United States of Suppression: Documenting the Crackdown on Dissent and Protests in the U.S. | Teen Vogue
TINA TONA
The backlash to progress is often swift. The response to the 2020 protests for Black lives and against police brutality — what may have been the biggest mobilization in US recorded history — was stunning. A bright spark of resistance and the expression of long-held frustration was met with suffocating state repression: arrests, beatings, prosecutions, and calls for more police funding from the highest levels of government.
With the 2024 presidential election on the horizon, authoritarianism in the United States is often discussed in terms of who will win the White House in November. What’s happened in the last few years under both Democratic and Republican leadership at the local, state, and federal level shows the need to hold all parties accountable. We’re witnessing a remarkable suppression of dissent, and in the last few months in particular it’s disproportionately affected young people. Starting in April 2024, nearly 3,000 people were arrested over Palestine protests on campuses, and some still face charges. Students calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and setting up tent encampments on their campuses were recklessly labeled extremists. One Republican congressman even introduced a bill proposing to send arrested student protesters to Gaza, where the recorded death toll stands at over 37,000, to do “community service.” Amid this clampdown, protesters are looking to history, drawing comparisons between the suppression of the civil rights movement and student movements of the 1960s and today.
For Teen Vogue’s United States of Suppression series, we spoke to civil rights lawyers, elected representatives, and organizers to understand how our right to protest is being curtailed, and how people are working around the barriers placed in their way.
Currently, there are more than 30 bills pending in Congress and statehouses across the country that seek to limit the right to protest. It’s not a fully new strategy, Michael Loadenthal, founder and executive director of the Prosecution Project, which tracks federal-level prosecution of political violence, tells Teen Vogue. “The laws follow the movement tactics,” Loadenthal says. “When Black Lives Matter activists throughout the Midwest and the country are blocking highways, then you have all these laws introduced that say you can't block highways; when people are setting up Standing Rock, in the early days of the Dakota Access Pipeline, you get these laws about blocking critical infrastructure.”
The Prosecution Project tracked some 13,600 arrests from summer 2020 protests (which they break down into categories of terrorism, extremism, hate crimes, and social protest prosecuted as a crime, based on what charges individuals faced). “We saw within the 2020 prosecutions more aggressive federal prosecution, more aggressive framing by federal authorities in evidentiary materials, and more aggressive investigative methods…a lot of things typically reserved for ‘serious crime’ were used against demonstrators,” Loadenthal tells Teen Vogue. “It seemed oftentimes — as someone who's read thousands of affidavits — to be breaking a nut with a hammer.”
We’re seeing similar categorizations of blocking traffic as “domestic terrorism,” or making “wilful disturbance” a misdemeanor, in response to pro-Palestine protests, in states including New York, Massachusetts, Arizona, and West Virginia. During yet another COVID spike, officials are attempting to restrict the ability to wear masks, targeting protesters in places like New York City, Los Angeles, and the state of North Carolina. As Artie Vierkant of the podcast Death Panel argued on a recent episode, “Masks are being attacked in part because they've successfully been made into symbols of solidarity... between COVID, disability justice and the fight for a free Palestine."
Loadenthal says he often sees the conflation of historic forms of social protest — that may include property damage or obstruction, but not violence against other people — with terrorism. “If you keep pointing to bulls**t and saying it's terrorism then when people die in actual acts of terrorism it does a disservice. I've worked with people who have died in acts of terrorism, who have lost spouses, who have been seriously injured in acts of terrorism. This is the space I work in. That's not what we're talking about when we're talking about someone blocking a highway.”
In a May 2024 feature for New York Magazine entitled “How to Criminalize a Protest,” focused on the charges against the Stop Cop City movement, writer Zak Cheney Rice described how, in the years following the Ferguson uprising and preceding the George Floyd uprising, Georgia included “damaging certain types of property” in their legal definition of domestic terrorism directed at the Black Lives Matter movement. This increasing criminalization of protest, one expert proposed, seemed to be a test: “How many people could [police] criminalize at once?” Meanwhile, cities across America are looking to build new “Cop City” police training facilities.
In our series, you’ll hear from Stop Cop City organizers who spoke to writer Jamila Osman about what happens when people are punished for going out in the streets and standing up against policies and proposals they don’t like. Marian Jones chronicles the history of male lawmakers criminalizing reproductive access and then criminalizing pregnancy itself.
When State Rep. Mauree Turner of Oklahoma tried to shelter a constituent during a protest of a gender-affirming care ban, they were censured. They write about choosing not to run for re-election after taking the “right” path to activism — then still being suppressed.
Dissent won’t stop. Resistance to bigotry, to racism, to climate destruction, to laws controlling people’s bodies — none of it is going away. Mass protests are in the works for the upcoming Republican and Democratic conventions and we’ll be watching to see what’s coming in the United States of Suppression. |
