRen racist conference in Burns, TN. " which is ugly news and a strong example of police/Klan unity.

A National Socialist Movement march on Newman, GA just a week before AMREN (April 21 2018) featured violent, armed police repression of protesters There, police dressed up like combat infantrymen aimed loaded rifles and shotguns at both protesters and media in order to make arrests for nothing more than wearing masks. This mask law is now used to protect the Nazis and KKK, even though it was supposedly passed to control the Klan and the white hoods they hide behind. Well, the Klan does not need to hide behind white sheets when they can wear suits and ties and hide behind police brandishing infantry-grade weapons and armored vehicles. It is clear that police in Donald Trump's AmeriKKKa have openly committed themselves to fighting on behalf of the Klan, the Nazis, and the alt-right. Thus, the combat strength of any neo-nazi hatefest is not that of the their own based stickmen, torch-wavers, and shield-brandishing thugs, but rather the combined strength of all of those plus the local and sometimes the state police as well. The pointing of loaded firearms at anti-fascist protesters in GA has crossed a bright red line in the sand.

Marching towards the protest pen (photo by Lacy Macauley)

Police notice of the checkpoint (photo by Lacy Macauley)

The search checkpoint (photo by Lacy Macauley)

Inside the protest pen (photo by Lacy Macauley)

Pigs protecting white supremacists from the public (photo by Lacy Macauley)

Previous week(April 21): Police aim rifles at anti-Fascist protesters in Newnan, GA. This is the face of armed Fascism under Trump

Previous week(April 21): Cops aims shotgun at photographer. This orange shotgun is supposedly loaded with "less lethal" rounds but could still kill at this close range.

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