The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine

A detail view of the badge worn by Matthew Elliston during an ICE hiring event on Aug in Arlington Texas Photo Ron Jenkins Getty Images Federal prosecutors have filed a new indictment in response to a July noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado Texas during which a police officer was shot There are numerous problems with the indictment but perhaps the majority glaring is its inclusion of charges against a Dallas artist who wasn t even at the protest Daniel Des Sanchez is accused of transporting a box that contained Antifa materials after the development supposedly to conceal evidence against his wife Maricela Rueda who was there But the boxed materials aren t Molotov cocktails pipe bombs or whatever MAGA agents claim Antifa uses to wage its imaginary war on America As prosecutors laid out in the July criminal complaint that led to the indictment they were zines and pamphlets A few contain controversial ideas one was titled Insurrectionary Anarchy but they re fully constitutionally protected free speech The scenario demonstrates the administration s intensifying efforts to criminalize left-wing activists after Donald Trump revealed in September that he was designating Antifa as a major terrorist organization a legal designation that doesn t exist for domestic groups following the killing of Charlie Kirk Sanchez was first indicted in October on charges of corruptly concealing a document or record as a standalone event but the new indictment merges his charges with those against the other defendants likely in hopes of burying the First Amendment problems with the affair against him under prosecutors suggests about the alleged shooting It s an escalation of a familiar tactic In Georgia prosecutors listed zine distribution as part of the conspiracy charges against Stop Cop City protesters in a sprawling RICO indictment that didn t bother to explain how each individual defendant was involved in any actual crime I wrote back then about my concern that this wasn t just sloppy overreach but also a blueprint for censorship Those fears have now been validated by Sanchez s prosecution solely for possessing similar literature Photos of the zines Daniel Sanchez is charged with corruptly concealing Photo U S District Court Northern District of Texas There have been other warnings that cops and prosecutors think they ve discovered a constitutional loophole if you can t punish reporting it punish transporting it Los Angeles journalist Maya Lau is suing the LA County Sheriff s Department for secretly inspecting her for conspiracy theft of governing body property unlawful access of a computer burglary and receiving stolen property According to her attorneys her only offense was reporting on a list of deputies with histories of misconduct for the Los Angeles Times If you can t punish reporting it punish transporting it It s also reminiscent of the Biden administration s matter against right-wing outlet Project Veritas for possessing and transporting Ashley Biden s diary which the organization bought from a Florida woman later convicted of stealing and selling it The Constitution protects the right to publish materials stolen by others a right that would be meaningless if they couldn t possess the materials in the first place Despite the collapses of the Cop City prosecution and the Lau probe and its own dismissal of the Project Veritas episode the Trump administration has followed those dangerous examples characterizing lawful activism and ideologies as terrorist conspiracies a strategy Trump allies also floated during this first term to seize the power to prosecute pamphlet possession anytime they use the magic word Antifa That s a chilling combination for any journalist activist or individual who criticizes Trump National safety reporters have long dealt with the specter of prosecution under the archaic Espionage Act for merely obtaining governing body secrets from sources particularly after the Biden administration extracted a guilty plea from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange But the rest of the press and everyone else for that matter understood that merely possessing written materials no matter what they stated is not a crime Guilt by Literature At what point does a literary collection or newspaper subscription become prosecutorial evidence under the Trump administration s logic Essentially whenever it s convenient The vagueness is a feature not a bug When people don t know which political materials might later be deemed evidence of criminality the safest program is to avoid engaging with controversial ideas altogether The slippery slope from anarchist zines to conventional journalism isn t hypothetical and we re already sliding fast Journalist Mario Guevara can tell you that from El Salvador where he was deported in a clear development of retaliation for livestreaming a No Kings protest So can Tufts doctoral scholar R meysa zt rk as she awaits deportation proceedings for co-writing an opinion piece critical of Israel s wars that the administration considers evidence of assistance for terrorism At least two journalists lawfully in the U S Ya akub Ira Vijandre and Sami Hamdi were nabbed by ICE just last month The episode against Vijandre is partially based on his criticism of prosecutorial overreach in the Holy Land Five affair and his liking social media posts that quote Quranic verses raising the question of how far away we are from someone being indicted for transporting a Quran or a news article critical of the war on terror Related Antifa Protesters Charged With Terrorism for Constitutionally Protected Activity Sanchez s circumstance is prosecutorial overreach stacked on more prosecutorial overreach The National Lawyers Guild criticized prosecutors tenuous dot-connecting to justify holding defendants responsible for one gunshot wound Selected defendants were also charged with supporting terrorism due to their alleged association with Antifa Anarchist zines were cited as evidence against them too Sanchez was charged following a search that ICE proclaimed on social media turned up literal insurrectionist propaganda he had allegedly transported from his home to an apartment noting that insurrectionary anarchism is regarded as the preponderance serious form of domestic non-jihadi terrorist threat The tweet also announced that Sanchez is a green card holder granted legal status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals project The indictment insists Sanchez was transporting those materials to conceal them because they incriminated his wife But how can possession of literature incriminate anyone let alone someone who isn t even accused of anything but being present when someone else allegedly fired a gun Zines aren t contraband it s not illegal to be an anarchist or read about anarchism I don t know why Sanchez allegedly moved the box of documents but if it was because he apparently correctly feared prosecutors would try to use them against his wife that s a commentary on prosecutors lawlessness not Sanchez s Violent rhetoric is subject to punishment only when it constitutes a true threat of imminent violence Even then the speaker is held responsible not anyone merely in possession of their words Authorities prosecutors haven t alleged the Antifa materials contained any true threats or any other category of speech that falls outside the protection of the First Amendment Nor did they allege that the materials were used to plan the alleged actions of protesters on July although they did allege that the materials were anti-government and anti-Trump We don t need a constitutional right to publish or possess only what the cabinet likes Even the aforementioned Insurrectionary Anarchy Organizing for Attack zine despite its hyperbolic title reads like a think piece not a how-to manual It advocates for tactics like rent strikes and squatting not shooting police officers Critically it has nothing to do with whether Sanchez s wife committed crimes on July Being guilty of possessing literature is a concept fundamentally incompatible with a free society We don t need a constitutional right to publish or possess only what the executive likes and the anti-government literature in Sanchez s box of zines is exactly what the First Amendment protects With history and leaders like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orb n as a guide we also know it s highly unlikely that Trump s censorship crusade will stop with a scant radical pamphlets The Framers Loved Zines There s an irony in a supposedly conservative administration treating anti-government pamphlets as evidence of criminality Various of the publications the Constitution s framers had in mind when they authored the First Amendment s press freedom clause bore far more resemblance to Sanchez s box of zines than to the output of in the modern day s mainstream news media Revolutionary-era America was awash in highly opinionated politically radical literature Thomas Paine s Common Sense was designed to inspire revolution against the established regime Newspapers like the Boston Gazette printed inflammatory writings by Samuel Adams and others urging the colonies to prepare for war after the Coercive Acts The Declaration of Independence itself recognized the right of the people to rise up It did not assume the revolution of the time would be the last one One might call it literal insurrectionist propaganda and particular of it was supposedly transported in boxes The framers enshrined press freedom not because they imagined currently s professionally trained journalists maintaining careful neutrality They protected it because they understood firsthand the need for journalists and writers who considered their ruling body had become tyrannical to espouse revolution For all their plenty of faults the framers were confident enough in their ideas that they were willing to let them be tested If the ruling body s conduct didn t call for radical opposition then radical ideas wouldn t catch on It sure looks like the current administration doesn t want to make that bet The post The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine appeared first on The Intercept