Keep Austin Criminal
Submission from Mapache, a member of the Contra Todo Collective in San Antonio
This racist country has a long history of being unkind to immigrants. Even under the liberal administration of Obama, American nationalism over its illegitimate border resulted in the most deportations under any administration.
Continue reading “SATX 161 Alerta! Anti-ICE Alerts & Organizing in San Antonio”
Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable
This is Rudy James Lunsford. He is a predator with a pattern of emotionally & physically abusing women, and has also reportedly raped one woman. He is approaching 30 years old this year, but preys on women as young as 19. By preying on young women in particular, he exploits them so that they will provide and care for him–described as simply wanting “sex, a free meal, and a ride when necessary.” He has been described as living a parasitic lifestyle, lacking “any sense of empathy without reward.” He is a skillful manipulator that knows how to use people, including by claiming that he used to be a bad person but that he’s changed.
Continue reading “Sheepz is a Creep: Abusive Artist Rudy James Lunsford”
Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable
[CW: Racism, anti-semitism, Nazi imagery, homophobia]
Our organization recently received a tip about a facebook group called UT Austin Hot Takes, which had recently been taken over by admins posting and enabling white supremacist content. As we investigated the group and its members, we stumbled onto information that overlapped with an ongoing investigation we had been conducting into some fascists & reactionaries who had showed up in May to disrupt RSF’s People’s Trial of the rapist professor Robert Reese. Below we’ve compiled the information we have gathered. We uncovered a larger network of connections that included outright Neo-Nazis, neo-confederates, and the racists of the Young Conservatives of Texas.
By La’Kayla Celeste. Republished with permission of the author.
I don’t make a habit of reading The Daily Texan, one of the nation’s largest college newspapers and source of great pride at the University of Texas at Austin. I don’t pick up the paper because of the residual bad taste in my mouth from several casually racist encounters I’ve had with the Texan over the 4 years of my undergraduate education. Now, as a second-year graduate student at the University completing a Masters Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies, my main concern is meeting my deadlines. This was the business I was minding when I happened across Volume 118, Issue 131 of the publication while on campus one morning a few weeks ago. It was the image that struck me: a close-up of Daniel Nkoola, Black creative and undergraduate student in Radio-Television-Film, the major I earned one of my bachelor’s degrees in. I picked up the paper, excited to read when something else in the top, right hand corner caught my eye. A graphic proclaimed that this story was the 6th installment in ‘The 5% Project,” a collaboration between The Daily Texan and UT’s chapter of the National Association of Black Journalist. I stared at the notation for a few minutes before snapping a picture on my phone, leaving the paper where I found it.
Continue reading “The 5% Project (It Really Be Ya Own People!)”
Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable
Update 10/25/19: As of Fall 2019, Lillian Bonin has acted as Chairman for the Young Conservatives of Texas. In the year since this article was published, we further uncovered her ties to white nationalists and participation in rape-apologia in pro-Kavanaugh demonstrations.
[CW: transphobia, anti-semitism, racism]
Over the past few days, we have been investigating the political activities and leanings of Lillian Bonin, a UT Liberal Arts Representative. On Friday, we acquired a screenshot of a comment made by Bonin on an AJ+ video. In this comment, Bonin refers to a white man attempting to unlearn his racism by saying “when the left literally won’t accept you until you fully cuckify yourself.”
Continue reading “Scratch a Liberal Arts Rep, a Fascist Bleeds”
Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable
A long-brewing conflict at Texas State University in San Marcos has burst into a display of student organizing power & collective capacity. Since the afternoon of April 11th, students have been staging a sit-in at the campus LBJ Teaching Theatre. The move came after 19 senators were absent from an impeachment hearing for student body president Connor Clegg, ensuring that he would be able to fill out his term. Clegg was facing impeachment over his inability to represent marginalized students–particularly students of color–on campus. In February, screenshots emerged of Clegg’s instagram account featuring racist and sexist captions. This was the latest incident with Clegg, who earlier in the year had made calls to defund the student newspaper after a columnist published a controversial article criticizing whiteness.
Continue reading “Expose Texas State: Racism & Student Resistance in San Marcos”
Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable
Last week, a series of on campus events demonstrated the strength of the Palestinian liberation movement at UT. The Palestine Solidarity Committee at UT hosted their yearly week of Israeli Apartheid Week actions, a chance to raise awareness about the struggles of Palestinians and initiatives like the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) campaign. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the mass displacement & ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, and the beginnings of Palestinian resistance to occupation. To make up for the lack of reporting in local and campus news outlets, we have gathered a rundown of the events and their significance here.
Continue reading “Long Live The Intifada! Israeli Apartheid Week at UT”
Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable
CW: sexual assault, harassment, homophobia, racism
We’ve just made it through another series of hellish weeks, with SXSW and Roundup hitting us back to back. As we come out on the other side of Roundup, we wanted to highlight some of the moments from this weekend that made even clearer why Greek Life is, at its core, a racist, cisheteropatriarchal institution. We’ve captured some of the student discussions and other events of this weekend, including catcalls, insider secrets, and assaults. Remember that this is only a small sampling of the events and experiences of this weekend, and there are likely many more stories that remain untold due to fear, shame, stigma, or the normalization of the horrors of Roundup & Greek Life.
Continue reading “Crash The Party: Shitty Moments from Roundup”
Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable
Ask a room full of organizers about the things that inspired and radicalized them, and you’ll probably end up with a good number of people. A few may specifically mention slam poetry & spoken word, a form of expression that often attracts radical and revolutionary thinkers because of its ability to give voice to experiences and ideas that are typically silenced. At UT, you may find some of these creative radicals in a local group called Spitshine Poetry. Founded in 2012, Spitshine hosts weekly writing workshops and regular open mic nights, where students may collaborate on and present their work.
Editor’s note: On Saturday, March 24th, The Autonomous Brown Berets de TejAztlan, SATX chapter, attempted to disrupt the local Cesar Chavez march, which had become nothing more than a liberal parade that failed to uphold Cesar’s politics. In particular, they were protesting the parade’s collaboration with the police (i.e. the strikebreakers of the ruling classes) and their refusal to endorse a boycott of an exploitative agricultural corporation, a direct affront to everything Cesar Chavez fought for.
We are republishing this report back in order to break the media silence around what happened yesterday. Despite numerous journalists with cameras taking photos of the disruption and the police repression it encountered, not a single news outlet even mentioned the protest or its content in their articles. We in Austin know too well how the police will silence stories and keep their media contacts in line, so that nothing that serves as bad press for the cops will make it onto a story. We encourage all who read this to share this article, spread the word, to recognize who the cop collaborators & enemies of the people are, and to discredit those who would seek to use Cesar Chavez’s image in service of exploitation and oppression.
Continue reading “¡Viva La Huelga! Report-back from San Antonio’s Cesar Chavez March”