Teen Vogue reports:

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.” [Continue reading…]