“M Scott Peck defines community as the coming together of a group of individuals “who have learned to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘delight in each other, and make others’ conditions our own.’”
“The real goal of politics is to make life easy and people happy.”
I.
I’m writing this to document my experiences in the Atlanta milieu from the beginning of 2021 to early 2023. I’m not the first and likely not the last person to speak out about their concerns and experiences of hardship within that context. It feels important to me to write this as an attempt to prevent that milieu’s cycles of harm; And hopefully save others from a lot of the heartache and trauma, myself and others have endured from associating with that crew. If I had been better informed about the context and taken all the red flags I had experienced more seriously I would be much better off. Writing this serves as part of a healing process for myself and I hope it can be that for others who’ve had similar experiences as well.
Whether you are reading this from inside or outside that social circle I hope you read this with good faith, patience, and curiosity. I know that writing this will put me in bad standing with some, and as a further target for harassment from people in that crew but that is exactly why I’m writing it. There are serious problems here that need to be talked about.
I can only speak for myself and my own experiences but I want it to be known that my perspective and the depth of my understanding of the happenings in Atlanta are also informed by my having had many conversations with others who were once a part of things and have since been burned. And I believe if you were to investigate yourself, you would find that the most coherent and consistent narratives to be found are from people on the outside of that scene.
To be clear, the group of people who’re being discussed here are the central crew of people associated with the South Bend Commons in Atlanta, Georgia. The behaviors being discussed here exist as dominant group behaviors that supersede the individual, thus it doesn’t matter who the individuals are or if they’re new. In order to be absorbed into the group they must adapt to either enable or exhibit these behaviors.
II.
My name is J, and I am a trans, gender-fluid Asian-Indian person. I have had prior history and relationships with the Atlanta context over the years through mutual comrades and organizing efforts.
I first arrived in Atlanta in late December of 2020 with a friend and comrade from Tucson Arizona (where I had been living at the time). We were both having a hard time with how people in Tucson were handling the pandemic. Essentially we had to endure being very isolated and had little to no room to discuss other ways of going about or conceptualizing our lives there. I had gotten out of a difficult living situation at the start of the pandemic and moved into an arrangement where I didn’t have much human interaction and was thus starving for a social life.
I found my visit to Atlanta to be so awe-inspiring and alluring that I couldn’t imagine going back to my solitary life in Tucson so I scrambled to get my things together to make the move. A lot of people have a similar experience when visiting Atlanta, they are often amazed by what has been built there, socially and infrastructurally. They truly do have inspiring models for the organization of communal life and revolutionary activity. However things there aren’t as they seem, what undergirds and binds that conviviality and togetherness is anything but genuine connection or joy.
When I first came to visit Atlanta, people there were extremely friendly and welcoming and many of them even encouraged me to move there. But soon after I did, I noticed a dramatic change. Many of those same people became cold, or mean. Some of them came onto me in a way that felt scripted and inauthentic. Things just felt weird in a way that I at the time couldn’t really make sense of.
Now I can say what this phenomena was, and that is that this crew invests a lot of energy into curating the scene to outsiders in a way that inspires positivity and aspiration but it’s simply a veneer. They have a strong party scene that coincides with an incredibly hedonistic and promiscuous culture, everyone there is constantly looking to fulfill their own pleasures and they have a really strange relationship to sex that is constantly seeking, impersonal and sometimes weaponized. People visiting can be taken in by this allure, and for the visitor it may be a brief excursion, but for those living in Atlanta this is their entire life.
My landing in Atlanta was problematized due to a complicated interpersonal dynamic with someone there that I share history with. I won’t go into details due to the sensitivity of that situation but essentially that person needed space from me, and this also often looked like her needing other people to also take space from me.
And now under normal circumstances you’d think that could be accomplished by directly communicating to someone about that, and ideally with consideration to both people’s feelings and needs. But that is not what happened.
Instead nothing was made transparent to me and people were constantly sidestepping the issue or pretending that there wasn’t one. Whenever I was left out of something or tried to talk about something I was confused or upset by, I was met with dismissal. I was told things that were contrary to my own experiences, I was made to question my own sense of reality and was pressured to submit to what I was being told. I was always made to feel like I was being unreasonable and a nuisance. The more questioning or upset I was, the more hostile people became. This put me in a constant state of nervousness and anxiety.
People had also started to spread rumors about me being some sort of creep or sex pest. Initially I blamed myself for this, I can be very friendly and flamboyant and it’s not uncommon for people to misinterpret my energy but usually people do the reasonable thing and not jump to conclusions about someone they just met, much less spread rumors around. People who know me better know that I don’t really engage in casual sex, I don’t find it desirable or fulfilling. Sometimes I engage in it but I don’t seek it. But I do love getting to know people and spending time with them and this was especially true when I was coming out of the pandemic. I was never initially guilty of anything other than being friendly.
I now know that these rumors are a part of a pretty standard pattern of bullying that exists in that community. From the start this phenomena had an air of being a mean joke but I couldn’t be sure. They enjoy leveraging people’s ignorance against them and if you aren’t aware of how they operate, these kinds of things can be very jarring. Looking back at this, it’s hard to imagine these rumors and concerns to be genuine. Excessive promiscuity is the norm for this group of people, especially towards new people and visitors. The majority of all interpersonal interaction there is about sex and it is not healthy. It’s not executed with responsibility or respect for one another. As some of you reading this are aware this scene has a recurring problem of men in the scene taking advantage of intoxicated women at parties; And it’s not like they care about addressing those incidents. In fact they go out of their way to undermine anyone who might bring such things up.
I believe these rumors about me were both a circumstance of the toxic environment that I was in, but also a twisted means to provide this person who needed space from me with that space. Now you might think that is a strange and backwards way of accomplishing that but that is exactly how that group of people operate. They have social skills that they excel at, but those skills are all geared towards manipulation and avoidance. And they do not care about how they may affect someone, in fact many of them get pleasure from emotionally hurting others.
These rumors and my being “iced” out saw a sharp increase after I had been seen spending time with someone who was on the other side of past sexual assault allegations against SBC members. This person told me ahead of time that I would be iced out and targeted for being seen with them, and it did. The sad thing was I never jumped to any conclusions about any of those conflicts and expected anyone who had concerns to simply have a conversation with me but they didn’t. For merely associating with this person, the SBC crowd started to ramp up isolating and bullying me. That by itself says a lot to me about how those past conflicts and allegations were handled.
While there, I had also started to notice that the gossip machine wasn’t exclusive to me or my situation. I often saw people spread gossip behind each other’s backs to pit people against each other, create a bad impression of someone and/or create chaos. I also felt like what was said about certain people and conflicts was kind of strange. As if they were omitting key information, or glossing over what had to be much more complicated conflicts. And somehow the narrative was always tailored to favor themselves. I also started to notice that there were a lot of people on the periphery that were apprehensive and alienated by the SBC crowd for some reason that wasn’t clear. And that you couldn’t really talk to anyone about any of these things.
There’s a learning curve for people who start to associate with this crowd that involves realizing that there’s something off about the discrepancies that exist in the things people are saying. If you spend time around them and start to get the feeling that something is “off” I would trust that feeling. A part of how they manipulate information is not to allow space for an opposing perspective. People simply aren’t heard. A lot of harm could be prevented if people were to just hear people out. It can feel unintuitive to do when a group of people are all saying the same thing but it’s important to hear from all parties before making a judgment on any conflict. They’re sensationalists as well, so it’s also important that whenever you hear something alarming to learn to reel it in until you’ve gotten more information.
This dynamic is so ingrained in the culture there that they do it with both big and small things, it is constant. During my time in Atlanta I lived with a dog named Ooma. When I first moved there someone had told me a story of Ooma trying to kill another dog and needing to be restrained. After a year, even after I caught onto how things in Atlanta worked, I was nervous about having Ooma around other dogs. Eventually I made the connection that the story I heard was more sensationalized bullshit. Ooma’s bad with other dogs, she’s big and intimidating. She can get confrontational or overly excited with dogs but she wouldn’t actually hurt another dog. But even after recognizing that for myself I had still internalized in my body that she was potentially dangerous to other dogs whenever I took her out. This is the kind of power that the SBC crowd’s narrative spinning has.
III.
A tremendous mistake I made in my time in Atlanta was continuing to relate to these people after so many red flags. My therapist pointed out to me that I’m the type of person who’ll stay in an abusive relationship, constantly blaming myself, feeling I deserve to be treated badly and believing that things could change and get better. And she’s right about that, this is consistent with how I’ve navigated similar situations at other points in my life. However with the SBC crowd, they don’t simply let you walk away. If they find having a relationship with you to be useful they will try to find ways to pull you back in. But you’re only able to reintegrate if they’re able to instill co-dependence. (This is something that I was susceptible to, as I had the propensity to forgive those who weren’t sorry and shoulder all the blame myself.) And on the other end, if you continue to break off from them they will find ways to punish you and make your life hell.
For those within the group, they’re like a clique of “cool kids” in highschool. None of them can imagine themselves not being a part of this “thing” and they believe that gives them free rein to treat each other however they want.
From the beginning of this situation to even now I’ve heard a variety of shifting narratives said about me and they’re done with the express purpose of isolating me and disrupting my life. There’s never been a *mutual* process of communication, care, accountability or resolution despite what they might say. The rumors range from all sorts of things from me being a creep, sex pest, manipulative fake friend, violent, to suffering from a delusional disorder and being mentally unstable. The range here should say enough about the intentions of the gossipers. And it’s notable that it’s said to a wide array of people to elicit alarm and not said to more involved people as a means to work through problems.
To be transparent here, there is bad behavior that I am responsible for that involves some women in my life during this time. And that is me engaging in anxious, dysfunctional patterns of communication with them, and also pouring water on someone as things escalated. I am sorry for those things and I recognize that I played a role in creating those dynamics. Those conflicts are complex and for the sake of the discretion of the others involved I won’t detail them. Neither I, nor my therapist would characterize my behaviors as harm. Dysfunctional and hurtful sure, but ordinary. I’ve also done a lot of work on myself and I am confident these behaviors will not repeat themselves.
After things hit a boiling point, this group of people responded by collectively creating a narrative that I was suffering from a delusional disorder. They had taken some things I had said out of context and spun them in order to justify it. After spreading the narrative and inciting hysteria they confronted me to tell me they cared about me and wanted me to get help. And then just as quickly as they created the delusional narrative, they dropped it and tried to proceed as if it were ordinary conflict. All the while placing the blame on me and me alone. This is classic gaslighting behavior, and it still baffles me that some of the people who were around during this could ever believe that this was done in good faith (but perhaps that’s a testament to how convincing they can be). I’m not the first person they’ve made out to be crazy, they do it as a means to contain conflict. They’ve done it at least a few times before with other people in different conflicts, it’s a consistent pattern of abuse. And it’s particularly effective because they engage in it as a group.
This form of gaslighting is a seemingly preferred method for containing conflict and it is abusive. There’s no better way to discredit someone than to make them out to be fragile and unstable. It’s an extremely effective tool for controlling a narrative. Anyone who challenges anything ‘the group’ says or does will face consequences and this is something that is unspoken but understood.
This dynamic is tricky because there’s a cognitive dissonance that binds this behavior. They are both aware and unaware. People in the group both simultaneously genuinely believe what is being said and at the same time understand what is actually happening and that it isn’t true. Either way their response is generally to sensationalize and spread the narrative while protecting the interests of the larger group.
For the sake of brevity I will not drag this on. If you ever find yourself in conflict with this group of people I would advise you to be cautious about how you proceed. They’re duplicitous and likely to weaponize anything you say against you. It is healthy to make an effort once or twice, but then if you find it not to be working it’s imperative that you walk away. And if you ‘hear’ about conflict involving this group of people, be skeptical.
Petty “Mean Girls”-esque infighting is exactly what they encourage and I’d refrain from engaging as it isn’t effective and it’s what they want.
They may feign caring about you or being apologetic in some way. But note, are you able to actually talk about your own feelings and perspective? Are you shown respect and consideration? Are they able to take ownership for any of their own behavior? Does their behavior ever change? The answer is likely not, and that is because they don’t actually care. “Mending” conflict is only important to them as it suits their own purposes. They do not care about people, they only care about what is useful to them.
After some time passed I eventually moved away from Atlanta. My therapist and some friends of mine had encouraged me to leave and extricate myself from that environment. I feel much better leaving. In Atlanta I was constantly on edge and I’m now more able to relax. However my sense of trust and safety among comrades has really been damaged. I no longer feel good about a lot of the people who I’ve built relationships with over the years as I suspect these behaviors aren’t exclusive to just Atlanta but are maybe akin to those within a particular political tendency. And I don’t feel ready or safe to come into relation with anyone who has even tangential relationships to the Atlanta milieu. One of the ways I’ve been dealing with this is to distance myself from political circles and have more relationships with regular people and do more regular things. This has been refreshing for me, regular people assume most people are good before they assume they’re bad. Everyone’s generally trying to just be at peace and live their lives. However, lacking a political dimension to my life has me out of touch with an essential part of what makes me who I am and that continues to be difficult.
Recently I learned that moving away from Atlanta isn’t enough to protect myself from the SBC crew’s abuse. Someone from that crowd has recently spread rumors to people in my hometown alleging that I’m a stalker (despite no one involved in any of my personal conflicts making that claim). They offered this information anonymously, with no context and no participation in a process. This has once again led to me becoming more isolated and disrupting my life. I plan to continue to take my therapist’s advice which is to allow people to experience me as I actually am and disregard those who don’t.
But importantly what this tells me is that walking away isn’t enough. I have to do more and not just for my sake. And that is why I’m writing a public account of my perspective, of my experiences in Atlanta and what goes down within that scene. And I believe that is exactly what this crew fears the most.
IV.
If you are reading this as someone who is a part of that crew I would urge you to step back and take another look at yourself and the people you surround yourself with. Do you feel like you have a relationship of mutual trust and admiration between you and your peers? Do you feel free to express yourself? Does how you move through your day to day life with others align with your values? Do you feel good about yourself? Are you happy?…
If you are reading this as someone who has a more distant relationship to this crowd I would urge you to regard this group of people with more suspicion than you currently do. Are you okay with people being treated in the ways I’ve detailed here? Have you not experienced anything that corroborates what I’m saying? Have you not heard other equally troubling things from other people who’ve spent time there? The people in the Atlanta milieu are very manipulative and skilled. They know what they’re supposed to say and how they’re supposed to make things seem. A way to see through the facade is to pay attention to what they do and not what they say. Ask questions, see what happens.
An unfortunate reality that deeply troubles me, is that no one will take any of this shit seriously enough. People will continue to relate to that crowd because they are useful, they do good work. And people will continue to choose to believe what is convenient for them. But the bottom line for anyone of good conscience is that the way they treat people is not acceptable and shouldn’t be allowed to continue. They engage in rampant abusive behaviors that need to be put in check. The kind of behavior they engage in is capable of causing people to kill themselves and I’m honestly shocked that hasn’t happened more already. The main reason why their behaviors continue is because it’s never properly addressed, it’s always shrugged aside or swept under the rug.
I think many of those people are redeemable if you’re able to relate to them as individuals outside the context of the group. But the problem of how they behave will persist as they go back to the group. They’ve created this “thing” that is larger than any of them individually. I don’t think there are any easy solutions to the problem. My instinct is a need for that formation of people to be broken apart and for them to be separated from each other; like schoolchildren. They should be forced to contend with other people and other ways of being in the world. Their behaviors aren’t operative outside of the specific social framework they’ve created. I think if something like that were to happen it would ultimately be a very generative outcome.
I personally am not interested in being friends or comrades with anyone who would turn a blind eye or make light of what this grouping of people do. There are enough people who’ve been hurt and enough substantive conflict for anyone who actually cares to see. I think we’re all missing the point of being revolutionaries if our organizing isn’t rooted in a genuine care for people.
I am deeply traumatized by my experiences in Atlanta and I have not been well. If you consider yourself to be a friend of mine (and are not from Atlanta) please reach out, I’ve been struggling a lot and I could use the friendship.
Thank you for reading.
– J