masculinizing the divine feminine

"Needy, unable to cope" (<- you try coping with chronic pain)

"Comfort seeking" (<- you mean.. having a preference for not being in pain.. how criminal)

"Using or trying to obtain drugs on a long-term, chronic base" (<- do you understand what 'chronic pain' means.)

"Asking for pain med then returning to sleep."

"States he’s level 10 pain, but does not appear to be in pain (or ‘5= on appearance)." (<- it is well-known that chronic pain patients tend not to display pain in the same way as acute pain patients)

"Dramatic response to pain" (<- notice how this directly contradicts the comment above. you cannot win)

"Gets IV med, then leaves unit to smoke or walk around" (<- wow requiring medication and then going off to do something you needed pain meds to be able to do is so suspicious)

link

If you use a calculator rather than doing all calculations by hand, would you see a reduction in brain activity on an EEG? If someone uses Grammarly to correct every grammar mistake they make rather than reading over their entire essay/email/cover letter/etc manually, would you see a reduction in brain activity? If I use google maps to map out what route I need to take to get somewhere rather than plotting it out by hand using a paper map and asking multiple people for directions, would you see a reduction in brain activity? Or, to use an example of something I did today - if I asked the Google search AI to write out the excel formulas I need to use to conduct statistical analysis on my dataset, rather than reading the documentation pages on Microsoft’s website for ANOVA tests/t-tests/etc and manually trouble shooting every time I ran into an error, would you see a reduction in my brain activity? Furthermore, because the study mentions poorer content recall when writing an essay via LLM, if you were asked to recall the processes of each of these tasks (eg, calculations, grammar, travel route times and directions, formula syntax) after having them automated for you, could you do it?

Like, almost certainly there would be a reduction in brain activity and poorer recall, because you are offloading cognitive tasks to a machine to do that thinking work for you. But neurological activity is not the language we use when we talk about other forms of automation, because it would be absurd to claim that there is collective cognitive decline happening as a result of Google Maps telling you where to drive or what bus to take. And this is a good comparison imo, because you certainly can't make the argument that everyday travel is less important/foundational to the functioning of society than writing an essay.

Before I could even process that, another officer dropped the big surprise: they’d actually been tracking me around town for days via Flock cameras. But they kept losing the trail, so when a camera alerted them that the Range Rover had been spotted turning into Kohl’s that morning, they quickly set up their ambush and waited for me and my wife to walk out of the store and get into the SUV.

[…]

One of the officers pulled out his phone, opened the Flock app, and showed me two photos: a wide shot of the Range Rover going through the intersection and a zoomed-in shot of the New Jersey license plate, which clearly reads 34 10 DTM and says VEHICLE MFR along the bottom. Critically, the number 10 is in a much smaller font than the rest of the tag, which is the non-standard structure New Jersey uses for manufacturer plates.

[…]

The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.

As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife, who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLR’s media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure—34 ## DTM—and Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.

Still, he warned me to drive straight home, park the Range Rover, and leave it there. If I were to cross into the neighboring town, I’d probably get flagged again and go through this entire ordeal again with a different set of officers. His parting words were ominous: “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”

De la Espriella's board purposefully refused to conduct a transition between administrations as lawfully ordered because Petro's government decided to show all fully allocated and spare funds for all ministries and state bureaus on live TV for everybody to see, so newly elected officials would have no way to lay claims on received deficits stemming from speculations on corruption the way they've kept stating they would all along this year.

This meant the incoming board to assume functions in both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Unidad Nacional de Gestión de Riesgos y Desastres ("UNGRD" for short, translating to "National Unit for Risk and Disaster Management") deliberately neglected their duty to carry out thorough inventorying to keep governance working so as to avoid the overbureaucratisation and cost overruns on critical areas they claimed the former government had failed to reach optimal operability, like welfare distribution depending on bilateral and multilateral deals already agreed upon and underway with foreign governments and trade organisations to balance trade development with proportional social expenditure to alleviate the lack of development on the means of production across regions the oligarchy (who now back de la Espriella's administration) have long neglected.

Without duly reviewing any of it, the newly appointed united stater ambassador to Colombia stated de la Espriella's government would nullify Colombia's involvement in Chinese-led Silk Road agreements in order to begin paying back the sponsorship Trump's government lend to de las Espriella's campaign through their foreign policies (the so-called "Donroe" Doctrine) and "keep Communism at bay", after which the Foreign Affairs Ministry announced they now back the Moroccan occupation of the República Saharauí and the zionist occupation of both Palestine and the Syrian Golan Heights. Clauses on mutual cooperation have been effectively broken: both Syria and Morocco are part of the Silk Road initiative, but the Colombian government have adopted policies that undermine the principle of mutual territorial sovereignty recognition underlying all international treaties (as per the Vienna Convention, which is the basis of all multilateral treaties like the Silk Road initiative), and by extension, of mutual cooperation (not that I personally believe the International Law-based Order™ has got any actually developmental value. But for a government that take so much pride from their very onset in upholding the very same Western Liberal status quo that brought it up, they're definitely doing a piss poor job at, on the very least, enacting any extent of clout to pretend to abide by it).

Yesterday morning, a 7,4 Richter Scale earthquake took place along the Colombian Pacific region, causing widespread deaths and damage on four major cities including the country's third largest one, Cali. Just as this happened, de la Espriella and his vice-president José Manuel Restrepo overslept on their newly appointed posts after taking part in Fiesta de las Flores parties in Medellín with Antioquia's governor and Medellín's mayor, without having yet de-facto appointed anybody to take charge of the UNGRD and taking up to eight hours to assign any provisional representatives to attend the emergency, not having sent any to the actual epicentre (San José del Palmar, a town with a population of a few less than 6000, most of whom are African-Colombians long marginalised by the oligarchy) almost 20 hours into the aftermath. When they finally arrived at Cali, instead of getting to tend to the emergency immediately, de la Espriella called on a press meeting to explain himself and greet and blow kisses on the attendants.

Only during his first weekend as president, cops attacked and extrajudicially detained unarmed protestors demonstrating against his election during the inaugural session, the national army opened fire on civilians, forest fires have raged all across the most forested regions outside of the Colombian side of the Amazonian Basin (most of them quite probably caused on purpose), and the most intense earthquake to have taken place in the country in decades crippled the four largest cities on the country's West (Cali, Quibdó, Manizales, and Pereira; two of them being part of the four —the latter two, along with Armenia (also greatly affected) and Ibagué— comprising the labour and commercial backbone for the main Coffee-producing region the Colombian bourgeoisie take so much pride in as well). And the wanker spent it all partying in Medellín (my work-worshipping, fascist home city, for anybody out there who didn't yet know where this was typed down from).

His government have had to backtrack on both of these policies: the Petro government's most recent UNGRD director had to resume his post to co-ordinate the management and efforts tending to the sheer scale of the emergency, as neither the newly appointed one nor any other officials from de la Espriella's board have got the specialised experience necessary to do so on notice; and they had to accept Chinese assistance to manage the situation nevertheless.

This is our picture for, at least, the next four years. We've got no international Communist hegemon backing any Communist movements here because the Chinese government are not the mid 20th century Soviet government, they don't promote Communism anywhere other than within their own frontiers and at a very ambiguously gradual degree of dialectical development. We've got no Free World™-sponsored opening Liberal bonanza because there's never been such a thing anywhere at any extent but as a fiction. And we've got no substantial development of the means of production vis à vis European Social Democracy supporting Palestinians at international institutional level because the only such-seeming government we've ever had spent four years struggling against a systemically organised congressional bourgeois bloc sabotaging most of their major law and reform proposals, to no avail except for moderate labour law reforms now lacking executive support.

he's also looking up into exporting bukele's prison system of building "megaprisons" to detain without a trial criminals, narcos, guerrilla fighters and probably political opponents. if he builds them and implements the very same system bukele follows anyone can be detained and imprisoned without a judicial order, and based on vibes because unlike el salvador, nor narcos or guerrilla fighters in this country have tattoos to identify them as part of the illegal groups, so the persecution of people who look "suspicious" is going to resume (this has happened a lot since probably the conception of the guerrilla groups in the fifties, all throught the rest of the century and well into the early 2000s) and we'll probably end up with similar results from uribe's "falsos positivos".

as @huzni said, the next four years are bleak to put it midly. the earthquake couldn't have happened at a worst time and place, mostly because many of the affected zones are for the most part, very impoverished. they do not have the resources to attend the emergency on their own and i'm pretty sure many families would not have the money to fully rebuil their lives. hell, chocó is a place where floodings and landslides are very frequent and people find very hard to recover from these disasters. add to that an incoming government full of sycophants, criminals, and thieves, and nothing good is going to come of it. i can already imagine the news stories that will come out about corruption in the handling of the emergency.

and if you're asking why we elected such a piece of shit, de la espriella ran a campaign based on either fear or hatred for leftists and guerrilleros, the electoral officials refused to give public access to the electoral software, the same one that was used to commit fraud in honduras, and sure enough, almost 250,000 people were found to have been illegally registered for the elections, and tallys were found to be modified after the election (i was a teller (scrutineer? what's the correct term for that, anyways?) and i saw how easy it is to alter those things), but like usual no international election observer gave a fuck. plus all the traditional media was backing far right candidates and straight up lying about the left candidate and petro's administration.

that one time AFU soldier honestly wrote about how they're ones occupying Donbass not the other way around:

You’re probably going to be wanting to look into the ties between commerce, kinship systems, and law to develop a more comprehensive sense of these things and a more historically grounded concept of racism, gender, and class struggle. I’ll try and recommend a (mostly) chronologically ordered group of texts that can give you the basics.

Overall theoretical framework:

The Combahee River Collective Statement

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations by Karl Marx

Development of domination:

Pathology of Patriarchy by Sanyika Shakur

A People’s History of Civilization by John Zerzan

Myths of Male Dominance by Eleanor Burke Leacock

The Metamorphoses of Kinship by Maurice Godelier

Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson

The history of Western civilization:

Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization by Robert A. Williams Jr.

The Early Growth of the European Economy by Georges Duby

Law and the Rise of Capitalism by Michael Tigar

Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany by Lyndal Roper

The Making of New World Slavery: From Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 by Robert Blackburn

Global capitalism:

Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire

Columbus and Other Cannibals by Jack D. Forbes

Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System by Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney

Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Truth/Power/Freedom by Sylvia Wynter

How to re-theorize class struggle:

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Limbaugh and Marcus Rediker

The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico by Steve J. Stern

Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis

Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman

The Wages of Whiteness by David Roediger

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America by Peggy Pascoe

The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America by Michael Taussig

Ch'ixinakax utxiwa: On Decolonising Practices and Discourses by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

Family, Welfare, and the State: Between Progressivism and the New Deal by Mariarosa Dalla Costa

It was interesting thinking about this, because I never conceptualized it that way as a child. I didn't think I was under an unreasonable pressure of having my location controlled by others, because it didn't ever really occur to me to see the shape of that pattern as something that Could be different.

I did get lost, though. Or - by my memory I only got lost once, when I was 5, and it was very scary. My mom remembers... many more incidents. But in those cases I knew where I was, and I'd got there on purpose, and I came back on my own time. Most of them, I didn't even know anyone thought I was lost. I'd just gone somewhere. And not told anyone.

At least a couple times I knew very strongly that I needed to be somewhere and not have anyone know where. I needed to get away from being seen, being known, being circumscribed. I needed no one to be able to come get me. Those times were mostly when I was older, when I'd started to go more places on my own power - city bus to school and so on - and when that sense of being pinned in place closed in I knew the shape of what I was escaping. But when I was younger it was just something I Did. I didn't know it as a need or as a reaction to anything in particular. It was just something that was important to me to sometimes do.

And I think it's an interesting window into misbehavior in kids. Problem behavior, things parents tear their hair about, things kids at some point just.... grow out of, apparently. How much is the backlash of a stress applied elsewhere? Some constraint, which they don't have the perspective to understand as unbearable or even unreasonable, which is pressurized and transmuted into some reaction through some other pressure-release valve. I mean, that's not at all a new analysis, that kids 'act out' in response to pressure. But I guess I don't often see it applied all the way back to "normal" levels of kids whining and yelling and getting into trouble, in response to the "normal" levels of constraint kids are under.

Which is so much, actually, once you're looking for it. But strangely I think a lot of people go through this double-forgetting, while they simultaneously gain more agency in their own lives and more perspective about the world and about agency as a concept. They don't complete the analysis of the situation they used to be in, with the new tools. They don't track the shape of the behaviors they grew out of, and what they felt like from the inside versus what they were named by adults, and how and when exactly those feelings and those behaviors slipped away.

World Wars 1 and 2 fatally weakened capitalist colonialism. [...] The private capitalist classes atop each colonialist nation had understood the colonies’ importance for their profits and thus for their imperial economies. They went to war in large part to retain their colonies. After the two World Wars, they faced, separately and together, momentous challenges to their existence. As their empires dissolved in wars of independence, losing them threatened capitalists’ profits and their national economies. Worse still was a potential alliance linking ex-colonies, the Comintern nations, and those capitalists’ own domestic socialist and communist parties and unions. Fearing such developments, nothing less than the survival of 20th century European capitalism seemed at stake for European capitalists and their supporters.

To undo this threat western Europe appealed to the post-World War 2 global hegemon, the United States. Within a few years after 1945, the US had scooped up much of what European and Japanese colonialisms had lost. US capitalists moved into newly independent, ex-colonies to widen and deepen their economic dependence via the dollar as world currency and both trade with and capitalist investments from the US. European capitalists lost everything or else had to settle for positions as junior partners of their US counterparts. Europe as a whole followed suit and became the junior partner of the US in most other dimensions (NATO, geo-politics, financial and cultural institutions, etc.) [...]

Ever since 1945, western European capitalists had set themselves to rebuild their economies by producing goods and services of better quality and/or cheaper than the US output that dominated both the US and other markets. This included some investments in their former colonies, rendering them economically dependent notwithstanding their political independence. The latter became more performative than substantive. It remains that way in many areas. The crucially important exception was the spectacular economic growth of the People’s Republic of China. That changed everything and continues to do so. It is transforming the world economy as it takes an ever more powerful place therein.

China’s still export-driven manufacturing economy competes globally and ever more successfully with what remains of manufacturing in the US and in Europe. China competes as well as an importer of energy and other inputs. Chinese competition added strains to the European and US economies that were already struggling to cope with the declines of their empires. Europe already had had a century of decline whereas the US was new to decline with many of its citizens steadfastly committed to denial as their coping mechanism of choice.

Western European capitalism had partly offset its decline first by post-war reconstruction, then by explosions of consumer credit. Then (and especially after 1989), Europe welcomed waves of cheap immigrant labor, while expanding eastward to re-absorb eastern Europe into its economic operations much as it was doing with its former colonies. Pushing NATO eastward and expanding EU membership were the chief mechanisms to accomplish western Europe’s capitalist neocolonialism. [...]

The shock of Trump’s abandonment of Europe as the US economy’s junior partner accelerated the decline of Europe. Once it had been the dominating center of a planet it had colonized. Now it had fallen to a poor third place in a world economy increasingly dominated by what had once been poor corners of that planet. On one side stood the declining but still strong US, on the other the rising People’s Republic of China. No wonder the Ukraine war drove Russia to declare its identity shifting from European to Asian. [...]

Given the deep personal opportunism cultivated in western European leaders by their subordinate (to the US) situation, they grasped that Trump’s betrayal threatened their careers. Trump’s repeated insults of and disdain for western Europe risked provoking European voters to turn against leaders seen as slavish toward Trump’s US. [...] Voters might ask where the money would come from to finance European rearmament when the US defense umbrella closed. If enhanced, would budget allocations for the military diminish outlays for mass public social services, raise their taxes or both. Europeans began to wonder out loud whether the Ukraine-Russia war being fought to the last Ukrainian, might prefigure a US war with Russia/China fought to the last European? [...] How that plays out in European politics provides new opportunities for the left and the right and existential threats to the traditional centrist pro-US political leadership trying desperately to retain power. [...]

And now let me show you how the history is very helpful here. And I'm going to take an extreme example, but it's valid, I believe, for the whole continent. Belgium is a very small country. I've been to Belgium. You know, it's very nice. Brussels has that old section that is charming to look at and all of that. But Belgium is a small European country with no great resources. But it had a colony, Congo, which is arguably the richest part of all Africa. Unbelievably fertile soil. The fantastic river that runs right through it that makes it navigable deep into the interior where all that rich soil exists. And so Belgium could become comfortable bourgeoise rich European country. But it doesn't take a genius to understand that's because it could rip off an immense colonial back hinterland. And the same was true of France and Germany and all the way through unless, of course, they lost it. And what happens to a society if it loses those colonies upon which its standard of living in very important ways depended? Well, we know the answer. We have a historical example. At the end of World War I, France and Britain and the United States deprived Germany of its colonies. Okay, that had something to do with the arrival of Mr. Hitler. It wasn't the only reason. But losing those colonies, losing the war, having the Europe's worst inflation ever in 1923 and 1924, followed by the Great Depression in 1929. That's too much economic trauma in too short a period. It produces a hysterical demonization. Guess what? Of Russia and of Bolshevism. And what did Hitler fantasize? Hitler fantasized taking Russia. [...] Okay, you put all this together and here comes my conclusion that the leadership of Europe is hysterical for comparable reasons. They have no colonies anymore. They lost them after World War II or in the intervening period. For a while they could hold on by French equatorial Africa was nominally independent politically but not really economically. But over time that was changed. Those countries have figured out political independence without economic independence doesn't add up to what they had hoped for. So more and more the Empire formal or informal atrophies. What's then left for Europe? The the two walls, US and China, are squeezing them. Being a junior partner is what they're stuck with. So the masses of Europeans will turn against European leadership. [...] And so the leaders to save themselves have to come up both with a demon that they're protecting their people from and some opportunity that might recoup their economically damaged situation. And what is that? The fantastical war against Russia that divides it up, gives a chunk to Germany, a chunk to France, a chunk to Italy, a chunk to Britain. All in the name of anti-authoritarianism. [I think the fantasy of defeating and carving up Russia for the leaders of Europe gives them a negative to be against and a positive to be for and and to solve.]

And that's my last point. My whole life here, in the United States, [...] we were always taught in the university and by our media that Russia is a nice place. Russia are good people. Communism is the sum total of evil. [...] Now there's no more barrier to making good with these nice Russian people because the barrier has gone. There's no more communism. Americans don't know much about communism. They didn't then and they don't now. But that was the evil, not Russia. Part of why Mr. Trump fell away from the Europeans and mocked them in their anti-Russianism is that he is a product, like I am, of this American training and our training wasn't in demonizing Russia. [...] And I can assure you because I went to the elite schools in this country and I have personal friends all through the government that the hostility to Europe runs very deep and is not at all limited to the Republican party or to Mr. Trump. Not at all. There's a clear sense that we carried Europe and that we can't afford to do that and that's the end of that conversation. [...]

[Meanwhile] the only strategy now for the European leaders, it seems, is to be seen as a force amplifier in Washington. That is, you know, if we can show that we're able to defeat the Russians, then suddenly the market value of Europe increases. They can't stop talking about how Europe brings value to the US. But if they have to talk this much about it then obviously they're covering up for some deficiencies here. [...]

What China has shown in the last 40 years is that this hybrid of public and private sectors with a dominant state and a dominant party on top of it, that's how you grow fast. And that fast growth happened in a country that didn't use any kind of external colonialism.

Primer on the initiative from Philippine social movements:

The original signatories were Australia, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the UK and of course the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Silica

lyo_likes_to_talk on IG

1. I will always find it weird for an adult to think a child is being "manipulative" because a child quite literally doesn't have the brain development to understand what manipulation is or why they shouldn't be manipulative.

Federal agents raiding the home of two alleged antifa “operatives” seized a telling piece of evidence, a defense attorney said during closing arguments in a landmark trial Wednesday.

A printing press.

That printing press was never presented to jurors. Still, the government has kept it locked away because it hated the pamphlets and zines it published, lawyer Blake Burns said.

Burns represents Elizabeth Soto, one of nine defendants whose fates were in the hands of jurors as deliberations began Thursday. All are accused of roles during or after a late-night noise demonstration outside Prairieland Detention Center, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility near Dallas that ended with a local police officer wounded by gunfire.

The case has become a bellwether for the Trump administration’s crackdown on dissent from the left. The government charged people involved with the anti-ICE protest with a slew of charges, including attempted murder and terrorism counts that defense attorneys said are being used to criminalize protest.

“They’re here asking you guys to put protesters in prison as terrorists.”

“They’re here asking you guys to put protesters in prison as terrorists,” Burns, the defense lawyer, told jurors. “That’s not happened before. And you are literally the only people in the world who can stop it.”

During 10 days of testimony in a packed Fort Worth, Texas, courtroom, prosecutors bombarded jurors with images of radical zines printed on the press, anti-government internet memes, drawings of burning cop cars, and a video of an unidentified street brawl between far-left and far-right protesters.

Prosecutors acknowledged those materials were protected by the First Amendment but said they showed the roughly dozen people who assembled outside the ICE facility were steeped in antifa tactics.

Eight of nine defendants on trial this month face material support for terrorism charges for wearing “black bloc” clothes at the protest. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have hailed the first-ever use of terrorism charges against alleged antifa members.

Defense attorneys argued Wednesday that prosecutors had wildly overcharged a case that should have centered on the alleged shooter, Benjamin Song, instead of the larger group.

Guilt by Zine

Prosecutors presented much of the evidence that might be expected at an attempted murder trial: ballistics and fingerprint experts, eyewitness police officers, and cooperating witnesses.

They also presented lengthy testimony about radical pamphlets and artwork collected from the defendants arrested that night or in raids during the following days.

Despite labeling the defendants “a North Texas antifa cell” in their indictment, prosecutors have acknowledged that they were at most a loose-knit collection of people from the Dallas–Fort Worth’s small leftist scene of anarchists and socialists.

Two of the scene’s fixtures were Elizabeth and Ines Soto, a married couple who operated the printing press and helped run a local reading group called the Emma Goldman Book Club, named for the early 20th-century anarchist revolutionary.

At one point during testimony Tuesday, a prosecutor spent more than half an hour scrolling through a Twitter account allegedly operated by the Sotos. The Twitter feed included a retweet of a December 2016 post with the words “How to handle fash in your hood” that included a shaky video of a street fight between protesters accompanied by the Flatbush Zombies song “Death 2.”

“I crack your fucking skull and use that as a bowl for cereal. I’m so serial. Ted Bundy, give me money, Son of Sam, gun in hand. Jeffrey Dahmer, with two llamas,” the jury heard in the song’s lyrics.

Defense attorneys objected to the introduction of the video as evidence.

“Yes, it is prejudicial,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Shawn Smith told the judge in defense of using the video. “The whole reason we’re putting it into evidence is because it’s prejudicial.”

Though U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Donald Trump appointee, allowed the Twitter feed to be presented in court, prosecutors could not definitively establish whether the Sotos had posted the video or what incident it depicted.

The Sotos, however, have not disputed that they were key members of the reading group. In his closing argument, Smith said the group was a front to recruit new antifa members.

“Emma Goldman Book Club,” Smith said. “It sounds very innocuous. It’s camouflage for what it is.”

“Your Body as Camouflage”

To help jurors interpret the book club’s readings and other materials, prosecutors presented a researcher at a far-right think tank as an expert.

Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy once focused his research on the Muslim Brotherhood. After the 2020 George Floyd protests raged, he wrote a book about “black identity extremists.” In recent years he has focused on another right-wing boogeyman: antifa.

Shideler said Monday that he helped write the definition of “antifa” included in the government’s indictment. He walked that testimony back Tuesday, saying that he only conferred on a draft.

Prosecutors also had Shideler read Trump’s September 22 executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, in an apparent attempt to suggest that the language was borrowed from the order.

Shideler described what he said were common tactics of antifa, including using the messaging app Signal — which Shideler said he also used — and wearing “black bloc” clothes to obscure identities. The phrase refers to instances where groups of left-wing demonstrators dress in all black to make them less individually identifiable.

The point of that testimony came into focus during the prosecution’s closing arguments. Using Signal and wearing black-bloc clothing were “tactics that assisted in the ambush of a cop,” said Smith.

“Material support. It sounds — I don’t know — nefarious. Complicated. It’s actually very simple,” Smith said.

He said that wearing black clothes at the noise demonstration would be enough to convict the eight defendants accused of material support.

“Providing your body as camouflage for others to do the enumerated acts is providing support,” he said. “It’s impossible to tell who is doing what. That’s the point.”

The government used Shideler and the antifa talk to try to distract jurors from the defendants’ actual actions on the night of July 4, said MarQuetta Clayton, an attorney for defendant Maricela Rueda. She also warned that the trial served as a larger proving ground for the government’s attempts to criminalize antifa.

“The government’s expert on antifa said his career may be boosted by the outcome of this case,” she said. “This is an experiment for them. But this courtroom is not a laboratory, and Maricela is not a lab rat.”

Charged for Carrying a Box

Rueda’s husband, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, is the only defendant on trial who is not accused of participating in the July 4 protest. Instead, prosecutors have charged him and his wife with conspiring to obstruct justice by moving a box of zines out of Rueda’s house after her arrest.

Free speech advocates say that Estrada’s arrest sets a dangerous precedent that criminalizes the mere possession of anti-government material.

“He is on trial for two things: Carrying a box, and conspiracy to carry a box.”

“He is on trial for two things,” said Sanchez’s public defender, Christopher Weinbel. “Carrying a box, and conspiracy to carry a box, of which they try to call evidence.”

Weinbel said the box contained Sanchez’s own possessions, the timeline of his movements disproved the theory that he was acting at the direction of his wife, and that a government agent had also testified that none of the materials were used in the investigation.

Smith, the prosecutor, argued that moving the boxes was part of a larger cover-up in the hours and days after the demonstration.

“What is important to the group is hiding their material,” he said. “This anarchist, insurrectionist, hating-the-government material.”

Song and the Rest

Defense attorneys chose their words carefully when it came to Song, the person accused of shooting an AR-15 rifle at two detention center guards and the Alvarado, Texas, police officer who was hit.

None of the defense lawyers overtly blamed Song for the bloodshed, but several suggested that the government should have distinguished between Song and the rest of the protesters.

“This should have been a three-day attempted murder trial of one person,” Weinbel said.

Prosecutors painted Song as the ringleader that night. Still, they argued that four defendants who are also on trial for attempted murder — Song, Rueda, Autumn Hill, and Megan Morris — could have reasonably foreseen that Song would use violence based on conversations before the demonstration.

The eight defendants who face material support charges gave aid to the attack by wearing black clothes, prosecutors allege. They include the defendants accused of attempted murder along with the Sotos, Savanna Batten, and Zachary Evetts.