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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://theintercept.com/2021/10/16/daniel-baker-anarchist-capitol-riot/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter">theintercept.com</a>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">A Florida Anarchist Will Spend Years in Prison for Online Posts Prompted by Jan. 6 Riot</h1>
<div class="gmail-PostByline-names"><a class="gmail-PostByline-link" rel="author" href="https://theintercept.com/staff/natasha-lennard/"><span>Natasha Lennard</span></a><span> -</span><span class="gmail-PostByline-date"><span>October 16 2021</span></span>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div><p><a href="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/10/GettyImages-1230676968-fbi-insurrection.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90"><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/10/GettyImages-1230676968-fbi-insurrection.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1024&h=512" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="452" height="226"></a></p>
<p class="gmail-caption">With the U.S. Capitol building seen in the
background, a sign on a bus shelter asks the public for information
about people involved in the Capitol insurrection, January 19, 2021.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images</p></div><div><p><u>On Tuesday,</u> a Florida judge <a href="https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/local/fbi/2021/10/12/daniel-baker-sentenced-federal-prison-florida-capitol-threat-case/8424086002/">sentenced</a>
Daniel Baker, an anti-fascist activist, to 44 months in federal prison
for social media posts that called for armed defense against possible
far-right attacks on the state’s Capitol in the wake of the January 6
riots. Baker, a 34-year-old yoga teacher and emergency medical
technician trainee, had no previous criminal convictions and has already
been held for 10 months of harsh pretrial detention, including seven
months in solitary confinement. He never brought a weapon near a
government building; he amassed no armed anti-fascist forces; he made no
threats on a single individual.</p>
<p>Baker will, nonetheless, face considerably more prison time than most <a href="https://apnews.com/article/black-lives-matter-texas-sentencing-courts-capitol-siege-675b12d0ddacb64d9030c444f8812a5c">January 6 defendants</a>, including those who crossed state lines, small arsenals in tow, with the aim of overturning a presidential election.</p></div><div><p>It
goes without saying that a United States federal court is no place to
appeal to ethical grounds for militant anti-fascist resistance. Yet
Baker, while prone to hyperbolic and sometimes paranoid rhetoric, was
certainly not alone in fearing that there could be January 6-style
events in statehouses nationwide ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration and
that local police could hardly be trusted as a bulwark. The Federal
Bureau of Investigations <a href="https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-capitol-siege-donald-trump-coronavirus-pandemic-racial-injustice-afde8d98740e057b340efa63c2d40007">warned</a>
of the potential for armed protests at state capitols. Florida is home
to over 60 far-right, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi groups <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/states/florida">recognized</a> by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and there are <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law">well-reported</a> links between Florida police departments and far-right militiae.</p>
<p>If there are moral arguments for physically confronting fascists —
and I believe there are — they would have been of scant relevance in
Baker’s case: zero such confrontations took place or appeared on the
horizon, and no far-right mobs amassed at the Florida Capitol around
Biden’s inauguration. This should have been a straightforward First
Amendment case, with Baker’s online speech, albeit bellicose, judged as
constitutionally protected. Instead, the formerly unhoused veteran has
been made a victim of government efforts to draw false equivalences
between fascistic far-right forces and the anti-fascists who would see
them opposed.</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>“The
overall message people will get from this is that online speech calling
for militant antifascist action will send you to prison for much longer
than actually taking militant action with fascists.”</p></blockquote><div><p>“The
American government has chosen to side with white supremacists, except
when their own bureaucracy forces them to prosecute the most blatant
offenders, albeit gently,” Baker told me in an email from prison. “They
criticized me for supporting Black Lives Matter, Feminist Liberation
ideologies, Global Revolutionary movements and direct democracy. … The
government has made its stance clear throughout my hearings.”</p>
<p>During his sentencing hearing on Tuesday, Baker’s attorney highlighted the case of a Georgia man who <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-who-went-washington-guns-threatened-shoot-pelosi-pleads-guilty-n1278968">drove to </a>Washington,
D.C., with guns and ammunition and sent private texts threatening to
shoot Rep. Nancy Pelosi in the head. The Trump acolyte had missed the
storming of the Capitol by one day due to car trouble. Like Baker, he
was charged with the interstate communication of threats. Unlike Baker,
he had a history of hideous, racist online speech, and direct threats.
And unlike Baker, he could leave prison soon: He will be sentenced in
December and faces between six months to two years in prison; his eight
months of pretrial detention will count as time served. Taking into
account time served, meanwhile, Baker will spend another 34 months —
almost three years — in prison.</p>
<p>“Dan’s case speaks volumes about how the state represses the left
much differently than it treats the far right,” Brad Thomson, civil
rights attorney at the People’s Law Office, who did not represent Baker,
told me. “Here, Dan was sentenced to three and a half years for online
posts opposing another January 6 incident. But for actual participants
from January 6, we’re seeing charges and sentences far below that.”
Thomson added that “every case is unique, but the overall message people
will get from this is that online speech calling for militant
antifascist action will send you to prison for much longer than actually
taking militant action with fascists.”</p></div><div><p><a href="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/10/IMG_4337-baker.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90"><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/10/IMG_4337-baker.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1024&h=512" alt="IMG_4337-baker" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="452" height="226"></a></p><p class="gmail-caption">Daniel Baker in 2020.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Courtesy of Eric Champagne</p></div><div><p><u>Baker was convicted</u>
at trial earlier this year on two counts of “transmitting a
communication in interstate commerce containing a threat to kidnap or
injure another person.” The threat of kidnapping charge <a href="https://www.wctv.tv/2021/02/19/tallahassee-resident-daniel-baker-indicted-for-inciting-violence-at-florida-capitol-building/">stemmed from</a>
a feverish public Facebook post in which Baker put out a general call
for anti-racists and anti-fascists to encircle the state Capitol, should
far-right groups attack it “on or around inauguration day,” and “trap”
right-wingers inside with cops. In the very next sentence, though, he
wrote, “we will drive them out of Tallahassee with every caliber
available!” The right wing militiae were thus to be trapped in and
driven out at once, on an unspecified day, by an unnamed collaboration
of counterprotesters.</p>
<p>The “call to arms” posts — of which Baker posted a number — were
reflective of his genuine and rightful rage against white supremacist
violence, but were disorganized and inchoate. Other social media posts
that prosecutors pointed to as evidence at trial included memes
featuring Homer Simpson, Baby Yoda, and a picture of a kangaroo. “It was
truly a surreal experience being in a literal kangaroo court,” Baker
told me. His prosecution, conviction, and sentencing exemplify the
government’s commitment to conjuring a left-wing <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/08/24/fbi-fusion-center-environmental-wind/">extremist threat</a> when <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/03/23/black-identity-extremist-fbi-domestic-terrorism/">none is there</a>.</p>
<p>Baker, slight and sinewy at 5 foot 8, lived in Tallahassee at the
time of his arrest — just over one week after January 6. Federal agents
raided his apartment with guns drawn and a flashbang grenade. “I thought
we were going to die when the FBI broke down our door, the whole
experience has been excruciating and traumatizing,” said his best friend
and roommate Eric Champagne, an artist and former Hindu monk who had
traveled with Baker to support Black Lives Matter protests around the
country last year — a fact that was cited by the prosecution as proof of
Baker’s extremist bent.</p>
<p>With his knowledge as an EMT trainee, Baker would, Champagne told me,
run to the aid of injured protesters. In their hometown, the friends
regularly brought food and necessities to the unhoused community, Baker
having previously experienced homelessness himself. “My heart is about
helping people who are homeless. I know how bad it can be,” he told me
on a phone call from prison.</p></div><div><p><a href="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/10/GettyImages-1294929250-insurrection.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90"><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/10/GettyImages-1294929250-insurrection.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1024&h=683" alt="GettyImages-1294929250-insurrection" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="452" height="301"></a></p><p class="gmail-caption">Rioters interact with Capitol Police inside the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images</p></div><div><p><u>There can be</u>
little doubt that Baker’s online posts were reckless at a time when
federal law enforcement had made clear its desire to demonize radical
left-wing politics — to conjure extremist forces equal, if not greater,
to those very real and deadly threats from the far right. Following
Baker’s arrest on January 15, U.S. Attorney Larry Keefe, who led the
prosecution, pronounced, “Extremists intent on violence from either end
of the political and social spectrums must be stopped, and they will be
stopped.”</p>
<p>It would be naive and ahistorical to hope that the U.S. government
would draw a moral distinction between militant acts carried out in the
service of genocidal white supremacy on the one hand and militant
resistance to such acts on the other. Even a week after January 6, when
it seemed that racist Trumpians had made undeniable their singular role
as an extremist threat to this country’s already diminished democracy,
the government once again doubled down on its baseless two-sidesism.</p></div><div><p>This came as no real surprise. The far right has for two decades been responsible for the vast <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/us/domestic-terrorist-groups.html">majority</a>
of deadly extremist attacks, while both Republicans and Democrats have
endorsed the targeting of leftists on the flimsiest of grounds — all the
more so when righteous, Black-led uprisings swept the nation last
summer. It was among the defining qualities of Donald Trump’s
presidency, to condone neo-Nazis and condemn with theatrical fervor the
dangerousness of anarchists and antifa. The Biden administration, while
making greater overtures to the dangers of the far right, has been no
less keen to make fallacious “both sides” claims about the threat of
far-left extremism.</p>
<p>After January 6, national security experts and liberals <a href="https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/11/16/biden-lead-fight-against-white-supremacist-terror-threat-column/6263293002/">urged</a> Biden to take on right-wing extremism through a strategy of counterterrorist law enforcement. I <a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/01/05/trump-rally-far-right-violence/">noted</a> at the time that it would be <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/08/28/kyle-rittenhouse-violent-pro-trump-militias-police/">misguided</a> to treat the state’s law enforcement apparatus as an ally in the struggle against white supremacist violence.</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>Cases
like this exemplify how the invocation of domestic counterterrorism
efforts against the right will inevitably harm the left, given the
state’s reactionary ideological tendencies.</p></blockquote><div><p>As Branko Marcetic <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/01/daniel-baker-florida-case-fbi-capitol">argued</a>
in Jacobin after Baker’s arrest, cases like this exemplify how the
invocation of domestic counterterrorism efforts against the right will
inevitably harm the left, given the state’s reactionary ideological
tendencies. The government made much of Baker’s “dangerousness,” citing
his ownership of two firearms and the fact that he had placed an order
for one more — hardly proof of a planned attack: Gun sales <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/03/gun-sales-january-background-checks/">jumped</a> 80 percent nationwide in January following the Capitol riot.</p>
<p>The prosecution focused, too, on Baker’s brief military training. He
had joined the U.S. military in his late teens but refused to be
deployed overseas. “His conscience prevented him from deploying with
people he didn’t trust to uphold human rights in a far off corner of the
world,” his friend, Champagne, told me. Baker then received an “other
than honorable” discharge, receiving no benefits.</p>
<p>Baker would later choose to use his military and medical training for
a cause he believed in. Like dozens of other anarchists, communists,
and socialists from around the world, Baker spent his savings to fly to
Syria to join the feminist-led, environmentalist, and directly
democratic political project in Rojava. There, he fought with the
Kurdish People’s Protection Units against ISIS. From his Kurdish
comrades, he told me he learned the concept of “welatparazi,” which, he
said, “denotes a sentimental feeling of loyalty and obligation of
service towards one’s community which shelters and nourishes us.”</p>
<p>The internationalist involvement in Rojava has been <a href="https://www.cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/peace/conflict_resolution/syria-conflict/foreign-volunteers-for-syrian-kurdish-forces-2017.02.23.pdf">compared</a>
to the communist International Brigades who fought against Francisco
Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. Despite the fact that the U.S.
had backed the very same Kurdish units in their fight against ISIS,
Baker’s participation was consistently cited by the government as <a href="https://twitter.com/MonicaCaseyNews/status/1448003991561023490">proof</a> that he poses a terror threat.</p>
<p>At his sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor, a Trump nominee whose appointment was <a href="https://civilrights.org/resource/oppose-confirmation-allen-winsor-u-s-district-court-northern-district-florida/">vehemently opposed</a>
by a coalition of over 200 civil and human rights groups, said that
Baker had intended to commit acts of violence, “like he went to Rojava
to do.”</p>
<p>“The government’s case relied heavily on the fact that Dan is
anarchist,” Thomson, the civil rights attorney, noted. “There is a long
history in this country of police, prosecutors, and courts targeting
anarchists for trumped up charges and excessive sentences. This legacy
goes back to <a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/05/07/deconstructed-may-day-labor-pro-act/">Haymarket</a> and continues to today, with Dan’s case being the most recent example.”</p>
<p><u>Baker described his</u> first months held at the Federal
Correctional Institution in Tallahassee as harrowing. “I was placed in a
cell covered in feces and rotated to other tainted cells every three
weeks,” he wrote via email. Another man held next to him in the Special
Housing Unit — solitary confinement — was severely mentally ill,
traumatized, and autistic. “He was soiling himself and throwing his
waste all over the cells and out under the door several times a day,”
Baker told me, noting that the “crueler guards” would consistently taunt
and abuse the man. “I eventually contacted his family with the help of a
sympathetic guard,” Baker said.</p>
<p>The quotidian cruelties of prison life abounded. Baker had to plead
for weeks to get vegan meals; as a Hare Krishna, he does not eat meat as
a point of respect for human and nonhuman life and is lactose
intolerant. “It took nine months to get them to stop sending me dairy
products,” he said. He’s had equal trouble accessing prayer beads and
says his legal mail was opened by prison staff, which is illegal. He has
filed <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21085731-baker-v-strong-complaint">a civil suit</a>
against the prison and a number of named guards in relation to the
alleged violations. The Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on Baker’s
lawsuit or the conditions of his confinement.</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>“When you remove one person from that sort of support network, it creates a great burden on the people who are left.”</p></blockquote><div><p>Baker’s
friends in Tallahassee are concerned for his emotional and
psychological well-being. Music teacher Desiree Gattis described herself
as playing “sisterly/motherly role” to Baker. She met him while he was
unhoused and helped him get back on his feet. Gattis, who has helped
organize Baker’s legal and financial support, is less interested in his
lionization as a political prisoner and would rather he be primarily
recognized as a vulnerable person, who has suffered serious trauma from
seven months in solitary confinement. She called the government’s
treatment of her friend “cruel and absurd.” “This is not a threatening
person,” she said.</p>
<p>Gattis said that prior to his imprisonment, Baker helped her “a great
deal” with her regular work with the city’s unhoused community. ”When
you remove one person from that sort of support network, it creates a
great burden on the people who are left,” she said. In a separate
conversation, Champagne echoed the same message: “For each person in
jail, a community suffers.”</p>
<p>Baker worries that, because of his felony conviction, he “won’t be
able to find work or continue to rescue injured people” and that he will
face far-right violence after his release and possibly while in prison
too. He will be appealing his conviction, but the likely venue — the <a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/trump-pick-confirmed-boosting-11th-circuits-conservative-lean">conservative</a>
11th Circuit Court of Appeals — will not be a welcoming one. In the
meantime, he told me that he plans to read and learn more about
liberation movements and abolitionist histories.</p>
<p>At the end of our phone call on the day following his sentencing, he
hurriedly read off a quote from the philosopher Bertrand Russell, which
he had recently come across. “‘Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly
strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for
knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind,’” he said.
“That’s how I feel.”</p>
<p><strong>Correction: Oct. 16, 2021, 3:05 p.m. ET<br>
</strong><i>A previous version of this article misspelled Brad Thomson’s last name. </i></p></div></div></div></div>
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