Manufacturing Terror
How the government is inventing terrorists to crush political dissent.
In the theater of the absurd that is the American justice system, the stage has been set in Texas. The gears of the state are grinding against two more individuals, Autumn Hill and Zachary Evetts. Their alleged crime? According to a federal grand jury, it’s providing “material support to terrorists” and attempting to harm federal employees. The terrorist organization in question? Antifa. There’s just one glaring, inconvenient, and fundamental problem: you can’t provide material support to a ghost.
ghost
a verb, not a group/
an idea you cannot jail/
a phantom they chase
Let’s be brutally clear, because the state and its media stenographers refuse to be: antifa is and never was an organization. It has no historical precedent as a formal group. It is a ghost haunting the fascist imagination. There are no leaders. There are no cells. There are no dues, no rules, no board members, and no slush fund of “millionaire money,” though I have it on good authority that I am, in fact, the CTO of Antifa Co. Intl. biz. The very idea is a phantom, a convenient boogeyman conjured by a state that needs a domestic enemy to justify its own tyrannical overreach.
Antifa is a political stance, an ideology, a verb. It is the simple, radical belief that fascism is abhorrent and should be opposed wherever it appears. To frame it as a hierarchical entity akin to Al-Qaeda is a deliberate, malicious fiction designed for exactly this moment—to persecute and imprison those who dare to stand against the rising tide of authoritarianism.
solidarity
we all keep us safe/
a threat to the fascist state/
we build our own world
So if it’s not an organization, what does this ideology look like in practice? It looks like a community. It looks like solidarity. It looks like mutual aid—the principle that our survival and liberation are bound up in each other’s. This isn’t charity, which flows from the top down and reinforces power imbalances. This is solidarity, a horizontal network of support built on the phrase, “We keep us safe.” When the state abandons its people to freeze, starve, or drown, mutual aid networks provide food, shelter, and medical care. This is a direct threat to a fascist state, which demands a dependent and atomized populace. Mutual aid builds independent, resilient communities that are much harder to control.
This ideology also manifests as an unwavering defense of bodily autonomy. Fascism, at its core, is about control—control of the economy, control of the press, and most intimately, control of our bodies. It seeks to impose a rigid order on who we can love, how we can identify, and what we can do with our own flesh. The fight for reproductive rights, for trans rights, for the right of every individual to exist without persecution, is therefore an inherently anti-fascist struggle. It is a direct rejection of the state’s claim of ownership over its citizens. The same state that sends militarized police to brutalize protestors is the one that seeks to legislate what a person can do with their own uterus. The fight for our bodies is the fight against fascism itself.
autonomy
this body is mine/
the state will not own my flesh/
to fight is to live
These men in Texas are being railroaded for understanding this. They are being made examples of because they see the rot that has taken root and sprouted, especially in red states where the boot of the regime feels heaviest. They spoke out, and for that, they must be silenced.
This is the reality of our “failed experiment.” While half of the working class starves, missing paychecks and facing eviction, Orange Hitler McFuckstick plans his own Arc de Triomphe. Disguised as a monument to the nation’s 250th anniversary, the celebration is conveniently scheduled for his own 80th birthday, complete with arena games to distract the masses from their crumbling infrastructure and nonexistent healthcare. When a reporter from ABC asked him point-blank, pointing to the model on the Resolute Desk, “What is this, who is it for?” he gave a shrewd and callous one-word answer: “Me.” The official reason was invalidated in a single breath of pure, unadulterated narcissism.
regime
the boot on our necks/
a stage for their unjust laws/
they jail all our friends
This is the regime Hill and Evetts stood against. This is the fascism they recognized. The charges against them are not about justice; they are a political weapon. By creating a fictional, monstrous “organization” out of a decentralized movement of conscience, the state has given itself a blank check to crush any effective opposition.
resistance
the work will go on/
in the streets and in our homes/
they can’t stop us all
We are the resistance. My comrades in Texas, we stand with you. To those in Chicago, Portland, and Washington, D.C., and every town in between who refuse to accept authoritarianism, your fight is our fight. They can’t jail an idea, and they can’t stop us all. The work continues in the streets, in our neighborhoods, and in our communities. Support your local mutual aid network. Defend your neighbors. Build the world you want to live in. That is how we fight. That is how we win.