In January, law enforcement officers began an operation to clear out the site of a future public safety training center outside of Atlanta. Protesters aligned with Antifa (and carrying the backing of groups tied to Stacey Abrams) had been occupying the land, ostensibly protecting the "forest," which in reality was the site of an old prison farm.
As troopers from the Georgia State Patrol warned the goons to vacate the land and threw pepper balls into tents to root out stubborn occupiers, Manuel Teran came out of his tent, firing a gun and wounding a state trooper. Other officers shot back, killing Teran.
Shortly before Teran's death, the left-wing Southern culture site The Bitter Southerner ran an encomium of the Antifa thugs, praising them as peaceful fighters for a noble cause.
"We win through nonviolence," Teran told writer David Peisner in that piece. "We're not going to beat them at violence. But we can beat them in public opinion, in the courts even."
After Teran died, Peisner wrote a follow-up in which he expressed his buyer's remorse in falling for Teran's lines like, "We are very peaceful people, I promise.” Peisner recalled more of the lies that Teran told, that he and his fellow "forest defenders" were peaceful hippies standing up for the environment.
“I don’t crave conflict," Teran dissembled to Peisner. "I’m out here because I love the forest. I love living in the woods. Being a forest hobo is pretty chill. Some folks probably have flashpoint moments where it’s like, ‘Oh, yes, the truck is being lit on fire!’ But not me. I love it when everything is calm.”
And now we're learning more about how deep Teran's domestic terrorism inclination actually was. Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr is looking to have a diary belonging to Teran admitted into evidence in the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) case involving five dozen of the domestic terrorists who wreaked havoc on Atlanta for months.
"The personal diary of Manuel 'Tortuguita' Teran, an activist who died after exchanging fire with police near the site of the planned public safety training center, was filled with phrases such as 'Cop cars love being on fire,' 'Prisons were built to be burnt down,' 'Burn police vehicles' and 'Kill cops,'” explains the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Jozsef Papp.
One drawing in the diary shows a figure in a black mask shooting at a pig with a police hat on. "Pew, pew, pew," reads the dialogue above the masked figure, while the pig says "Oink, oink" as blood spews from its mouth.
The AJC's Bill Torpy shared even more about the diary, including an entry in which Teran wrote about what he wanted his friends to do if cops killed him.
“If the cops kill me, I want you to riot, burn down their stations, and set their cars alight. Know that I went out fighting and ask we all could have peace and be free,” Teran wrote.
“If the cops kill me I want you to riot, to kill as many of them as you can," he added. "They are terrorists."
Teran also apparently believed that the FBI would "assassinate" him but that dying for his cause would be worth the risks he took.
"I have helped people and will hopefully inspire others to do more mutual aid without getting assassinated," he wrote. "My exit strategy is to keep resisting fascism, ecocide, and the damn capitalist heteropatriarchy.”
In another entry, Teran gave his justification for calling for the deaths of law enforcement officers. He wrote, “Killing cops is okay! Killing people is generally a bad thing. Fascists and cops count as people but killing them is morally and ethically just because they are threats to the survival of many people." And he hailed the idea of "Dead cops! Dead cops everywhere.”
Don't fall for the lie that the thugs protesting the public safety training center in Atlanta are innocent environmental crusaders. They're domestic terrorists, and Teran's diary makes that truth abundantly clear.
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