Daniel Sanchez is facing federal charges for what free speech advocates say is a clear attack on the First Amendment.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/9388

Daniel Sanchez is facing federal charges for what free speech advocates say is a clear attack on the First Amendment.

The post The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine appeared first on The Intercept.

Federal prosecutors have filed a new indictment in response to a July 4 noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, during which a police officer was shot.

There are numerous problems with the indictment, but perhaps the most glaring is its inclusion of charges against a Dallas artist who wasn’t even at the protest. Daniel “Des” Sanchez is accused of transporting a box that contained “Antifa materials” after the incident, supposedly to conceal evidence against his wife, Maricela Rueda, who was there.

But the boxed materials aren’t Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, or whatever MAGA officials claim “Antifa” uses to wage its imaginary war on America. As prosecutors laid out in the July criminal complaint that led to the indictment, they were zines and pamphlets. Some contain controversial ideas — one was titled “Insurrectionary Anarchy” — but they’re fully constitutionally protected free speech. The case demonstrates the administration’s intensifying efforts to criminalize left-wing activists after Donald Trump announced in September that he was designating “Antifa” as a “major terrorist organization” — a legal designation that doesn’t exist for domestic groups — following the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Sanchez was first indicted in October on charges of “corruptly concealing a document or record” as a standalone case, but the new indictment merges his charges with those against the other defendants, likely in hopes of burying the First Amendment problems with the case against him under prosecutors’ claims about the alleged shooting.

It’s an escalation of a familiar tactic. In 2023, Georgia prosecutors listed “zine” distribution as part of the conspiracy charges against 61 Stop Cop City protesters in a sprawling RICO indictment that didn’t bother to explain how each individual defendant was involved in any actual crime. I wrote back then about my concern that this wasn’t just sloppy overreach, but also a blueprint for censorship. Those fears have now been validated by Sanchez’s prosecution solely for possessing similar literature.

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  • MelianPretextEnglish
    5·
    13 days ago

    Right on the 100th anniversary of Gitlow v New York. History rhymes right on time.

    Gitlow, who had been arrested in the raids, would be charged under New York’s post–McKinley assassination legislation, the criminal anarchy law.

    Gitlow’s crime, such as it was, was distributing something called the “Left Wing Manifesto,” a document that emerged out of contention within the then-dominant Socialist Party.

    According to that manifesto, “The old order is in decay. Civilization is in collapse. The proletarian revolution and the Communist reconstruction of society—the struggle for these—is now indispensable. This is the message of the Communist International to the workers of the world.” For the New York criminal justice system, such writing was a clear example of flagrant violation of their legislation.

    At his trial in January 1920, Gitlow was convicted and sentenced to five to ten years in prison. After appealing all the way to the Supreme Court, the conviction was upheld. The opinion delivered in 1925 by Justice Edward Sanford was ominous: “A State may punish utterances endangering the foundations of organized government and threatening its overthrow by unlawful means. These imperil its own existence as a constitutional State. Freedom of speech and press . . . does not protect disturbances to the public peace or the attempt to subvert the government.”

    Leonard, Aaron J. 2025. Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against American Communism.