This is Andrew Jackson in 1835, ordering the US mail inspected to suppress abolitionists, asking Congress to criminalize antislavery speech, and stoking state sanctioned mobs to arrest and torture Americans who opposed slavery.
This is Stalin’s Article 58 (PDF) of the RSFSR code, where “anti-Soviet agitation” was a crime that meant whatever the interrogator needed it to mean.
This is Dennis v. United States, the 1951 McCarthy-era ruling that upheld the conviction of Americans for organizing and teaching political theory. Not for what they did. For what they taught.
This is South Africa’s Terrorism Act of 1967, which defined terrorism as anything that might endanger “law and order” and let the police hold suspects without trial.
This is Trump. Punishment is being elevated to deter all political opposition to a white police state.
America has criminalized political speech and identity again, in order to recharacterize lawful conduct. Owning a weapon, owning a book, using an app, knowing the wrong people, all of it becomes an overt act of an anti-Trump conspiracy.
To be clear, this is the exact grievance of the KKK, and of the January 6 mob. Prosecuted for their associations, their beliefs, their plans, they called it tyranny. Now they hold the power and have made it into their application of tyranny. Their violent attempts to replace democracy with dictatorship by overturning an election go pardoned, so that democracy will end. The people who oppose dictatorship draw harsh prison terms for having a legally bought gun and a printed paper. The standard that was angrily rejected, now the radical activist right-wing imposes on everyone else. Not an accident. Corruption.
…the biggest reason nothing in America functions in the public interest: rampant corruption…
The “agitator” label fits anything and everything the white police state decides on their whim, exactly as it did under Jackson, Stalin, McCarthy, and apartheid.
That’s how nine people in Texas just drew 30 to 100 years in jail for a Fourth of July protest at an ICE detention center.
Is a 30 year prison sentence for reading material the America you recognize? It’s very Jacksonian, and thus why Edgar Allan Poe sold so many copies of his 1843 guide to cryptoanalysis: “The Gold Bug“.
Poe’s cryptography from 1840 to 1841 was a newspaper challenge daring readers to send ciphers he would crack, which led to his 1841 essay “A Few Words on Secret Writing.” “The Gold-Bug” then became the most widely read work of his lifetime.
