Anti-Solidarity Strategy
By In Defense of Movements (IDOM)
Prairieland is not an anomaly, it’s a precedent.
The Prairieland trial marked the first case in which the government prosecuted left-wing demonstrators and alleged they are part of a terrorist “antifa cell.” Prairieland is not an outlier but rather a warning about what lies ahead.
This series shares key learnings from Prairieland: how the government has deployed the case on multiple fronts, how it has recast political ideology as criminal conduct, and the ways fear, isolation, and narrative manipulation have already fractured solidarity among the left’s practical coalition of progressives, liberals, and leftists.
We hope that you use this series as motivation for having conversations within your institution or organization. We encourage you to make the implicit explicit. There will be tough conversations as you work towards alignment of values and strategy. We must not shy away from these conversations because there is simply too much at stake.
Anti-solidarity as strategy
The larger ambition of the Prairieland prosecution, through securing the nine convictions, is to discourage us from supporting each other. In short: Prairieland is an anti-solidarity project.
The state’s use of media narratives and compelling testimony from activists that was used against defendants lays a blueprint for how to break solidarity — not only between defendants but also among their supposed or would-be allies. We must recognize that there is a broad instinct on the left to create distance from anything that could be construed as adjacent to violence, extremism, or militancy — even when those underlying allegations are actively contested or downright unproven.
Despite the left’s intellectual understanding of solidarity in the face of authoritarian repression, there remains a cultural willingness to accept the state’s “official” narrative at face value that a group of “violent leftists” weren’t doing things “the right way” and therefore deserve to be punished. And as a result, the left largely abandoned these activists and others in similar situations.
For instance, in January 2023 when Tortuguita, an Atlanta Forest Defender at Cop City, was murdered by police, there were many on the left — within philanthropy specifically — that accepted the state’s false narrative about the shooting. It wasn’t until later, when the truth was revealed about Tortuguita having their hands up, sitting crossed legged, not firing at officers did it become more culturally acceptable to openly support the Stop Cop City movement.
That distancing has had profound consequences, not only for defendants and victims of police violence themselves, but for the left as a whole that fails to recognize prosecutions such as Prairieland, as connected to the larger escalation already underway against protest movements, immigrant justice organizing, climate activism, and movements for healthcare and bodily autonomy.
This instinct to treat defendants as “untouchable” fundamentally misunderstands what is unfolding.
Here is what’s happening: The state is expanding its use of conspiracy frameworks that are untethered from meaningful evidence of coordinated planning or financing. If people are being put into prison for decades for sharing an ideology with someone who allegedly committed an act of violence, what does that mean for the rest of us?
Right now, the left is treating Prairieland as somehow categorically different from other political prosecutions simply because of the allegations of violence.
There were no statements of outrage from major U.S. nonprofit institutions and no sign-on statements of solidarity when the state withheld evidence or when defendants were moved repeatedly between facilities, placed in solitary confinement, misgendered in jail, denied consistent access to support systems, and subjected to pressure tactics designed not simply to secure cooperation, but to isolate people from one another and from broader movements that might otherwise rally around them.
Rather, the state successfully exploited and deepened existing fault lines on the left throughout the case. One striking example emerged where a local organizer associated with the 50501 movement, Nelida Quirina Media Frias, testified that their daytime protest outside Prairieland had been peaceful, “collaborative” with law enforcement, and deployed coordinators responsible for deescalation. This allowed narratives around non-violence to be weaponized and become the determining factor among the broader left of who is and who is not worthy of defense.
The result is that distinctions between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” movements, or between “good” and “bad” protesters, are increasingly being weaponized in ways that encourage people to distance themselves from those deemed too controversial, marginal, or easily vilified by the state.
That reality shaped not only public response to the Prairieland case, but undermined the willingness of main stream organizations and philanthropy to publicly stand alongside the defendants once the government’s narrative had taken hold.
To further illustrate the point, compare Prairieland to the case against Southern Poverty Law Center. In many ways standing in solidarity with SPLC is an easier choice, not because of the charges, but because of their institutional positionality which has enabled them to raise millions of dollars and gather support from fellow nonprofits. However, the state’s case against SPLC will come down to the same legal and narrative strategies and tactics that were employed in Prairieland. We see these cases as being one in the same.
We must avoid the tendencies of the left to treat each new prosecution as isolated and exceptional, rather than as part of a developing strategy on the part of the state that expands the categories of people who can be framed as dangerous, extremist, or beyond solidarity.
That dangerous and disturbing tendency leaves movements perpetually reacting to the last escalation rather than preparing for the next one.
IDOM investigates political prosecutions, attacks on movements, and the erosion of civil liberties.
Source: indefenseofmovements.substack.com, May 19, 2026