The Battle of the Blue Cat Café
How an anti-gentrification boycott became a proxy war between the radical left and the alt-right.
By Michael Hardy / Issue April 2018
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/the-b ... -cat-cafe/
Gray’s brother Paul, an Austin security guard and Iraq War veteran, became curious about the protests at his sister’s cafe. Over lunch with their mother, Rebecca mentioned that the protesters could get out of hand, and Paul offered to come by, observe, and ask them to clear the property if need be. She accepted. “He’s in security, he’s gone to war,” she says, describing her thought process. “He knows how to manage crowds when they get out of hand. That’s what he does for a living.”
In June 2017, Defend Our Hoodz members learned that Comedy Central was planning to film the pilot episode of a new show called Power Couple at the Blue Cat Café and announced a demonstration to disrupt the shoot. But when the protesters showed up at the cafe, they learned that the shoot had been called off. Instead they were confronted by Paul and three of his friends. A video shows a tense standoff between the four men, one brandishing a baton, and a group of protesters in bandannas and balaclavas. It’s unclear who struck the first blow, but in the ensuing melee—which was not captured on video—one of Paul’s friends was hit in the head and began bleeding, according to the police report. Police officers called to the scene used a stun gun to subdue a protester, and two demonstrators were charged with aggravated assault and evading arrest.
Soon after the clash, Defend Our Hoodz found an interview Paul had given to the alt-right podcast Exodus Americanus a week before the incident. Identifying himself as a “far-right militant,” Paul described how his sister, a “sweet . . . beautiful young white lady,” had been menaced by Mexicans and communists. “They hate her simply because she’s white,” he told the hosts, before inviting listeners to come to Austin to help defend the cat cafe. Rebecca claims that she rarely sees her brother and was unaware of his far-right connections. “I’m just so mad that he wasn’t honest about what his agenda was,” she says. (Paul could not be reached for comment.) Defend Our Hoodz posted a link to the interview on Facebook. “It has never been clearer,” the post reads. “Blue Cat Cafe, on the ruins of Jumpolin, is a safe space for nazis and white supremacists.”
To cope with the ongoing protests, Gray stepped back from full-time management of the cafe and began seeing a therapist. She says she was diagnosed with PTSD. “They want to drive me insane and mentally cause so much stress in my life that I lose it,” she says. Still, she refuses to accede to the protesters’ demand that she close the cafe. “I put every dollar I had into this. It’s not like packing up an apartment and moving away.”
Illustration by Christopher DeLorenzo
Maneki neko
Although cat cafes have popped up around the world, they are particularly popular in Japan, where many apartments do not allow tenants to have pets.
When pickets and bullhorns failed to drive the Blue Cat Café out of East Austin, anti-gentrification sympathizers set out to destroy the business’s online reputation by spamming Yelp, Facebook, and Google with negative reviews. “Avoid this place unless you want to donate to their racist cause,” read one post on Yelp. “Smells terrible, the food is garbage, and the owner’s brother is a nazi,” wrote another commenter on Google. Reviewers claimed to have seen depressed cats, diarrheic kittens, and worm-infested water bowls. (There is no evidence that these claims are true.) Hoping to cut off the cafe’s source of cats, which were provided by a network of shelters, Defend Our Hoodz encouraged its supporters to file complaints of animal abuse with the Austin Humane Society. The tactic worked: in October, the Humane Society announced that it was ending its two-year-long partnership with the cafe, though it did not endorse any of the allegations of abuse. “We are truly saddened by the current neighborhood conflict,” a statement from the Humane Society reads. “The conflict has nothing to do with AHS and is not good for animal welfare in an animal-loving city.” Other animal shelters in the greater Austin area have continued to lend cats to the cafe; Gray declined to reveal their names, fearing that they too will be targeted.
Defend Our Hoodz sees the Humane Society’s decision as a major victory in its campaign against gentrification, proof that its brand of aggressive protest works. “The boycott, we didn’t see it as something symbolic,” the Defend Our Hoodz spokesperson says. “If somebody crosses the picket line, they are accountable.” Just after Halloween the group posted a photo on Facebook of a dimly lit street overlaid with the words “Make Gentrifiers Afraid Again.” “Halloween is over but that doesn’t mean gentrifiers can’t be scared the other 364 days a year,” the post read.
Although it continues to organize protests against the Blue Cat Café, Defend Our Hoodz is also looking beyond Austin. On Facebook it frequently supports anti-gentrification struggles in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York and has made common cause with radical anti-capitalist organizations across the country, such as the Red Guards, a self-described “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collective.” Delgado says that Ledesma hijacked the group for his own purposes. “There’s no people from the barrio in it anymore,” she says. The Defend Our Hoodz spokesperson says some East Austinites remain in the group but admits many live elsewhere: “We never claimed to be from East Austin. Defend Our Hoodz—I mean, that’s plural. My community is Austin. My community is the Chicano community. My community is who I choose to side with and who chooses to side with me.”
Masked Man Confronts Austin City Council Over Gunmen Outside
Armed Antifa members intimidated reporter at Kate Steinle memorial
Infowars.com - March 22, 2018
https://www.infowars.com/infowars-repor ... ed-antifa/
Masked Man Confronts Austin City Council Over Gunmen Outside
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtYgI9LfHI0
Communists Terrorize Small Business
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVERKg9c-6E
Protest breaks out at East Austin cafe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSZ0M51AFeA
Feb 11, 2017 Protest at Blue Cat Cafe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWPFPXX9r44
Blue Cat Café vandalized with anti-gentrification graffiti, super-glued locks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOCQvuZp7Ew
FIGHT GENTRIFICATION
Defend Our Hoodz / Published on Jul 6, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jc5FIvxHeI
UT Professor Threatened By Armed Antifa Group Found Dead
by Tyler Durden / Fri, 04/06/2018 - 17:09
A controversial University of Texas professor who was repeatedly threatened by Antifa over a domestic violence incident from 2016 was found dead in his home on Thursday. The cause of death is unknown.
Richard Morrisett, 57, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of strangling his girlfriend off campus, which prompted outrage from a coalition of UT parents. In response to the incident, UT President Greg Fenves announced in a Thursday letter that employees who commit crimes off campus could face discipline, even if found not to pose a threat to campus safety, security or other operations.
Armed extremist Antifa group, "Revolutionary Student Front" repeatedly threatened Morrissett following the incident, defacing the door of his lab with graffiti reading "GET Out Morrisett OR ELSE" and "WATCH YOUR BACK RICHARD."
As one of several militant Antifa groups detailed by watchdog organization Far Left Watch, Revolutionary Student Front Austin is affiliated with armed extremist Antifa group Red Guards Austin.
Revolutionary Student Front – Austin is a self described “revolutionary anti-capitalist student movement” that organizes at the University of Texas – Austin. This militant student group recently made headlines for holding self-defense training on campus and tweeting about killing police officers. Earlier this month they published a comprehensive document outlining their so-called “Revolutionary Mental Health Program (RMHP)”. This 13,000+ word document covers the formulation, goals, failures, and successes of this program and why the ultimately decided to end it . Below are some of the more alarming excerpts from this document:
Their stated goal for this program was to address the mental health needs of student and to ultimately recruit and radicalize students with mental health issues in order to “make them into active fighters”:
“The primary goal of this program was to address the mental health needs of students in a way that would primarily serve to politicize and strengthen them, to become more committed to revolution and more capable of carrying it out.”
Through many hours of discussion with students while tabling and at our public meetings, and through regular contact with disgruntled students, we uncovered numerous pressing needs facing the general student body and working-class students alike. From this point, we sought to determine a site of struggle that would appeal to the sections of the student population most ripe for radicalization and to develop a plan to address those needs in a way that would politicize these students, with the goal of course being to make them into active fighters in the revolutionary class struggle.”
They also admit that this idea was partly inspired by the Socialist Patient’s Collective (SPK), a German neo-Marxist group that attempted to re-frame “mental illness” as a product of capitalist oppression and believed that the sick formed a revolutionary class of people who could be radicalized to join their cause:
“Over the winter of 2016 and in the early spring of 2017, the leadership of RSF spent a significant amount of time studying the work “Turn Illness into a Weapon,” which recounts the experiences of the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK) of the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1970. “
Here they explicitly outline that every project they do is designed to “recruit fighters”:
The goal of every initiative and program launched by a revolutionary organization should be for the purpose of recruiting fighters into its ranks and forging them in the fiery furnace of class struggle.
Here they suggest that some of their own organizers suffer from mental illness:
Orienting recruitment toward those suffering from qualitatively more intense mental illness, a population whose conditions in general serve as barriers to reaching the point of being continuous fighters (we say “in general” because many of the best organizers in the revolutionary movement and our organization also suffer from these conditions) does not accomplish the task of drawing from the most advanced sections of the people.
Throughout the document there are multiple pictures of armed communist militants, quotes from communist revolutionaries and dictators, and repeated affirmations to their commitment to political violence and preparation for war:
“Because our forces can only be built through the militant, violent struggle against the enemies of our class, we know that these fretful cowards will never reach that point. Making war will prepare us for the war to come, rally around us and bring into our ranks those who realize the necessity of violence to achieve a classless society free from exploitation, and unmask the real enemies of the people. We reaffirm our commitment to the principle of revolutionary violence that is necessary to confront the enemies of the people”
...
The knowledge that prison or death awaits us as revolutionaries aiming to destroy capitalism should be enough to encourage us to develop our organization in a thorough and well-rounded manner
And the document concludes with an unapologetic promise for more political violence:
“The actions to come in the following year will draw clear lines in the sand between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries. We will make no apologies for the necessary violence of our struggle and will spare no sacrifice for the battles to come because we are revolutionaries committed to the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a classless society. We live for the people, we fight for the people, and we die for the people. This is what it means to be a revolutionary and this is what we uphold from this point until the final dying breath of capitalism.”
So let’s unpack this. A heavily armed communist militia group:
openly supports a communist dictator who brutally killed millions of people
openly advocates for targeted political violence against “capitalists”
openly encourages armed insurrection against the U.S. government
openly recruits at the University of Texas at Austin
openly admits to targeting students with mental health issues to become “fighters”
and openly admits that some of it’s own organizers suffer from mental health issues
UT President Greg Fenves released a statement regarding the professor's death Friday:
Professor Morrisett’s death is a tragedy. We support his family and loved ones as they grieve during this time. We recognize these are difficult times on campus and the university will offer all the support we can to students, faculty and staff members.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04- ... found-dead
Controversial UT professor who pleaded guilty to domestic violence found dead
Richard Morrisett, 57, was found dead April 5, according to Plohetski.
Author: Shawna Reding, Kalyn Norwood
Published: 10:55 AM CDT April 6, 2018
Updated: 6:17 PM CDT April 6, 2018
The University of Texas professor who pleaded guilty to a domestic violence incident from 2016 -- causing outrage among parents for the school's "lack of action" -- has died, KVUE's and the Austin American-Statesman's Tony Plohetski confirmed.
Richard Morrisett, 57, was found dead in his home April 5, according to Plohetski. The cause of death has not been released yet.
Morrisett pleaded guilty to a felony charge of strangling his girlfriend to the point that she saw "stars," KVUE's news partners at the Statesman originally reported. The incident happened off-campus, but a coalition of UT parents called SafeHorns believed university leaders should have disciplined the tenured professor.
While a student said she did not agree with what he did, she's sad to hear about his death.
"It's just really sad and I hope everyone learns from this and gets to move on and learns, 'Yeah we can move past it' or you know, make changes so that won't happen again," said Courtney Bates, a student.
The university is also speaking out about Morrisett's death, calling it a tragedy.
"We are really viewing this as a tremendous tragedy," said Shilpa Bakre with the University of Texas. "At this point, we're not really focused on the protests and things that surrounded (him). We're focused on the fact that there was a loss of life."
She went onto say, "these are challenging times on campus and so as a university we're really trying to come together to provide as much support as possible to the faculty, staff and students as they work through this process."
Morrisett served as a professor with the College of Pharmacy. He had been with the university since 1997.
RELATED:
Parents outraged by UT's lack of action in professor assault case
http://www.kvue.com/news/local/parents- ... /512680628
UT building vandalized after controversial professor assault case
http://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/ ... -514918443
Morrisett's criminal case prompted a new policy at UT. UT President Greg Fenves announced in a letter Thursday that school employees who commit crimes off campus could be subject to discipline, even if officials find they are no threat to campus safety, security or other operations.
UT President Greg Fenves released a statement regarding the professor's death Friday:
Professor Morrisett’s death is a tragedy. We support his family and loved ones as they grieve during this time. We recognize these are difficult times on campus and the university will offer all the support we can to students, faculty and staff members.
http://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/ ... -535911162
Communist students vandalize WWI memorial at UT-Austin
Kassy Dillon, Massachusetts Campus Correspondent
@kassydillon on Mar 08, 2018 at 2:43 PM EDT
The "Revolutionary Student Front," an unofficial group of communist students at the University of Texas at Austin, decided to mark International Women's Day by vandalizing a fountain on campus.
The RSF recently had its Twitter account suspended for "promoting violence," but has not toned down its rhetoric, stressing "the necessity of organizing women for revolutionary violence" in its latest posts.
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10620
SXSW / Piñata Demolition / Gentrification & More
Demolished East Austin Piñata Shop Is the New Center of Austin’s Gentrification Debate
by Dan Solomon, February 17, 2015
http://www.texasmonthly.com/daily-post/ ... ion-debate
Austin Landlords Demolish Piñata Store For SXSW, Call Mexican Tenants ‘Roaches’
By Cindy Casares, March 16, 2015
http://www.latina.com/lifestyle/our-iss ... sxsw-party
Jordan French, the Landlord Who Demolished the East Austin Piñata Shop, Has Been Forced to Resign From the Company He Started
by Dan Solomon, March 26, 201
http://www.texasmonthly.com/daily-post/ ... ced-resign
A little more about Austin’s Status Labs…
Texas Firm Admits to Bribing Journalists for Coverage
By Patrick Coffee on Sep. 12, 2014
http://www.adweek.com/prnewser/texas-fi ... age/100376
PR pitch: We’ll pay you to mention our clients
Allen Wastler | @AWastler
Thursday, 11 Sep 2014
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101993331
http://jimromenesko.com/2014/09/11/pr-f ... r-clients/
SXSW “Brain Hacking” Experts Promote DIY Mind Control
Using parts from Radio Shack! by Kit Daniels | Infowars.com | March 17, 2015
http://www.infowars.com/sxsw-brain-hack ... d-control/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZRAkQPLyOA
SkyNet Lives! #StopTheRobots @SXSW
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... 47#p563947
http://www.myfoxaustin.com/story/285216 ... ay-we-live (Video)
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015 ... /24777871/ (Video)
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/stop-robots-pr ... ce-1492126
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http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/14/anti-r ... d-at-sxsw/
http://www.infowars.com/rage-against-th ... he-robots/
#StickerGate “Whites Only” Gentrification
Austin Mayor Steve Adler: ‘White people’ stickers appalling, offensive
March 18, 2015
http://www.statesman.com/news/news/crim ... sug/nkY7f/
Why I did it (Video by Adam Reposa)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGzSBslnIQQ
http://www.dwibadass.com
Adam Reposa’s Crazy Awesome “I’m a Lawyer, Get Outta My Way” Advert (Video)
Austin lawyer Adam Reposa says he put up ‘white people’ stickers
By KXAN News Published: March 20, 2015
http://kxan.com/2015/03/20/austin-lawye ... -stickers/
Stickers and their Discontents, March 20, 2015
http://equilibrionorte.org/2015/03/20/s ... scontents/