Latest / Gimme a Break! / Fight state repression of anti-ICE activists! Support Prairieland defendants and Minnesota 15!

Transcript

Fight state repression of anti-ICE activists! Support Prairieland defendants and Minnesota 15! · Gimme a Break!

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: Hey, my name is Mari Salah Rada.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_04: Folks call me Mari.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_04: I am a prairie land defendant being held in Johnson County, still in segregated housing.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_04: Um I have a poem to bring in a special time coming up this year, and it is simply titled My Inmate Number and Another Identifying Date.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so this is 2025-0-2018 1017-1992.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_04: This revolution around the sun, still counting days, uprooted and secluded, choosing where my focus goes.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_04: Trying to know how long my hair grows, trying to sharpen my claws and unclench my jaws, trying to nurture magic naturally.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_04: Behind these bars, I'm working cellularly.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_04: They can't recondition this with captivity, how rich it is to think differently.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_04: An inheritance that feels like glitter, softness others reject, and the defiance necessary for living out our wildest dreams.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_04: I choose joy in a place birds nest among barbed wire and sing songs of freedom to the morning sky.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_04: Resistance will always be on my mind.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_08: Hello.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_03: And the audio you heard at the beginning is of Marisela Rueda, which Prison Radio recorded from the prison she's currently in.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: She is one of the Prairie Land defendants who have collectively been sentenced to over 500 years in prison for an anti-ICE sound demo.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_03: On March 13th, after a three-week show trial in Fort Worth, Texas, nine anti-ICE activists were found guilty of, quote, material support to terrorism, quote, conspiracy, and other bogus charges.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_03: The witch hunt against these activists is the front line in Trump's campaign to outlaw anyone who opposes government policy.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_03: And the same government that annihilates school children any brands leftist activists here as quote terrorists.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_03: And the left really needs to fight to free these defendants, and I'll read their names.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_03: This is a precedent-setting case of government repression against the left and anti-ICE activists in particular.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: So this episode is focused on the Prairie Land case as well as the Minnesota 15, who are anti-ICE activists and union members facing felony charges of conspiracy for their role in organizing protests and fighting against ICE attacks in Minneapolis.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: And the fight against ICE is national, of course.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: And just here in New York City, ICE shot Oscar Belgal.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_03: And there was a swell of anger, not just against ICE, but also against Mamdani and his NYPD for being complicit in letting ICE carry on.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_03: ICE raids and abductions have increased across the country.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_03: So defense of immigrants and anti-ICE protesters is really a central issue of this moment.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_03: So here to discuss the significance of these cases, we have John Piper with the Partisan Defense Committee, and he was in Fort Worth for the Prairie Land trial, and he's also organizing a United Front rally in New York City on Saturday, the 24th of October.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_03: Also with us is Hannah, who's part of the support group for the Prairie Land defendants, as well as Cam, who's one of the defendants in the Minnesota 15 case.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_03: So welcome everyone.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_03: So we think these cases are key for the entire left, but also that the DSA should do more about these cases.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_03: It's the biggest socialist organization, and they should really be fighting to free the Prairie Land defendant and to drop the charges against the Minnesota 15.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_03: I just got an email, as did every member of the DSA from Serena, an national leader based in Texas, and she describes how Texas state troopers abducted DSA-endorsed candidate for Austin City Council, Misael Ramos, while he was out walking his dog.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: And police apparently targeted him because he protested ISIS shooting of Wilbur Garces Perez, a Venezuelan immigrant who was targeted while driving for DoorDash.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_03: And her email said, this is our new normal.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_03: While immigrant families are ripped apart, organizers are punished for daring to speak out against ISIS cruelty.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: But the email did not say anything about the Prairie Land defendants.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: And this will not do.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_03: We have to fight on the basis that an injury to one is an injury to all, and understanding that all of these cases are connected.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I will note that the government is harassing the DSA itself right now.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_03: So even more reason to fight like hell for freedom of the Prairie Land.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a number of left caucuses in the DSA that have taken up this cause, which is very good.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I believe the chapters in Texas and Minneapolis have also supported the respective cases.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_03: But we really think that these cases need to be a national priority campaign.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_03: And so to help motivate why that is, we're gonna start with John.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe you could give context for the repression that's going on against anti-ICE protesters.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: In the last few years, we've seen a whole wave of repression also against pro-Palestine activists.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: And this is also connected to the anti-ICE repression.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: I believe a Lekka Cordia was being held at Prairie Land at the same time this protest was happening.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_03: And I think she was held there for a year.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_03: But, anyways, maybe you could explain the context and then maybe the Prairie Land case itself.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, even before Trump, there was increased repression against the pro-Palestine encampments on the campuses and demonstrations in defense of Gaza against genocide.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: We saw under Biden the prosecution of the black nationalist Uharu III for speaking out against the war against Russia and fighting for black liberation.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: They were convicted of being registered agents because they took Russia's side in the war.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: Then Trump has made it a key point to increase repression against the left, which in his view includes anybody from George Soros to anarchists and communists.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: He went after the Palestine protesters, he went after the campuses that were allowing the encampments to exist at all.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then he went after the anti-ICE protesters as partisan of unleashing the racist attacks of ICE in Los Angeles and in uh Texas.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now, uh in the context of all this, some activists in Dallas Fort Worth wanted to do a noise demonstration on the 4th of July at an ICE detention facility outside of Dallas called Prairie Land in rural Texas.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: And they set off some fireworks to show the detainees that they were not alone, that there were people that cared about them, and actually got cheers from the detainees who were watching from their windows.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: But then a cop pulled up and pulled out a gun and was about to shoot one of the protesters.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: A cop got injured with a minor injury.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: And as a result, all of these activists were charged with conspiring to murder the cop.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Then in uh the fall, when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Trump put through his executive order declaring that Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization, that anybody that's against Americanism, against the church, against the family is a terrorist that needs to be stopped.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: This executive order then became the basis for charging the Prairie Land defendants with all being terrorists and conspiring to give material support to terrorism, and they were rushed to a three-week show trial in February and March and convicted.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: And they were sentenced to, in Champagne Song's case, a hundred years in prison, for Marisella Rueda, 70 years, and the other defendants got anywhere from 15 to 50 years in prison just for going to a protest.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: This is an outrage, it's an attack on all our rights, and we all need to fight to free the prairie land defendants.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, thank you.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so maybe Hannah, if you wanted to explain what is a noise demo for some people who might not know what that is.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_05: So noise demonstrations have a long history in prisoner solidarity movements through throughout history.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_05: Basically, you go to a place of confinement where people are being held against their will, and you let them know that they're not forgotten and that they're not alone, and that we out here are fighting for them through the walls and that they matter because they're in a situation where they're constantly being dehumanized, where they're constantly being subjugated to violence and deprival.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_05: And to know that people are out there for you is really important.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_05: And there is also a long history locally of noise demonstrations.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_05: Afia Sidiki is a local prison um political prisoner at FMC Carswell, and there has been quite a few um noise demonstrations there in solidarity with her, and she's in solitary confinement.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_05: And during the Prairie Land trial, we went to the jail, and the same words that they were saying to the people in that concentration camp, you are not forgotten, you are not alone.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_05: We were saying to them, and those same feelings and expressions of solidarity, and they hurt us just like the people inside the concentration camp heard them, and we're gonna keep doing our best to make sure that they never feel forgotten and that they're not alone and that they come home.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_05: Like as the chant goes, you are not forgotten, you are not alone.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_05: We will fight to bring you home.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_05: That's what a noise demonstration is and why it's so important.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_03: So I think that was really useful for disabusing people of all the lies that have been said about what happened outside Prairie Land.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_03: In this case, there's been a lot of liberal hysteria over the question of guns at the protest.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's a big reason liberals are squeamish about this case.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_03: But can you explain why in Texas in particular you're kind of crazy not to have any means of defense, especially at protests?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_05: So I have a long answer for this.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, okay, good.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, so we have to defend each other and our community some way.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_05: DFW has dozens of fascist cells and some of the most dangerous cops and gels in the country.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_05: Guns at protests are quintessential in the South, especially in Texas.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_05: It's part of a culture down here.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_05: Everyone has a gun.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_05: After all, they, the fascists in all its forms, don't want us to have guns.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_05: And you know why all these gun restrictions happened?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_05: It's not because of mass shootings, not the KKK.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_05: It was white girls and fascists alike afraid of the Black Panthers.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_05: The government has never wanted non-white people to own and display guns as beacons of revolutionary potential and material possibility of community defense.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_05: And so one of the things that I'm particularly interested in and passionate about is the history here in DFW of armed community defense.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_05: The first time I saw it was during the 2020 George Floyd uprisings.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_05: I saw black people with guard dogs and rifles surrounded by pigs on rooftops and white supremacist counter-protesters across the street.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_05: And it was the most radical thing I'd ever seen as a young leftist.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_05: It was beautiful, it was Texan as fuck, and I felt safe.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_05: Black people have never stopped being murdered by pigs and racists.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_05: So they took up arms again, like the Black Panthers.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_05: Armed groups later protected the reproductive justice protests and drag shows across the Metroplex.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_05: So it's really important to consider that when we're looking at the Prairie Land case.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_05: What Champagne Song did bringing rifles to a vulnerable situation was normal as fuck for DFW protesting.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_05: Here is an individual who went to hundreds of protests armed, embracing solidarity, collective care, and community defense.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_05: And nothing reckless ever happened.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that was really powerful, actually.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks for that.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_03: This case is widely recognized as the first major federal test case prosecuted under Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, NSPM7.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_03: Do you want to talk a little about the significance of that?
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_05: Well, yeah, it was it was hard when that came out, when the indictments came out after Charlie Kirkchut and everything, and seeing my friends were being designated as terrorists.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_05: So I think it's really important to consider and to realize how this affects all of us, that it affects the Prairie Land defendants in every aspect of their life right now.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_05: They all have that terrorism designation.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_05: Even the people with the least amount of charges to the most amount of charges, all of them have that on them.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_05: It's disabling to their cases because it's in Texas and in the federal government, it's so difficult to argue against terrorism cases because terrorism is a made-up concept.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_05: It is made up by fascist governments, it's made up by colonial regimes.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_05: It is a designation given to people who say no to the bullshit, who say no, I'm not going to let you kidnap people from their communities, from their families.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_05: I'm not going to let you steal our resources.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_05: I'm not going to let you steal our land.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_05: It has been used against indigenous people, it has been used against Palestinians.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_05: It has been used against South Asians both after 9-11 and during present colonial periods.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_05: And so when we look at this terrorism designation, we also have to look at the history.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_05: And we have to look at the history locally.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_05: I'm not sure you've heard of the Holy Land 5, but they were also local to DFW.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_05: And they were declared terrorists for having a foundation that gives money to Palestinian families.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_05: And that's what they got their terrorism designation for.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_05: And there is still somebody who is serving a near life sentence for being part of an organization that gave money to Palestinian families.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_05: And that was local.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_05: And so when we're talking about this case and talking about NSPM7, none of this is new.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_05: There are communities all around the world that have faced terrorism charges for just existing.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_05: And now it's a lot of people that are marginalized in different ways.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_05: And now white people, when they stand up against fascist regimes and against neocolonialism, we're also facing that because we're doing that out of love and solidarity.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_05: And and solidarity has its risks.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_05: And going forward with the NSPM union, we're uh it sounds super fucking cool and necessary.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_05: And like we need to be in this together and recognize that the we're all in this struggle together for for something better than the shit we've been given.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_03: For sure.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_03: John, do you want to talk a little bit?
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_03: This has a long history in this country of leftists and fighters for black rights and women's everything being labeled as a quote terrorist.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, it's 140 years since the Haymarket martyrs who were simply fighting for uh the eight-hour day were falsely accused of terrorism and executed in Chicago.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: There were the Red Scares and Palmer raids after World War I.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: There was the prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Smith Act that was used against the Trotskyists and the Communist Party in the 40s and 50s, and then the massive COINTELPR campaign by the FBI to disrupt the left and the Black Liberation struggle that led to over 30 Black Panthers being executed by the FBI and the cops.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's uh cases like Mumia Abu Jamal, the former Black Panther that's still on life without parole in Pennsylvania, um whose committee has endorsed the rally we're doing.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's a constant campaign against the labor movement, against the black liberation struggle, and against the left by the government, and it's something we need to fight now before it goes further.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's totally Orwellian, of course, because who are the real terrorists here?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_03: The biggest terrorists is the US government, US imperialism.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so okay, maybe Hannah, if you want to tell us a little more about the defendants, give listeners a sense of who they are.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_05: Well, they are some of the most amazing people I've ever met.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_05: Um I've known Champagne for six-ish years, and off and on we just kept meeting again and again until we cemented a a friendship.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_05: And I have known some of the other defendants for for less time.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_05: But in the time that I did get to know them, they are just beautiful.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_05: Rowan is so gentle and so loving, and like literally, there is not a straight animal that will not be loved by Rowan and be taken in and taken care of.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_05: I remember the very beginning of our friendship going to Rowan's house.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_05: We were spending the night for something, and Rowan was taking care of these baby cats that they had found and literally just calling up everybody, trying to find resources to help these cats and bring them back to health.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_05: And sadly, they it seemed they had a genetic disorder and they were really sick and they passed away, but during their final days, they were loved and they were held and they were cared for.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_05: And that care for these creatures is what Rowan like symbolizes in my head.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_05: Champagne has always been there for people, even even inside now.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, they're finding ways of being there for the people inside.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_05: One of the things that me and several of the defendants were working on, and several of them were supporting me on it, was uh mass mutual aid self-and-social therapy.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_05: Because we were trying to imagine alternatives for what care could look like, for what mental health could look like, for what responding to crisis could look like.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_05: And that was the work that we were trying to do.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_05: And now Champagne is trying to do that for the people in solitary confinement or in the segregation cells around them.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_05: Marty is the poet.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_05: And I mean, she would resist labels in any way possible, but she moved with love and commitment.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_05: And we need to be standing with these beautiful people and doing everything in our power to make sure that their needs and their demands are met.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_05: Because they were always the people that showed up for you out here, showed up for people out here.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_05: Like there's so many times that they were there for people, including me, and and uh now it's just our time to to give that back to them and and help the world realize that we're at a fucking loss, but we're rebuilding and we're gonna keep fighting for them and we're gonna make sure that there's a soft spot for them to land when they do come home and that they're taken care of while they're in there and when they come home when they get out.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that was a very moving picture to give a sense of how much of a travesty this is, this show trial and framing these people as terrorists, and just how actually insane that is.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_03: Mari has poetry that's on prison radio that uh listeners can listen to.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_03: It's very good poetry, actually.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: Many of these uh defendants are artists, poets, writers, uh printers, the sodos printed zines.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: Des uh was arrested just for carrying zines in his car and sentenced to 30 years for having anarchist zines in a box in his car.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's what they're calling terrorism.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's really atrocious, this whole case.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_03: Now we're gonna move to the Minnesota 15.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_08: I think Edward was gonna introduce all 15 of the defendants in the Minnesota 15 case are union members.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_08: They are leaders in their union locals.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_08: They were part of defending immigrant neighbors against Trump's Operation Metro Surge earlier this year, uh, when ICE agents descended on Minneapolis and terrorized the city.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_08: Just to remind people, it's not even been a year since ICE murdered Renee Good and Alex Predi.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_08: There was mass anger throughout the country, and in Minneapolis, of course.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_08: Tens of thousands of people came out on one of the coldest days that I've ever seen.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_08: And it really showed there's a lot of potential for the working class to take the reins.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_08: Actually, be an active factor in fighting back against Trump repression and retaliation to organizing against ICE and this massive mobilization that the government put in Minneapolis.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_08: The government slapped a bunch of bogus charges on the Minnesota 15.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_08: They're trying to scare people so they don't protest against this tyrannical government abuse at the hands of ICE and CPB and all of these other alphabet agencies that the government uses to intimidate its opponents.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_08: So maybe, Cam, you could describe what happened, the surveillance, the witch hunt that's going on around this case.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I'd be happy to.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_07: And thanks for having me on.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_07: And as I talk, I'm probably going to echo a lot of what Hannah said, and I really appreciate a lot of what we heard out of our Prairie Land comrades.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_07: And uh can't reiterate enough that our collective solidarity is instrumental to our collective survival and making this world a better place.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_07: We will not get anywhere unless we stand with each other.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_07: To give you a little background, Minneapolis has been in a bit of a pressure cooker uh socially for quite some time.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_07: Even as far as resistance goes, some of the most intense uh resistance to colonization in American history happened here in Minnesota with the Dakota Uprising.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_07: Um and beyond that, into the 1930s, you had this really infamous uh trucker strike in which Unionists were killed by the state.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_07: There was a general strike.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_07: It's really famous in the city's history.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_07: We also are the birthplace of the American Indian movement.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, we're the birthplace of anti-racist action.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_07: And over the last 10 years or so, we've really seen ever since the uh the street execution of Jamar Clark and the occupation of the Fourth Precinct uh 10 years ago, which lasted a month and accumulated during the Black Lives Matter movement.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_07: It really galvanized people in a more uh militant direction.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_07: It became very clear to people that our politicians are doing nothing uh to help us and that these police are still murdering us in the streets uh without any justice, without any accountability, and without any meaningful policy change.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_07: And then this just kept happening in Minneapolis.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, there were many cases, but the next huge one was Philando Castile, who is a cafeteria worker that was murdered in front of his children while he was driving and pulled over for a routine traffic stop.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_07: There was, and then of course, six years ago now, the George Floyd uprising.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_07: We all saw the videos of George Floyd during during the COVID era.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_07: I live six blocks away from George Floyd Square, and when that happened, everybody in the city knew it was on.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_07: This place had already been a pressure cooker, so much anger had been built up, nothing had changed.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_07: When that happened, the city exploded into anger.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_07: We had the week of the thousand arsons, where a fair portion of the city was burning.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_07: And eventually, after protracted uh street battles with the police and looting, uh, the third precinct was burned down in Minneapolis, which ultimately resulted in Derek Chauvin finally being charged with murder.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_07: Um, it took the city taking down the police station to even get that small concession.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_07: Our Democratic governor, of course, declared the National Guard on us.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, state forces were were used to converge onto dissent here in Minneapolis.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_07: There was extreme brutality during that time period, and uh, it just went on for months.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_07: And the people here got really good at organizing amongst themselves.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_07: That first week, people in my neighborhood took over a hotel that was owned by a local pedophile.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, we just housed the homeless.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_07: 30 years of Democrat promises of ending the homeless, and once our community had control of our neighborhood, we were able to end it in a night.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_07: We had neighborhood assemblies.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_07: Essentially, South Minneapolis remains somewhat of an autonomous zone with police afraid to go in for the better part of a year.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_07: When I look at MetroSurge, it seems really obvious to me that this was less about immigration and less about rooting out fraud or whatever their bullshit excuse was.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_07: It was directly about political reprisal about a city that refused to bend the knee to authoritarians and was willing to use a wide array of tactics in order to push off state forces.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_07: And so the state wanted to come back and they wanted to pacify Minneapolis.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_07: And I think this is kind of uh the entry point to Operation Metro Surge.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_07: We have the announcement of the NSPM 7 last September, in which they're declaring anybody labeled an anti-fascist, a terrorist.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_07: With that in mind, and with also needing to expand their white supremacist programs underneath ICE in the concentration camps, Metro Surge kind of served a dual purpose.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_07: Metro Surge was a surge of, at its height, more than 5,000 immigration agents, which is by far the largest in the country's history.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_07: To give you an idea, the Minneapolis police force is less than 600.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, so ICE and federal agents far outnumbered local law enforcement on our streets during the period of Metro Surge, and it was very much military-style occupation.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_07: And actually hearing from a number of our immigrant neighbors, they were telling us that this reminds them of the war zones that they had fled from home.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_07: A lot of Somali neighbors were talking about this.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_07: I have an Irish neighbor who grew up in Belfast during the troubles, and he said, I recognize this.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_07: It was checkpoints.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_07: Like, to give you an idea, too, like it's the entire city of Minneapolis.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_07: There is violence happening almost on a daily basis during Metro Surge, which is happening from December all the way up and through March, I think is when they kind of officially started to push back.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_07: And during that time, they're running these immigration operations, but really it's just wholesale brutality against the people of Minneapolis.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_07: Even when I wasn't at demonstrations, I was just working and I was like leaving a parking lot, and some ICE agents drove past and just were shooting rubber bullets at anybody they saw on the street, tossing tear gas canisters out of their moving vehicles just to fuck with us.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_07: Obviously, this culminated in a large-scale resistance, and it got worse and worse.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_07: And then Renee Good was killed just blocks away from my house.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_07: And obviously, when we see this woman who is is herself a queer refugee from a conservative state, um, who had come to this community and had been a legal observer, just get executed point blank in the streets.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_07: There was another response to that.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_07: We all showed up at the memorial site, and the local police running cover under the local Democrats brutalized us for hours while they protected ICE.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_07: And we we continued to see this.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_07: A week before Alex Predi's murder, there was the shooting of Julio Soso Cellis in northside Minneapolis, and that turned into a wide-scale riot.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_07: The entire community of North Minneapolis was incredibly brave.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_07: It was an exchange of fireworks on both sides, from what I'm to understand, for hours, and it resulted in ICE actually retreating and losing half a dozen of their vehicles, which were searched.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_07: People discovered classified documents in the vehicles.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_07: And I think it's important for people to realize that when we look at the deportation numbers that were happening in Minneapolis at the time, right?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_07: When Julio Soso Cellus was shot back in January 18th, deportation numbers were at their height.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_07: We were looking at 250 people being deported a day.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_07: The following day after the riot in Northside, those deportation numbers dropped to less than 120, and they never returned to those numbers again.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_07: So I really think the people on Northside gave ICE enough of a bloody nose that it made them really reconsider.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_07: And it made them take more of the heat off of our immigrant neighbors and put it more onto local resistance.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_07: And then, of course, on January 23rd, we had the first general strike in generations here in Minneapolis, and it was the accumulation of a dream, right?
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_07: It's something I've thought about ever since I first became a baby anarchist when I was 15.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_07: And it was incredible.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_07: There was multi-pronged approaches, there were workers' assemblies that had led up to this, planning this out, and everybody worked together.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_07: We had a diversity of tactics and a lot of people who had different ideas of what that should look like.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_07: But instead of arguing with each other and trying to perfect each other's plans, we just kind of let everybody do what they thought that they were good at.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_07: And we worked in collaboration with each other.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_07: And that really led to facilitating the general strike.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_07: I think too, there's some other things happening there.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_07: After the George Floyd uprising, local unions had really been making pushes for years towards general strike infrastructure.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_07: So it might have been catching lightning in a bottle a little bit, but we did have the bottle on hand before that.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_07: And on top of it, the majority of our immigrant brothers and sisters in this city were not going to work.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_07: They were terrified for their lives, hiding in their homes.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_07: And so the general strike, in a lot of ways, was just realizing a broader reality of what the unions were already facing.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_07: And so with that and some agitation from the rank and file, a lot of agitation from the rank and file unions, we were able to get union leadership on board of a day of no work, no school, no shopping.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_07: That also resulted in 60 major corporations here in Minnesota sending a letter to Trump being, you gotta stop this.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_07: We're losing money.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_07: The workers are getting agitated and organized.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_07: We can't deal with this.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_07: And the very following day, most of us would say in retaliation, Alex Predy was murdered in the street.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_07: Um, this was only blocks away from where Renee Good was killed on Nicolet Avenue, what we call Eat Street here in Minneapolis.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_07: And uh Alex Pready was a legal observer.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_07: He was defending an unarmed woman who was being brutally pepper sprayed by several ICE agents.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_07: He put himself in front of her and they ended up uh shooting him multiple times, like eight or nine times, just an absolute execution.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_07: Alex Pready was a VA critical ER nurse.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_07: He was a conceal carrier, and so apparently, as soon as they saw his holstered legally held gun, they just decided to open up their clips on him.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_07: Um, and that resulted in a probably an eight-hour battle with the police, who again were called in on behalf of Democrats so that they could protect ICE and brutalize our community for hours on end.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_07: Tons and tons of tear gas, tons and tons of rubber bullets.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_07: I got my finger broken by a rubber bullet intended by for my face.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_07: They just unleashed everything they had and we forced them out of the neighborhood.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_07: Tim Walls, our local Democratic governor and a former high school teacher of mine.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: Tear gas waltz.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_07: Tear gas waltz, he's probably arrested more protesters than any other governor in U.S.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_07: history.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_07: He once again sick the National Guard on us, put up cordons around the area, prevented people from going in and supporting us.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_07: Um and so we see this long layer of ice brutality with democratic collaborators and enablers who are essentially running cover for them and feeding us a bowl of shit and telling us it tastes great.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_07: And yeah, so after that, really what was characterized by the resistance here mostly was uh the rapid response networks.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_07: Um there was a massive decentralized network of people working on signal loops.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_07: There was as many as like a thousand people on a signal loop.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_07: So many people were in it that just my neighborhood of Powderhorn like had a dozen of those thousand-person loops, basically.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_07: Everybody and their grandmother was on these loops.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_07: Um, and we had people who were doing a counter-surveillance program, a legal counter-surveillance program called Whipple Watch, which was stationed outside of the main base of operations for ice here in Minnesota in the upper Midwest, which is the Henry Whipple building, located in Fort Snelling, which is also a historically horrible colonial site where genocide and concentration camps happened.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_07: So it's continuing in that present function.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_07: Whipple Watch would be observing, recording license plates, and following ice movements outside of Whipple, and they would be relaying that information to dispatchers in the rapid response groups.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_07: The rapid response groups would go out, they would protect schools, hospitals, critical nodes of infrastructure from ice.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_07: And anytime ice got in, it got to a point where our response time was under three minutes citywide.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_07: And the state talks about extensively about how effective it was against them, especially the decentralized nature of it.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_07: The fact that there were so many people working autonomously, but in collaboration with each other made it impossible to really track.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_07: And it's ultimately these tactics that resulted in the retreat of Metro Surge.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_07: Shortly after that, June 16th is when my house was raided at 6 a.m.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_07: with a SWAT team and a battering ram, and four or 13 of my other co-defendants uh had been raided that morning.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_07: And uh we were charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers with intent of violence, which carries up to six years in prison.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_07: Some of my other co-defendants are facing accelerated charges, some of them are facing interstate stalking for following ICE across state lines.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_07: Some of them are accused of assault on an officer for what's essentially a car accident that ICE caused.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_07: There's a lot of ridiculous claims within the indictments, but yeah, I guess that's kind of that in a nutshell.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_07: Sorry for the long explanation.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: No, that was useful.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: One thing that struck me, there was mass surveillance that has been disclosed where the feds were infiltrating the activists in Minneapolis, uh, going to their meetings, getting into their signal chats, taking their license plates, and so forth.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then to get this indictment, the prosecutors actually went to the grand jury with this chart claiming there was a conspiracy between the AFL CIO, various anarchists, a socialist alternative.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty much anybody any of the defendants had ever spoken to was part of the conspiracy.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_07: My mixed martial arts group called Left Jab was included.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_07: A local free bike collective called the Grease Pit was included.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_03: In both these cases, trans activists have been in particular targeted and mistreated by the state.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_03: That's a really important component here, and part of our defense here is in particular advocating for defense of trans prisoners.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_03: Did you want to speak on that, Sam Hannah?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so there are four prairie land defendants that are on the trans spectrum.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_05: And that was weaponized in court during the trial.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_05: Again and again.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_05: Megan and Autumn were constantly dead named and misgendered throughout the whole trial.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_05: It was so fucking disgusting and devastating.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_05: And eventually the judge originally was like, you gotta gender them correctly, basically.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_05: It seemed kind of clout chasy, and then he never enforced it.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_05: They just kept doing it and they kept being violent in their language.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_05: And one of the during the Void Dyer, which is where you question the jury and shit, where and and this trial for the actual jury selection for because there was a mistrial, um, the judge chose the questions from a list of questions that the prosecution and the defense submitted.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_05: And so two of the questions that were asked were really disturbing because they do they deal with like biases that exist very much very presently in the South.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_05: That one of the questions was, do you believe that trans people are more violent?
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_05: And another question was like, Do you believe that trans people should be allowed to own guns?
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_05: And so it is some crazy Darvo shit.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_05: Here is a population of people that are incredibly marginalized, that are that are sometimes kicked out of their homes by their families, that are criminalized out on the streets, that have immense amount of violence enacted upon them.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_05: There are so many trans women that have been killed and that are still being killed, and that have a higher rate of being criminalized.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_05: And you are trying to impose upon them violence.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_05: It's trying to claim that they're the violent ones when we live in a society that is inhospitable to trans existence and that existing as as a trans person is a rebellion and a resistance all on its own.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_05: Rowan was consistently misgendered throughout throughout court documents, and then all of them were.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_05: She had tried to pass a law that would make it so that it would be impossible for courts to use people's gender identities against them during trials.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_05: She had tried to pass that back in like 2024, and obviously didn't go through because we're in this fucking hellhole and nothing's ever going to get better until we make it better.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_05: The trial was a show trial, and there was never a possibility that it was going to be a fair trial for them.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_05: And a big part of that was the weaponization of queerness and the criminalization of queerness.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_05: It's still fucked up.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_05: People are being deprived of their HRT, they are being in prison right now.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_05: In prison right now and being and being misgendered and being kept in like the out trans women.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_05: And for the most part, at when they were at FMC in that big prison where where they were housed with 100 mostly cis men, their fellow incarcerated people were very protective of them, were very respectful of them.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_05: It was the guards that were misgendering them.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_05: It was the guards that were depriving them of the things of the medicine that they need and of their gender-affirming care.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_05: There were, you know, a few cases that Autumn went in public about like of being sexually harassed by another incarcerated person.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_05: But uh for the most part, it's the guards that that dehumanize trans people in in jails and prisons, and it's fucking awful.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_05: And it's um just really important to support the defendants right now.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_05: Um they're going through hell.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_05: And trans people should own guns.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_05: There's there's a zine called Yeah, there's yeah, like, and obviously, like, and and there are a lot of cases around the country where trans people are being criminalized for defending themselves.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_05: And yeah, read zines.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_05: There's a zine called Queers with Guns.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_05: It might have popped up in the trial, so many zines popped up in the trial.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_03: No, that's really important, and also why we have to really fight very hard to get the word out and let the state know we're watching, that they're not gonna just be treated like that without any opposition to it.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I gotta stand in and sing the praises of my queer and trans comrades here in Minnesota.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_07: I have three trans comrades.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_07: I think the majority of us are queer, but if you look anywhere on the front line here in Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, you are going to find trans and queer folk always on the front.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_07: This is a community that intrinsically understands state repression, and they also know that you have to take matters into your own hands to protect yourself.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_07: To that point, of the defendants, right?
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_07: The most violent raid that happened of the Minnesota 15 was of a trans refuge house just across the river from me that my co-defendants were living at.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_07: And that's a lot of people from out of state who are living in conservative states that are denying HRT, um, who have moved to Minnesota to find a more hospitable climate for them.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, this house was raided.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_07: This is kind of where trans guns matter, right?
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_07: One of the organizations that's implicated in the conspiracy and who a number of my co-defendants are members of is the Ray Ray Bolt Gun Club, which is an above-ground trans and queer-led gun club where they do really basic trainings, dry fire exercises, that sort of thing.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_07: There is definitely a pattern of state repression here.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_07: The state is definitely targeting specifically trans folk, and especially ones who have of more radical persuasion, who are willing to defend themselves and their communities, and they see them as a top-level threat.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_07: And after having been and having seen my comrades on the front lines, I can definitely attest to why they're afraid of them.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_03: I think you guys have both made very compelling cases for the defense of the right of armed self-defense, which is constantly under attack in this country.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: These are two of the lead cases in the country where they are really trying to break the back of dissent, break the back of protest, and similar things have been going on all across the country.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: We've got cases in LA like the Baldwin Park 3, two of whom were convicted.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: In Spokane, three people were convicted on charges similar to what they're doing in Minneapolis.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: Some people have fought these charges, but others have been convicted, and we really need to fight for everybody.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: The industrial workers of the world had a slogan like what Hannah said, that they're in there for fighting for us.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: We need to fight for them.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you guys for really powerfully laying out and motivating why everyone should be involved in these cases.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_03: As I mentioned at the beginning, there's a United Front rally on Saturday, the 24th of October.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_03: We are also part of the United Front for Clean Break in the DSA.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_03: We're the United Front of people who want to break the DSA from the imperialist ice enablers of the Democratic Party.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_03: But we have endorsed this rally as well, and we've been making announcements for it in our branches and chapter meetings.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um maybe, John, if you want to explain who some of the other endorsers are that have come together for this rally.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so we're having a rally here in New York City at the Brooklyn Friends Meeting House Saturday, October 24th at 3 p.m.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: And just to give a sense, we have a variety of left organizations and others who are coming together to fight to free the prairie land defendants, defend anti-ICE protesters, fight government repression of the left.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: This includes the campaign to bring Mumia home, Mubia Abu Jamal, the former Black Panther political prisoner, Brittany Kubachek, the DSA independent socialist candidate in Rhode Island, the committee to defend Tom Alter in New York, the Texas state professor who was fired for being a socialist, the Freedom Socialist Party, Feminist Generation Flushing, Internationalist Group, International Socialist Alternative Revolutionary, Maoist Communist Union, the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional Chicano from Texas, the Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida from LA, the Minnesota 15 Anti-Repression Committee, Betty Davis of the New Abolitionist Movement, National Lawyers Guild at CUNY Law School, Socialist Alternative New York City, Spartacus League, Unite for Peace, New York City, and Shenachley, the political prisoner in Texas, Chicano Political Prisoner, and his campaign.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_03: And more.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_03: More keep coming in.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's as of yesterday.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_07: I'm proud to say I'll be there.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, we have speakers, anti ICE protesters who faced charges in Los Angeles in federal court, Minnesota 15 activists, and two activists from Dallas Fort Worth, along with activists here in New York.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: York City.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: There's a real case to be made that regardless of differences over strategy and tactics of all of these groups, that leftists really need to have each other's backs.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_03: And that expense of the left and minorities is also in the interest of the entire working class and the government will use these same quote terrorism charges against striking trade unionists who stop scats on the picket lines.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so we really have to bring this fight inside our organizations, inside our unions, and for those of us in DSA, inside DSA.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_03: And while we should definitely put pressure on them, we can't rely on Democratic Party electeds or politicians to defend us.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_03: We have to mobilize broadly and get the unions, which have a lot of social power, to really lead the defense here of all of our rights and livelihoods, to wrap up.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_03: If Hannah and Cam want to let people know who can't make the event in New York City, how can they support?
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_03: How can they reach your defense groups and give your socials?
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_03: And we'll put them in the show notes as well.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_05: There's the prairie landdefendants.com, which is our website, and there is the DSW Support Committee Instagram.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_05: We also have multiple fundraisers.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_05: We have our main fundraiser, the Gives and Go, that you can find on the website.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_05: But the the fundraiser that we're really trying to push right now is Maddie's fundraiser.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_05: She really needs a lot of support right now.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_05: She's in solitary confinement and segregation, and she needs the people on her team to advocate for her, and that costs money.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_05: And then just spreading the word, getting the word out, reaching out to anybody with a teensy bit of power or influence and moving the Prairie Land case into the collective consciousness so people don't forget about them, people don't forget that they're still sitting in dungeons and continue to fight ice, continue to pursue a better world where people can be safe, where people can move, where there are no borders, there are no walls, there are no nations.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_05: That's another way to honor the defendant is to keep fighting for collective liberation.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_07: Keeping the fight for collective liberation is going to be key here.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_07: Just looking at the surveillance that we've seen here in Minnesota and our upcoming court trial here on October 20th, we're trying to expose what looks like a national modern coin tell program called Operation Keyhole.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_07: And the implications that we've seen show that the DSA, all the major political groups in the country, all of the unions, the state does not discern who their enemies are anymore.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_07: And so it's very important that we show solidarity with each other.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_07: And the best way you can show solidarity with Minnesota 15 is to organize your communities, your workplaces, hobby groups, places of worship, uh, and turn it into an anti-ICE machine that collaborates with each other so that we can defeat this authoritarian mechanism.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_07: Shy of that, if you could just use our case as an excuse to organize a benefit, a fundraiser of any sort, anything that can bring people together to talk about how we can resist together.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_07: You can also come to our website, uh, you can donate directly to our fundraiser, but most importantly, get out there, organize, and maintain solidarity with our with our people behind the wire in prairie lands and across the country.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_07: And obviously, never forget the tens of thousands who are languishing in concentration camps and hunger striking right now, not to mention those who have disappeared and those who have been deported to countries, some of which they don't even recognize.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for that.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think John wants to say something about the Partisan Defense Committee.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'd just like to say that I encourage everybody to give generously to the GoFundMe's that we'll post on our notes.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: But we also have a stipend program, and we will be sending$100 a month and have been to, I believe, eight of the Prairie Land defendants that have been convicted.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: And we will be having a holiday appeal benefit in January to raise money to send the money directly to the defendants as well as uh pay the help pay their legal fees.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_03: Great.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so thank you.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you all for coming on.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_03: Edward's gonna give his pitch, which he always does at the end of every show that we do.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_03: But um before that, I just wanted to say that we're gonna end the episode with a recording of Champagne's song reading the statement given just before being sentenced to a hundred years in prison.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_08: That concludes this episode of Give Me a Break.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_08: Uh, you can check out all of the work of the Just Break Already caucus by going over to our Linktree.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_08: That is linktree.com slash DSA underscore just break already.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_08: You can follow our social media on X.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_08: We are at Clean Break Now and on Instagram, we are at DSA underscore just break already.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_08: We love to get all of your love letters, hate mail, comments, criticisms, anything you got, send it to us.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_08: We read them in response and share this with a friend.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_08: People need to know about these cases, people need to fight to defend the Minnesota 15 and the Prairie Land defendants.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_08: If they're in DSA, if they're not in DSA, it doesn't matter.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_08: We need as many people as we can to get out here and fight in defense of those who are facing this repression by the state right now.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_03: All right, thanks.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_03: We'll see you guys on Saturday, the 24th, right?
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's really to meet you guys.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, but it's gonna be awesome.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_05: It's gonna be so amazing.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, I can't wait.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_06: Hi, this is Champagne Song, and me and my fellow Prairie Land defendants are in solitary confinement in Johnson County Jail, Texas.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_06: This is the statement that I read just before being sentenced to 100 years in prison.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_06: I don't hate.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_06: I don't hate anyone.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_06: I don't hate cops.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_06: I don't hate Trump.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_06: I don't hate Nazis.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_06: My beliefs are composed thus.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_06: First, that we should help each other.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_06: And second, that we should protect one another.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_06: I never want to see anyone get hurt.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_06: I never want to see good people standing up for what they believe in, gun down in the street.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_06: What we all saw happen to Renee Good and Alex Pretti is my worst nightmare.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_06: It was the kind of thing that I had feared for a long time after dealing with officers who could be reckless, who could be bullies, who could be violent.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_06: But fear is not hate, sadness is not hate, and wanting people to live is not hate.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_06: And so, when I was standing in the street on July 4th, 2025, in plain view, with reflective safety strips and high visibility clothing, what I saw right in front of my eyes was my worst nightmare.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_06: When I saw Lieutenant Thomas Gross stop pursuing and point his gun at the back of a running, unarmed protester, as he testified, I was terrified.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_06: As a firearms instructor and a United States Marine Corps veteran, I understood what I was seeing.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_06: I knew what it meant for someone to lean hard forward into their gun to prepare for recoil, as he testified.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_06: As the evidence shows, I did not want to hurt anyone.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_06: I never had the intent to hurt anyone, and I tried my best to avoid anyone getting hurt.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_06: It is impossible to say that I was trying to ambush anyone or planning any violence as the 26th not guilty verdicts prove.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_06: I was shocked and surprised and saddened.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_06: I am so grateful for what didn't happen.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_06: I am so grateful that we are not here mourning another death and another tragedy, another Alex Pretdy, another Renee Good, another Gotham John, another Manuel T.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_06: Taran, another Atatiana Jefferson, another Fernando Castile.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_06: Now 22 people have been arrested, have been persecuted, have been tortured for what?
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_06: For nothing.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_06: None of these people really did anything.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_06: And none of these people had anything to do with what happened with me.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_06: This is wrong.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_06: This is mass punishment.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_06: This is collective punishment.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_06: This is guilt by association.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_06: This is injustice.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_06: Back in 1895, the white supremacist U.S.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_06: Senator, pitchfork Ben Tillman, gave a speech to the Constitutional Convention of South Carolina on how to use injustice to take power.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_06: He said, How did we recover our liberty?
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_06: By fraud and violence.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_06: We tried to overcome the thirty thousand majority by honest means, which was a mathematical impossibility.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_06: After bearing these indignities for eight years, life became worthless.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_06: Now this is how men take power over others.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_06: By injustice, by fraud and violence.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_06: That history matters because injustice has always been dangerous.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_06: It does not only harm the person standing in court, it spreads.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_06: It teaches people to be afraid.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_06: It teaches people that the government can decide who is guilty and look for reasons afterward.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_06: First, they covered up and hid evidence.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_06: Second, they banned every black juror from both jury pools so that there would be no one to question the police.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_06: Third, they told me I had no right to protect myself or protect anyone else.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_06: They told me I wasn't even allowed to say the word self-defense.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_06: As you heard in the trial, they tortured their own witnesses, American citizens, tortured and terrorized and medically neglected.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_06: Three men, Matt Greer, James Johnson, and Carl McCrae, have died here in the Terran County jail in just the last week.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_06: And in this case, a 24-year-old has suffered a heart attack, and a 58-year-old grandmother said she would die from torture.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_06: Mothers, fathers, teachers, students, package workers, programmers, and engineers all persecuted and subject to torture in this case.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_06: People are being treated as if their lives do not matter.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_06: All of this is bigger than me.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_06: I know that I am the person standing here.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_06: I know that I am the person being judged.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_06: But I also know that a case like this can become a warning to everyone else.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_06: That if you speak, if you protest, if you try to protect someone, if you are associated with the wrong idea, you can be turned into a symbol instead of treated like a human being.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_06: Nothing saddens me more than when I think about all of these different people and their different families and communities and how they have suffered and how unfairly they have been treated, just like me.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_06: Whatever's taken from me will wind up being taken from you.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_06: It may be these 22 strangers today, but it will be you tomorrow.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_06: On June 9th of this year, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center testified to Congress that hate has migrated into the government.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_06: Into the government.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_06: The government, in its secret motion to give me a life sentence, called me the embodiment of Antifa.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_06: What does that even mean?
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_06: I am not a member of any group called Antifa.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_06: I'm not a part of any terrorist organization.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_06: There is, in fact, no group called Antifa.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_06: Everyone knows that.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_06: But this government is so blinded by hate that they have arrested 22 good people for nothing.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_06: And they want to bury me with an idea.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_06: The idea that they hate is the very idea of being against fascism.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_06: What kind of people are not against fascism?
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_06: What kind of people are not against the hate and war and genocide and concentration camps that the Nazis brought upon the world?
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_06: What kind of people would not agree to say no kings and no furors?
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_06: The hate has migrated into the government.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_06: Now that hate is taking power over me, it is taking power over you, over your words and your ideas.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_06: How long until you are called a domestic terrorist too?
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_06: Like the prosecutor said, if they call you a terrorist, they can take your house, they can take your car, they can take everything.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_06: When they killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, they went on TV and they called them domestic terrorists the same day, within the same hour.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_06: When could that happen to you?
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_06: When I was staying in my home city of Dallas for eleven days, I did fear that I might die at any moment from a government that is hateful and vindictive.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_06: I did not run because I wanted to escape responsibility.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_06: I stayed because I was determined to survive long enough to do the right thing.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_06: I don't fear for myself now.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_06: I fear for all of you.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_06: What will you do?
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_06: In this time of great failures and great injustices, what will you do?
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_06: How will you help each other?
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_06: How will you help yourself?
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_06: This is Champagne Song, sentenced to 100 years for anti-fascism.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_00: These commentaries are recorded by prison radio.