The FBI opened its first file on the NAACP in 1941 and did not close it for forty years, and the men who maintained it were not ideologues, they were bureaucrats, they had supervisors and form numbers and procedures, and the procedure was the point, because you do not need a villain when you have a process, and the process looks enough like order that the country can watch it happen and file it under news and go back to work, which is roughly what we are doing now, while a mechanical engineer named Zachary Evetts begins the first of his fifty years in federal prison for watching fireworks go off outside a detention center in Texas on the Fourth of July.

Evetts was one of nine activists convicted in March stemming from a noise demonstration at ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility near Dallas last Fourth of July, where protesters set off fireworks, vandalized government vehicles, and broke a security camera, and where one demonstrator, Benjamin Song, fired an AR-15 and struck a police officer in the shoulder, an officer who survived and who, it emerged at trial, had his weapon drawn and pointed at the back of someone running away when Song fired. Song received one hundred years. Savanna Batten, who arrived separately, had no role in the planning, and left when facility guards asked her to, received fifty. Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, who was not at the protest and moved some zines and leftist literature at his wife’s request after she was arrested, received thirty. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, was convicted of seditious conspiracy for organizing an assault on the United States Capitol to overturn a presidential election and received twenty-two years. Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, who coordinated the January 6th attack from a hotel room, received eighteen. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, called the Prairieland sentences swift and uncompromising justice, and the country filed it under “news”.

The charge is material support for terrorism, a phrase designed to sound like what it is not. Material support does not require that you supported terrorism, intended to support terrorism, or that terrorism resulted from anything you did. It requires that you provided assistance in connection with one of a list of enumerated crimes, among them the riot statute, which the government also charged here, so that prosecutors could charge riot, charge material support predicated on the riot, convict on both, and then announce the convictions as proof that antifa was a terrorist organization, the designation laundering the charge and the charge confirming the designation, a circle so elegant in its dishonesty that you have to read it twice before the floor drops out. Zachary Evetts is a terrorist because he provided material support for terrorism because he stood in a parking lot with a firework, and what keeps that sentence standing is not its logic but the fifty years welded to it, which function as the conclusion of an argument that was never up for consideration.

This statute has been here for a while. It was tested, refined, and made legally durable on the people the national security state has always used as its first application: Palestinian solidarity activists, Arab and Muslim communities, anyone whose grief over Palestinian deaths the government found useful to reframe as danger. The Holy Land Foundation gave money to Palestinian orphans and its leaders received sixty-five years between them on material support charges. Sami Al-Arian ran a think tank. Muhammad Salah was tortured by the Israeli government into a confession that American prosecutors carried across the Atlantic and into a Chicago courtroom. What the government learned from those prosecutions it has been applying ever since, to Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian Columbia graduate student abducted from his own naturalization appointment last year and handed a deportation order to Jordan this month, to Mahmoud Khalil, who spent months in federal custody missing the birth of his son for graduating from Columbia and attending protests, to Rümeysa Öztürk, detained for weeks over an op-ed in a student newspaper, because the apparatus was always going to be pointed somewhere else eventually, and the somewhere else was never going to know that until it arrived at its own door and found the tools already warm from use.

What the Trump administration did in September was issue the permission slip which was an executive order designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization, followed three days later by a national security memorandum directing federal agencies to investigate and prosecute protesters engaging in anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and anti-Americanism, none of those terms defined, because the terms are not the mechanism, the mechanism is the material support statute and the riot charge and a judge willing to stack sentences consecutively, and the undefined terms exist so that the mechanism can reach whoever the government decides it reaches on the day it decides to reach them. The Department of Justice charged fifteen Minneapolis residents this month with felony conspiracy to impede federal officers, and the indictment devotes ninety-four pages to cataloguing their offenses, among them posting on Facebook that we need to become ungovernable, attending a meeting at a DSA office, wearing a hat commemorating a Sioux Nation labor organizer from the 1934 Minneapolis strikes, possessing a bullhorn, giving someone a radio, and including a devil emoji in a Signal message about a flat tire on a Homeland Security vehicle. The US Attorney, when reporters pressed him on whether any of the fifteen had injured an officer, said that was not the measure of a serious federal crime, and perhaps he is right, because if it were, the indictment would have very little to work with, and the indictment is the point.

Because what is being built here is not a legal framework, exactly, though it wears law’s clothes and speaks law’s language and is administered by people with titles and offices and form numbers and procedures. What is being built is a price list, and the prices are being set high enough to make the conduct unthinkable rather than merely illegal, so that the organizing and the meeting and the flyer and the firework outside the detention center in the dark become things people calculate against fifty years and decide they cannot afford, and the calculation happens alone, quietly, and the government never has to make another arrest because the arrests it has already made are doing the work. This is not a new method. It is the method, the one the FBI filed under COINTELPRO and the one the McCarthy era ran on school teachers, updated for a moment when the charging document lists devil emojis and the press release calls it counterterrorism, and the update is less a change than a clarification, a government deciding openly what previous governments preferred to do quietly, which is its own kind of escalation, the announcement that the pretense is no longer necessary.

The people in the Prairieland detention center on the Fourth of July, and the ones in the 418,000-square-foot warehouse the Department of Homeland Security is retrofitting in Surprise, Arizona, one mile from a public high school whose student body is more than sixty percent Hispanic, are the answer to what happens when the price list does its work and the organizing stops. The Surprise city council has refused to oppose the federal plan and will not meet with its own constituents to discuss it, and community activists have filed a petition to dissolve the city and transfer its governance to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, a democratic impulse so basic it would be unremarkable anywhere the democracy were functioning, and which here requires 70,000 signatures in six months because that is what is left when the institution meant to represent you decides you are not worth the trouble. A man named Memo has been held for nine months with no criminal record, and his five-year-old child visits him through a fence on weekends, and the mayor of Surprise has determined that this is a federal matter and referred concerned residents to a website.

The Prairieland sentences exceed every sentence handed down for January 6th because the January 6th defendants were attempting to seize power and the Prairieland defendants were attempting to question it, and in the accounting of the current American state those are not equivalent offenses, the second being graver, because power can absorb a challenge to its results more easily than it can absorb a challenge to its premises, and the premise being challenged outside that detention center in Alvarado, Texas, on the Fourth of July, with fireworks and a crowd of people who believed that the humans inside the wire deserved to hear that someone was still out there, was the premise that the people inside the wire did not matter, which is the load-bearing premise of the entire project, the one the sentences are designed to protect. Savanna Batten left when she was asked to leave and received fifty years, and a federal judge told her she had committed an assault on democracy, and we are expected to read that and not notice what it says about whose democracy is being defended and from whom.

The FBI opened its file on the NAACP and the NAACP survived and the FBI’s reputation did not, and that is the version of this story that gets told in retrospect, the one where the institution looks small against the movement it tried to bury, but that retrospect is purchased at enormous cost by people who paid it in years and careers and lives, and the cost is not visible from the comfortable distance at which history is usually read. We are not at a comfortable distance. We are inside the file, watching it being opened, reading the press release in which the acting attorney general announces that swift and uncompromising justice has been served, and deciding, each of us alone, whether we are the kind of country that sentences a woman to fifty years for leaving when she was asked to leave, or whether we are still capable of being surprised by that, and what we are prepared to do with the surprise before it too gets filed under news and forgotten.

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