Criminal Anarchy in Minnesota

From Birds Before the Storm by Margaret Killjoy

or: Thoughtcrime and flimsy cases

I had this whole post written for you for today. It was about how much I love books. It was about how I haven’t read enough novels this year, about how I love audiobooks but there’s a particular joy found in forcing the entire world to slow down so that you can sit in a chair and read fiction printed with ink on paper.

But I can’t always make the world slow down, and I woke up yesterday to a text from Minneapolis. “ICE has shut down my street. They’re raiding my neighbor.”

It wasn’t long before I saw video of one of the arrests, of a man named Isaac who is accused of conspiracy to impede the efforts of law enforcement. He was led out of his house and he had his head held high and he calmly gave his name and information to the neighbors who had come out to support him.

The feds seem to want to throw the book at this man and fourteen other people. There are 276 allegations made in the 94 page indictment. (I won’t link it directly because it is hosted on a .gov website, but it is easily searchable. I used “indictment of 15 Minneapolis.”). The group of them are accused of all sorts of crimes, almost none of which involve anything that a lay person would presume to be criminal, because they’re being accused of conspiracy.

In short, (and I am not a lawyer), a conspiracy is when two or more people come together and say “we should do the following crime.” We’ve got free speech, so it’s not inherently illegal to say “what if we did crime?” But as soon as any of those people take any “overt acts” (including otherwise legal acts) in furtherance of the conspiracy, it’s criminal conspiracy and everyone is liable. If you and I were in a room and I said “we should steal candy out of vending machines,” and later you looked up blueprints of a vending machine, the state might have a conspiracy case against us. Even though talking about crime is legal and looking up information is legal.

It’s a fantastic loophole, if you’re the state, by which to prosecute otherwise constitutionally protected behavior.

So there’s this 94 page indictment with 276 numbered allegations against members of a group called DAMN (Direct Action Minnesota; I’m very critical of most protest group names but damn that’s a good one) and nearly every one of those allegations is simply a description of what’s involved in organizing protests. The government alleges that they coordinated their actions via Signal. The government alleges that they transported shields in a pickup truck. The government alleges that they used vetting processes to determine who should be trusted. The government alleges that many of them have self-identified as anarchists. The government alleges that they organized blockades at the Whipple building, the headquarters of their occupation of the Twin Cities.

Blockades. Shields. During the press conference, the state brought up the indictees’ “aggressive use of shields” without a trace of irony in its voice.

At the very, very end of the indictment, one of the indictees (allegation number 275) is alleged to have kicked a police car and another one of the fifteen (allegation number 276) is alleged to have used a car as a dangerous weapon and caused an injury to a police officer. Most people I’ve talked to assume that final allegation is referring to a minor traffic accident with a police vehicle. It certainly wasn’t a big enough incident to appear in any news stories I could find, nor was this only allegation of injury important enough to be mentioned in the press conference.

Over and over again in the indictment, the government alleges that the indictees self-describe as anarchists. Much of this “evidence” was gathered from public talks given on a public tour that aimed to show the country how people organized in the Twin Cities. It is absolutely clear that the potential anarchist identity of some of the organizers is a large part of the case against people. The word “anarchist” appears far, far more often throughout the text than the word “antifa,” the name of the listed domestic terror group that the state desperately wants people to believe exists.

Of course, it’s not illegal to be an anarchist. It’s protected free speech.

I, for example, am an anarchist. I believe that society should be organized from the bottom up, not the top down. I believe that we can build our society on horizontal structures. The concept of the “state,” which anarchists oppose (alongside other oppressive hierarchical structures like patriarchy, racism, and capitalism), is a relatively new one in human history and anarchists are not actually opposed to organization and working together.

We’ve got a scary name, of course. It’s one that has led to a lot of confusion, because it’s so often misunderstood (as I’ve written about before). In this case, I presume the state is relying on the popular misunderstanding of anarchism. They say “these people are anarchists” because they want people to believe that the indictees are Batman villains who are out to sow chaos and destruction wherever they go.

The FBI does know what anarchism is, of course. I’ve read explainers put together by our enemies that actually understand what we’re about in broad strokes (“know your enemy” is a basic and core principle of warfare). But they won’t be including a rational explanation of who we are and what we’re about in an indictment like this.

The press conference yesterday was short and it’s honestly sort of amusing to watch. The state presents the scaaaary evidence like… people’s facebook pages that include slogans like “we must become ungovernable” or a social media banner image of the burning police precinct from 2020.

The journalists in the room were all incredibly competent. They said (I’m going to paraphrase herein) “if there was a conspiracy to commit violent acts, can you point to any violent acts they committed?” and the government simply said “read the indictment.”

The journalists said “if you’re trying to press charges against the violent criminals, then are you going to press charges against the law enforcement officers who killed Good and Pretti?” and the government said “if our investigation into those cases supports an indictment.”

One journalist directly said that it sounded like the government was accusing people of thoughtcrime. Which is fitting, because one of the allegations against one of the indictees was that the indictee wrote an article for CrimethInc. (If you want to commit thoughtcrime too, you can read CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that puts together some of the best news and analysis of world politics you’ll find anywhere.)

But maybe most importantly of all, the journalists asked basically: “Most of your previous attempts to indict people over this sort of thing have failed dramatically. Why will this be any different?”

The government responded “our previous indictments haven’t failed.”

Another journalist corrected him, that half of them have so far and more are failing all the time.

Because the government has tried to indict alleged protestors in Minnesota already, and judges are throwing out those cases. I talked with one of those former defendants yesterday while preparing to record a podcast on the issue and that person was clear that the government indicts on flimsy cases, that they’re desperate and flailing. They were clear that the judges in Minnesota are sick of the government’s lies and bad legal arguments.

The federal government is desperate to find a small group of people to pin the blame on. They’re desperate to divide and conquer, to say “these are the bad protesters, blame them.” But as much as I love the Minnesota anarchists, as much as I’m proud of their participation in the protests, the resistance to the ICE occupation of the Twin Cities involved more or less the entirety of those two cities and was not limited to this or that ideological tendency. Never in my life had I seen such unity before.

I don’t know if these new indictments are going to stick. It looks like all of the indictees are getting out of jail before trial, which is a good sign, but the state does seem to be making a bigger deal out of this particular case than previous cases. We’ve got reason to be optimistic, but people still deserve and need our support and solidarity.

The state’s most powerful weapon is fear. They want to pick a few people and slap them with charges to get everyone else to stay home and to get everyone else to say “I don’t know those people and I’d never do anything like that!” They want to pick people off and isolate them.

If you think they’re going to only fuck with the anarchists, then you’ve never read a history book. The people of Minneapolis know that. That’s part of why they’ve been out in the streets in such great number. People know that fascism doesn’t only come for the most vulnerable, it comes for us all. If the state successfully picks off the “bad protestors,” they will expand that category. (They’ve already had to expand it pretty broadly if it’s including the “aggressive use of shields.”)

At the arraignment for the defendants yesterday, the state attacked supporters gathered outside the courthouse. They’re afraid. Not for their lives, but for their legitimacy. It’s hanging on by a thread.

I don’t think they’re going to successfully pick anyone off anymore. Not this time. Whether the charges stick or not, we can stand behind these defendants. The Twin Cities were the bulwark against ICE, and now these defendants are the bulwark against repression. So we’ll stand behind them.

And who knows? Maybe next week I’ll get to tell you about how much I love books, and not about yet another terrible thing happening in the world.