Georgia prosecutors have indicted 61 individuals under the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, for their alleged participation in the #StopCopCity movement and for, as they put it, promoting “virulent anarchist ideas.”
Something tells me this isn’t the whole story… “Promoting anarchist ideas” sounds like political speech to me, which isn’t illegal, whether in Georgia or anywhere else in the US.
You can find the indictment online at the link posted above. It goes pretty deep into how the prosecutors understand anarchism. There’s definitely an ideological bent to the prosecution, but the things they’re being indicted over are arson, destruction of private property, and a host of illegal means of preventing the construction of Cop City. Still…the prosecution is clearly extremely concerned with misrepresenting anarchism as a political ideology.
these are things maybe like, three people out of all the people being indicted are actually guilt of. the Georgia state government does not deserve your benefit of the doubt on these being “good” prosecutions when they just arrested people for running a bail fund like two months ago.
I’m not defending the indictment, I’m explaining the crimes with which they’re being charged. Being accused of a crime doesn’t mean they’re guilty. It just means those are the crimes the state elected to charge them with. An important distinction.
They are using the claim that this is all ideologically-driven in order to charge them as co-conspirators. One person in a protest burns a trash can, and you claim they were all ideologically in support of that as members of the same “criminal organization” and charge them under RICO laws.
Of course political speech is illegal. Always has been. It just isn’t nominally legal on paper. People have been indicted, prosecuted, and imprisoned for it constantly. A famous example is Eugene Debs, who was prosecuted under the Espionage Act and imprisoned for an anti-war speech he made in 1918.
Please don’t be taken in by the veneer of moronic constitutionalist liberalism. The state punishes people when it feels like punishing people, and does so especially for political speech and dissent…for being an anarchist; for being a leftist. The propaganda it puts down on paper has never changed that.