Denver Communists

Protest Drip Café
Friday, Oct 2 from 6 - 9 pm MT
869 Santa Fe Dr, Denver

🌈 Join the Denver Communists 🚩 Notes of Dissent 🎺 Bread & Roses Legal Center 🏴 the Trans Empowerment Alliance ⚧️ and Trans Rescue Network 🏳️‍⚧️ for our monthly protest against the Drip Café, a coffeeshop run by an anti-LGBTQ+, fundamentalist Christian church.

Drip has continued to attract a motley crew of reactionaries who support them — not just fundamentalist homophobes, transphobes, and misogynists, but racists, anti-immigrant xenophobes, Zionists, Islamophobes, anti-choicers, and more.

Last month, some far-right Drip supporters showed up at an anti-ICE high school walk out and provoked students to kick their sorry asses, including by calling them the f-slur. Then they came to the art walk to whine about “the intolerant left” while we laughed at them.

Our monthly protests have evolved into a mix of a picket, an anti-fascist counter-demonstration, and a street party. We always have a good time, whether we are informing people about Drip’s homophobia and transphobia, exchanging sharp words with self-identified bigots, or shooting the s**t with each other and the First Friday Art Walk crowd.

Come through! Every first Friday until Drip closes down for good.

(For more info, check out the anti-Drip slideshows pinned to our Instagram page.)

🚩Join us for a Communist Party!
Sunday, Sept 27 at 2pm
Sunken Gardens Park, 479 W 9th Ave

🌳 Join the Denver Communists for some IRL socializing! When you get there, look for our flags! We will have food, drinks, and politics ready to share.

📕 Join Firebrand and the Denver Communists for a study group on Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs

Farrell Dobbs’ Teamster Rebellion is a brilliant account of one of the great labour battles of the
1930s. The strikes took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States in 1934. The workers,
who drove trucks for a living, were members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT)
union. The book explains how the dispute escalated from a strike about union recognition into a major
battle with the employers, the police and the local state. The Minneapolis strikes of 1934 demonstrated the ability of a small Trotskyist organisation to make a breakthrough into the wider labour movement and lead a struggle of to victory. The Minneapolis strikes helped spark the revival of the industrial militancy of the working class of the United States from the depths of the Great Depression. The strikes show how it possible for working class action to win, even in difficult circumstances of economic downturn, anti-union employers and hostile authorities.

📅
Sept. 28: Ch. 1 & 2
Oct. 5: Ch. 3 & 4
Oct. 12: Ch. 5 & 6
Oct. 19: Ch 7 & 8
Oct. 26: Ch. 9 & 10
Nov. 2: Ch. 11 & 12
Nov. 9: Ch. 13

🔗 Download the ebook https://bit.ly/teamster_rebellion

🤓 Study Guide: bit.ly/foundations-of-marxism

🚩 Join Firebrand and the Denver Communists for a two-week study group on The Mass Strike by Rosa Luxemburg.
The lessons of The Mass Strike — that workers’ strength lies in rank-and-file activity, that even the most vulnerable and unorganized workers can revitalize the labor movement, and that mass strikes, economic and political, will continue to break out as long as capitalism reigns — have been repeatedly played out over the ensuing century. And as capitalism threatens the very globe itself, the final lesson — that socialist politics and organization are essential for converting spontaneous mass strikes into coordinated revolutionary victory — could hardly be more relevant.

📅
Monday, Sept 14
The Mass Strike, Ch. 1 - 4
*The Russian Revolution, Anarchism and the General Strike
*The Mass Strike, A Historical and Not an Artificial Product
*Development of the Mass Strike Movement in Russia
*The Interaction of the Political and the Economic Struggle

📅
Monday, Sept 21
The Mass Strike, Ch. 5 - 8
*Lessons of the Working-Class Movement in Russia Applicable to Germany
*Co-operation of Organised and Unorganised Workers Necessary for Victory
*The Role of the Mass Strike in the Revolution
*Need for United Action of Trade Unions and Social Democracy

🔗 Text available online
https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/

🤓 Study Guide: bit.ly/foundations-of-marxism

rightwingers stay trying to make a new Red Scare happen 😂🖕

This First Friday was a wild one! Last month, right-wing grifter Corey Blair of the floundering “Break the Chains Media” made a few videos of our protest that received significantly more engagement than the single-digit reacts his posts usually get. Predictably, that brought a wave of new wanna-be influencers to Friday’s protest, all hoping to boost their public profiles and make a few dollars mocking q***r people protesting for their rights.

This time, in addition to Blair, we saw Wayne Laugesen, a right-wing AM radio personality intent on provoking protesters; his cameraperson lackey, Jorge Stakis; and the queen of performative outrage, Angela Rose. All of these jokers tried to provoke reactions from protesters — hoping to turn our struggle into social media content — but between the grifters’ bad breath and even worse personalities, protesters knew to avoid them.

Another loser who uses the name “First Amendment Media” also made an appearance. When a woman blocked his camera because she didn’t want to be filmed, he pulled out a can of pepper spray and an umbrella and started threatening to mace people for obstructing him. This charade went on for upwards of an hour, with him eventually trying to get the police involved. They were happy to try to repress the protest, but they found no crime after reviewing the boy who cried wolf’s footage.

These grifters are ultimately incidental. They don’t care that the community doesn’t want Drip here, and they definitely don’t care whether Drip stays open. Their only concern is raising their own public profiles in the hopes of becoming the next Charlie Kirk (before his assassination).

We had seen most of these right-wing wanna-be influencers earlier at the high school walk out against ICE, where their agitation got a chilly reception to say the least. They are not really activists or organizers, but social media personalities who leech off of progressive movements to clip farm and rage bait.

Despite the distractions, we had a great and effective protest. The Art Walk crowd and local scene are as supportive as ever, with people walking by and starting “F**k Drip!” chants completely unprompted. A mother of two trans girls came up and told us how important our struggle is during a time of increasing q***r repression, and how the protests serve as a symbol of hope for q***r youth in Denver.

That is ultimately what matters. Denverites don’t want a hub for bigotry downtown, and the grifters and reactionaries who come out to support Drip mostly succeed in annoying locals and drawing even more attention to the problems Drip creates in the community.

Drip now finds itself trapped in a contradiction: its alliance with these grifters is one of the only ways it can get the media attention and donations it needs to stay open, but those same grifters also drive away the local clientele Drip would need to survive as an actual business.

Drip was bound to see a rise in support after last month’s uptick in media attention, including a national Fox News story. About two dozen out-of-towners came to awkwardly stand in front of Drip, half-heartedly trying to play defense for it. Often, this amounts to them insisting that Drip “loves” the protesters — despite the slurs, deadnames, intentional misgendering, and everything else — to which we’ll often respond, “Then why do they oppose gay rights?” Inevitably, this is met with some thought-terminating cliché like “Christ is king.”

It’s exhausting, and it highlights why the focus of the protest is engaging with the Art Walk crowd and informing them about Drip, rather than wasting time trying to reason with Drip and its supporters.

After this past weekend, the necessity of removing this reactionary stronghold from Denver could not be more apparent. Our struggle against Drip will continue on the First Friday of next month, and every First Friday until they close. Come join us and help show that the LGBTQIA+ community won’t be intimidated and won’t back down.

Protest Drip Café
Friday, Sept 4 from 6 - 9 pm MT
869 Santa Fe Dr, Denver

All you transphobes bound to lose!

🌈 Join the Denver Communists 🚩 Notes of Dissent 🎺 Bread & Roses Legal Center 🏴 the Trans Empowerment Alliance ⚧️ and Trans Rescue Network 🏳️‍⚧️ for our monthly protest against the Drip Café, a coffeeshop run by an anti-LGBTQ+, fundamentalist Christian church.

Our monthly protests have evolved into a mix of a picket, an anti-fascist counter-demonstration, and a street party. We always have a good time, whether we are informing people about Drip’s homophobia and transphobia, exchanging sharp words with self-identified bigots, or shooting the s**t with each other and the First Friday Art Walk crowd.

Come through! Every first Friday until Drip closes down for good. (For more info, check out the anti-Drip slideshows pinned to our Instagram page.)