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anarchist_critic wrote

I've seen a lot of it too. Here in the UK, someone I know is involved in attempts to get anti-abortion protests banned, using PSPO's. PSPO's are a notorious irregular power used mainly against homeless people, and widely condemned by civil liberties groups. Basically, a local council can ban whatever they like if they think it causes a "nuisance", and it's used to ban things like rough sleeping, begging, street drinking, etc. If a precedent is set that they can be used to ban protests, we'll see it across the board - fracking, anti-war, antifa, you name it. It's a far lower hurdle than the stuff they already use to ban protests. A less generic version of this kind of law was used to destroy the militant animal rights movement about a decade back. But, for this person, winning a victory over sexists is more important than the right to protest. So many "anarchists" these days are idpols. This means they think the "real" hierarchies are informal hierarchies of race, class, gender and so on, and the priority is reversing these hierarchies, using whatever means are "strategic", and if you speak out against them, you're a racist or sexist or whatever. Smashing the state and capital is very much secondary, if they even still believe "the state" exists. They object to the state because it's racist and so on, and they think this makes them anarchist, but they're helping lower barriers against repression. Oh, and by the way, speech laws affect idpols too, because they're forever getting arrested for hate speech in Britain, France etc. The wording of the laws is generally not group-specific, it's "on grounds of" a certain criterion (race, gender identity, religion...), meaning that "reverse" racism/sexism/etc counts ("kill all white men" is hate speech), not to mention inter-group bullshit such as trans v TERFs or Muslims v Jews, or things like militant atheism. They're cutting off their own hands and feet to get recognition from power, and it would be pathetic if it wasn't so serious.

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