2025-09-14, On stop cop city rico charges being dropped

Earlier in the week, reports indicated that Judge Kevin Farmer, who is overseeing the trial against the Stop Cop City protesters, is planning to dismiss conspiracy and arson charges against folk.

Before saying anything else, I want to say that it is grotesque that Stop Cop City has become about the legalistic narrative in such a way that has completely erased the murder of Tortuguita, especially because it was their murder that ostensibly led to the actions that led to people getting arrested and receiving RICO charges. But I suppose it is more difficult to say that we are winning when Tortuguita is still dead and the thing they died to prevent is happening.

But holy /fuck/ is it... angering and disorienting, to have seen for the past few days, articles and social media posts all discussing how the (possible) dismissal of these charges means the state failed. (Notably, I have only seen one post that acknowledged that the dismissal is intended, not official.)

Especially when, on the other side of "RICO charges dismissed = state failure," there is "RICO charges filed = abolitionist success."

That one has always been a harder sell to me, and I wrote about it at length after that perspective /was/ formalized, when Antipode published Hannah Kass's paper calling Stop Cop City an abolitionist success: "[Stop Cop City] prefigured a life-world which sustained the trees and their defenders."

(It must be noted that that was written while some defenders were facing RICO charges, others are now impoverished and transient due to retaliation from employers during Stop Cop City, and many, many, many trees have been destroyed.)

Between the dismissal of RICO charges meaning the state failed and the successful arrest of protesters meaning that abolition succeeded, the belief carried in social media discourse is now that Stop Cop City was both an abolitionist success and state failure.

Given the material changes that occurred, that feels like a claim grounded much more in a certain form of ideology than any practical appraisal of effect and causality.

Unpacking that ideology is... something I'm really struggling with, across my research. Here, I'm going to take a similar approach as I did with /Citing for Containment/: I'll use the same theoretical field as that piece, which used the same referrants as Kass did.

But my intention is to show that the theory is being used to construct a narrative, not conduct analysis, and that the two forms of use result in very different interpretations when conducted on the same material.

(This effort demonstrates larger points about Hegelian dialectics and commodification via industrial intellectualism, but explaining that is beyond the scope of this piece.)

For the dropping the RICO charges to mean the state had failed, certain things would have to be true.

It would have to be true that the value of the indictment was a conviction. That the purpose of the case was to imprison people. That until convinction, the charges had no meaning: simply potential to be fulfilled or erased.

If any of that were true, then yes, the dismissal would indicate a failure.

But those truths are retroactively constructed from meanings that only formed /after the charges/.

At the time, a lot of discussion was about how the RICO charges were poorly-formed and thus were unlikely to stick: the repression was understood as the point, especially: disrupting solidarity around Tortuguita.

The value of the charges, as posited by both those issuing and receiving them, was in its ability to disrupt ongoing practices. In that, it succeeded.

The charges formatted activists as criminal enterprise. It made Weelaunee Forest into a site of domestic terrorism. It taught reporters, judges, readers, and even the arrested how to narrate what was happening.

All that began happening - and was understood to have begun in this way - as soon as the charges were announced. Convinction, at that point, was not seen as the value, or a likely outcome, so making sense of the arrests around that point wasn't possible.

And as that happened, it provided the material to renarrativize why it was happening, and what it could mean, in real time.

And with the dismissal of charges, the truth of that material can never be questioned, even as the products that social media discourse and institutional critical theory continue to circulate as truths.

I said I would connect this back to theory, and I didn't. But it felt good to get this out, and I'm going to take another swing at this topic.