Come out to New Day Bakery on Thursday, June 23rd at 6pm for an engaging discussion on political repression, the National Security State, and collective legal resistance, featuring activist and PM Press author Kris Hermes and Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC) founder and Executive Director Lauren Regan. The event is co-sponsored by CLDC and Community Alliance of Lane County (CALC).

Hermes will talk about his new book Crashing the Party: Legacies and Lessons from the RNC 2000, an engrossing combination of social history and courtroom drama. Hermes, formerly on staff with the National Lawyers Guild and a member of multiple radical law collectives, examines the origins of contemporary protest policing and the creative legal resistance used to overcome it.

Regan, who serves as staff attorney for CLDC, will talk about new perspectives on policing, surveillance, and security. She also operates a public interest law firm, the Justice Law Group, specializing in constitutional law, civil rights, and criminal defense. Regan is a founding board member and past president of the Cascadia Wildlands and serves as a Lane County Teen Court judge, Oregon State Bar Leadership Fellow, and National Lawyers Guild, Eugene co-chair.

Over the past sixteen years, people in the United States—and dissidents in particular—have witnessed a steady escalation of the National Security State, including invasive surveillance and infiltration, indiscriminate police violence, and unlawful arrests. These concerted efforts to spy on Americans and undermine meaningful social change are greatly enhanced by the coordination of numerous local, state, and federal agencies often operating at the behest of private corporations. Normally associated with the realities of a post-9/11 world, Crashing the Party shows how these developments were already being set in motion during the Republican National Convention protests in 2000. More importantly, Hermes documents how dissidents effectively confronted these new forms of political repression by pushing legal boundaries and establishing new models of collective resistance to the legal system.