Moving a box of zines can now get you 30 years in Trump’s America, echoing the UK’s crackdown on protest

~ punkacademic ~

On Tuesday, while England played Ghana in the World Cup, down in Texas nine people each received decades in jail for participating in an anti-ICE protest.

The noise demo, on the last Fourth of  July, had been organised to show solidarity with those incarcerated in the Prarieland ICE facility, near Dallas. Fireworks were set off. Graffiti was sprayed, and a government car’s tyres were slashed. The protest was peaceful until a police officer arrived and drew his weapon; another protestor – now sentenced to a century in prison – fired an apparent warning shot which struck and wounded the officer in the shoulder.

A number of the protestors now sentenced to decades in prison were members of the ‘Emma Goldman Book Club’, which as far as the government was concerned was clear evidence of their conspiratorial intent, as was possessing a printing press, and publishing zines. Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, sentenced to 30 years for moving a box of zines, was not at the protest but simply responding to a request from his wife after her arrest.

The political and legislative agenda which has made this possible is deeply rooted in conspiracy theories. The Prarieland defendants were characterised by the prosecution as an ‘antifa cell’, which coheres not with reality but with the paranoid ramblings of the US government’s new counter-terrorism strategy, which posits anarchists, ‘antifa’, and transgender folks as part of an international conspiracy against the United States.

This is the reality of Trump’s America: after a decade of a confected ‘free speech crisis’ manufactured in bad faith by the far right and laundered by a mainstream media desperate for clicks, you can now land in prison for actually expressing your views – or just reading.

The sentences handed down to the Prairieland protestors follow the indictment of the Minnesota 15 — a group of anti-ICE protestors who allegedly sought to obstruct ICE officers in their round-ups of their fellow citizens in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis-St.Paul. Pivotal to the indictment are the supposed anarchist motivations and connections of the accused, evidenced being the purported authorship of an article on CrimethInc.

Both cases represent an America that Trump and his coterie hates. Believers in mutual aid, trans-inclusive feminism, of diverse backgrounds and gender identities, they have become the latest to feel the wrath of the US state against those who dare oppose it.

Similar paranoid echoes have been heard here in the UK, not least from Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s ‘indepedent’ reviewer of terrorism legislation, who’s given a couple of very quotable addresses to the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange. Hall’s take is that foreign intelligence officers might – hypothetically, of course – ensure “that the UK hated itself and its history…That the very definition of woman should be put into question, and that masculinity would be presented as toxic….That white people should be ashamed and non-white people aggrieved”.

The answer, for Hall, is the potential introduction of new counter-subversion legislation. In an era of raids on Quaker meeting houses and an ongoing Spycops inquiry, it seems clear that ‘restraint’ is not on the agenda when it comes to the British State; lest we forget the ongoing war on pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protestors which has culminated in hundreds of arrests.

Also last week in London, a US State Department official, Sarah B Rogers, attended the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference – the so-called ‘anti-woke Davos’ – with far-right figures from across Europe were. There, she launched into a tirade against what far-right influencers style as “Da Yookay”, a meme-created fantasy of a right wingers’ dystopia. In addition to going against the wishes of Henry Nowak’s parents and making him a martyr for a cause he never supported, Rogers took pot-shots at disabled folks and the Motability scheme.

Next to its own declarations, such interventions abroad indicate very powerfully that the Trump regime wants to see its war on dissent replicated in its vassal states. With non-violent direct action increasingly treated as terrorism in the UK, and pensioners forced to wear ankle tags for opposing fossil fuels, Starmer’s legacy leaves Britain ahead of the curve.

This judicial and legislative onslaught amounts to a transtlantic war against freedom of expression and protest, often packaged in the guise of a war for ‘western values’ and ‘liberty’.

But the protests continue – for Palestine, against ICE, for climate sanity, for trans rights, for the rights of refugees, for the disabled. The work goes on, through and despite suffering, oppression, and demonisation.

Emma Goldman died in exile, mourning her banishment from the America which, despite a tortured relationship with it, she loved. She believed a different America, a different world was possible, as do we. The beauty of her life is her humanity, her fallibility, her striving. That life has echoed down the decades on T-shirts, in zines, in books and book clubs.

We’ll keep moving the boxes.