Jamie Peck looks like one of those goth girlfriend memes if they grew up and started reading Marx, and that’s pretty much what she is. I met her back when we were in the same communist caucus in the Democratic Socialists of America (yes, we exist). At the time, she was still working on the The Antifada, the leftist podcast she started with her ex-husband. In sidebar Discords with the other ladies of the caucus, we’d split our time between rating our own hot photos and discussing how we could make the DSA culture less chauvinist and racist. Peck was funny, shockingly sincere, and occasionally provocative.
As a hot edgy leftist podcaster she was the type of woman who could have gone reactionary like the Red Scare crones — that might have been more lucrative, she jokes. Instead, today Peck is a committed organizer and spokesperson for the Block Cop City movement, one of the offshoots of the larger Stop Cop City movement that has risen in Atlanta in response to the plan to cut down the Weelaunee Forest and build a monstrous multi-million-dollar police training facility.
We caught up over the phone after a Weelaunee Defense Society meeting in New York about Mayor Eric Adams’ plan to build his own “Cop City” in Queens. She was one of the organizers of the event, which took place in a community garden in the Lower East Side, and I had not gotten a chance to take her aside and ask her some burning questions: How did she go from media person to movement person? And, as a fellow organizer girlie who doesn’t want to get a “real job,” how does she make money?
“Part of it is just that my career took a dive,” Peck tells me. “I was pushed out of the moderately successful podcast that I started due to complex interpersonal shit between me and my ex-husband.” She tried to start another podcast, Everybody Loves Communism, but it fizzled out. She tried to write, but that’s hardly a viable career option these days. “I was kinda depressed, honestly,” she says. “I was like: Wow, I really have fucking nothing now.”
“The same guy will message me and ask me what’s my opinion on anarcho-syndicalism and also ‘how much for a picture of your pussy?’”
Around the time Everybody Loves Communism was winding down in early 2023, the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta was exploding again, following the murder of activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, or Tortuguita, by Georgia State Patrol troopers. Peck was watching the movement from New York, where she lives, and saw the call for a week of action in Atlanta that March. “When I went to Atlanta for the first time I went as a journalist but also as someone who was looking for a new political thing to get involved with that I could really believe in as a communist,” she says. “I wanted to see for myself what this movement was about and if it could be the place for me.”
It turned out it was exactly the place for her. The atmosphere at the week of action was electric; she knew she had to be involved. She returned in June for another week of action. But things were calmer then, and in some ways, disappointing; the March crowds had dwindled, and it was clear the movement needed to figure out next steps. On a hot day with terrible air quality (“I felt like shit afterwards”), activists and organizers, including Peck, came together to talk about whether the tactic of the forest encampment had been exhausted. “The choices were maybe getting killed in the forest or holding up a sign at a protest or canvassing for the referendum. We came up with Block Cop City as an option that was conflictual without being unnecessarily risky.”
One of the ideas that came out of the meeting was a nationwide speaking tour to inform people about what was happening in Atlanta and nationalize the movement against cop cities by connecting the dots to what was happening in other locales. Peck went on tour for over a month. “I put my life on hold,” she says. “I sidebarred my question of: Am I ever going to have a career again? I did about 20 stops around the Northeast. I knew that I wasn’t going to regret doing something like this. I knew it’d inform whatever I’d do next.”
But hold on, I ask, how could you afford to do that? “The answer right now is OnlyFans.”
This wasn’t Peck’s first turn with sex work. She describes herself as “an elder stateswoman of internet nudity.” She’d done some sketchy Craigslist modeling for dudes with cameras, and she was briefly a Suicide Girl after college. She’s not shy about her body and describes herself as a lifelong supporter of sex worker rights. She started her OnlyFans after she missed a trip to Atlanta in 2022 because she was dead broke. “I was like, shit, I need a way of making money that will leave me the time and energy that I need to fully commit myself to the movement and to my media project,” she says.
She also “wanted to make super sure that I would never have one of those weird turns. I was seeing examples of that among various left figures, Ana Kasparian,” host of the Young Turks podcast, “comes to mind. I’m not the kind of person who would ever make those trade-offs and that’s probably why I’m not more successful.”
While refusing to sell out or court the fasc-fashion Dimes Square set may have been a negative for her media career, Peck’s career as a beautiful lady on the internet is booming. She does still have her Majority Report fans (while we were chatting after the community meeting on the Lower East Side a listener approached us on the street and asked for her photo) and that niche audience helped her grow her base on OnlyFans. Surprisingly, the audiences overlap.
OnlyFans is “a deeply parasocial platform,” Peck says. The people who subscribe to her OnlyFans seem to have things in common with her or, at least, with the public persona Jamie Peck. That includes politics. “I do have a private life but I am largely an open book and I try to keep it pretty real with people,” she says. “On some level, it is a chance to buy a little bit of access to me. Like most kinds of sex work there is a social-emotional aspect to it. It’s kinda like therapy.”
“If you want to be a bad bitch, be a bad bitch.”
Doing this kind of work puts her in a strange relationship with men who could be comrades: “The same guy will message me and ask me what’s my opinion on anarcho-syndicalism and also ‘how much for a picture of your pussy?’ It surprised me a little bit the degree to which those things are all mixed together for them.”
But in the end, it’s just a job, and one that gives Peck a lot of freedom. She tells me, “We all have to make money somehow, whether it’s working in the service industry, or the sex industry, or maybe you have a really easy email job at an NGO, you know? Whatever makes it possible to do it.”
It, right now: She’s working on a political memoir about the early 2000s and has started a new podcast about movement-building called Party Girls, with co-host Sam Beard. They met on the Block Cop City speaking tour. She feels hopeful about the future of communism, mostly. She sees a future in the abolitionist work being done by informal networks of communists and anarchists across the country and here in NYC.
“Queens Cop City has given us a real rallying point,” she says. “New York is already a cop city in so many ways, you know, but that is a little more diffuse and difficult to explain to people than an actual thing they’re building that embodies so many of the phenomena that we’ve been talking about and working against. On some level it’s good because now we have a concrete set of things to organize around.”
I agree. I’m in the abolitionist movement too, trying to do some of the same work Jamie does. This moment feels full of energy; at the meeting at the community garden, the atmosphere was optimistic. Multiple young people approached me to ask: What’s next?
I ask Jamie what she told young people when they asked her things like that on the speaking tour. She’s not only an elder stateswoman of nudity; she’s a movement elder now. She says she hopes to mentor young women especially.
“I talk to a lot of people who want to get involved but they’re scared,” she says. “I’m here to tell you that you can just do it. If you want to be a bad bitch, be a bad bitch. I was not raised to be a bad bitch, I was raised to be a fucking PMC. Look at me now. You can do whatever you want to do. Fuck the authorities. If there’s anyone out there who wants to learn about this shit, call me.”
December 19, 2024: The original version of this article misstated which podcast Jamie started with her husband as Majority Report. She worked on Majority Report separately from The Antifada.
Cheryl Rivera is an editor at Lux.
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