U.S. booksellers warn: Trump decree may criminalize book sales

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A group of concerned booksellers recently sent an open letter to the American Booksellers Association and the American Booksellers for Free Expression raising an “urgent concern” about the Trump administration’s NSPM-7 anti-antifascist memorandum. The presidential security memo issued last year specifically targets what the regime sees as leftist ideas in books, zines, and other publications, which is a major concern for all of us that care about books and freedom of expression.

“As we continue opposing book bans and other legislative challenges,” the letter says, “we must also prepare for the potential criminalization of those in our industry.”

The letter was written and signed by Firestorm Books in Asheville, NC, Autumn Leaves Books in Ithaca, NY, Boneshaker Books and Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis, MN, Burning Books in Buffalo, NY, Charis Books & More in Decatur, GA, Pilsen Community Books in Chicago, IL, and Word Up Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria in New York, NY.

“Bullies thrive in an environment of silence and isolation,” the letter continues, urging national bookselling organizations to take stronger and more public stances against national and local attempts to criminalize free speech.

The letter is raising the alarm specifically over NSPM-7 , a Trump administration memo issued on September 25, 2025 in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. The memo is a naked attack on freedom of expression and freedom of thought, justified by waving the bloody shirt of allegedly rampant violence.

Titled “National Security Presidential Memorandum-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”, the memo attempts to ground its argument by gathering unrelated incidents of political violence, protest, and activism under one overly-broad and hazily defined umbrella of surging left-wing violence. These incidents, the state erroneously claims, are all connected somehow, as “a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns” by “domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties.” There is no evidence presented of who is coordinating this, how they are doing it, or why.

The memo lumps all of these “assaults” under its own definition of “anti-fascism,” which it unironically equates with anti-Americanism:

Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

This is excessively and intentionally broad. Phrases like “traditional American views on family” are so vague as to be meaningless, allowing the state to define nearly any conduct, speech, or thought as a national security threat, thus authorizing repressive state action against anyone.

This isn’t theoretical. As the bookstores’s open letter notes, a group of protesters who demonstrated on July 4th, 2025 outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Texas have already been targeted by this memo. As The Guardian reported, nine protestors were arrested and “a jury found eight of nine protesters guilty of ‘providing material support to terrorists’ … this ‘material support’ included owning a ‘printing press’ used to print anarchist zines and being part of a leftist book club, the federal government argued.”

This “printing press,” for the record, was just an office printer, a paper cutter, and book binding materials. To quote The Guardian again:

The federal government’s focus on the possession of leftwing literature, including zines, and other basic security measures common in our modern era – like owning Faraday bags, meant to block wireless signals to prevent surveillance; using the encrypted messaging app Signal; or dressing in all-black clothing – is alarming to activists.

The sheer breadth of NSPM-7’s mandate allows for common items to be tied to an invented ideology that the administration has defined and built up. It transmogrifies a stapler into an antifa terrorist stapler and justifying the use of crushing of state power and violence.

The sentences handed down to the Prairieland protesters have been cruel and excessive, between 30-100 years in prison. This is effectively a life sentence.

For The Nation , Grace Byron spoke to Autumn Hill, one of the Prairieland protesters who was sentenced to 50 years in prison (longer than some January 6th rioters, Byron notes). Hill is a trans woman, and is currently in a men’s prison.

The entire interview is worth reading, especially for Hill’s thoughtfulness in articulating her beliefs and politics. She’s inspiring, and not speaking in the violent, antisocial rhetoric this regime wants you to fear. Hill believes in a neighborly hospitality and love: “My whole life is driven by this radical love and by this urgent need to see justice done.”

This is exactly the sort of inflated, cruel criminal charge that this open letter is warning about. They’re correct that bookstores are a natural next target.

“We believe that if unchecked,” the letter says, “this administration could bring similar charges against ABA members under NSPM-7’s stunningly broad definition of ‘antifa extremism.’”

The bookstore workers are calling on the ABFE and ABA to take a close look at “the Prairieland case, its relationship to NSPM-7, and the implications for bookstores and our customers.” These are attacks that deserve “to be addressed by the ABFE publicly” and that “the ABA should communicate its intention to defend members from prosecution.”

This craven state action is, of course, completely ahistorical and grounded in nothing other than grievance and authoritarian impulses. But it shouldn’t be lost on the rest of us that America was rather literally founded on radical ideas expressed in short publications. (Howard Zinn’s Artists in Times of War features a wonderful defense of America’s long tradition of radical pamphleteering.)

Pamphlets by concerned citizens, political radicals, and artists are an essential American form. If they were capable of feeling any remorse, shame, or care for others, the Trump administration and all the cops, judges, and flunkies who are lining up to weaponize NSPM-7 wouldn’t be able to face themselves in the mirror.

Keep Autumn Hill’s words close to your heart: there’s “an urgent need to see justice done.”

Image from whitehouse.gov