RE:
https://c.im/@cdarwin/116805546054463127
Trump’s targeting of “antifa” began in his first administration
and has only intensified since he retook office.
Last month, the Trump administration issued its “counterterrorism strategy”,
describing “anarchists and anti-fascists” as
“violent left-wing extremists”
and equating
“pro-transgender ideology” to terrorism.
This strategy built upon its National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7),
issued in September shortly after the killing of far-right commentator Charlie Kirk,
which the right inaccurately blamed on violent leftwing protesters and trans people.
At least three of the nine people convicted and five of the 22 charged Prairieland defendants are trans;
many have been incorrectly named in legal filings,
despite having legally changed their names.
“There’s a long history in the US of trying to claim that anarchists or communists,
or other -isms on the left,
are engaged in criminal conspiracies,
and then conflating their activism with those so-called conspiracies,
casting a wide net to equate speech with violence or critical acts,”
said Gibbons of Defending Rights and Dissent.
That history goes back to the conspiracy charges against Emma Goldman
– Joseph McCarthy’s early attempt at building the Red Scare
– to the political imprisonment of Black Panther and American Indian Movement members,
to police arresting George Floyd protesters to control crowds.
Book club members and local activists familiar with the
#Prairieland case say that
the literature and other leftist rhetoric were presented as evidence of criminality to a jury unfamiliar with or even hostile to the cultural and intellectual diversity in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
They say Johnson county, where the Prairieland facility is located
and where defendants were initially jailed,
antagonized the defendants,
putting them into solitary confinement for weeks,
subjecting them to repeated strip-searches
and denying them dietary restrictions,
while characterizing them as violent terrorists from the big city.
Defendants Autumn Hill and Meagan Morris,
both trans women,
are being held in men’s facilities,
where they are vulnerable to rape and sexual abuse
– counter to recent federal rulings that trans women should be held in women’s facilities for their safety.
According to Hill’s wife, Lydia Koza, Morris was denied access to hormone treatments
while in Johnson county,
which could have had severe medical consequences.
(The Johnson county sheriff’s department did not return the Guardian’s request for comment on the defendants’ treatment in jail.)
Hill and Morris received 50-year sentences for conspiracy to riot and ambush a law enforcement officer,
even though they were not present when shots were fired.
“[The prosecution] just used the fact that this is not ‘normal’ to most people
– you don’t recognize this, therefore it’s sinister,”
said Koza
Open quoted post Quoting
The Sotos’ crimes largely stem from a “printing press”
that the FBI noticed during the initial raid of their home:
a standard office printer,
a paper cutter
and a book binder.
During the raid, one of the Sotos’ children told Elizabeth’s attorney that
police put a bag over their head
and brought them in for an interrogation;
another child was interrogated in the home.
Elizabeth only found out about their child being taken for interrogation from an article published by the anarchist collective Crimethinc
that was later made into a zine.
The justice department did not return the Guardian’s request for comment on the raid of the Sotos’ house,
its attacks against the first amendment or its unusual use of counterterrorism law.
The federal prosecution argued the Sotos used the printing press to produce anti-government zines
for a book club they and some of the other defendants were part of,
named for the celebrated 20th-century anarchist
Emma Goldman,
who 99 years ago this month was arrested on conspiracy charges for organizing against the first world war draft.
At the book club,
the group read political zines on subjects like
“a journal of materialist feminism” and
“a call for the eradication of artificial intelligence from the face of the earth”
– perhaps niche,
but nothing illegal,
an FBI agent testified in court.
Still, the FBI seized these zines, along with the printing press and a collection of poetry about losing a sibling to cancer.
#Prairieland 
