Signs you're a dangerous terrorist: using Signal, moving zines

Nobody's talking about how "terrorism" has expanded to mean, in law, armed opposition the the government. Throw in terrorism and the sentence goes up dramatically.

Is it possible to oppose the government with arms yet not be a terrorist? I'd say, yes. But I never expect to see a prosecution acknowledge that. They're even making drug smugglers into terrorists and murdering them extrajudicially.

This is hardly a new approach or development.

A decade ago, reading Linux Journal would get you flagged as being an extremist : https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4rp5l6/nsa_classifie...

In Poland during the Soviet occupation (1945-1989) people were beaten and jailed for having a copier that would be used for copying magazines and brochures

The sentences are pretty crazy but what’s with the strange understatement.

> One fired an AR-15 at the police, which goes beyond legitimate protest into inciting violence (and maybe even deliberate provocation)

The accurate statement is that he shot and wounded a police officer who he intentionally targeted according to his own testimony (where he claims he did so because he thought the cop was going to shoot his guys).

> Signs you're a dangerous terrorist: using Signal, moving zines

The accurate statement is: “hiding zines that could be considered evidence of affiliation at the request of your arrested wife”.

Listen, the sentences seem politically motivated. They’re quite long. But if you joined a protest group where the organizer shoots a policeman and you’ve all got weapons at home and then you tell people to move the material you have at home that indicates you’re part of the group then I think the convictions are pretty accurate.

This is pretty out there stuff. And I’m not going to give the benefit of the doubt to the guy who yells “get to the rifles” then gets to the rifles and shoots a policeman that he could have been ‘potentially inciting violence’ by shooting. He committed violence. And hiding the facts here does not make me sympathetic.

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/sentencing-for-8-accused-o...

> One fired an AR-15 at the police

This is what makes this different. There’s lots of gun clubs all over the place. But if a member shoots at the police (or anyone, really) they are going to get the book thrown at them and everyone associated with them who helped them, etc.

Because that changes your club from something normal to something that tried to shoot cops.

There’s a group in my town called the NFA club or something. They get their rifles out and march around neighborhoods. They stop cars. Quite scary. But they no the law and never brandish, directly threaten, etc. But if one of them ever shoots at a cop, I expext the whole group is going to jail.

> Let’s be clear: a few of the protesters were out of bounds. One fired an AR-15 at the police, which goes beyond legitimate protest into inciting violence (and maybe even deliberate provocation). I would never condone that kind of activity.

This is the crux of the issue - from the perspective of the government, this was a group of people who lead an armed terrorist attack on a government facility in order to disrupt the functioning of that facility because they held an ideological belief that the facility was immoral; and it's irrelevant that not every member of the group personally shot a cop with an AR-15, just as it wasn't relevant that Osama bin Laden didn't personally hijack any planes and crash them into buildings when the US government sent special forces to break into his compound and kill him.

> Instead, other “evidence” was used to infer that they planned violence, including this specific argument that should give everyone pause:

> “[…] including their decision to communicate and auto-delete messages on Signal, an encrypted messaging platform widely used among activists, journalists and other citizens wary of government surveillance.”

Given that the other evidence that they planned violence was that they set off fireworks outside the facility, vandalized it, and then shot a cop in the neck when the cop came to investigate the vandalism, I don't really care that the government prosecutors also considered their use of Signal as evidence that they planned violence. Frankly, if you're part of a group that is planning violence, it is a good idea to use an encrypted messaging platform like Signal that has an auto-delete feature to do that planning, the prosecutors are correct to note this.

Even though I am commited to resisting "fascism" in all it's forms,the people convicted were definitly working themselves up to do something even worse. For me there crime was to be undisaplined and they did not understand there responsibilitys while armed, which is unexcusable. If they realy wanted to engage in armed struggle against fascists, then there are plenty of places where they could voulenteer to fight irregular mercenary forces hired and equiped by companys and governments to destroy populations that have the missfortune to live on top of some oil or other extractable resource, but what they did was cosplay bieng a revolutionary in a suberban environment, and no doubt had plans to hook up for a few drinks at the club later. These people made the classic, fascist, mistake of thinking in terms of a hiarchical relationship of rights, and forgot , that everybody has rights, even a dumb ass junior cop who goes where he's told, while for all anyone knows is fielding texts from his wife ,promising that he will take the van in and get the brakes checked.

Don’t forget shipping people to foreign concentration camps for having tattoos.

This article is quite dishonest.

> Let’s be clear: a few of the protesters were out of bounds.

"out of bounds" is a nice way of putting it. Terrorism is an accurate description.

> But these sentences far outstrip anything that’s been given to anyone on the right wing: the leader of the Proud Boys, as this article notes, was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

I think the difference here is the planned terrorist activity, and condolence of violence. If the Proud Boys were doing to same sort of thing, then fair - but I cannot find in a Google search that they did.

> One protester wasn’t even present, but was sentenced to 30 years for moving some zines

> The ninth defendant, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada was not at the protest, but was convicted of corruptly concealing a document or record after prosecutors said he moved leftwing zines and other materials at the request of Rueda, his wife, after she was arrested.

Clearly it was not just "moving some vines", it was knowingly concealing evidence and attempting to prevent the course of justice.

> Instead, other “evidence” was used to infer that they planned violence, including this specific argument that should give everyone pause

An argument can be made there, all are innocent unless proven guilty. But I suspect they admitted to being fully aware and supportive of the terrorist activities. The prosecution can claim all they like, the important thing is what ends up being considered.

A reminder that the current administration was running military operations on Signal.

The ability of Texas to adhere so intensely to the idea of radical individualism while also being wholly committed to fascism at a policy level has always confused me.

When I studied Texas history in University, the textbook opened with a sentence along the lines of "Texas Government has always been characterized by incompetence and nepotism", and through that lens, I filed many of the absurdities (e.g. Greg Abbott's entire career and the "free speech area" on my university campus) under that bucket.

A couple decades haves since passed and my view has changed to see the openly racist institutions, targeted policing and zero-sum "satesmanship" at both local and state levels that forego core democratic values for "winning" (or at least lining the pockets of your donors) as something more jaded and sociopathic.

There are a lot of truly good, smart people in Texas, yet it's been an fairly openly fascist state for decades. Coming from the Bay Area and having lived in a lot of places, I've never felt like I lived in a police state more than in the DFW metroplex, although when visiting family in Northern CA, CAMP operations in Mendocino County come as a close second in terms of authoritarian vibes.

I was so confused with how many people from the valley openly aligned and invested in such a deeply corrupt state in the 2000s. Elon was unsurprising given his fashy incel leanings, but Apple's choice to build the Austin campus floored me. An office in a state where your female employees don't have reproductive rights? How do you endorse that?

You can't just look past the political rot that has defined Texas for generations with the excuse that you can buy a "Keep Austin Weird" sticker at H.E.B. The people in Austin and across the state advocating for a better future and an accountable government deserve a shoutout, but man, if you wanted to see the writing on the wall for American Democracy, all you needed to do was look at Texas anytime between 1996 and now.

It's sad because it really is beautiful country full of decent people, but it's blatantly and unjustifiably corrupt, and diametrically opposed to the core American values that it attaches to it's lifted, 9-tom, 1/2"-longer-than-the-same-model-sold-in-every-other-state pick 'em up truck, and it's gamed so hard that the people in the state will never undo it.

Texas was the test case.

Anyone who values democracy is automatically an anti-fascist.

Democracy is _inherently_ anti-fascist.

Well. It's a signal. What did you expect?