Towards a united, anti-imperialist front.
“Whatever is unprincipled, incorrect, and counterproductive about you and your style of work, you have to be willing to subject to the rapier knife of revolutionary criticism if you are serious about creating a revolution. Everything — action or inaction, the way you relate to people you work with, how you deal with the masses, how you deal with your family, how you deal with personal relationships, how you deal with people with whom you disagree has to be open to criticism and self-criticism. None of us is perfect, but we all claim to want to create a revolution. In order to create this revolution we must be willing to sublimate our egos for the good of the movement and suffer death of these egos by a thousand cuts. It is only when we are able to do this that we will truly be able to move forward and create a revolution-and win… We cannot organize our communities for revolution if we cannot resolve the contradictions among ourselves…There is no separate way in a revolutionary struggle. We’re all either in this together or we’re working at odds with each other. The sooner we recognize this and begin seriously working to resolve the contradictions among us, the sooner we can seriously begin to build a foundation for revolution… We can no longer afford the luxury of rumormongering, making unsubstantiated allegations, or harboring ill feelings without airing them.”
– Safiya Bukhari, The War Before
Operating from within the u.s. empire, there are many contradictions that run rampant in our movements — so much so that sometimes, the movements we foolishly perceive as posing a challenge to the state are actually reinforcing its violence.
We must always remember that every unprincipled choice and counter-insurgent action we take are done from within the belly of the beast — and in order to kill that beast, we most first resolve the contradictions that fuel its forward motion.
Guided by the wisdom of our elders, below is a humble attempt at an anti-imperialist reflection on the contradictions that were recently brought to light within broader prison abolitionist spaces in the so-called u.s. We have written it in hopes that it provides further context for the events that happened, why it happened, and what we ought to do to ensure that such things never happen again.
Safiya Bukhari says that in order to create the revolution…we must suffer the death of [our] egos by a thousand cuts. The following is a thousand such cuts.
“Bad-jacketing” (or “cop-jacketing,” “fed-jacketing,” or “snitch-jacketing”) is the practice of accusing people of being a cop, informant, fascist, or other kind of bad actor on specious or non-existent evidence. The term has been used since at least the 1960s, where it primarily described COINTELPRO operations that bad-jacketed legitimate members of the Black Panther Party and other organisations. It was, ironically, rumours from infiltrators consolidating their own positions that led to organisations not only isolating but, in come cases, severely beating or executing innocent individuals.” – Not Liking Someone Doesn’t Mean They’re A Cop
Eric King is an anarchist and former political prisoner who was released from ADX Florence in December of 2023, after spending almost a decade behind bars in federal prison. Eric was originally incarcerated in September of 2014, following his attempted firebombing of a congresspersons office in Kansas City — a direct response to the racist police killing of Michael Brown just a few hours away in Ferguson, Missouri.
Following his capture by the state, Eric refused to disavow his staunch commitment to anti-fascism. Eric has been beaten, persecuted, and even falsely indicted on felony assault charges of the same government officials that brutalized him for years. He is also one of the few political prisoners to ever beat the Feds in court after taking that same bogus felony assault charge to trial. While in prison, Eric worked with his co-editor, Josh Davidson, to publish a book called Rattling the Cages, which was published in 2023. At the time of this publication, Eric is currently touring the country to promote his second book, a memoir called A Clean Hell.
Eric is immensely beloved and respected by many anarchists engaged in prison abolition efforts across amerikkka. Even before he began working as a paralegal for a movement law firm in Denver following his release from prison, Eric had been involved in ongoing efforts to help provide material support for prisoners incarcerated across the country. To say that he has become a prominent figure within prison abolitionist spaces would be an understatement.
On October 30, 2025, Eric King released a statement on his Instagram account that was allegedly penned by Casey Goonan, a current political prisoner that is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison for direct actions taken in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle during the spring of 2024. Casey is the only federal defendant from the Student Intifada in amerikkka and was given a domestic terrorism enhancement after pleading guilty to “maliciously damaging or destroying property used in or affecting interstate commerce by means of fire or an explosive.”
In the statement released online, a person who organizes with a mutual aid collective called Workshops4Gaza (W4G) is explicitly outed by their legal name. This person is accused of “gathering intelligence” on the movement, “infiltrating groups,” “seeking to disrupt or destroy the movement,” secretly plotting to build a “national network” of prisoner supporters, and many other dangers behaviors. They were also accused of stealing funds that were raised for Kojo Sababu — a Black elder and still-incarcerated New Afrikan prisoner of war — when Erik participated in a workshop with the same collective earlier that year.
W4G organizes classes and workshops to raise funds for Palestinians in Gaza. Most recently, the collective has also been working to provide support for various political prisoners across the world, in an effort to build bridges of international solidarity with all those who struggle against the evils of empire. Since their formation in the spring of 2024, W4G has raised over $300,000 for numerous families and mutual aid groups in Gaza. Since the very beginning, this work has been known by many to be incredibly consistent, transparent, and principled.
This is why the statement posted by Eric King, which directly attacks the integrity of an individual person in the collective, as well as that of W4G as a whole, sparked a wildfire across multiple prisoner solidarity organizing spaces.
Before the statement was posted online on the 30th, it was circulating on various signal groups and other communication channels with many prison abolitionist organizers. Many people knew that the statement would soon be made public, and some had been holding their breath over this matter for months. Tensions might have publicly erupted that day, but had been building behind the scenes for the past two months.
“Since the commencement of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, millions around the world have taken to the streets in support of Palestine against the genocidal Zionist entity. We are, globally, in an unprecedented moment of anti-imperialist mobilization, which threatens not only the Zionist occupation but the colonial powers that uphold it.” – Not Liking Someone Doesn’t Mean They’re A Cop
Just a few months prior to the October 30th statement, a political prisoner in the UK known as Teuta Hoxha went on hunger strike for over 30 days to protest the prison’s unfair targeting of her as a “domestic terrorist.” T has been unjustly held in pre-trial detention without the possibility of bail alongside 23 of her co-defendants, collectively known as the Filton 24, who took direct action against Elbit Systems — the largest weapons manufacturer in the West producing bombs and other technologies of death used to enact genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Workshops4Gaza was instrumental in uplifting the demands of T Hoxha’s hunger strike, while many others in the west who participate in the settler solidarity industrial complex were largely silent and dismissed it altogether. Tragically, this is too often the case in our spineless movements that routinely forsake the few militants brave enough to engage in true rebellion against the system. “Solidarity” in the west is an entire industry of ted talks, webinars, op-eds, and other activity meant to uphold reformism and pacify militancy.
As word of T’s hunger strike reached the dungeons of amerikkka, others also caged for their own militant actions against settler colonialism joined her.
One prisoner who embarked on a solidarity hunger strike was Black-Palestinian political prisoner, Malik Muhammed. Malik is currently serving a decade in an Oregon prison for throwing a molotov cocktail in the midst of the George Floyd uprising in 2020. At the time of this publication, Malik has just been moved out of solitary confinement at Snake River Correctional Institution, where they were isolated for over 300 days.
Another political prison who learned about T Hoxha’s hunger strike and went on one of their own was none other than Casey Goonan.
Right after Casey began their hunger strike, Workshops4Gaza released a statement written by Casey in solidarity with T. Hoxha. In this statement, Casey expressed the importance of continuing to center Palestine, and of working to support the political agency of the movement’s captured militants — whose only weapon left within the dungeons that cage them are their minds and wills. The hunger strike is a sacred form of resistance undertaken as a last resort by those who have had everything else taken from them.
As the momentum of the hunger strike continued to grow, so did public support for it.
The international hunger strike undertaken by T. Hoxha and Casey Goonan — two anti-imperialist militants captured by the state for their bold and direct action in support of the Palestinian cause — was one of the greatest forms of international solidarity in recent history. While the rest of the “movement” struggled to build the dire anti-imperialist front required of those committed to dismantling settler colonialism, political prisoners paved the way by showing us exactly how it is done. In doing so, they not only transcended the confines of the prison walls that caged them, but the border walls between nation states that collectively confine us as well.
When Workshops4Gaza shared Casey’s statement announcing the beginning of their solidarity hunger strike with T. Hoxha, Eric King immediately left a public comment expressing his sadness that Casey was taking this action just one month before their scheduled sentencing in federal court. According to Eric, embarking on a hunger strike in solidarity with the Palestinian cause during pretrial detention was a reckless and dangerous decision that risked significantly worsening Casey’s legal outcome in court.
Many people overtly disagreed with Eric’s remark in its centering of “legal safety” over the militancy and political autonomy of a political prisoner. The hunger strike was meant to subvert the very fascist reign that Eric believed Casey needed to bow down and submit to, all in order to hopefully mitigate their sentencing outcome.
In the face of these criticisms, Eric continued to double down. He later went on to make a video discussing how Casey’s hunger strike was a frivolous endeavor. He claimed that we in the U.S. had no control over what happened to T. Hoxha or any other prisoners in British prisons, and that we needed to instead focus on what we could for prisoners in the U.S. such as Casey.
This disagreement would go on to reveal a major contradictions amongst self-identified abolitionists in the west — imperialism.
(At the time of this publication, one of the Filton 24 has successfully escaped from the clutches of the British state and has heroically gone underground. We love you, Shibby. May the rest of our comrades join you soon, and may the bastards that chase after you never catch a single one.)
“The epidemic of bad-jacketing is inseparable from the problem of peace policing. Many organisers advocate for a policy of de-escalation at all costs, even in the face of potentially deadly violence from police and Zionists. They speak of “agitators” who disrupt and “escalate” “peaceful protests” – a nebulous euphemism that they apply to both the Zionist who shows up with a knife and the militant who comes prepared to fight back. We should be clear: our enemies are not “agitators.”
Our enemies are the police, who brutalise us and lock us away to enforce settler colonial order. Our enemies are Zionists and other white supremacists, who assault and harass us in the streets, and stalk and threaten us in our everyday lives. Our enemies are politicians and other establishment liberals, who carry out colonial and imperialist genocides, here, in Palestine, and around the world, all the while crying crocodile tears about a so-called humanitarian crisis that they created. Our enemies are legacy media institutions, who smear resistance as terrorism and mobilise support for each of these attacks.
We must take care to differentiate between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, and to distinguish between enemies and potential friends. Too often, we see organisers reject co-strugglers in order to appeal to liberal institutions that will never be on our side. They may frame the conservative path as the only strategic option, rejecting open support for armed struggle, militant direct action, and anything else that would create “bad optics.” Disagreements from co-strugglers are treated as threats worse than that of liberal media, who we must appeal to for sympathy, or Zionists and cops, who we must appease for our safety. When our enemies attack us anyways, these organisers pin the blame not on the perpetrators but on the co-strugglers who deviate from their line. They forget that to be attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing but a good thing. Our enemies do not strive for unity with us, knowing that ours is an antagonistic contradiction, knowing that our collective liberation requires their annihilation. It is better that we, too, abandon any notions of conciliation and recognise our enemies as enemies.
For all these reasons, we urge people to draw a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. Abandon the euphemisms and name our enemies. When we struggle through our differences, let us do so with a shared understanding of what we are for and what we are against.” – Not Liking Someone Doesn’t Mean They’re A Cop
One month after the hunger strike, in September of 2025, Casey Goonan was finally sentenced in federal court after being held in pre-trial detention for over a year and a half. The judge ultimately superseded the recommendations made even by the prosecutors and imposed a preposterous sentence of over 235 months (20 years).
Casey Goonan’s sentencing was horrific and heartbreaking. Most importantly, however, it revealed the failure of the western “prison abolition” movement. Although they were the sole federal defendant from the 2024 Student Intifada, the movement as a whole failed to develop the mass popular support that was necessary to de-legitimize and challenge the “terrorist” rhetoric used by the state to capture and sentence them so harshly. Instead, the movement’s strategy was largely to try and mitigate Casey’s sentencing by pacifying their militancy. Clearly, it failed.
In the weeks following Casey’s sentencing, tensions continued to escalate as people pointed fingers at each other, trying to find a scapegoat to blame for the outcome of Casey’s sentence. Ultimately, many of these fingers would be pointed directly at the person from Workshops4Gaza who was doxxed and fed-jacketed by Eric King.
The list of grievances towards them were plentiful. They were close comrades of Casey’s and worked to uplift their political work from within the dungeons of empire — work that often conflicted with the recommendations of their legal team and support committee that disagreed with Casey’s decision to remain politically active in the manner that they were. Eric King was one such person.
The day after Casey Goonan’s sentencing, Eric King went on a podcast episode and provided the public with his own analysis of what had happened to Casey — suggesting that one of Casey’s relatively “unknown” supporters was a federal agent. This would become the first time Eric publicly perpetuated allegations about the person he would continue to target and harass for months. The next day, Eric returned to the podcast and continued to assert that one of Casey’s supporters had nefarious intentions that had directly resulted in their horrific sentencing outcome.
It is important to note that while the feds did use plenty of examples of Casey’s correspondence and phone calls with different supporters in order to justify their sentencing, none of Casey’s correspondence with the person Eric has continued to blame for Casey’s sentencing outcome was ever cited in the prosecutor’s brief — nor was the hunger strike they undertook in August of 2025 mentioned either.
However, this did not stop Eric from pointing fingers at his chosen target.
A few weeks later, Eric King and his co-editor Josh Davidson hosted a talk at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair called “Prison support, security culture, and protecting our comrades inside.”
The description of the talk read: “More and more of our comrades may be facing serious repression in the coming months or years. In the wake of Casey’s sentencing and how their own words — words encouraged by supporters — were used against them, we will break down how to support those inside SAFELY, the hows but also the WHYS, and how to look out for dangerous supporters and how to handle them.”
A week later, a different political prisoner that Eric’s target had been in correspondence with received a letter from Josh informing him that there was credible reason to believe “the W4G person is an undercover cop or informant…” No evidence to back up that claim was provided. A member of the prisoner’s support committee also received a similar message from Josh. A few weeks later, another political prisoner would receive similar correspondence from Josh. This time, however, the letter from Josh requested that the prisoner send Josh copies of any letters that they had received from “the W4G person” so that Josh could “analyze then for patterns.”
The October 30th statement doxxing and further fed-jacketing a woman of color in the W4G collective was released online by Eric in the midst of this manipulative letter writing campaign by Josh.
“Modern oppression is hidden. It is a shapeless oppression, indefinable by a single picture. It is composed of hundreds of small isolated actions and thousands of details, none of which appears as a tool of torture, unless and when the whole picture and the logic underlying the system are understood.” – Walid Daqqah, Consciousness Molded or the Re-Identification of Torture
Promptly after the statement Eric shared on October 30th was made public, Workshops4Gaza released an incredibly detailed response explicitly refuting the allegations. They directly laid out a timeline of when they reached out to Eric to facilitate the workshop, when they set up the chuffed fundraiser for Kojo, as well as all of the short deposits made directly to Kojo at the advice of Eric and supporters of Kojo at the Jericho movement. In the months following the workshop and leading up to the October 30th statement, W4G attempted to contact Kojo numerous times to confirm he had received the initial funds before the rest were sent. However, they received no response, either from Kojo or from his supporters.
After ghosting W4G on the question of how to confirm Kojo had received his initial funds, Eric began to place the entirety of the blame for funds not making their way to Kojo onto the collective.
Eric continued to escalate his animosity towards the collective for months. The multiple podcast episodes, the book fair talk, and even the letters sent all across the country are just some of the many examples of everything that collectively played a part in laying out the groundwork for his October 30th post. They were an attempt to test the waters and see just how much would be tolerated by the spaces where he and Josh could exercise their power and social capital.
Although the response statement immediately put out by W4G directly refuted the claims made in Eric’s post, he would refuse to take the statement down for weeks — claiming it was in the best interest of the movement (its “safety”) to know the truth about the person he had targeted.
On November 15, two weeks after Eric released the initial statement, NYC Jericho finally received confirmation from Kojo Sababu that he had indeed received the funds that W4G had sent him. The following is what Kojo wrote on November 12, 2025:
“Sorry to find out all the things that happened since coming here. This place is under lockdown procedures due to someone being viciously murdered and the institution has been shaking down the entire complex for weapons and excess property, we have been down since early Oct. The money may have been overlooked due to something I have received from my brother. All is well because I seen the transaction now. Thank all of you, and Lisa for any assistance rendered…” (Lisa is the doxxed member of the W4G collective) “… and forgive the mistake obviously made by me. I’ve been sick lately, strange feeling coming in my head area. I don’t know if it is blood pressure or something related to drugs given through the surgery. This has been one super rough situation since that particular time. If anything is faulty it is due to me, please no one should carry that burden except me. Build To Win not to destroy the complete sacrifice people have made to turn our work, hope, and energy into flames. Got to go we are out for an hour. Kojo”
This update was immediately made public by W4G, and many people subsequently forwarded it to Eric King. Despite being provided with clear evidence that disproved the public allegations he had made about the collective, Eric still refused to retract the original post for another week. Instead, he continued to double down and maintain that the individual in the collective that he had targeted was dangerous — again, citing their decision to support Casey’s hunger strike.
Shockingly, Eric even argued that his post had clearly had a positive impact on the movement. Despite Kojo expressing dissatisfaction with how these events had unfolded, Eric insisted that there would never have been clarity about the status of Kojo’s funds if he hadn’t made his accusations publicly. He credited himself for Kojo receiving the rest of the money raised for him, despite doing absolutely nothing to help facilitate the transfer of funds that W4G was forced to navigate on their own.
All of this is incredibly unprincipled.
While it might be confusing to understand just exactly why Eric and Josh would engage in actions like these, it is important to point out that none of this was about a mere difference in “tactics,” as Eric would later go on to assert weeks later. It was about a difference in politics, which was erroneously dismissed as “interpersonal conflict.”
For years, Eric and Josh have acted as de-facto authorities among prison abolitionists, making themselves the unilateral arbiters of who gets to be a part of the movement and who does not— regardless of how much push-back they receive. Because of the extreme amount of social capital and power that they have amassed as white men, they get to define what counts as acceptable forms of solidarity with political prisoners and what does not.
Eric weaponizes his status as a former political prisoner to assert his authority over the entire prisoner solidarity movement, insisting that only he knows what is best for people like Casey— despite demonstrating little if any understanding of the politics that make Casey who they are.
Casey has been a life long anti-imperialist, and their politics are guided by the resistance in Palestine, and other anti-colonial struggles. Their militancy and the ways they exercise their politics even from within the dungeons of amerikkka mirror the ways that Palestinian prisoners themselves engage in steadfast resistance from within zionist dungeons in so-called israel. It is out of respect for these principled political views that many of Casey’s comrades have refused to allow them to become a submissive, passive subject in the face of the inhumane repression they have experienced — the same comrades Eric and Josh insist on characterizing as a danger to the movement, who must be neutralized at all costs.
While understanding Casey’s politics helps contextualize the political activity they have engaged in since being incarcerated, assessing Eric’s politics also helps make sense of why he has so strongly opposed it.
Eric King’s consistent emphasis on prioritizing material support (letter writing, putting money on books) for prisoners over political support (amplifying their writings & connecting them to the struggle outside) is the driving cause of all of his counter-insurgent and unprincipled behavior.
It makes sense that Eric King would de-legitimize and misunderstand the efforts of those who sustain the militancy of our political prisoners. It makes sense that he would undermine the historic hunger strike that anti-imperialist prisoners undertook in the west. It all speaks volumes to his lack of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial analysis — which is only further highlighted by his solidarity with amerikan prisoners alone.
In the comment section of the statement that W4G released in response to Eric’s own, Eric’s wife would go on to make a series of orientalist comments that further highlighted the racism as well as the lack of anti-imperialist, anti-colonial analysis in much of the amerikkan anarchist movement.
Eric’s (white) wife claimed that W4G would have worked harder to get the funds to Kojo if he were Palestinian, and that the reason they did not was because he was Black. In stating this, she framed the colonial subjugation of Palestinians as a privileged population, articulating a false divide between Palestinian and Black prisoners.
Eric’s wife, who to our knowledge has never herself been incarcerated for any political activity, also attacked those who expressed solidarity with W4G and accused them of caring more for Palestinian and Arab martyrs over “Black elders” — reminding them just how badass her husband was in comparison to them. This was just one of countless unhinged, orientalist, and straight up odd rampages she would publicly go on.
And how did Eric respond?
When confronted with his wife’s racism, Eric collaborated his wife on a post where she stated — “If we’re gonna play identity politics, my little queer voice matters too” — before continuing to spew even more violent fed-jacketing allegations against the woman of color Josh and her husband had already targeted for months on end. We won’t waste any time articulating just how unserious, racist, and pathetic this all was. Scratch a bothered white woman and a racist fascist bleeds.
Giving free promo to racists isn’t our goal — but digesting the entire picture that has been painted here by all the deep-seated racism and colonial attitudes on display throughout this episode is still important.
Assata Shakur put it best. “Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other people’s freedom as well. The victory of oppressed people anywhere in the world is a victory for Black people. Each time one of imperialism’s tentacles is cut off we are closer to liberation.”
Ultimately, the lack of care demonstrated for Palestinians by Eric and his wife speaks volumes to their true regard for Black prisoners as well.
For those of us in the west who wish to center those engaged in the most successful anti-colonial resistance in modern history, for those of us who look to Palestine as the compass of our struggle, all of this behavior is utterly disgusting and unacceptable.
We understand prisoner solidarity work not as its own separate movement, but a struggle that is ultimately at the heart of all of our movements. It is impossible to support our political prisoners without directly engaging in the political movements they come out of. Paradoxically, Eric’s goal seems to be to isolate political prisoners from their movements and communities, precisely by downplaying and pacifying the prisoner’s politics.
But we refuse to let him get away with this.
Our militants belong to us. We are already forced to surrender them to the state after they are violently captured and stolen from us, so why is it that we must also surrender them to people like Eric, too?
Maybe it is entitlement which makes them believe that prisoners belong to them alone, or perhaps it is ultimately their own cowardice — their sense of feeling threatened by the militant movements they themselves are not brave enough to enter. Thus, the only way they can regain control of those movements is by destroying them from the inside, co-intel pro style. The result is a sanitized, pacified “abolitionist” movement with no teeth at all. One where safety — individual safety, not collective safety — is the driving force that guides our movement.
There is a vast distinction between providing prisoners with material support versus political support — and while both are important, the latter is far more revolutionary. Eric’s attempts to effectively de-legitimize political support for political prisoners because it personally makes him uncomfortable cannot be described as anything other than textbook counterinsurgency and pacification.
Letting all of your decisions be guided by considerations of “safety” alone ultimately legitimizes the violent reign of the state. It allows the enemy to set the terms of our struggle, to the point where we can only ever be on the defensive, and never on the offensive. But taking an offensive position and upholding and defending militant acts is the only way to sustain the forward motion of our movements.
That Eric would be incapable of understanding why someone like Casey would choose to maintain their militant politics even behind bars is unsurprising when faced with the fact that Eric has never engaged with such politics himself. When was the last time anyone heard him or those around them utter the word “Palestine” when it wasn’t to be racist towards Palestinians online, or when he was explicitly telling Casey to not talk about Palestine because it would worsen their legal outcome?
“Dismantling misogyny cannot be work that only women do. We all must do the work because the survival of our movements depends on it. Until we make radical feminist and queer political ethics that directly challenge heteropatriarchal forms of organizing central to our political practice, radical movements will continue to be devastated by the antics of Brandon Darbys (and folks who aren’t informants but just act like them). A queer, radical, feminist ethic of accountability would challenge us to recognize how gender violence is reproduced in our communities, relationships, and organizing practices. Although there are many ways to do this, I want to suggest that there are three key steps that we can take to begin. First, we must support women and queer people in our movements who have experienced interpersonal violence and engage in a collective process of healing. Second, we must initiate a collective dialogue about how we want our communities to look and how to make them safe for everyone. Third, we must develop a model for collective accountability that truly treats the personal as political and helps us to begin practicing justice in our communities. When we allow women/queer organizers to leave activist spaces and protect people whose violence provoked their departure, we are saying we value these de facto state agents who disrupt the work more than we value people whose labor builds and sustains movements… We have a right to be angry when the communities we build that are supposed to be the model for a better, more just world harbor the same kinds of antiqueer, antiwoman, racist violence that pervades society. As radical organizers we must hold each other accountable and not enable misogynists to assert so much power in these spaces. Not allow them to be the faces, voices, and leaders of these movements.” – Why Misogynists Make Great Informants
Make no mistake about it. What Eric King and Josh Davidson did was nothing less than a public humiliation ritual, in which they stripped a beloved comrade of her anonymity and good name before throwing her to the wolves. The so-called anarchist and abolitionist movements allowed this to happen because of their propensity toward celebrity-worship in lieu of principled politics. In the current state of US anarchism, someone like Eric King— a white man with books, documentaries, podcasts, and immense social capital and stardom — is able to get away with anything, and remain entirely above criticism. This is what celebrity worship does: rather than assess what was being said, people decided it was true simply because of who was saying it. Without a single piece of evidence to substantiate a single one of the extreme allegations they made about their victim, the u.s. anarchist movement still jumped to amplify the statement he released and condemned all those who didn’t go along with it.
In a nutshell, the word of a white man with immense social capital was valued over that of a woman of color who was not nearly as well known in prison abolitionist spaces.
After Eric’s statement hit the internet, there was a growing divide between two camps — those who aligned with the fed-jacketers, and those who stood in solidarity with their victims. Another way to see the conflict was that it was one between those who maintain anti-imperialist principles, and those who do not.
Rather than attempt to understand what inspired her values, rather than humble themselves and attempt to center Palestinians, Eric and Josh instead turned their victim into an enemy and attempted to recruit all those in prisoner solidarity spaces against her — effectively trying to neutralize her ability to ever organize again by wielding the power of their social influence.
The fed-jacketing campaign undertaken by Eric King and Josh Davidson, as well as its general acceptance by the broader anarchist and abolitionist movements here in the imperial core is proof of the deep-seated racism, misogyny, and colonial attitudes that run as a powerful current beneath them. What does it say about so-called anarchists in the west that they were more than willing to accept all of this, other than the fact that they’re clearly not as committed to challenging all forms of hierarchy as they often claim?
When you allow the social capital of white men, which manifests as power and authority within the spaces they occupy, to control your thinking, when you allow them to convince you that someone is an undercover cop and deserves to lose their employment, their sanity, and all of their trust with those around them… what is left of you to call an abolitionist?
What happened to Eric and Josh’s victim was a textbook case of what happens when someone finds themselves at odds with powerful white men — powerful through their social status and name recognition. Though Eric is considered a beloved hero to many, this entire incident should serve as a warning: never again can we put someone on a pedestal and give them so much power that they are able to destroy someone’s life the way this person’s was destroyed. There is no justification for treating another human being in this way.
“The biggest threat that bad-jacketing poses to us, here and now, is that it singles people out for state repression. Militants are more likely to be on the receiving end of these accusations, but also, anecdotally, people of colour, neurodivergent people, and anyone who “does not belong” (and, of course, people who fall into all of those categories). In doing so, the people who make these accusations in effect carry out the work of the state. They reproduce the oppressive dynamics of the outside world and push people out – often, the very people our movements are supposed to be fighting for. By pushing them out, bad-jacketing then denies support to people who are often already at heightened risk of criminalisation. It makes people into easy targets, signaling to the police that they can get away with brutalising, arresting, and jailing someone without outcry from the community.” – Not Liking Someone Doesn’t Mean They’re A Cop
After Eric finally took down his statement (after almost a month, in which it continued to circulate widely among movement spaces), he released an incredibly feeble attempt at an apology to save face. In this apology, Eric failed to retract any of the lies he and his friends spread about their victim. Instead, he made vague claims about how his “trauma” had caused him to handle an interpersonal conflict poorly.
But, Eric is not the only person in this situation who is traumatized.
In the midst of this violent fed-jacketing campaign, the woman of color who was doxxed by Eric King was put on suicide watch — following her and another member of the collective also being fired from the “co-op“ that they worked for, thus losing her employment and income. When Eric was made aware of this, he claimed that she was lying, arguing that it was impossible his statement had resulted in anyone being fired. He then mocked her for being suicidal and claimed she was lying about this too.
Clearly panicking from the possibility that this information might be made public, Eric then went online to demand that his victim also publicly identify her employer, in order to verify her claim that she was indeed fired from her job. Again, the burden of proof was rendered entirely onto the victim, whereas Eric was never forced to substantiate a single one of the horrific allegations he made — which is what started the whole incident to begin with. While continuing to challenge the trauma of his victim, Eric even went as far as to assert that he would retain “the best labor lawyers that money could buy” on behalf of the victim, so long as she cooperated with the demands he made of her.
The collective would ultimately publicly identify an online language-learning platform, Orange Blossom Education (OBE), as the employers that quietly fired the two collective members with no explanation, less than 48 hours after the publication of Eric’s statement. OBE later went on to announce that they were hiring for the two positions that they had quietly fired the two collective members from, while continuing to ignore the outcry from the community who attempted to hold them accountable for their unacceptable labor practices.
The same day that W4G came forward to publicly identify the employer that had fired them, Eric was busy promoting his upcoming book at a book fair in San Francisco.
Aside from the fact that Eric and Josh’s violent smear campaign targeted a woman of color and an autonomous collective that raises desperately needed funds for those in Palestine; aside from the fact that Eric and Josh posture as revolutionaries but have barely uttered the word “Palestine” since the genocide began; there is much to be said about how a woman of color who remained committed to the principles of Palestinian resistance was singled out by two white men and labeled as a danger to the entire movement. How white people can do all of this and still remain broadly trusted and respected by the colonial movements who continue to uplift and platform them is difficult to grasp.
This moment has plainly revealed that our movements are not nearly as abolitionist, anti-racist, or anti-imperialist as they claim to be. This is the moment to name just exactly why we are not, and it’s past time we name how to get to where we need to be. It certainly cannot be through continuing to idolize and platform people who use their social capital to destroy the lives of principled organizers.
It is too often the case that misogynists and racists fed-jacket people who disrupt their hegemonic and domineering behavior. When we sit with the patriarchal, racist, imperialist, popularity-obsessed nature of anarchists and our networks, these rumors about “dangerous people” or “outsiders” go almost entirely unchallenged and unchecked — ultimately fracturing our movements beyond repair.
It would be the understatement of the year to say that Eric King and Josh Davidson destroyed a life with these reckless accusations, with zero proof whatsoever. In doing so, Eric and Josh demonstrated just how ineffective our movements actually are at identifying actual potential dangers, and misdiagnosing others — at the expense of people’s lives.
“Actual infiltration, which occurs when someone enters our lives and organizations under the guise of a friend in order to provide information to the government, should not be taken lightly. But our baseline understanding of it often takes the form of a few convenient tropes, reinforcing existing biases against militancy and justifying dismissiveness towards criticism. We are unable to fully understand our adversaries because of these clichés.” – Not Liking Someone Doesn’t Mean They’re A Cop
But wasn’t Eric just looking out for Casey? They’re the one who wrote the statement!
Casey is a captured militant who is currently trapped within the confines of an amerikkkan dungeon, with drastic limitations imposed on their ability to connect with those on the outside. We love our comrade, and we believe that they were ultimately also a victim of this violent fed-jacketing and doxxing campaign carried out by people that took advantage of their trust and exploited their name. Eric had been opposed to W4G for months, even while Casey still considered them their close comrades that supported them at times when those closest to them undermined and violated their political autonomy.
Casey has also been an incredibly principled anti-imperialist for decades, and this is something that is fundamentally different from Eric King and his flawed political analysis. Casey has much less to prove to us, and we are committed to resolving their own role within this immense contradiction directly with them.
Knowing that Eric King has been corresponding with Casey consistently after their sentencing and relaying all of his unfounded grievances against W4G to them, we view the drastic turn in Casey’s position towards the collective as just another casualty in the effective fed-jacketing campaign that Eric King and Josh Davidson inflicted against W4G.
Furthermore, even if Casey did indeed write the statement Eric posted in their name — a statement that not even their actual support committee engaged with online — Eric knows very well that not everything that a prisoner writes needs to be shared online. Look at the example of his original response to Casey’s hunger strike, or the snippets from the podcast where he rants about how supporters need to recognize when a prisoner is doing something dangerous and to discourage them from doing it. Eric made the decision with his own autonomy to share a statement that mirrored sentiments he himself was spewing against the collective, and he cowardly released it under the pretense that he was simply uplifting the words of the same political prisoner whose other more principled words he had no problem ignoring prior. Convenient.
But but but how can you be so carceral? Eric is just a traumatized man?
Yeah, no shit. None of us view Eric nor his actions in a vacuum. We also disagree with the assertion that it is “carceral” to expect survivor centered accountability by the men who have harmed them.
Being able to recognize and acknowledge everything that contributed to getting to this moment is important, but that does not inherently serve as a justification for these actions. Eric cannot be forgiven for committing the harm he did just because he is a traumatized individual, because frankly, what form of harm would anyone ever be held accountable for if this was always the convenient excuse?
Contextualizing why Eric might have jumped to the escalatory methods he did is really vital to making sense of how we prevent others from following in his footsteps, but contextualization is not an opportunity to entrench excuses or to justify the behavior he enacted. That’s a super dangerous precedent to set.
Workshops4Gaza released a very thorough response to this point that we will uplift at this time.
“Eric did acknowledge that he acted in such a way because he was triggered and is severely traumatized from prison, and that he needs to work on himself. This is an important self-reflection and these kinds of public acknowledgements are welcome. However, he continues to deny he caused any real harms, that this member hasn’t lost their job, or that they were put on suicide watch. This kind of unprincipled behavior is unavoidable in leftist movements because many people are drawn to this work because of the trauma they or their loved ones have experienced. But this is no excuse for creating further abuse and trauma. Josh and Eric should have made their concerns privately, directly to the people and groups concerned. However, since they made a public campaign, they are now responsible for publicly apologizing, publicly retracting their slander and compensating the people targeted if that is requested. All other people, organizations, businesses and groups that promote, associate with or support Eric and Josh without calling out their unprincipled and damaging behavior are also complicit in this harm.”
Thus, we will end with this.
Since the release of his statement, Workshops4Gaza was forced to cancel the first of its workshops since their formation in the spring of 2024 due to low attendance, and they have seen a drastic decrease in the amount of donations going towards the fundraising campaigns of Palestinians that they support in Gaza. This is perhaps the worst consequence that has occurred since Josh and Eric were made to feel untouchable enough to attempt to debilitate the collective as effectively as they clearly did — all while continuing to happily travel the country and promote their second forthcoming publication. This is unacceptable.
While we believe that there is certainly value in learning from Eric’s lived experiences, stop giving these men your money. Don’t buy their book, cancel your pre-orders, steal it if you have to. Providing material support to Eric and Josh is proving there is no accountability for this type of reckless, dangerous, and unprincipled behavior. It is legitimizing the abusive smear campaign that they publicly went on against a woman of color. It’s setting the example that white men like them can do quite literally anything that they want and nothing will come of it. It’s creating the precedent that the more publications you have under your belt, the more dangerous shit you’re allowed to get away with.
While nothing can be done to erase the harm caused by the co-conspirators of this fed-jacketing campaign, we collectively have the opportunity to set the tone going further, to ensure that no one ever feels emboldened and untouchable to ever do any of this again. We must raise the standard and ensure these dangerous, unprincipled actions do not continue to go excused because the white men engaging in them are shielded from any rightfully deserved criticism.
Furthermore, it is very clear from the pathetic “accountability” that Eric took that his primarily concern is his public image and repairing any damage that would occur towards his book sales and reputation in the community. But it’s ironic he thinks an actual attempt at accountability would do this, when the original actions he engaged in to get to this moment should have been good enough to highlight his true colors accordingly. Thus, in order make Eric actually take actual accountability, we must take away the thing he continues to try and protect along with every other person with prominence in our spaces who engages in similarly unprincipled actions — social capital.
The demands are simple:
1) retract all public defamatory statements
2) publicly apologize for the specific harm that has occurred, instead of demanding the collective accept the shitty notes app apology that Eric originally shared and only kept up for a work week — which was also riddled with further false allegations against the collective
3) follow up with everyone written to in prison who received the letters fed-jacketing the collective
4) never participate in unprincipled actions like these ever again
5) center and uplift any other demands of the victims, they are the only ones who get to decide how this ends.
If this is not possible, these motherfuckers need to leave our spaces entirely. This is the same filth and violence we all ought to stand staunchly against, and it is unacceptable it is now breading in spaces we are meant to be safe from it and further driving women and people of color away.
We anticipate that some people, namely those that have continued to worship and stand behind Eric and Josh despite everything, will argue that this is all too harsh. But we simply do not care. We see the double standard — where a woman of color can have her anonymity stolen from her in a public humiliation ritual by white men who want to punish her for her politics that challenge their comfort. We take notice of how much people happily eviscerate the victims of the same white men they rush to consistently coddle and protect. We take notice of everyone who misogynisticly manipulates the rightful calls for accountability into “inciting drama” and “asking for sympathy”. We see this all clearly, and we say fuck you.
And finally, to Eric.
Eric King, you need better comrades. Because either you decided to do everything despite everyone around you pointing out how wrong this all was, or you are surrounded by those who cannot tell you when you are wrong.
The yes-men around you have made you believe that you have earned the right … that you have suffered enough to be racist, misogynistic, and abusive with impunity. And those same loser yes-men make you believe this because they use their own proximity to you and act like they have earned that right as well. But we are here to remind you otherwise.
You are no god. You are no master.
And you certainly are No KKKing.
Solidarity with Workshops4Gaza.