






From @generalstrikeillinois on Instagram
View the zine: Screen PDF – Printable PDF
View the Prison Censorship Survey results
Individual articles:
Download the FOIA request data (zip): 2023-2024 IDOC Drug Confiscations, 2024 Drug Exposures
Prison censorship is a front in the fascist american project. For the millions buried by the largest prison system on the planet, we know that access to communication and reading materials remain one of the only ways people behind bars can maintain humanity. Prison is censorship, a system of walls and borders that criminalizes people and ideas: a system we are determined to break by building bridges of solidarity – through sharing books and publishing zines.
Coinciding with the fascistic expansion of police and cop city projects, the prison censorship machine has rapidly marched on, consuming the majority of local, state and federal facilities. Played-out “war on drugs” fear mongering is why most people behind bars no longer receive physical mail: books are banned under cover of “content-neutral” and “publisher-only” restrictions, and private monopolies experiment with dystopian tablet technologies to monitor and profit from all communications.
Illinois has been one of the last holdouts until last year when prison copagandists began another all-too-familiar disinformation campaign. Guards are staging drug exposure hospitalization stunts to take away physical mail – incidents easily disproved as impossible by medical experts and according to IDOC’s own confiscation and exposure data. Unlike other states, this battle is being waged at capitol: multiple bills for and against mail scanning are being debated in Springfield. IDOC has not made any announcements yet, but has signed a new phone/email/tablet contract with ICSolutions: Illinois could fall to all-digital mail unless we organize now to stop it.
One voice that has not been heard from are those behind bars who are bearing the brunt of their draconian machinations. We made sure to share their plans to thousands of our incarcerated correspondents throughout IDOC, asking for comments and strategies on how to fight back and providing information on the bills and the addresses to write congress. Throughout these pages you’ll hear directly how mail censorship affects life behind bars: and special appreciations to the brave souls writing us, refusing to be silenced.
We are determined to stop mail scanning and book bans in Illinois: we share these tools and updates, seeking comrades to help break down the panopticon through underground networks of paper and print. Free the books, free the mail, free the people – free them all!
Reposted from Midwest Books to Prisoners
Write Casey and send them support!
Casey has been retaliated against for filing a grievance against a deputy that threatened them. The retaliation by the grievance committee came as a variety of writeups based on concocted claims of “filing false information” and “interfering with the operation of the facility”.
Starting Monday 6/9/25, Casey will be on “LOP” (Loss Of Privileges) until 7/8/25.
This retaliation against them means:
– no phone calls
– no visitation
– no commissary
– having to fill out a form to call lawyers
The “loss of privileges” will last for the bulk of their remaining time at Santa Rita Jail as their sentencing date is on 7/22/25. So make sure to send them reading materials, letters of love, solidarity, and support! Let them know we haven’t forgot about them and that these walls can’t separate us!
Send mail to:
Casey Goonan #UMF227
Santa Rita Jail
5325 Broder BLVD.
Dublin, CA 94568
Love and struggle, CSC
Reposted from @freecaseynow (IG)
Available for download here.
For distribution at protests, festivals, sporting events, waiting rooms, cookouts, libraries, dining halls, courtrooms, traffic jams, emergency rooms, corner stores, public transportation, sideshows, recreation yards, or anywhere else you may encounter others who’ve had enough.
(Blackened/improved from a previous document shared early 2025.)
\\\\\\\\\\\\ FRONT & BACK TEXT BELOW \\\\\\\\\\\\
REMEMBER 2020, 1968, 1878, 1791 — WE CAN WIN
Thousands of years of kings, queens, emperors, presidents, & ministers demanding obedience. 500 years of crackers enslaving & colonizing this planet. 250 years of anglo/yankee domination.
Trump this, Musk that. Democrats, Republicans, Zionists, Confederates, Fascists, Conservatives, Liberals, Progressives. So many flavors of the same expired bullshit.
2020: Cops executed George Floyd. A police station was burnt down. For a brief moment, the world opened up.
1968: White power executed MLK. Black communities erupted into rebellion. For a brief moment, the world opened up.
1878: Indigenous peoples in the South Pacific rose up in arms against european colonizers attempting to exterminate their communities & hijack their homelands. For a moment, the world opened up.
1791: Enslaved Africans & their descendants began an uprising in the Caribbean, destroying property, profit, & slavery. For a long moment, the world opened up.
Whether a handful of friends or a massive crowd, we know that the footsoldiers of every regime can be defeated. The secret is to begin.
« In Memory Of Our Fallen; Let us turn their cities into funeral pyres.
In Memory Of Our Fighters; Let us honor your names with fire and gunpowder.
Peace By Piece
(A) »
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE!
¡QUEREMOS UN MUNDO DONDE QUEPAN MUCHOS MUNDOS!
Back text:
Look for those pushing and help them push harder.
Move together. Be water.
They can control a march of 10,000 — they can’t control 10 marches of 1000.
De-arrest. Don’t let people get grabbed.
If they do, don’t let their cars or busses leave.
They only care about money, so causing monetary losses is your only vote.
On the inside, the demonstration is an organism of care and support.
On the outside, it is ferocious and uncontrollable.
Without their toys they are powerless.
No one is coming to save us.
Everything is at stake.
www.notrace.how
submitted anonymously
Repost from Civil Liberties Defense Center
Over the last month or so several activists around the country known to CLDC received an unfriendly email from Google. The Google user was informed that Google received and responded to “a legal process” from the FBI compelling them to give up all the info and data related to your Google account. As usual, Google claims to be gagged from letting you know until after the fact (months or years later) that they are letting the FBI suck up your personal (and you thought private) information, photos, emails, Google phone numbers and Google documents. This of course includes the information of those you sent emails to, shared Google docs with, etc.
One activist received one of these Google emails on December 6, 2024, and responded by requesting that Google provide them with the subpoena related to their account. Ten days later Google provided them with a redacted copy of the subpoena dated April 27, 2023—seeking Google data from January 1, 2023 until the date of the subpoena pursuant to a federal grand jury in the District of Minnesota. So Google informed this person their data was seized almost 2 years after Google gave it to the FBI. Others who have received similar Google notices have not received responses from Google yet. (But just to emphasize this was pre-Trump state repression).
First, a reminder—Google SUCKS and you should delete your Google account as soon as possible. See our digital security page for alternatives to Google-Snitch.
Second, if you receive something similar, reach out to the CLDC so we can help. You should probably go ahead and ask Google for the subpoena as well.
Finally, do not speculate publicly (or in writing) about what you might think is being investigated. And remember to think twice about putting anything in writing that could harm you or your community. Take yourself and your political work seriously and engage in document hygiene.
We’ve got your back.
“I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason.”
– Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks
Our history is a history of names of the dead.
Oscar Grant, Kimani Gray, Alton Sterling, Freddy Gray, Brionna Taylor, Mike Brown, Timothy Green, Kajeme Powell, Vonderitt Myers, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sean Bell, Rekia Boyd, Sonya Massey, Ta’Kiya Young, and on, and on, and on….
Since about 2015, when I first found people who were keeping track, the average number of people killed by police every year is about 1,500 people. 1,500 unique individuals whose lives were snuffed out, whose absence ripples across a whole constellation of relations – relatives, friends, loved ones, communities, etc. That, of course, is only explicit murders, not a variety of different forms of death in custody that are also murders, not harassment, not brutality, not sexual assault and rape.
So great are our dead, and at every turn they should be honored and remembered. Who remembers them and honors them better than our fighters? But…who are our fighters? Who makes note of and remembers them?
Our history is a history of defeat, and that defeat has us adopting the worldview of the enemy, has us accepting the limits of our chains. The left wing of capital, the self professed revolutionaries and yes even many anarchists, have adopted a stance of self victimization. In shock from the violence of oppression, the daily blood quota to keep a system of racial caste domination functioning, many will flee from what is asked of us, talking about safety before talking of fire and gunpowder – if they ever do. They will say “White Bodies To The Front!”, “Dismantling White Supremacy is White People’s Work!” as if someone could ever fight in place of us. They will tell people to stay out of the streets, to stay in line, to not come out before ever thinking of picking up a rock and a stick. They will talk infinitely about the strength of the police, but will never talk of their weaknesses.
When those few brave individuals, no longer accepting the daily misery and humiliation, no longer accepting the limitations thrust upon us by the color of our skin, strike out in displays of ferocity and courage, the activists and revolutionaries rush in to spit upon their memory. They’re adventurists. Individual action doesn’t do anything. Your actions are going to bring repression upon us. You’re making us look bad. You’re a fed. That was a false flag. They’re not affiliated with us, we’re the good ones. We’re the docile ones. We’re the cowardly ones who never dare to strike against our chains.
This tension is notable in looking at who is worth remembering. We talk of the innocent, the unarmed killed by the police and vigilante. If the innocent deserve our support, the guilty do doubly so. So much breath is wasted in trying to justify why so and so isn’t a criminal, was innocent, didn’t deserve to die. As though all our other kin deserve death. All the while the dominant order continues to stack our bodies because they see crime not in the action but in the origin – the birth in black skin.
I do not identify with this mythical figure of innocence – a white figure, an appeal to white morality. In the figure of the shoplifter, the drug dealer, the prostitute, the carjacker, the shooter I will always see more of myself. I know what is done is incidental, irrelevant, an excuse to play out fantasies of violence against black people, a desire to punish the Black Other to affirm the Goodness of White.
In an act of reclaiming the memory of the guilty, of uplifting our fighters I wish to talk about two particular individuals – Christopher Monfort and Korryn Gaines.
Our Memory Is A Burning Fuse
“My intentions are the best for the city and the country. The things I’m accused of are selfless acts. I didn’t get anything out of them.”
– Christopher Monfort, Seattle Times Interview
October 22nd. Smoke rises from the Seattle City Maintenance Facility – multiple cop cars have burst into flames. A note is left at the scene referencing the video of King County Sheriff Paul Schene repeatedly punching 15 year old Malika Calhoun who is held in custody.
The perpetrator gets away, the attack remains unsolved.
10PM on the 31st, a cold Halloween night, and a vehicle drives through the streets of Seattle’s Central District. It pulls up next to an SPD patrol car and the window rolls down. The officers turn their heads to look over and from the darkness of the vehicle they are greeted not with a face, but with a barrel of a rifle. It opens its mouth to speak.
KRAK KRAK KRAK.
This exchange of speech in a language the police know so well lasts less than a minute before the rifle disappears into the darkness of the car. The vehicle quickly turns around and speeds off from the direction it came.
A look back over the scene: An SPD patrol car riddled with bullets, one pig slumped in his seat dead, the other injured.
“And when we die there ain’t no fireworks or fuckin parades”
– Bambu, Since I Was A Youth
November 6th, the armed death cult of SPD hold a public memorial – a procession through the city they occupy, a show of force. Around the same time out in Tukwila a snitch, a cop without a uniform, calls in a suspicious vehicle that matches the description of the vehicle that opened fire on the occupying army. The enemy encroaches on an apartment complex, a man brandishes a 9mm Glock and flees up the stairwell. The enemy approaches, the man pops out from the corner putting the gun into the cops face and pulls the trigger – click – he forgot to chamber a round. He goes down in a hail of gunfire into his head and stomach.
The enemy enters the man’s apartment. They find a small armory – a bolt action rifles and 2 semi-auto rifles, a shotgun, another .45 handgun, homemade explosives and firebombs and booby traps.
Ballistic and DNA forensics identify this man – Christopher Monfort – as the arsonist and gunman. Despite all odds he survives, now paralyzed from the waist down with a bullet lodged in his spine and with brain damage.
“So when the system seems to break down what do we do? We march, we protest, we form groups and the police scowl at us on the sides of the road and talk about the overtime they’re getting. If you stand close enough you can hear them. They have no intent on listening to a thousand or ten thousand people marching for police to stop their brutality. When you see a couple police officers brutalizing or murdering someone there’s always a few, maybe half a dozen, of their friends around them. They’re not gonna tell on their buddies. They’re not crossing the blue line.”
-Christopher Monfort, Final Statement to the Court
Despite everything, Chris was able to speak for himself. He was sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2017 in his cell at Walla Walla State prison, allegedly from overdose. Anarchists continued to support him until his death.
—————————————————————-
“’She always was a little radical, and she was hardcore about certain stuff. She did a lot of research … laws of the land,’ Rhanda [Korryn’s Mother] said. ‘And right after Freddie Gray got killed, it amplified because he was a neighbor to us. We used to see him.’”
– Interview with the Mother of Korryn Gaines
March 10th, 2016. A woman is pulled over for driving a vehicle with a piece of cardboard where a license plate should be. She is ordered out of her vehicle as a cop threatens to taze her. “You are not going to kidnap me, you are going to have to kill me.”
She is arrested for a disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. She is held for two days in isolation with neither food nor water.
August 1st, police come to her door to serve a warrant for missed court dates. The door is opened, the the cops are greeted with a shotgun to their face. They retreat and call for back up and a 6 hour standoff ensues.
Initially they try to frame the situation as a kidnapping but have to roll it back as a Facebook livestream of the stand off goes viral, with her calmly in her home and the occasional shot of her children in the background eating and playing. She talks about the situation while friends and followers cheer her on and tell her to hold strong.
In part of the video, Gaines asks her 5 year old son “Who is outside?” He answers “The police.” She asks why; “To kill us.” He responds.
Toward the end of the standoff, the Baltimore Police – with compliance from Facebook – gain access to her account, shut off the live stream and deactivate the account. Within moments of the live stream going down, the cops shoot through the wall, killing Korryn and wounding her child.
“’Officer shot through a wall and couldn’t even see nothing,’ Rhanda said. She describes the sentiment of the officer as, ‘Nerve of this little Black girl to stay in this house when we said to come out!’”
– Interview with the Mother of Korryn Gaines
The Black Liberation Army Is A Living Tension
“…our final consideration is whether or not these masses must centralize their organizing (not to be confused with the obvious need to coordinate their efforts!). To that I answer with an emphatic, ‘no!’ and further, I contend that such centralization will only make it easier for our oppressors to identify and level repression upon us – prolonging the crisis our generation must deal with.”
– Russell Maroon Shoatz, The Dragon and the Hydra
These two stories are a drop in the ocean – there’s a thousand stories like these. Hidden, buried, choked out by our enemies and the cowards who enable them. Names and acts we will never know. The point in recounting and connecting these stories, beyond the inspiration of individual action, is to describe a living tension.
Once is an act of insanity. Twice is a lone wolf. A thousand times begins to look like an army.
While revolutionaries waste their ink and breath talking of conditions, of “the people” not being ready, the past two decades has been the informal spread of practices and the development of ad hoc fighting formations. The shooters, the rock throwers, the looters, the arsonists, the getaway drivers. A black liberation army – a de facto informal network of fighters across the territories dominated by the american state – has been building and fighting right before our very eyes.
Many look at this and see disorganization, a child needing the strong hand of the Patriarch to guide them, whether in the form of the vanguard party or the leader, to the real means of freedom that these chaotic and ungrateful negros will never grasp on their own. But any closer look shows that we are very obviously organized and coordinated – perhaps the most organized forces in these territories and perhaps it’s the revolutionaries who need a lesson in organization.
Or better yet, the revolutionaries need to be pushed out of our way.
Yes, the organization, the coordination, the fighting spirit is all there. What is needed is for us to consciously recognize this – that we aren’t fighting alone, that to some degree or another we have built upon the ideas, strategies and practices of others, refined in the forge of street combat. This consciousness has been developing over the past 20 years and through bitter and bloody experience will continue to develop is greater and lesser degree, in different ways, in different territories.
I don’t have a plan or a great analysis to give you to beautifully close this out. All I can offer is this; I see tensions that need to be pushed, memories that need to be reclaimed, and developing practices that need to be analyzed. Through writing, through video, through music, performance, crime, and practice in the instances of street combat to come I seek to spread and clarify these and be in dialogue with the development of the black liberation army, walking alongside it as an anarchist and developing it as a participant.
If nothing else has been made more clear to me, I can clearly see that many individuals in many different territories see a similar trajectory and, like me, awkwardly stumble towards it. Just as I develop and dialogue with local and regional tensions, I hope to dialogue with you all, sharing our ideas, sharpening our practices.
I cannot say what the future holds, victory or defeat. All I can say for certain is that no savior from on high will deliver us from the position we find ourselves in; that our destiny is in our hands alone, so let’s make sure our hands are armed.
In Memory Of Our Fallen; Let us turn their cities into funeral pyres.
In Memory Of Our Fighters; Let us honor your names with fire and gunpowder.
Peace By Piece
(A)
Crossposted from Unravel
Reposted from Blessed is the Flame
PDF download link: [ENG] Blessed Is The Flame – Issue #3
(For those who wish to print the newspaper, see the instructions below.)
The 3rd issue of the anarcho-nihilist/insurrectionary newspaper “Blessed Is The Flame” has been published. Its pages contain reports of direct actions, claims of responsibility, texts, poems, and news from anarchist prisoners and trials that were published in November and December 2024 in ten different languages across various parts of the world, or were sent to us via email and are being published for the first time. (Some of the texts published for the first time will also be uploaded as standalone posts on our blog, blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net.)
Our goal is not only to break down the linguistic barriers that hinder information, solidarity, and the dissemination of propaganda by the deed on an international level but also to give counter-information a printed form. We believe it is crucial for counter-information to transcend the limits of the digital realm.
In an era of rapid developments, we unfortunately published the 3rd issue a bit later than we had planned, as this is the first time the newspaper is officially published in seven different languages: Greek, English, Spanish, Indonesian, French, Italian, and German. A new post will include links to all these translations, once they are published on the respective counter-information platforms.
We extend our heartfelt thanks to all comrades—both within Greece and abroad—who contribute by translating, offering financial support, and enabling the circulation of this newspaper in different parts of the world. Anyone interested in helping translate “Blessed Is The Flame” into even more languages can contact us at: blessedistheflame@riseup.net.
For those interested in printing the newspaper, ask a trusted print shop to print it in A5 format as a colored booklet. In a few weeks from now, the English and the Spanish editions of the newspaper will also be available in an alternative format appropriate for the US paper sizing system.
For printing, please download the PDF directly from our website, as the download link may be updated in case we detect minor formatting errors in the file that may have overlooked.
When we conceived the idea for this newspaper a year ago, we could not have imagined that it would eventually take on such international dimensions so that, with the help of comrades from different parts of the earth, it would cross continents. The first issue was published only in Greek, but the second was also published in English and Spanish, and an effort is now being made to translate it into French as well. This issue is being published in even more languages and we hope that the translation efforts will multiply in future issues.
Comrades who are interested in contributing to this project can contact us in the email address blessedistheflame@riseup.net
Anarchy of action has always been a small but lively flame burning contemptuously in the vast gloom of apathy and compromise; let us make its blessed light reach the ends of the earth and kindle it with our destructive passion for freedom. Every attack born of this passion is a reminder that the resistance to the world of power is not alive only in certain historical moments with the approval of the masses, but is an everyday affair; that there will always be those who struggle to get out of the mire of oppression; every attack is a statement that there are black sheep who refuse the mutilated life offered to them by this rotten society.
Every unrepentant word that comes out of the mouths of imprisoned comrades is proof that repression does not break the rebellious spirits.
And finally, every death in action is an eternal call for struggle.
Regardless of whether nowadays the intensity of the anarchist offensive has dropped considerably, the above messages remain unchanged throughout the centuries, because this very intensity has always made circles, and it is in our hands to turn the wheel.
For the Black International
NYE Noise Demo @ MCC Chicago
Cheers y’all, to another year of raising hell against the prison state in solidarity with our comrades and community behind the walls. Chicago did it right again with a rambunctious noise demo outside the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the hellacious downtown federal jailscraper. Mobile laser sound systems blasting, pots and pans clanging; bird whistles and a gaggle of megaphones filled the air with chaotic rhythms. Folks inside loudly banged windows from every cell window and floor, showing us dance moves and light shows of their own. “Free Them All!” we chanted, demanding the release of Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and all political prisoners; and called out the pigs for the murder of Dexter Reed in his car, Sonya Massey in her home, Cory Ulmer and Robert Brooks behind bars, just a few of the over 1300 people murdered by police this year. On the street, plenty of passing revelers stopped by to see what the street ruckus party was about, checking out the zine cart and even helping hold the ACAB banner. The crowd marched around the building to make sure people on all sides got to see that they are not forgotten, to share the countdown to the end, to ring in the new year and join in on the dance party happening on the street.
An overwhelming pig presence surrounded the area for hours in advance: cruisers lining the streets with dozens of cops idling on corners, a fence blocking off the plaza was installed since last year. Despite their seeming omnipresence, we resisted, shaking their fences and shooting fireworks bouncing off the heights of those brutalist prison walls, exploding joyously outside cell windows. Later, some went to the ICE field office conveniently located down the street visible from MCC. The pigs were too slow to stop a little redecoration with an important unwelcoming message to incoming Trump ICE dictator Tom Homan: painted on the front efface, “Die, Homan. GTFO Chicago”, “Abolish ICE”. We marched on for several blocks before disappearing into the new year for more late night revelry; unfortunately, after everybody had already dispersed, some sneaky pigs apprehended at random a few people at a CTA train platform; one was held overnight and released with a misdemeanor.
It’s imperative to mark the connections between the carceral state and the xenophonic white supremacist colonial project of of mass deportation; many more prisons and jails are being planned to be built to process the millions of lives they intend to interrupt. Homan, the incoming “border czar” says Chicago is ground zero on day one of the incoming Trump regime: but they underestimate how fiercely determined and prepared people are to defend our city from their racist federal stormtrooper armies. We reject the racialized copagandized ‘dangerous city’ narrative crafted by an entire ecosystem of police scanner bros, racist nightcrawlers, and low-orbit suburban MAGA chuds feeding video clips to FOX and other right-wing outlets, who all year have spread disinformation and sensationalist lies, hyping up crime and demonizing migrants to the point of absurdity. They’ve been laying the groundwork for the incoming regime to attack the good people in our supposed leftist “Sanctuary City”, but even despite this policy, neoliberal administrations fail our newest residents with embarrassingly insufficient social services and decrepit ‘shelters’. A coordinated astroturf campaign from the right has been underway to divide communities and erode the public, an attempt on Illinois MAGA takeover: dustbin of history types Paul Vallas and Darren Bailey have failed mayoral and gubernatorial power grabs, but unfortunately Eileen O’Neill Burke snuck through as new top prosecutor, a racist FOP-backed former judge who in her first week dropped charges against Oak Lawn pig Patrick O’Donnell who committed a brutal hate crime against a 17 year old Palestinian. Caught between cowardly neoliberals and fascist onslaughts, it’s time to break from elections, reforms, and turn to each other to carve new paths.
Crime will be the main vector in which the incoming fascist regime will leverage in justification for their abhorrent plans to deport, meaning our strategy of defending against this must apply abolitionist frameworks and a rejection of “citizenship”, “peace”, and their “law and order”. The struggle to overthrow carceral society is tied directly to the fight for inherent and forever rights and unstoppable force of migration. Facing an untenable dystopic future, more people are realizing the necessity to organize autonomously and collectively, to fight to survive against this fascist wave of aggressive prison politics going buck wild with Trump’s re-election, and to build a more liberated existence. Escalate against the state and support the comrades willing to take risks to bring it all down!
Remember, it wasn’t too long ago that two people escaped from MCC with bedsheet ropes from above the 10th floor of this downtown monstrosity, a reminder that no wall is too high to deter our desires and stop the will of people yearning to be free. Free Them All!!
Submitted anonymously via email.
Both up on zines page.
#FreeCaseyNow: On Casey Goonan and the Abandonment of Political Prisoners in the Pro-Palestine Movement Version 1 print
FreeCaseyNow: On Casey Goonan and the Abandonment of Political Prisoners in the Pro-Palestine Movement Version 2 print
submitted anonymously