“I guess everybody’s a domestic terrorist now.”
I can’t say how many times I’ve heard these words in the last few months. After the murder Alex Pretti, top officials were quick to defend the ICE officers who extra-judicially executed him by labeling him a domestic terrorist. They said the same about Renee Good. Over the last year, I have been forced to keep my silence as the government spun a conspiracy theory labeling my friends and I as domestic terrorists, as members of a shadowy terrorist conspiracy that does not exist. I have watched them lie about the compassion, loving kindness, and mercy of the dearest hearts I know, and call them murderous, riotous, violent. I have kept my silence. Now I will break it to speak the truth.
A wise woman I love called the tactics of this administration “state terror.” It was terror when Lt. Gross aimed his handgun at the back of a fleeing protestor before he ever saw a gun. It was terror when a SWAT Team traumatized my wife and found family with a no knock raid, and pointed roughly a dozen guns at a newborn infant and her nursing mother. It was terror when Johnson County Jail tortured my friend Lynette Sharp, who I love, targeting an older woman for her perceived weakness, so she would cooperate to save her life. It was terror when Shawn Smith brought an indictment threatening us with decades of prison, and terror when he attempted to use that to coerce us to sign plea deals admitting to material support for terrorism and to cosign government-authored lies about the existence of an anarchist or autonomous Marxist terror plot, which the government’s cooperating witnesses undermined in their testimony during trial at the risk of perjury, lies which may cost our codefendants 15 years of their lives, those who plead guilty. It was terror when Judge Mark Pittman threatened our lawyers with contempt jail time for representing us for seeking our best interests, terror when he browbeat the jury panel during selection, and terror when he paraded us in front of Lynette in a demonstration of his power to abjectify us in public to facilitate identification. The whole process of our prosecution and trial was one long gauntlet of terror after terror, designed to bully us into false confessions, and to drive the jury to abandon reason and condemn nine innocents.
It is said and corroborated that the sounds of violent argument and a bloodcurdling scream of terror were heard from the jury room during deliberations. Ultimately, our unprecedented sentences are government by terror. If you are an activist, says Judge Reed O’Connor, and you even THINK standing up for the incarcerated, or standing up to police is acceptable, be terrified. This is what we the government will do to you too. Terror has always been the tactic of fascists and white supremacists, of the haters in the streets, from the lynchings and coups of southern whites at the end of Reconstruction and through Jim Crow, down to the mass shootings, far right rallies in blue cities, and other acts of stochastic terror through the modern day. When Mr. Fair of the SPLC testified before congress about the upcoming court case about their work, he described hate as having moved into the government. It is this administration which stands for hate, and this government which uses the tactics of terror. “Do not dare stand up to us,” they say with their actions. “This will happen to you.”
I do not believe in harbouring hate or terrorizing anyone. I believe in Love. Do not fear, Love, and trust in the Love of your fellow creatures. Fear Not is the encouragement of the angels. Be Strong and Courageous is the instruction of the Most High in scripture. Where there is Love, there is no Fear. Take care of each other. Shelter and feed each other, the widow, the orphan, the alien in the land. Prison is the great terror which has been wielded to silence us, but I have never feared power more than I love truth, and it is love that can overcome the regime of mass incarceration, and truth that will set America free. Arise, Love! Arise, Truth! Abolition Now!
