Charlotte Head speaking outside Woolwich Crown Court in 2026 | Filton24 Defence Committee
My lawyer faces jail over a speech to jurors – a first in English history – as state seeks to silence Palestine solidarity
Editor’s note: Shortly after this piece was published, Rajiv Menon was granted a last-minute stay on his appeal. His case will now be heard in September.
England prides itself on its legal system, supposedly a pinnacle of fairness, neutrality and justice.
Having faced two trials and 18 months’ incarceration before a verdict was even reached, I’ve witnessed the falsity of these claims. Today will mark another low: the lead barrister on my case, Rajiv Menon, will appear at the Royal Courts of Justice accused of contempt of court over remarks he made in a closing speech to the jury.
If found guilty, he’ll face up to two years in prison.
This is the first time in English legal history that a barrister has been prosecuted for defending their client in this way. The Garden Chambers, where Menon is a KC, has said it is “extremely concerned about the chilling effect on the Bar of the state seeking to criminalise barristers for their representation of their clients”. The Criminal Bar Association (CBA) has warned that other lawyers are now afraid of doing their jobs.
“[They] have become uncertain and scared of what they can and can’t say; scared that somehow they might be – at the end of a trial where they have faithfully represented their client themselves – facing a charge of criminal contempt,” said Riel Karmy-Jones KC, chair of the CBA. “It is starting to feel like it’s about the politics of the subject matter of the trial, rather than the core principles of how a barrister represents his client.”
That has certainly been my experience.
In August 2024, I entered an Israeli weapons factory in Filton, Bristol, along with other activists. We destroyed military drones created by Elbit Systems: quadcopters set to be exported for use in Israel’s illegal genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Any nation found to be supporting or abetting those committing a genocide is complicit and culpable under international law; there are legal precedents that allow an offence to be committed to prevent a greater offence occurring, as we did at Filton. Yet upon arrest we were held incommunicado for almost three weeks in counter-terrorism custody, which the UN warned may amount to ‘enforced disappearance’.
We were presented at magistrates’ court, charged with criminal damage, violent disorder and aggravated burglary. These were ordinary offences, but Judge Johnson later granted himself the right to use a ‘terrorism connection’ at sentencing. We were denied bail and imprisoned under the Terrorism Act. Johnson introduced reporting restrictions to ban the media from mentioning that, if the jury found us guilty, he could sentence us as terrorists, which would drastically lengthen our jail time and impact our futures. Jurors were also not made aware of this fact.
Despite the restrictions, media coverage of our case blew up during my 18 months in custody awaiting trial, with grand accusations made about my co-defendants and me.
In June 2025, five months before our trial, Yvette Cooper, then the home secretary, discussed her decision to proscribe Palestine Action in the Commons. She specifically acknowledged that she could not discuss our case “to avoid prejudicing future criminal trials”. Yet just moments earlier, she had referred to the “attacks at […] Elbit Systems UK in Bristol”, saying Palestine Action had “committed acts of serious damage to property with the aim of progressing its political cause and influencing the government”.
Two months later, Cooper went further still. In an Observer article titled “Palestine Action ‘is not lawful protest’”, she referenced the charges in our case, which she said, “in the assessment of the independent Crown Prosecution Service, [had] a terrorism connection”. She also accused Palestine Action of “intimidation, violence, weapons, and serious injury to individuals”.
Given that our trial had yet to take place, it seemed a case of putting the cart before the horse – and one that risked prejudicing jurors. Given Cooper’s position in government and the role she played in the legal proceedings to proscribe Palestine Action, it is inconceivable that she did not understand the reporting restrictions surrounding our trial. She has faced zero repercussions for what may amount to breaking the law on contempt of court.
For Rajiv Menon, the sole KC for the defence, it is a very different story.
At our trials, a heavy burden fell on Menon’s shoulders as he and the other defence barristers were forced to contort themselves to keep up with Johnson’s ever-increasing restrictions on what he deemed permissible as evidence.
As well as being prohibited from telling the jury about the terrorist connection, we were forbidden from referencing material the prosecution had included in its own evidence bundles. Elbit’s actions in supporting Israel’s genocide were deemed irrelevant.
In his closing speech, Menon reminded the jury of their role. He spoke about the case of Penn and Mead in 1670, which saw a jury imprisoned and fined for contempt of court after acquitting two Quakers of unlawful assembly. As Menon said, that case it is the cornerstone of the British legal system as we know it – it established the right of juries to make decisions freely and without threat of repercussions.
Menon also spoke emotionally and passionately about my background and how I ended up involved in this action, highlighting the centrality of the Palestinian cause to my motivations. His has since been dubbed a historic speech by legal professionals and the public alike.
Charlotte Head speaking at a protest for Gaza in Hackney | Filton24 Defence Committee
On 4 February, after 36 hours of deliberating, the jury found us not guilty of aggravated burglary. It was unable to reach a verdict on the other charges of criminal damage and violent disorder. Two weeks later, we were released.
Around this time, the Crown Prosecution Service announced it would seek a retrial and Johnson advised that he would refer Menon for criminal proceedings, a fact that could only be reported on last week.
Johnson alleged Menon committed contempt of court by referencing a plaque commemorating the Penn and Mead case, which highlights “the right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions”. This plaque isn’t hidden, it’s in the entryway of the Old Bailey, where our trial would have taken place had it not been for space and timetabling constraints. Our jurors would have had to pass it several times a day.
Menon was not threatened for being inaccurate; he was persecuted for jeopardising what has become a lynchpin case in the British state’s war against Palestine Action.
The crucial question is why. Why was a government minister – the home secretary, no less – allowed to publicly and repeatedly prejudice our right to a fair trial and get away scot-free, whilst a renowned human rights lawyer was punished for doing his job?
Did the government feel the Filton defendants were too close to winning, thereby undermining its proscription claim? Did it want to issue a warning, to create a chilling effect on legal professionals and defendants in subsequent trials? Or is our legal system simply a two-tier system, where those in power are above the law and the rest of us can be punished for simply being irksome?
During our retrial earlier this year, further restrictions were placed on the scope of evidence. The jury was told that in that courtroom, Justice Johnson was the law – and in a courtroom, the law is tantamount to God.
We were found guilty of criminal damage. We had never been charged with terrorism, yet Judge Johnson sentenced us as terrorists on 12 June. I am serving six years in prison and will face a further 15 years on notification once I am released, during which time I will have to regularly check in with the authorities, and will have to register any new device, bank account, telephone number, email address, vehicle, relationship and overseas travel plans with the police for the rest of my life.
The UK abolished the divine right of kings long ago; but it is alive and kicking in our legal system. The privileged few in the upper echelons are permitted to bend the law to breaking point to further the government’s political agenda. The same people are trying to rob the British public of the right to a jury of their peers by blaming jury trials for our backlogged court systems. It is not juries that are the problem; it is our courts that are beleaguered by pressure from those in Parliament, the intelligence services and the police.
The Home Office has interfered with our case again and again in a bid to shore up its proscription of Palestine Action by using us as political scapegoats. Yet, for his work in defending me, my barrister may be disbarred and potentially face prison time himself.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.Vote Labour for Genocide.
Defendants were not told criminal damage case could carry a terrorism connection until after they were found guilty
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) wants to sentence five more Palestine activists as terrorists for committing criminal damage, it can be revealed.
Brendon O’Hagan, Amanda Kelly, Hmeera Atiqnisar, Mohammed Malik, and Alma Yaniv were convicted of criminal damage last month for a protest at a Barclays bank branch in Burnley in 2024.
It was carried out in the name of Palestine Action almost a year before the group was banned under terrorism laws.
In the agreed facts of the case, the prosecution’s lawyers acknowledged that Barclays provided investments and loans to Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms firm.
The court heard that the activists smashed windows and sprayed red paint over the building, with damage costs allegedly amounting to £212,805.
Court filings show that it was only after the trial concluded that the CPS decided to apply for a terrorism connection to be added to the case.
The move came after the judge overseeing the case requested submissions on whether the case should be designated as having a terrorism connection.
This means that neither the jury nor the defendants were aware that the case could carry a terrorism connection until after the guilty verdicts were delivered.
…
The move suggests that a ruling last month against another four Palestine Action activists, who were sentenced as terrorists by Justice Jeremy Johnson, is already having far-reaching consequences for protest-related trials in Britain.
Johnson treated the four protesters as terrorists even though they were only convicted of criminal damage at an Elbit Systems factory in the Filton area of Bristol.
Atiqnisar, one of the defendants in the Barclays case, told Declassified: “You go through a two-week trial only to be told after it’s over that you were on trial for terrorism.
“Johnson’s judgment has opened up the floodgates for potentially hundreds of activists to be sentenced as terrorists for taking direct action against genocide.
“It’s a few broken windows and red paint that they’re now saying is terrorism. It shows you the lengths the state is willing to go to in order to protect the Israeli weapons trade
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Vote Labour for Genocide.
Ellie Kamio is one of the ‘Filton 25’ group of anti-genocide activists targeted by the UK government for damaging an Israeli death factory.
In the sick farce of Keir Starmer’s war on UK, Kamio and three others were sentenced as terrorists despite being charged with no terror offence.
The judge, deeply connected to the ‘security services’, banned the jury from knowing they could acquit — and banned jurors from knowing about his sentencing plans until after they convicted. Even the press were banned from reporting on it.
But Kamio remains defiant and celebrates the ‘award’ of her ‘terror’ sentence.
wow wtf who would have thought that the girl from swansea who grows veggies and likes to party would earn this title. i’m flattered that the state thinks i’m this annoying. this is a label that has been given to so many who have fought against apartheid and genocide throughout history. if opposing genocide makes me a terrorist then so be it. because it was an honour to dismantle 40 weapons that would commit war crimes.
i’d like to thank my mum and the rest of my family. to the people who raised me and the ones who shaped how i see and move through the world. but most importantly i need to thank palestinians because when i think of your liberation, it is worth it.
i’m grateful to everyone who has been here, physically and spiritually, who has written, prayed, cast spells and sends us love. you lot have given me strength for prison round 2 😛
on the morning of the 12th of june it was clear from judge johnson’s giddiness that he had prewritten a wild sentence, that completely disregarded sentencing guidelines and quite frankly the law. no surprise there lol. now i know what the worst case scenario is. it sucks but i can do it.
the crown prosecution aptly named our case ‘operation recomply’. we were arrested under counter terror powers on the 7th august 2024. this was always their plan. to use our convictions to justify the proscription of palestine action. to intimidate britain into complying. to stay ignorant or lose hope. has it worked?
so long as there is a hole in my arse my spirit cannot be crushed. it is not the time to despair. it is the time to work together and channel our rage into something productive. because when the state moves as weird as it has been, it means that liberation is close.
celebrate moog’s hung jury! pull up for the next wave of filton 25 (major babes) who are currently on trial at the old bailey. they need you now so please show them the same love we received. meanwhile us four will be back at it again to appeal sentencing.
my final thank you goes to all the losers who have had a hand in my imprisonment. in trying to squash our spirits, the state has hammered us with everything they’ve got. in doing so, it has created the most resilient group of people who now know the inner workings of the legal and prison system. knowledge is power baby! they will continue to underestimate the people and i will watch the state’s flailing corruption burn to the ground from my cell hehe.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/Genocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
CounterSpin interview with Seth Stern on criminalizing dissent
Janine Jackson interviewed Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Seth Stern about the criminalization of dissent for the July 26, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The official government press release is headlined “Leader of Antifa Cell Members in North Texas Sentenced to 100 Years in Prison for Terrorist Attack on ICE Facility.” That statement from the Office of Public Affairs states that
eight North Texas Antifa cell operatives were sentenced for their roles in rioting, using weapons and explosives, providing material support to terrorists, obstruction and the attempted murder of an Alvarado police officer at the Prairieland Detention Center on July 4, 2025.
If you aren’t questioning the Trump White House version of reality, in which vandals snuck into the Reflecting Pool with “very sharp knives and razors” because they hate freedom, you probably don’t care about the Prairieland case. But for all of the rest of us, this is a nightmare: historically, legally, morally.
What is happening here, and how do people who think a country with aspirations for democracy, with the understanding that that critically involves protest and multiple voices, how do we respond to what has just happened in the case of activists who participated in a protest at Prairieland ICE Detention Center—or didn’t—and are now facing lives in prison?
There was never a time to not pay attention, to not understand that an official enemy campaign was always going to come for anyone designated undesirable—laws, practices, long-held understandings be damned. But if ever there were a time of comfortable ignorance, it’s over.
Here to help us see what’s happening in this case, and how to move forward, is Seth Stern. He’s the chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and he joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Seth Stern.
JJ: We can start with material facts about Prairieland. A group of people gathered outside an ICE detention center to protest the policy, the actions, of masked agents sweeping Black and brown people off the street and into camps, and then out of the country without due process, and to show audible support for those inside. And a man did shoot and wound a police officer.
But we know this case is not ultimately about a noise protest, or even the wounding of a police officer, because if it were that, the sentences would look different, and we wouldn’t be hearing things like “assault on democracy,” or “conspiracy to conceal documents.” Can you just set us up a little with why you are so concerned about this? Because injustice is old, but this feels new.
SS: It really does. What we’re seeing here is an attempt to criticize, not only an ideology, but a very loosely defined ideology. The administration’s theory is that because they attended the same protest as the shooter, and because they read some of the same literature as the shooter, might have shared political views with the shooter, you can from those facts alone infer a conspiracy, infer an organized—as the administration would call it—“terrorist attack.”
In reality, none of these people—including the shooter, in all likelihood—came to the protest with any intention of a police officer being shot. Certainly the other six defendants who were at the protest besides the shooter had no idea that was going to occur. There was no evidence, and no allegation, even, that anyone had planned a shooting.
When these people left their homes to go to a protest, they figured they would sleep in their own beds that night. At most, they might have contemplated the possibility of getting picked up for trespassing, or a noise disturbance, or the typical minor misdemeanors that people risk when they engage in protest activity. But there was no reason anyone would contemplate that they might be held criminally liable, their lives ruined, sentenced to decades behind bars, for merely attending a protest where someone else shot somebody.
The prosecutors and judge made very clear that their purpose was to send a message to people sharing a similar ideology. The prosecutor said, “This is not any normal ideology. This is an ideology that endorses political violence,” presumably referring to anarchism, or whatever shared belief system these people supposedly had.
But almost everyone, in some circumstance or another, would endorse some form of political violence. Like, I’m the grandson of Holocaust survivors. I don’t really take issue with violence against Nazis. Does that mean that if I go to an anti-Nazi protest, and I have some anti-Nazi books, let’s say, on my bookshelf, that if someone else at the protest, who I’ve never met, commits an act of violence against a Nazi, that I’m then implicated in a conspiracy, and go to prison for decades based on what that person does? It sounds absurd, but it’s no more absurd than what happened at Prairieland.
And I shouldn’t neglect to mention, one of the individuals who was convicted, and sentenced to 30 years, wasn’t even at the protest. He’s somebody who allegedly transported a box of pamphlets, because his wife was at the protest, and he believed, according to prosecutors, that the box of pamphlets might implicate his wife, might be used against her, so he was “concealing evidence.”
Evidence of what? This wasn’t a how-to manual. Yeah, obviously, if his wife had been the one to shoot the police officer—which she wasn’t; nobody alleges she was—and he had a how-to manual on where to get a gun, how to get into this protest and how to shoot a cop, that would be a whole different case. We wouldn’t be having this conversation.
But that’s not what was in the box. They were ‘zines. They said nothing about this protest, about the Prairieland Detention Facility, about shooting this police officer. They were written years ago; they’re political theory that’s available at bookstores nationwide.
So when they say that he concealed evidence by moving these ‘zines, evidence of what? It’s evidence of an ideology. It’s evidence of somebody’s reading habits. There should be no universe where that can be considered concealment of evidence, because it’s not probative of anything. You can’t introduce somebody’s reading habits, or their library, their bookshelf, as evidence of a specific crime in court.
And if you can, we’ve got a big problem, because people have hundreds of books; books can be interpreted any which way. I have plenty of books on my bookshelf that I’m sure someone could characterize as endorsing some form of violence or another. That doesn’t mean I agree with the books. I might; it depends. But that’s really a preposterous way to conduct criminal proceedings, is to thought-police people to this degree.
JJ: And yet here we are, because I think, for a lot of folks, it sounds just as weird as you’ve just laid out. First of all, it sounds like these rulings are not saying you can’t protest. They’re saying, “You can protest, just not against the administration. Just not with these particular ideas.” We all saw January 6, but if you don’t like it, then it’s going to be labeled terrorism.
And I guess I’d want to pull you out on that, because we can say what folks did was not illegal, but if you keep changing the law to make things illegal, then the ground is shifting under our feet. And so what’s happening there, from a legal perspective? Are we just creating new categories, and now you can say yesterday you weren’t violating the law, but today you are, and so now you go under the jail?
SS: Theoretically you can’t do that, because we’ve got a Constitution that trumps any executive order, or even statute. In this case, we’re talking about NSPM-7, and the Trump administration’s new counter-terrorism memorandum, which don’t change the law. They’re simply an expression of prosecutorial priorities, and they instruct prosecutors to go after Antifa, to go after far-left groups, people who they view as “anti-American,” whatever that means.
People with “extreme gender ideologies”; no idea what that one means. I’ve never heard of any sort of trans “supremacy” movement that wants to lock up cisgender people. So presumably they’re just talking about people who believe that trans people should have rights, and now they’re on the same plane as terrorists, as ISIS, according to this administration.
It’s all pretty absurd, but at the end of the day, we have a Constitution that prohibits people from being locked up for what they think, write or read, as long as they are not inciting imminent violence.
So hopefully the appellate courts will reverse these convictions, but the law is only as good as the people who enforce it. So if the judiciary isn’t up to the task, if the judiciary is compromised, and lawmakers are unwilling to step in—and, of course, at the end of the day, the president has pardon and clemency power, but we know who’s president, so that’s not something you can rely on—then the law is not as good as the paper it’s written on. So that’s the situation we’re in. And if the appellate courts don’t correct this egregious error that the trial courts have committed, we’ll be in a really scary place.
Remember, in Georgia, they tried something very similar with the Stop Cop City protesters, very similar situation. They indicted 61 people who were part of the Stop Cop City movement, because a few of those individuals had allegedly committed criminal acts: arson, vandalizing police cars, whatnot. There was no indication that all 61 of those people had anything to do with those isolated criminal acts, but they were looped into a RICO conspiracy, solely because they, again, read the same ‘zines, shared the same ideologies, were part of the same movement, had the same alleged belief system.
That case fell apart, as it should have, after putting all 60 of those people through a whole lot of headache and expense, but still, it ultimately fell apart. And it was easy to dismiss at the time as though, this is just some local prosecutor who had an awful idea and made a fool of himself. Now it’s the federal government doing it.
And you mentioned January 6. These sentences here were far more severe than any sentences against anyone involved in January 6. That issue was raised with the judge, who said, “Well, this case was charged differently. This case was charged as terrorism.” So essentially incentivizing prosecutors, going forward, if they want to get headline-grabbing sentences and make themselves look effective, to overcharge, to continue charging defendants as terrorism, despite the lack of any evidence of them being terrorists, being affiliated with a terrorist group or having any terrorist intentions. So we should expect to see more of this. Hopefully other trial judges will do their jobs, and not leave it up to the appellate courts to clean up the mess.
JJ: I think language is playing a role here. I have said repeatedly that when news media took “war on terror” out of quotes, we lost something. A brain wrinkle got smoothed, so now we can just say “terrorism.” “I don’t know actually what it is, but I know it’s the very worst thing in the world and I don’t need to ask any further questions.” And we’re now at that situation with Antifa; what the actual heck? Now Antifa is being legally identified as an organized thing? What is meaningful? What changes when you allow folks to say, “Hey, we made up a name for everybody who thinks a certain way, and now you’re a group and you’re conspiring terrorism?”
SS: I certainly agree, even before the Trump administration, the idea of terrorism had kind of lost its meaning, but I think one assumption that everybody, for the most part, had was that to be labeled a terrorist, you have to have engaged in or collaborated with others who engaged in violence, and that you had to have some foreknowledge of that violence. And to get to a point where people are being convicted of terrorism for merely going to a protest, where the prosecution didn’t even bother trying to prove that they had any intention to commit an act of violence, that they had any foreknowledge that one of them might pick up a gun and shoot at a cop, is really quite alarming, because terrorism becomes less of an action and more of an ideology that people like Donald Trump can define as synonymous with dissent. Anyone whose beliefs are inconvenient to him, or that interferes with his agenda, becomes a terrorist. “Anti-Trump” and “anti-American” become interchangeable in the views of the administration and judges, apparently, who are sympathetic to them.
So it’s quite scary to have this kind of power to abuse the word “terrorism,” particularly in a domestic context. In the international context, we’ve long had the problem of prosecutors and judges and politicians characterizing things as national security threats with no basis to do so, going back to the Pentagon Papers, where the truth about the Vietnam War was almost censored because the administration at the time called it a national security threat for the American people to know the truth. Fortunately, the judiciary back then rejected that.
Reporters are threatened with prosecution under, for example, the Espionage Act, because their reporting supposedly poses a national security threat when, in fact, it merely is inconvenient to those in power. We see that, for example, in the case involving Hannah Natanson, the Washington Post reporter whose home newsroom was raided. That’s long been an issue in the context of national security in matters of war, international issues.
But now you’ve got any local dissident, any activist, any person in any of the 50 states who opposes the president’s agenda, being treated the same way, being treated as a national security threat. The line between First Amendment–protected dissent and terrorism is just entirely blurred by this administration. And, again, the judges have the power to set it straight. Whether they will or not is to be determined.
JJ: I will say I spoke with Mara Verheyden-Hilliard in 2017 about arrests after the first Trump inauguration, where police were saying, if you were somewhere near an act of property damage—I think it was a car being set on fire—if you were near it, it’s the same as you committing it. If you were wearing black, well, forget about it; you are obviously part of it.
At the time, a Washington Post poll was saying that one out of every three DC residents were saying they’d taken part in a protest against Trump since his first inauguration. And that was half of the district’s white residents, half of people making more than $100,000 a year and a fifth of respondents over the age of 65.
So what I want to say, and what I think you’re wanting to say also, is you’re not safe from this. The idea that you’re not going to do anything wrong is not going to protect you in this case. We’re seeing the straight-up criminalizing of resistance per se. And so I guess I’d ask you, what can we do? What can we be doing in the face of this?
SS: That is important to remember, because it is easy for people to look at this and say: “Well, I am not an anarchist. I don’t read these zines. I don’t go to these kinds of protests. My protests are permitted. I’m not at risk.”
But I’ve mentioned Des Sanchez, who was convicted solely for transporting a box of zines. Think about the Don Lemon and Georgia Fort cases. They were arrested, of course, while covering a protest at a church in Minneapolis, against immigration enforcement there.
I don’t think anyone would characterize Don Lemon as a far-left anarchist type. You can like him or not like him, but that’s not something that he is. But the Trump administration sought a warrant that would have allowed it to gather from YouTube a list of subscribers to both Lemon and Fort’s YouTube channels.
Now, that warrant was fortunately rejected by a judge, but think about it. What possible evidence could a subscriber to Lemon and Fort’s YouTube channels have that would assist the Trump administration in prosecuting its frivolous case against those journalists? All they saw was what was publicly broadcast. The prosecution already has that. This is clearly an attempt by the Trump administration to gather information about who is in possession, who is accessing news, that it does not like.
So just as Des Sanchez was prosecuted for his box of zines, those who watch Don Lemon and Georgia Fort’s show may have faced danger or risk down the road. Why else would prosecutors want their information? It has nothing to do with their case.
So it’s certainly a mistake to believe that this is a problem that is limited to “Antifa,” or people on the political fringes. Stephen Miller has said the entire Democratic Party is a terrorist organization. Donald Trump has called the press “enemies of the people,” has called his critics “the enemy within.” He is not only talking about anarchists when he says that.
Seth Stern: “When there’s enough resistance, the administration will back down, or shift its priorities. People do have the power to do that.”
As far as what we can do, I would encourage people to make their voices heard. Of course, we’re not in a position where Congress is likely to act, and we don’t have control, directly, over what any judge does.
But we have platforms. We have local newspapers, we have social media, we have the ability to write letters to the editor, op-eds, posts, videos, create noise, create a chorus of dissent.
We’ve seen repeatedly, for example, with ICE in Minneapolis, that when there’s enough resistance, the administration will back down, or shift its priorities. People do have the power to do that. This isn’t a situation where there is some corporation that can be boycotted, where there is a direct lever to pull to stop the administration from criminalizing dissent. But if there is enough uproar, and if we make that uproar to some extent bipartisan, there can be sufficient pressure to, if not stop them, cause them to be a bit more cautious, and to dial it down.
We need to continue making noise about this, continue talking about it on radio shows, continue talking about it on social media and on newspaper pages. And we need to communicate clearly to people with different political ideologies that, hey, one day the shoe is going to be on the other foot. And once you give the government, once you give prosecutors the power to criminalize dissent in these ways, it’s a matter of time before the political tides turn, and that same power is used against you.
Whereas earlier in the Trump administration, I think there was this feeling of exuberance on the right, the feeling that this party is never going to end. We’re going to be in power forever. We’re not really worried about these sorts of hypotheticals, where it comes back to bite us one day.
Now I think there might be a little bit of recognition that this MAGA thing is not going to last forever, that the political tides might be turning, and people are a bit more concerned about how the abuses that they’re enabling, the powers that they’re granting the president, could one day be used against them. So I think it’s time to lean into that and send that message.
JJ: Absolutely. Let me just ask you, in case you have any final thoughts about what journalists or reporters—you know, it’s mixed. Independentreporters are bringing us the story. Elite reporters are doing something slightly different. Any thoughts about journalism, and the role it plays right now?
SS: Yeah. Well, it’s an old story where independent journalists—who are not necessarily abiding by this myth that good journalism has to be in this passive, neutral voice, that is so objective it doesn’t acknowledge reality—are calling it like it is.
Whereas some corporate outlets, although they have covered the convictions, they’re covering these convictions the way that they covered, say, the Iraq War: One side says that these people were terrorists, and the defense attorney says that they weren’t. The prosecutor says they are. Here’s a quote from both sides. Done.
It’s good they’re covering it, but in a way, they’re sanewashing it by reporting it that way, by not giving any sense of how unusual this is, how unprecedented and how absurd. And I’m not saying that they should editorialize, if that is not the style of journalism they do. There’s room for all different styles of journalism. But you don’t lose neutrality by providing some historical context.
So if you’re not going to come out and say in your own voice that this is alarming and preposterous, you can provide historical context. You can talk about how dissent has been treated in the past, how unusual these charges are. Compare it to, as I saw one, as you said, independent outlet do, compare it to the Haymarket cases, compare it to past abuses, McCarthyism, so on. Give readers that context. Don’t just get a quote from both sides and call it a day. This is a bigger story than that.
JJ: All right. Well, we have lots more to talk about, but we’ll end it now for now. We’ve been speaking with Seth Stern from the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Thank you so much, Seth Stern, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
SS: Anytime.
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Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
