The sadistically cruel and politically motivated sentencing of the Prairieland defendants, following a trial rife with due process violations, on terrorism and conspiracy charges for involvement with the non-existent Trump-fantasy “antifa” organization, is unjustified, disproportionate and openly targets political speech. One defendant has received 30 years in prison for moving a box of political literature. Others were prosecuted as part of a conspiracy for having a printing press and being members of a leftist book club. The sentencing judge admitted from the bench that he sought to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology” — rather than a focus on alleged criminal activity. This miscarriage of justice demands reversal. The Trump administration’s ideologically-driven NSPM-7 is an open political attack based on points of view that the administration wants to criminalize into silence. It is a direct attack on First Amendment rights using the weight of law enforcement and prosecutorial power in an effort to chill, prosecute, censor and repress political opposition to its policies and actions that are vastly opposed by the people of the U.S. The goal here is to sow fear and chill engagement in First Amendment expression.
Disciplined, powerful, mass resistance is what this historic moment of government repression demands. The Administration is advancing a fascistic and slow-motion coup to try to roll back hard-fought democratic rights unlike anything in our lifetimes. The people have, time and again, historically stood up to and overcome severe abuses by government used to repress social change. The suffragist movement, the fight for labor rights, the civil rights movement against Jim Crow apartheid and for Black liberation, the refusal to cooperate with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, the fight for LGBTQ equality, and so many other hard-fought struggles for justice have had to resist historic forms of domestic oppression by the U.S. Government. The more that people stand up for what they believe in, speak out, exercise their constitutionally-protected democratic rights, the less powerful this effort at censorship and repression will be. We will overcome this also on the road towards a just society.