Don Lemon and the St. Paul Nine are Headed for Prime Time

 

     As Bleeding Minnesota continues to dominate both the news and our consciousness, there’s one episode that especially embodies the utter madness of the cultural spasm playing out in front of us.

The January 18^th protest at the Cities Church in St. Paul has everything you’d want in a Trump-era legal crisis: institutional incompetence, political gaslighting, ostentatious cruelty, and bad faith everywhere you look. All the hits.

Already, Pam Bondi is in way over her head, but that’s not stopping her. In her latest overreach, she arrested Don Lemon, last Friday, for his attendance as a journalist at that protest. If the stakes and the visibility weren’t already high enough, charging Lemon pushes them through the roof.

I’m guessing Lemon planned for this. His brand has been more-or-less in limbo since his racially-tinged purge by CNN two years ago, and he knows that Trump, like dictators everywhere, lusts to see reporters stand trial.

Apparently Lemon thinks poking the bear is a good career move. Being a reporter, Black, and gay makes him a walking trifecta of things Trump hates. This is certainly raising his profile, but risk-free it is not.

Whatever his motives, Lemon lawyered-up in advance. He hired Abbe Lowell, last seen defending Hunter Biden against all manner of outrageous allegations from traitorous buffoons in Congress. Between Lemon and Lowell, there’s enough star power to light up any courtroom, if that’s where Bondi wants to go.

But trial or no trial, Lemon will surely be the most visible of what I’m now calling “The St. Paul Nine” — the three activists, two journalists, two political candidates, and two as yet unnamed defendants — all of whom have been arrested and indicted by Bondi’s stooges at DOJ. But let’s start at the beginning.

The purpose of the Cities Church protest was obvious: an agonized public response to the murder of Renée Good (Alex Pretti was not, as yet, dead). The organizers were known activists, experienced at making “good trouble,” and they chose that particular church when they found out that its pastor was leading a double life as, yes, an ICE field director. Imagine that, the perfect MAGA operative — church and state in the same asshole.

Can you think of a better metaphor for the entire Trump era, where atrocities routinely go hand in hand with religious piety? When you think about it, it’s all quite efficient: love thy neighbor on Sunday, arrest her on Monday, deport her whole family on Tuesday. Just as Christ taught.

Anyway, the protesters marched into the church, interrupting the service, but obstructing no entrances — a salient point, as we’ll see. They brought in the press, including Don Lemon, and plenty of phones. They waved signs, chanted slogans, and generally observed the classic rituals of civil disobedience, little changed since Gandhi and Martin Luther King first used them to alter history. The only difference being the phones.

But for all that planning and visibility, the whole episode was over and done with in 20 minutes. Left alone, it might have been just another demonstration flushed down the memory hole. Instead, Pam Bondi swung into action. Needing to make an example, in classic police-state fashion, she had three of the organizers arrested later that week.

These included Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney whose before-and-after arrest photos might just live forever in the annals of fascist propaganda:

Her original mugshot, posted by DHS, showed her with a calm but mildly defiant expression, not at all surprised to be in custody.

A second mugshot, posted 30 minutes later by the White House, was digitally altered to make her skin darker and her overall appearance disturbed, with tears running down her face.

So let’s stop right here and consider the implications of that faked photo. This was, after all, an official, on-the-record communication of our federal government. In an age of AI, deepfakes, Russian bots, and a shamefully corrupted media, we need that government to be fighting disinformation, not spreading it.

Instead, with that one photo, our government is communicating, loud and clear, that nothing it says or does can be taken seriously, let alone trusted. That it will bend reality in any way that suits it. That it doesn’t give a shit if we believe it or not. That bad faith is the only faith on offer, take it or leave it.

The St. Paul Nine have all been indicted for this fiendish brandishing of signs, slogans, and smartphones. They’ve all been charged by Bondi with violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994, a law explicitly designed to protect abortion clinics. Say what?

Yes, the FACE Act, as it’s known, was passed at a time when abortion clinics were regularly subjected to intimidation, violence, and occasional assassination. Then, as now, Democrats in Congress wanted strict protections for women entering these clinics. Then, as now, Republicans wanted abortion doctors executed and women enslaved, though they didn’t say that out loud back then. Instead they insisted on extending the same protections to other types of healthcare facilities, including those scammy “crisis pregnancy centers” that have sprouted like poison ivy since the fall of Roe.

But they also added houses of worship to the list of protected properties. Which seemed a non sequitur at the time, but not anymore. The FACE Act indeed covers the obstruction of access to a church, and Pam Bondi has a church in mind.

Part of the subtext here is that Trump has long wanted to walk back those abortion clinic protections, because cruelty to women is important to him. Just last year he pardoned 23 anti-abortion zealots who’d been convicted under the FACE Act, and his pet Supreme Court might yet have something game-changing to say on the subject one day soon.

For now, it’s enough to know that the FACE Act was already a flashpoint in the abortion wars, well before Bondi decided to weaponize it. Now she’s using it to go after both civil rights activists (euphemism for Black people) and members of the press (Lemon and Georgia Fort, the other journalist arrested).

The FACE Act has rarely been invoked in the context of a church. The law is about obstruction, after all, and who obstructs entrance to a church? Certainly not the St. Paul Nine. They are all on video, conspicuously not obstructing anyone. This will surely come up at trial, if there is one.

But Bondi seems to think the FACE Act is a winner. It’s a federal statute, carrying federal penalties. It sidesteps any messy First Amendment issues. And it lets her deflect the problem by making it about protecting worshippers, as opposed to arresting five-year-olds and murdering civilians.

She’s assuming there are enough judges out there willing to tolerate such legally dubious bullshit, this at a time when even Trump-appointed judges are clearly not in the mood. So it’s hard to escape the feeling that Bondi has no idea what she’s doing, that her entire purpose in life is to jump through any hoop her dementia-addled boss puts in front of her that day. This is not a secure career path.

Still she’s forging ahead. Never mind that her optics are terrible, that her moves tend to backfire, that her indictments are unlikely to stick, or that she routinely violates as many laws as she prosecutes.

Never mind that the St. Paul Nine seem to have all the chops they need to run rings around her in the media, and probably in the courtroom.

And speaking of courtrooms, if there’s really to be a trial in Don Lemon’s future, it’s worth noting that Abbe Lowell eats idiots like Pam Bondi for lunch.