A Chat With Georgia's 50501 Movement Leader

"Bri" doesn't want resistance to the Trump Administration to be about her. She wants it to be about you.

The chatter among progressive political veterans about the “50501” movement has, to some degree, been about who the hell is running this thing. I have heard the phrase “baby activists” used.

I’ve spoken with one of the organizers of the unpermitted rally tomorrow, ‘Bri,” who had the megaphone at the march on February 5th downtown.

Bri is local. I know her identity. I am withholding it because Elon Musk regularly suggests that his critics should be jailed and I could hear her kid in the background of the call.

My sense of it is that the 50501 organizing is an outgrowth of Reddit and Discord conversations that were well populated by anarchists and anarchist-adjacent people who want people in the street but aren’t interested in creating organizational baggage - and an entity to target. Bri is aware of the mistakes of the past, and is trying not to repeat them. But read it for yourself.

This conversation is lightly edited for clarity, length and to make both of us sound as smart as we think we are.

George Chidi

Tell us what's happening tomorrow.

Bri

Well, we have another quickly scheduled, unpermitted protest. We're trying to harness the momentum of the 50501 movement and keep things going. You know, it's a grassroots indigenous movement. It's happening at 12:00 p.m. at the capitol. We are peaceful protesters. We are very cautious. We are pressing that message. Anybody who we've been in communications with and anybody that we've been encouraging to join us is aware of that.

GC

Who are the organizers of the 50501 movement?

Bri

There aren’t any individual organizers. It's entirely grassroots. It's just individuals that have stood up and volunteered their time, their resources, their area of expertise, to get this movement going,

GC

When you're organizing this, are you talking with folks? I mean, is there a conference call and everybody gets on it from the 50 states? How does this actually work?

Bri

Some of the original kinds of organizers have posted publicly about some things, but they're primarily on Discord and on Reddit.

GC

I just never got into Discord. I mean, I know what it is, but I'm not …

Bri

it's not encrypted, so it makes me a little bit uncomfortable. But there are other platforms that we utilize that are a little bit more bit more secure.

GC

Is there a goal for the 50501 movement? What’s the end state?

Bri

Yeah, so, I'm only going to speak for Georgia, because obviously that's where I am and that's what I have control over. The national goal is to empower and organize individuals so that they can do what's best for their individual state and their individual communities. Here in Georgia, what we're doing right now – and especially tomorrow – is we're prioritizing making connections with other already-established groups and organizations, and individuals who are not established, so that we can get them the resources that they need to become the kinds of activists they want to become.

GC

That was my next question. I’m looking at what was going on two weeks ago. We've got some people there, but what do you do with that …

Bri

<continuing> So that I’m not just screaming into the void? Our main goal is to be organized locally, to make sure that people are feeling empowered within their communities, to make sure that people are finding their communities. We’ve been isolated for a really long time. A lot of America is chronically plugged in, chronically online, and it's highly unhealthy, especially in today's time, because that leaves us vulnerable to be taken advantage of and to be weaponized. Living in this space of fear and anger. The way we fight that is by connecting to our communities.

GC

It's interesting that you say that, because as I've been talking to folks and as people have been talking about the 50501 stuff, there's this sort of reserve. Like, “who the hell are these people? I don't know you. I've been protesting for 10 years, and I've never seen any of you.” Because there's this fear that it's a setup.

Bri

So, I’ve done a couple of other things. I'm involved in other already established organizations, so I am aware, and I’ve been on the receiving end of some of those more traditional activists. We look to them for guidance and some of their wisdom. Then sometimes – and I think is this is pretty relevant in today's time – we can take some of the old ways and say, ‘hey, you know what? This didn't seem to be working in the past, and we're going to do things a little bit differently.’ We're going to throw a couple of things out there and see what sticks, and as long as we're being peaceful about it, I don't see the harm.

Of course, there's always going to be bad actors. We're doing our best to make sure that we're following certain opsec [operational security] guidelines, and making sure that we are keeping a lot of our organizers and people wanting to protest with us as safe as we possibly can. But our own government is not even keeping us safe right now, so we're feeling a lot of like frustration in general. A lot of us are Democrats, and to be sure, I really want to be clear that 50501 is opening their doors to anybody who wants to participate and stand up against this current administration and the unelected official who's actually in charge.

GC

By the way, I got a lot of interesting information from that viral … whatever the hell that was that happened.

Bri

I'm not on many socials.

GC

You’re better off. I'm not either. Somebody had to tell me about it because I don't TikTok, because I'm

paranoid.

Bri

So what happened?

GC

Well, one, Google George Chidi and Tiktok, and you'll see it. <laughter> I stood up for a second and said, “Look, I write for Rolling Stone to The Guardian. And if you work for the federal government and you want to fucking leak something, here I am. Here's how to find me.”

Bri

Hell yeah.

GC

So yeah, like, 500,000 views later … right? I am now at a point where I can't actually talk about what I got leaked at without being on a secure line. Yeah, it's like that. Some of that stuff was like being handed the Ring video tape.

Bri

Here’s the deal. If we're not scared, then we're on the wrong team. You know what I mean? So, thank you, and I'm sorry. We're doing the good work.

GC

So, you're out there. A bunch of people show up. Nobody's taking names. Like … here, give me your name and your phone number and your email address so we can keep connected. And nobody's saying, “Hey, here's where you can donate money to the cause.” There was none of that, which I found, you know, mildly refreshing. I'm not going to lie.

Bri

There are ways to give, but you just have to know who to get in touch with.

GC

Are you all cruising to that place, where you say you absolutely need a mailing address so that you can get people calling Congress or showing up without having to go through Discord or Reddit or something? I'm asking you.

Bri

You know, a lot of us struggle with hierarchical terms. We don't want anybody who's in a leadership kind of position within our movement to truly be in power, you know, because again, at the end of the day, we are all the people, and we are all in power, and we really try to listen to each other and advocate for each other.

GC

I am a veteran of the of the Occupy Wall Street movement, so I kind of get it.

Bri

Here’s what they did do wrong. Really, truly, they didn't have any real leadership, right? So we are looking into how we can go about things a little bit differently. That being said, are we interested in becoming a 501c? No. Definitely not. We don't actually want to be a “real” organization. We're a movement of people. We want to get people motivated and connected to be involved in already-established organizations. We want people leaning into their community.

It's just that right now so many people are so overwhelmed, they don't know how to do that. So, our main priority is taking this energy and talking directly to individuals. Yeah, sure, we had a lot of people screaming and yelling on the fifth but like, we also had a lot of people talking and connecting with each other. And really, that's the energy that we want to be harnessing and that's the kind of community we want to be fostering. So that's our main priority.

GC

Understood. What do you want people to know about you?

Bri

Nothing. My first name is fine. I like to keep as private as I can, because I have friends and family that I need to make sure that I keep safe as well. I'm very active in my community, and as I said, I'm involved. In other organizations and other kinds of underground movements, and we just respect our privacy a lot.

GC

That's also a legacy of the Occupy Wall Street movement, by the way. I didn't think I knew an anarchist before any of that stuff. And there's a whole cell, a bunch of them!

Bri

There’s a lot of them! And they’re not violent. You know what I mean? A lot of people, most of us, want the same thing. And I'll tell you what, it ends up that a lot of anarchists are just libertarians that have had to turn a little bit more extreme because of what we're facing right now. I think that it's important so see that humans are capable of consuming information and looking at it with a critical-thinking mindset and asking themselves if they need to change their mind based on the new information that they've received.

I think that getting a little bit more extreme has been viewed in a negative light, because a lot of people think they're going to be violent, and that's not it. It's just that we see that the old ways just aren't serving us, and we can form something new, especially when we have the current administration literally burning everything down. We might as well rebuild from the ashes. And I think that a lot of us are prepared.

GC

Is there anything you had wished I had asked you?

Bri

I don't think so. I don't think that there's anything else that I really that I feel compelled to say, except that I was a little perturbed by the 11 Alive publicity that we got on the 5^th. This is not about the police. This is not about how the police show up and how many police show up and whether or not our participants get arrested. We're can't control everybody. We're going to do our best to make sure everybody follows the rules. That's what we're encouraging. But at the same time, we're here to stand up against all of the injustice that's going on right now. But we're not Stop Cop City. We're not Antifa. Whether or not those members show up to our protest is up to them. But I just don't want it highlighted. I don't want law enforcement highlighted at all, if we can.

GC

Noted. I will see you tomorrow, I hope.

Bri

Awesome. I'm very excited.