Signing your name “ACAB,”putting Lil Wayne lyrics in your Instagram caption, posting fliers calling a cop a murderer, having the name of your clique tattooed on your face: Any of these could be used to put you away for a decade, thanks to a law that allows the state virtually endless latitude to police creative expression.
Take two of the most prominent current criminal defendants in the state of Georgia: Defend the Atlanta Forest aka Stop Cop City, the movement organizing against the Atlanta police training facility known as Cop City, and musician Young Thug, aka Thugger aka Young Slime aka Country Billy Made a Milly. Georgia state prosecutors have claimed Thug’s label, Young Slime Life (or YSL), is a front for a gang of the same name. Though it sounds like a joke, the abolitionists, environmental activists, and anarchists of the Stop Cop City movement, now growing across the country as more cities propose their own versions of Cop City, are being pursued by the state largely on the basis of actions that are both creative and collective, paralleling the YSL case.
The real crime is collective action, expressed creatively.
Young Thug, born Jeffrey Williams, and 27 co-defendants were hit in May 2022 with a 56-count indictment under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The 28 men stand accused of being part of a criminal enterprise under whose auspices they allegedly committed murder, attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and other “street gang activity” that prosecutors argue are proven by Instagram posts with captions like “SLIME OVER SLUTS.”
The RICO Act of 1970 allows any member of an organization to be held responsible for crimes committed by any other member of the group if the organization can be said to be based around criminal conspiracy. It was put to its most notorious use by federal prosecutor (now-disbarred lawyer) Rudy Giuliani to charge Mafia bosses for assassinations committed by their subordinates. But it was too good a tool to reserve for fighting just one enemy. As now applied, RICO is starting to look like a license to lock up everyone in an Instagram Close Friends circle if one of them may have committed a crime.
In August 2023, 62 activists with Defend the Atlanta Forest were hit with a RICO indictment that spun the tale of a vast conspiracy to commit money laundering and domestic terrorism going back to 2020. Each of the Cop City defendants faces up to 20 years in prison. The alleged conspiracy supposedly exerted its power through blog posts (lame but fortunately for us all, legal), one single incident of punching a cop (based but unfortunately illegal), and holding marches “intended to overwhelm the police” (being popular and cool is apparently frowned upon). Central to the state’s case against the activists is their real or perceived shared ideology of anarchism, as evidenced through social media posts and zines. If there are any communists in the bunch, no doubt they’re royally pissed about being misrepresented.
RICO charges can be filed at both the federal and state levels, and Georgia’s state RICO Act is even broader than its federal counterpart, allowing prosecutors sweeping license to use acts that are not themselves illegal as evidence of a crime. Both the Atlanta forest defenders and the YSL crew were charged under Georgia’s state RICO law. Thus both criminal complaints are packed with details about social media posts, music videos, flyers, zines, and other forms of expression, each instance described ominously as “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.” Both the Cop City and YSL indictments seize upon generic actions that are commonplace for any activist or any rap artist, respectively. Both groups’ real crime is collective action, expressed creatively.
Bad tattoos are still not illegal.
Of 182 “overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy” — in other words, acts that supposedly point to the existence of this alleged racketeering organization—that are attributed to YSL, four are murders and eight more are murder attempts, but a whopping 54 are based on lyrics or social media posts. Some of the lyrics cited, no doubt as a result of an assistant prosecutor spending 90 hours combing through lyrics line by line on Genius.com, include: “I never killed anybody but I got something to do with that body,” “slime or get slimed,” and “Red just like Elmo but I never fuckin giggle.”
The social media posts are just as flimsy. The indictment references an Instagram post showing a defendant sporting a “YSL” tattoo on his forehead (bad tattoos are still not illegal) and another showing a different defendant wearing a red shirt that said “MASA,” which we are supposed to believe is short for “Make America Slime Again.” A crime against good taste, but please, State of Georgia, be serious.
Prosecutors taking rap lyrics literally and using them as evidence in criminal cases — sometimes as the centerpiece of a case — has become so pervasive that it is the subject of a handbook for criminal defense attorneys written by two University of California, Irvine, professors in 2021, “Rap on Trial.” A thin guardrail for these prosecutorial practices has, theoretically, emerged over the past two decades. References to “breaking down bricks” — “bricks” being slang for drugs — are a dime a dozen in the genre and don’t count as proof of anything, the “Rap on Trial” handbook says. If dead bodies were showing up covered in slime, YSL would certainly be toast.
The Cop City indictment relies even more heavily than YSL’s case on innuendo and guilt by association. While the movement is largely autonomous and consists of many groups and individuals with a variety of tactics and strategic alignments, the prosecutors frame the movement as they would a highly coordinated gang. The prosecution writes of the movement’s “extremist” ideology of “protection of the environment at all costs” and valuing the collective more than the individual. The use of terms like “mutual aid” of course proves these anarchists are all in cahoots, which in turn proves they are culpable of crimes.
The prosecution goes on to write that, horrifyingly, Defend the Atlanta Forest provides “financial, personal, and emotional support to remain loyal to the movement. After arrest, emotional and personal support is offered through letter writing campaigns and encouragements of ‘solidarity.’” Yes, the state of Georgia is essentially criminalizing caring too much about other people.
The use of terms like “mutual aid” of course proves these anarchists are all in cahoots.
As in the YSL case, prosecutors also focus heavily on their target’s creative media production — in this case blog posts and zines, which participate in “the spread of anarchist ideas.” Next they’ll come for used bookstores, Narcan trainings, cooperatively owned vegan coffee shops, and those kids who made the perpetual stew in Bushwick.
A great many of the other “overt acts” in the indictment consist of movement members helping each other occupy the forest; paying for walkie-talkies, fuel, a generator, food, tarps, camping supplies, and “printed documents in support of the occupation of the forest”; wearing camouflage clothing; possessing phone chargers, food, climbing accessories, and medication.
Three activists are accused of looking up the address of Trooper Jonathan Saucedo, believed to be one of the killers of forest defender Manuel Esteban Paez “Tortuguita” Terán, and putting up flyers in Saucedo’s neighborhood calling him a murderer. Another filmed and photographed police as they tried to detain him, while another signed his name as “ACAB.” Making fun little flyers and having a cool non-binary name are not illegal acts in and of themselves. But it is in the interrelation of these acts that the crime lies. After claiming a monopoly on legitimate violence, the state now grasps at a monopoly on legitimate collective action.
The powers of the RICO Act, especially in Georgia, have now metastasized to the point that they can bulldoze supposed First Amendment protections and hack away at any form of collective organization, with creative expressions like zine-making and song lyrics as the evidence of criminal conspiracy — something that both rappers and activists have to worry about. The direction the long arm of the law is grasping in is no coincidence. Collective action, like art, has a way of transfiguring what would otherwise be small and insignificant gestures and of moving many more people than its immediate audience. What a neat trick it would be to turn regular people’s only bottom-up sources of influence and power into a crime.
Emily Lever is a reporter and translator/interpreter based in New York. She has been published in Bookforum, Jewish Currents, New York Magazine, Africa Is a Country, Popula, City Limits, Gothamist, and elsewhere.
Here's why we publish
Feminist thought is increasingly banned from universities and marginalized in billionaire-owned media. We’re proud to publish it. While these institutions are firing feminists, we’re hiring them — as brave journalists, writers, and artists who challenge ideas about gender at every level.
If this matters to you, please support Lux today. Independent media depends on you.