Lisa Fithian

Lisa Fithian is an American political activist and protest consultant.

Life

Lisa Fithian, American political activist and protest consultant,[1] began her work in the mid-1970s as a member of student government in her high school and at Skidmore College. As a member and coordinator of the Washington Peace Center for seven years during the 1980s, Fithian organized hundreds of events and demonstrations on a range of issues, locally and nationally, and helped lead an extensive anti-racism process that transformed the Peace Center into a multicultural organization.

In the early 1990s, Fithian joined the labor movement, bringing her experience to the Justice for Janitors campaigns in Washington, D.C., Denver, and Los Angeles, and to nursing-home workers in San Francisco and Detroit. She also provided training and support work to the United Auto Workers and with the Detroit Newspaper Strikers.

Fithian has continued her work for social, economic, and environmental justice, providing training and organizing support to many of the global-justice mobilizations around the world since the shutdown of the World Trade Organization Ministerial in Seattle in 1999.

After Hurricane Katrina, Fithian worked with the Common Ground Collective in New Orleans, and was tightly connected with Brandon Darby, a known infiltrator.

Prior to arriving in New Orleans with Darby, Fithian was instrumental in dismantling Camp Casey, where Cindy Sheehan led a protest against George Bush. On more than one occasion Fithian was witnessed instigating tension among activists and was banned from Camp Casey One, also known as “the ditch.”

Currently Fithian serves as a National Steering Committee member of United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of over 1,000 local and national groups working to end the war in Iraq and build a broad movement for social change.

She is a member of the national team of Extinction Rebellion.[2][3]

In a video criticized by Politifact [4] by Millie Weaver, Fithian was recorded planning a coup or a counter-coup. Among her recorded statements were:

  • Let's say we want to shut down the White House and make sure that nobody goes in and out, right? We'd need to map the White House and know every access point that we are gonna blockade it. But, then we may need more people of support that so might say Black Lives Matter Plaza or African-American Museum on the Mall of Constitution... the two public assembly sites so we can quickly move large numbers into zones of potential conflict. So, we are talkin about what would it take to surround the White House and have people do stuff.
  • Where are the police stations? Where are the key government buildings? Who are the Trump boosters?
  • Get ready to shut down your city on the 4th or 5th.
  • We might have to like... take over TV stations, right? Maybe we're taking over the local TV stations and getting air time to put out a call for people to come and join us. I know that sounds crazy. I've always wanted to do it though.
  • So we are talking about what would it take to surround the White House and have people do stuff. We can divide it up easily with affinity groups. So, I want people to think about who's got power in your community, map the power, map the opportunities, then look at it strategically and begin thinking about who you would want engage based on the scenario that's happening. And so for us that might mean blocking the bridges and main thoroughfares coming into the city... kinda shut the city down.
  • So, we are going to be in a crisis but we want it to be one that we are creating. We want to make sure we are on the offense, not the defense. We want them to be responding to us and not responding to them.

Writings

Fithian has written throughout the years, including the introduction to the post-9/11 edition of Abbie Hoffman's Steal this Book, and the 2007 book anthology What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation by South End Press.[5] Her most recent book is Shut It Down: Stories from a Fierce, Loving Resistance, Chelsea Green, 2019.[6]

Notes
  1. "Meet Professor Occupy". Mother Jones. Retrieved 10 November 2020.
  2. 'Shut It Down: Veteran Organizer Lisa Fithian Offers a Guide to Resistance in Era of Climate Crisis', 'Democracy Now' September 6, 2019 https://www.democracynow.org/2019/9/6/lisa_fithian_activism_shut_it_down
  3. Jeremy Deaton, 'The Radical Philosophy of Extinction Rebellion', PBS, August 2, 2019 http://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2019/08/the-radical-philosophy-of-extinction-rebellion/
  4. "Video makes it look like left-leaning groups plotted post-election coup. That's not the whole story". Politifact. Retrieved 10 November 2020.
  5. "What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation (publisher's overview)". 2007-02-15. Archived from the original on 2010-12-21. Retrieved 2007-12-17.
  6. Publicist page at Net Galley for Shut It Down https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/book/166698

References

Bunn, Austin (2003-11-16). "Them Against the World, Part 2". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-01-03.

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