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Nine of the Prairieland protesters received sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years; one received a 30-year sentence for moving a box of zines. (Photo: DFW Support Committee)

This week on CounterSpin: Are you upset about ICE agents using your tax dollars to detain and deport people because they have a quota to fill – and to kill anyone who doesn’t “comply”? Are you bothered by women losing not just the right but the ability to access abortion for whatever reason they might have? Do you care that fossil fuel-created climate disruption is rearranging the planet?  Well, my friend, you might be a terrorist.

Last September, Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) that added a whole lot of folks to a list of “domestic terrorists”. All of us are now officially, by challenging or questioning the Trump White House and their acolytes, “the enemy within.”

When Trump pushed through NSPM 7 last fall, folks like Hina Shamsi at the ACLU told us: it’s a scare tactic – “domestic terrorism organization” as applied to a wide range of groups that are, in the memo’s language “anti-americanism, anti-capitalism, anti christianity” does not create new federal crimes or powers. The president, even if it’s Trump, cannot rewrite the Constitution.

Which, Shamsi explained, doesn’t mean it isn’t scary, despite being a “fever dream of conspiracies, outright falsehoods and the president’s distorted equation of criticism of his policies by real or perceived political opponents with ‘criminal and terroristic conspiracies’.

We have to stand up where we can, how we can, right now. And right now could have started years ago but it can at the least start with getting prison time for moving zines. 

We’ll talk about the Prairieland case and what it means for you, with Dorothee Benz, who wrote recently about it all for FAIR.org