The Spoon River Clarion

 In recent days, the Intercept reported on a federal case in Texas in which a young man has been indicted literally just for possessing and transporting anarchist zines. There is no question that the material in these magazines is First Amendment–protected. So, how could moving them around be a crime? 

The feds' theory of the case is that he was deliberately moving these magazines in order to hide evidence that could incriminate his girlfriend. But there is nothing at all incriminating about these materials. All they could reveal, if investigators found them, was that his girlfriend had an interest in anarchism as an ideology—or, at the very least, was reading about it. 

Which—again—is not a crime. 

If being an anarchist is not a crime; and reading about anarchism is not a crime; then moving around anarchist literature because you're worried that it might create the impression that you or a loved one is an anarchist or wants to read about anarchism, is likewise not a crime. 

Of course—the defendants in this case might have been worried that the feds would try to treat it as a crime—which they now are! But this just shows the defendant was right to worry that federal investigators would not play by the rules. 

This case, then, does indeed sound like a pretty transparent violation of First Amendment rights. No doubt, federal investigators are depending here on the assumption that it affects a small enough and unpopular enough group of people, though, that no one will care. 

They're assuming that the courts will not vindicate the rights of mere anarchism-curious leftist young people who are tangentially involved with a group of other people linked to an alleged act of political violence targeting an ICE facility. 

"Liberalism faces no severer test than in its attitude towards the right of unpopular minority propaganda," as V.L. Parrington once put it, in his Main Currents in American Thought. 

And throughout the modern period, anarchists have often stood in the role of the most unpopular minority of them all. 

The powers that be often treat anarchism as presumptively violent and criminal, due to its ideological rejection of state authority. And so, First Amendment or no, officials and vigilantes have tried for years to suppress the mere expression of anarchist ideas. 

In one of his poems in the Spoon River Anthology, Edgar Lee Masters describes what happens to a local journalist, for instance, after he publishes a poem favorable to the anarchists who were "hanged in Chicago" in the wake of the Haymarket affair. For his words, the journalist was "tarred and feathered," and his small press was "wrecked." 

Here—in the fate of the Spoon River Clarion—we see the ancestor, as it were, of those small anarchist "zines" that are still being criminalized and attacked today—merely for the expression of ideas. 

And as we see the government ignore the rules; as we see them set aside Constitutional rights in order to persecute an unpopular political movement and to serve the interests of the powerful—the words of the small-town reporter in Spoon River—the ones that got him in trouble with local vigilantes in the first place—seem likewise applicable today: 

I saw a beautiful woman with bandaged eyes

Standing on the steps of a marble temple.

Great multitudes passed in front of her,

Lifting their faces to her imploringly.

In her left hand she held a sword.

She was brandishing the sword,

Sometimes striking a child, again a laborer,

Again a slinking woman, again a lunatic.

In her right hand she held a scale;

Into the scale pieces of gold were tossed

By those who dodged the strokes of the sword.

A man in a black gown read from a manuscript:

'She is no respecter of persons.'

Then a youth wearing a red cap

Leaped to her side and snatched away the bandage.

And lo, the lashes had been eaten away

From the oozy eye-lids;

The eye-balls were seared with a milky mucus;

The madness of a dying soul

Was written on her face

But the multitude saw why she wore the bandage.