No Fireworks Over Prairieland
Dear readers,
While New York celebrates a summer of wins — the Knicks, the socialist electoral sweep, Zohran’s reversal on increasing NYPD headcount — an ominous cold front gathers to the West. In Brooklyn, my activities of zine-making and regular protest used to seem like quaint and mostly ineffective political engagement. That was prior to the Prairieland sentencing on June 23, in which 8 main defendants received prison time of 30 to 70 years each for alleged crimes of providing material support to terrorists and inciting riot — the evidence being zine-making and participation in protest. Benjamin “Champagne” Song, the only defendant who fired a weapon, was framed as a leader of an “Antifa” cell and received 100 years. An additional seven protestors received between 30 years and 22 months for their actions, which amounted to showing up at an ICE protest in black clothing. No one at the Alvarado, Texas ICE facility at the center of the protest died due to their actions. The detention center still stands intact.
We are 18 months into the second Trump presidency and the evidence keeps growing that some of us are going to be dealt with before he attempts to launch a third. The federal government has handed down what are essentially death by prison sentences to 9 of the Prairieland defendants as a way to deter future protest, but also as an attempt to create a precedent for prosecution on the flimsiest of pretext.
One response might be for activists to curtail certain types of activities, such as making or reading zines that call for an end to the fascist regime we currently live under. But this would be the wrong lesson to take from Prairieland. If we stop our political activities, this administration will be successful in its attempts to stomp us out; silence and shrinking is compliance with a fascist agenda. Instead, we must create the conditions for solidarity and practice it as if our lives depend on it. They do.
Solidarity in practice looks like agitating around defendants who are hemmed up, using our social networks and media contacts to push counter-narratives. It looks like organizing defense funds and mutual aid for family members of defendants who might be at risk of losing their homes while trying to support someone through a trial. It looks like writing letters for moral support and showing up to court support. And it looks like never snitching on other activists.
This solidarity can not take place except under the conditions of an organized movement. The Prairieland defendants were accused of being part of organized “Antifa” (an abbreviation of anti-fascism and used loosely by a variety of actors). However, it is precisely because the Prairieland defendants were not organized together that the prosecutor’s case against them gained evidence in the form of confessions and information from five of the defendants, who were still sentenced to serious time in prison. In Issue 17, forthcoming this month, LG Fadiman and Eva Rosenfeld talk about what successful organizing for mass defense looks like.
We must also endeavor to be organized across movement spaces, across factional groups, and with our elders. The Prairieland sentencing verdict was handed down when I was on a retreat with Black feminists, many of whom were my movement elders with dozens of years of experience doing protest. I spent a week learning that my youthful bullheadedness wasn’t unique; wherever I wanted to go, they’d been there and done that. And there are lessons to learn from them, from each other. A fellow attendee bemoaned the courts but told me they were most upset about the defendants not having the movement ties they needed to fight effectively. They didn’t have a network to call on, so a network — like the one that mobilized for the Cop City defendants in the form of money, news coverage strategy, and legal support — did not mobilize. This is a cautionary tale: We cannot wait until things pop off to build the network we will need to survive. Turn to your neighbor now and get organized. Find an elder now and learn what they know.
These are dark times, but survival requires hope. When I am being an optimist, I think that everything becoming criminalized gives us more possibilities for resistance than ever before. One way to resist is to not let the Prairieland defendants suffer alone. Support them by writing to them and providing material support that covers their bills and commissary. Most urgently, support them and all political prisoners by continuing to do political work. They can’t get us all.
See you out there,
Cheryl Rivera
Lux Editor