On September 12, 2024, a ruling was handed down in the case of the “Uhuru Three.” Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), Penny Hess, Chairman of the African People’s Solidarity Network, and Jesse Nevel, Uhuru Solidarity Movement chair, were acquitted of failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as agents of Russia, but were found guilty of conspiracy—that is, conspiring with the Russian government to sow discord and to interfere with elections. The charge of conspiracy is particularly nefarious because it effectively criminalizes thoughts and ideas as actions, and, as the Black Alliance for Peace explains, “conspiracy should be understood as the state deploying anything vague and circumstantial to use against our movement when it cannot get a conviction on anything else.”
Using the charge of conspiracy to undermine radicals has a very long history. It is very effective because it facilitates mass indictments and trials that can cripple entire organizations in a single proceeding. One of the most well-known examples is the Smith Act trials of the Communist Party leadership throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. Defendants were convicted of conspiracy and insurrection based on books, writings, and membership; no overt acts of violence were committed against the US government. Then as now, Black radical leaders like Claudia Jones and Pettis Perry argued that depriving communists of their right to write, speak, assemble, and publish abrogated those rights for all people and that outlawing ideas through the charge of conspiracy was the first step on the path to fascism. Similarly, the conviction of the Uhuru 3, who face up to five years in prison essentially for organizing on behalf of oppressed people generally, and African people particularly, portends entrenched attacks on radical and progressive forces irrespective of which faction of the one-party state is in office.
The Uhuru Three’s conspiracy conviction must be understood alongside the Biden administration’s attack on independent Pan-African media. In a press conference the day after the ruling in the Uhuru case, Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused African Stream, a Kenya-based platform sharing a wide array of content regarding politics, movement, and social realities on the African content and in the Diaspora, of being a front for the Russian media company RT. Similar to the accusation that the APSP and its solidarity network were doing the bidding of a Russian agent, Blinken claimed that RT was funding and exerting nefarious influence on African Stream, effectively reducing the latter to a voice of Kremlin propaganda.
That Blinken mentioned African Stream alongside the platform Red (formerly Red Fish) is no coincidence; it is part of a long pattern of Black Scare/Red Scare repression that simultaneously targets radical (e.g., communist, socialist, revolutionary nationalist) organizations and institutions alongside Black ones across the ideological spectrum, but particularly those with an internationalist, revolutionary, and/or anti-imperialist orientation. As explained in Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, the Black Scare/Red Scare eliminates the difference between challenges to white supremacy and challenges to capitalist exploitation because both oppose the organization of the United States along race and class lines. As such, those organizing for Black liberation and socialist transformation became essentially interchangeable as suspicious, outsider, and plausibly destabilizing. Both became represented as foreign, aligned with enemies of the United States, and thereby undeserving of citizenship, rights, privileges, and entitlements.
Shortly after Blinken’s announcement, African Stream was deplatformed, disappearing instantly from YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook under the auspices of the Foreign Missions Act. Akin to the Foreign Agents Registration Act under which the Uhuru 3 were prosecuted, the Foreign Missions Act requires personnel of “state-directed” media companies to notify the State Department when operating on US property. The aim is purportedly to protect US national security and foreign policy interests, which has historically been a key rationale for the nullification of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of association. The notorious Internal Security Act of 1950 (McCarran Act), for example, required many radical and communist organizations to register with the Subversive Activities Control Board. The specific penalties for not registering outright communist organizations or those that were purported to be communist fronts, communist infiltrated, communist dominated, communist supported, or communist inspired included five years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine for every day unregistered. The “labeling” section of the act required “Communist-action” and “Communist-front” organizations to label any materials sent through the mail as deriving from such organizations. Such labeling, it was argued, aimed to curtail freedom of information by inviting persecution and harassment to persons who received these mailings. It also imposed a “malignant form of censorship” based on the allegedly “dangerous or harmful character . . . of the publisher or distributor.” This “labeling” process shares much in common with Twitter’s previous “state-affiliated media” designation that was seemingly meant to undermine the credibility of outlets that were affiliated with those designated enemies of the United States (i.e., Russia, China, Iran) and that challenged the narratives of the U.S. mainstream media.
Regarding the McCarran Act, the Communist stalwarts Claudia Jones and Ferdinand Smith and their comrades imprisoned on Ellis Island warned in November 1950, “If we can be denied all rights and incarcerated in concertation camps, then trade unionists are next; then the Negro people, the Jewish people, all foreign-born, and all progressives who love peace and cherish freedom will face the bestiality and torment of fascism. Our fate is the fate of all opponents of fascist barbarism, of all who abhor war and desire peace.” The McCarran Act, they argued, worked through and with the Black Scare/Red Scare by denying human rights to radicals, not because they posed a physical threat but because their fight on behalf of labor, Black rights, and true democracy threatened to subvert the status quo. Likewise, such repression meant that an attack on one group of “others” could quickly spread to all groups of “undesirables.” Finally, the state of perpetual siege and war in which repression flourished was becoming normalized in the United States, and values like peace and freedom were being distorted into threats to national security to legitimate racialized carcerality and expulsion.
The parallels between that 1950s moment and our current epoch—in which the war-intensified genocide of Palestinians is normalized, anti-Cop City organizers are designated domestic terrorists, support for bail funds fall under RICO statutes, student protestors are brutalized and ostracized by colleges and universities, and Pan-African organizations and institutions are attacked as agents of a foreign power—certainly animate the widespread idea that we are currently living through the “New McCarthyism.” That we are presently in the throes of another (Black Scare) Red Scare certainly challenges the idea voiced by some activists that a Democrat presidency will “ope[n] space for those of us who are more radical than Kamala Harris to put the pressure for change, especially in the first place when it comes to the genocide in Palestine.” The ongoing repression of Pan-Africanists, students, organizers, workers, and ordinary people who oppose genocide, settler colonialism, Western imperialism, the expanding police state, and escalating warmongering renders dubious the idea that US electoral politics in and of themselves have the capacity “to enlarge the terrain of mass struggle, to guarantee a space for the trade union movement to win victories, for the women’s movement to win victories, for people of color to win victories, for working and poor people to win victories.” While it is true that Donald Trump is the more overt and boisterous fascist, it would be the height of dishonesty to deny that the attack on the APSP, African Stream, and countless other radical organizations and individuals provides the infrastructure for full-blown fascism—and the neoliberals currently in power are active and willing architects.