In
the 2017 book “Antifa:
The Anti-Fascist Handbook” by Dartmouth College professor Mark Bray, Chepe was
listed as a Smash Racism DC organizer. As Chepe, Alcoff described the
organization as a “loose affinity group” working to “make DC and the
surrounding area too unsafe for outright neo-Nazi groups and fascists.”
Jose Alcoff, a.k.a., Chepe
TheDCNF was unable to identify any other Antifa members
going by “Chepe.”
Alcoff rose to prominence in Antifa circles as Chepe during
the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, where his leadership earned him
the title “King Communist,” a co-host of the progressive podcast Radio Dispatch joked in 2012.
‘Chepe’ leading a “know your
rights” legal training during the Occupy Wall Street protests, July 22, 2012
(YouTube/Screenshot)
Carlson is a co-founder of The Daily Caller News
Foundation.
The DC police are treating the incident as a “suspected
hate crime,” according to a police report. The mob spray painted an anarchy symbol on
Carlson’s highway and left signs on his property that made reference to his
political affiliation. The investigation is ongoing.
The Antifa group was also responsible for chasing Cruz, a Texas Republican, out of a D.C. restaurant in
September and sent the senator the message: “You are not safe. We will find
you. We will expose you. We will take from you the peace you have taken from so
many others.”
Alcoff claimed on Twitter he had no involvement with the mob
at Carlson’s house, though he frequently interacts on Twitter with
Smash Racism DC co-founder Mike Isaacson, who said on his blog that he had advanced knowledge of the mob action
at Carlson’s house.
“We have got to dispense with nonviolence,” he said as
Chepe on Radio Dispatch in December 2016 during a discussion on
how to approach those he perceives as fascists.
“You have to expose them and you have to expose where
they live, their names, what they do for a living,” he added. “Never let
them be anonymous, and never just push their rhetoric without directly
countering it.”
Alcoff has been arrested at least twice in connection
with his radical brand of activism. He was arrested in New York City in
2004 during demonstrations outside the Republican National Convention. He was
let off with a pledge to behave and one day of community service, according to USA Today.
Jose Martin is often introduced to audiences as an
“organizer,” “activist” or “militant researcher,” and has published articles
with Rolling Stone and The Indypendent, and regularly appears on BBC radio programs. He discussed his
vision of a police-free society on MSNBC in 2015.
Jose Alcoff, identified as “Jose
Martin” on MSNBC’s “The Docket” Jan. 6, 2015 (Source: MSNBC.com/Screenshot)
Alcoff
calls for the rich to ‘die in a fire’
The significant efforts Alcoff takes to separate his true
identity from his radical personas appear to be intentional, and his comments
become more extreme when he has more anonymity. Through his Twitter account,
which he’s managed to keep anonymous, Alcoff has said that Antifa organizations
need to operate “both an above board group and a below one.”
Operating groups within the bounds of the law is necessary
to “get press” and “to have a base of support,” while underground groups are
necessary so activists can’t be “linked by prosecutors or press,” he wrote.
Alcoff said to avoid too much overlap between lawful and unlawful groups “to
keep the press from blowing the open secret.”
Alcoff appears to operate similarly.
For example, Alcoff spoke on the Joint Economic Committee
Democrats’ “Opportunity Agenda” podcast in August, where he stressed
the importance of a stable and depoliticized regulatory environment so that
“companies and industry figures out how to profit from more responsible
lending.”
(Twitter/Screenshot)
In July 2017, he urged his nonviolent followers on Twitter to “stop
limiting yourself,” addingthat
“the left wins nothing w/ nonviolence.”
In October, Alcoff advised his law-abiding Twitter followers that they’re
“doing it wrong” and later offered advice on how to execute “a good neck
punch.”
(Twitter/Screenshot)
Alcoff holds an especially militant view towards law
enforcement, an institution he believes should be dismantled completely.
“Police lives don’t matter. They can all burn in Hell,”
he tweeted in
September, for example.
His tweets also glorify the killing of his political
opponents. For example, in July 2015 he tweeted that Donald Trump would make for
“such a spectacular public guillotining” shortly after the mogul declared his
candidacy for president.
“I truly hope he has a very public death at the hands of
the pitchfork wielding exploited, a public execution that befits Trump’s
stature,” he wrote.
Alcoff, through Twitter, frequently calls for the complete dismantlement of America’s system of
government. In a 2013 tweet, Alcoff said he wanted to join “a conspiracy
to destroy the United States from within” — a position that doesn’t seem
to have changed.
(Twitter/Screenshot)
Alcoff, whose job puts him alongside lawmakers, tweeted
in September that
most members of Congress are “imbeciles,” and later said that “it wouldn’t be hard” to
“push an antiimperialist, antimilitarist line” on incoming left and center-left
members.
He also boasted in October that his job duties involved
actively working to
block Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
One tweet suggested that Alcoff’s D.C. colleagues aren’t
aware of his radicalism.
(Twitter/Screenshot)
Meanwhile, Alcoff is much more moderate by comparison
when speaking to the media as Jose Martin.
For example, Alcoff said as Jose Martin on “BBC Business Matters” in October 2017 that “we need to go
in a socialistic direction.”
“This is about changing how we produce value and how we
produce wealth, not just how we consume it,” Alcoff said. “And I think that
then becomes the first part of how we democratize it so that people then make
decisions that have a better impact on the whole.”
“I am on the radical left, the far left, that believes in
rupture and social revolution.” He added that he “doesn’t really think
that you can engage in change in a gradual way. Social transformation of
society can’t be a gradual thing.”
(Twitter/Screenshot)
He’s even more abrasive on the streets.
“I’m a communist, motherfucker,” Alcoff said before
spitting at a cameraman at a March 2005 protest in Chicago. He recorded himself
again yelling the phrase at a Ron Paul supporter at a
six-month anniversary event of Occupy Wall Street in March 2012.
Alcoff
seeks to radicalize others, build infrastructure of resistance
(Twitter/Screenshot)
Alcoff also said he isn’t concerned about those put off
by his calls for violence. His message, he tweeted in 2015, is intended to “radicalize those who
aren’t” repelled by his extreme views.
(Twitter/Screenshot)
Alcoff views his radicalism as an embodiment of what the
left should aspire to be. He scorns reporters who criticize Antifa for “turning
people off the left” and calls the “bourgeois media” the “enemy of the people.”
And Antifa has seen a resurgence since the 2016 presidential election
against what radicals perceive as “fascist” policies from the Trump
administration. But as an influential figure within the movement,
Alcoff says he doesn’t care whether or not the president is actually a fascist.
Rather, the longtime Antifa operative views Trump as a tool to be exploited as
radicals seek to move society closer to social revolution.
“If we’re wrong, if [Trump] is just George W. Bush
somehow … then at minimum, what we’re doing is building the infrastructure that
builds space for other forms of resistance — for resistance against everyday
white nationalist and white supremacist policies,” Alcoff said as Chepe on Radio Dispatch in December 2016.
“And we don’t stand to lose if we’re building that
infrastructure,” he continued. “That’s what we should have already been doing,
even if [Hillary] Clinton had won and even if Trump is not a fascist.”
In 2013, Alcoff, speaking as Chepe, said his ultimate goal is to tear down all existing societal
structures to make way for a new post-state world “without capitalism,
without private property, without patriarchy, without white supremacy and
without imperialism.”
He also said that radical social revolution can only
come about on the heels of smaller, more mainstream progressive victories, such
as minimum wage increases.
“Capitalism, especially North American capitalism, is so
based on this individualistic and neo-liberal perspective that we all exist as
automatons — as individuals,” Alcoff said in 2014 as “Chepe” on Radio Dispatch. “So if we’re going to engage, we have to
remind people that collective struggle wins us victories. What we
have to do before the big final collective victory — social revolution — is we
have to win a lot of small ones.”
He also claims to be involved in campaigns worldwide.
Speaking as Jose Martin on “BBC Business Matters” in 2014, Alcoff said he has
injected himself into movements as a “militant researcher” in Brazil, El
Salvador, Honduras, Spain, Portugal and France.
“Basically, if I’m traveling I’m going to be engaging in
some level of militant research,” he said.
In practice, Alcoff has acted as a thought leader and
legal coordinator within radical movements.
“I began as one of the arrogant veteran leftists who came
in and said, ‘This is wrong, that is wrong, that is wrong,'” Alcoff
said of his entrance into the Occupy Wall Street movement on Radio Dispatch in 2012. “I was humbled by it and
tried to position myself a little bit as a theorist and also have participated
in … the Mutant Legal Collective.”
The now-defunct Mutant Legal Collective was
a coalition of legal activists in New York City that worked closely with the
National Lawyers Guild, a progressive bar organization that Alcoff also coordinated with during Occupy Wall Street.
Alcoff is also close with the former president of the New
York City chapter of the guild, Gideon Orion Oliver. The two appeared to have
developed their relationship during Occupy Wall Street, having delivered a “know your rights”
training together on the street for protesters.
Alcoff and Oliver have praised each
other on Twitter. Oliver also tweeted a picture of his newborn son, noting that
he was supposed to meet “Uncle Chepe” in June.
Here’s
How TheDCNF linked Jose Alcoff to “Chepe,” “Jose Martin”
Alcoff attended a panel discussion at Left Forum 2015 as
Jose Martin, where the event’s moderator noted that he co-wrote an article on
autonomism — anti-authoritarian and localized form of Marxism — in the April
2015 issue of the Marxist journal Science & Society. Alcoff later
acknowledged during the discussion he wrote an article in the issue titled
“Marxist Encounters with Anarchism.”
But the journal shows that the article’s authors were Jose
Alcoff and his mother, Linda Alcoff, a professor of philosophy at Hunter
College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Ten months before he attended the panel, Alcoff said on
Twitter he was working on an article on autonomism for a scholarly journal.
(Twitter/Screenshot)
“Hey Chepe,” an audience member said during the panel’s
question-and-answer session. The greeting provoked what appears to be an
affirmative response from Alcoff. “Chepe and I are friends. I’m an anarchist
and he’s a communist and we talk about this stuff a lot. We actually don’t find
much in opposition to each other.”
Jose Alcoff (left) and Mark
Bray (right) at Left Forum 2015. Alcoff was introduced as “Jose Martin,” and
later identified as “Chepe.” Bray would later publish a book identifying
“Chepe” as an organizer of Smash Racism DC. (Screenshot/YouTube)
Beside Alcoff was Bray, the professor that would later
write the 2017 book identifying Chepe as a Smash Racism DC organizer.
Photos of Alcoff in his professional capacity are almost
non-existent. His picture was featured in the accompanying PowerPoint presentation for a webinar he attended in
August, and Americans for Financial Reform posted a photo of Alcoff at an event with Ohio Democratic Sen.
Sherrod Brown in April 2016 on its Flickr account. Earlier that year, in March,
the organization tweeted a photo of Alcoff standing to the right of Democratic
Rep. Maxine Waters of California.
Alcoff frequently promotes his Jose Martin and Chepe
media appearances through his Twitter account, @sabokitty.
And while Alcoff has never posted a picture of himself on
Twitter, others have.
Alcoff also made references to his mother on his Twitter account, providing a
connection from his online persona to his true identity.
In late October, Alcoff tweeted that his mother was in Brazil when Jair
Bolsonaro won the nation’s presidential election.
His mother, Linda Alcoff, also posted over a dozen photos of Alcoff to her
Facebook account. In many, she identifies him as her son, “Chepe.”
(Facebook/Screenshot)
Alcoff’s radicalism appears to have been bred at a young
age.
“I was raised in a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist family that
understands intersectionality,” he said at Left Forum 2015. “On the other hand,
much of my adult life has been in anti-authoritarian movements ranging from
counter-globalization to some of the anti-militarist wings of the anti-war
movement to Occupy Wall Street to Cop Watch.”
Alcoff’s mother reminisced in a December 2016 Facebook
post that when Alcoff and his brother, Sam Alcoff, were teenagers,
they “began to ask for presents of cans of spray paint” and “duct tape,
bulk cutters [sic], gas masks.”
“But I was a good Mom,” she wrote. “One Christmas I
wrapped up a bull horn and put it under the tree. Those days may be returning.
Happy holidays guys.”
Click here to
view more tweets from Alcoff and his associates archived by TheDCNF.
