Show Trial: A Punishment For Solidarity Itself

In an act deemed “going apeshit against enemies of the Reich,” two judges just levied brutal prison sentences of 30 to 100 years, a combined penance of 450 years, on eight anti-ICE members of a scary if imaginary “North Texas Antifa cell” convicted of terrorist-abetting “crimes” like protesting, lighting fireworks and moving a box of zines. The case, widely seen as a test of regime efforts to criminalize dissent or any unwelcome speech, moved one defendant to muse, “What kind of people are not against fascism?”

The grievous injustice against the group, dubbed The Prairieland Defendants for the ICE concentration camp they were protesting, comes amidst almost daily court victories elsewhere against the regime. Last week, three key rulings in federal district courts saw judges strike down administration election meddling, abuses against immigrants and, in a blistering 29-page decision, “blatantly unlawful and unethical use” of a grand-jury subpoena targeting Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. To date, there have been at least 272 wins against Trump, several from judges he appointed; after one especially irksome loss, Stephen Goebbels memorably whined, “Judge Sparkle (sic) decrees that America belongs to any random alien on Planet Earth.”

Faced with mounting losses in other endeavors – wars, pools, polls – more regime lackeys are also getting testy. Newly back from having a baby but still hyper-toxic, Press Barbie went on Hannity to shriek about “deranged leftists desecrating our federal monuments” with algae: “Only the Democrats could hate beautifying our Capitol.” Of six people arrested for “vandalism” – more than for raping minors – many are “longtime donors to the Democrat Party,” who “completely destroyed our country,” also to “Barack Hussein Obama” and, gasp, ACTBlue. With fear-mongering truly all they’ve got, Hannity joined in on Dem “radicals…You’ve got Mr. Nazi Tattoo Platner, and six-gender, God-is-non-binary Talarico, and Pocahontas, and Mamdani…”

Amidst a “rolling coup“ in an increasingly fascist America, where threats from the left have always loomed larger than on the right and today’s despots cling frantically to a power they somehow know is illegitimate, it’s little wonder principled citizens protesting vulnerable brown people being locked up in concentration camps have become ”the new Red Scare.“ It’s helpful to remember that everything earlier autocrats did – Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet – was legal; they just changed the rules to do it. ”This is Soviet shit,“ wrote one observer, summoning the terror of Stalin’s staged show trials in the 1930s to eliminate most of Lenin’s staff and other ”saboteurs,“ from Bukharin to, via pickaxe, Trotsky exiled in Mexico; in the end, only ”Stalin the Executioner“ remained.

The “legal,” in Trump’s case, was last year’s menacing national security directive “NSPM-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” which explicitly declared a fictional Antifa – in fact any American who opposes fascism, supports the rule of law and uses their First Amendment rights to defend it – a “MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION” and “SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER,” whether “it exists or not.” Prairieland, the first case successfully brought under NSPM-7, tests the state’s ability to quell dissent by perceived “enemies,” and could shape a future playbook for using the Antifa label – and “creative and highly theoretical claims by the state” – as “a catchall designation to criminalize activists writ large.”

The surreal sentences inflicted this week on eight mostly non-violent Prairieland activists came three months after their convictions on terrorism and other charges stemming from last year’s July 4 protest at the for-profit Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. The action began as a noise demonstration, a typically safe, festive event where fireworks are set off “to remind people inside they are not forgotten.” That day, it devolved into vandalism – of cars, a guard shack, a security camera – by several protesters. Some brought guns – a red flag to many activists, but common in open-carry Texas where queer or trans people can face armed counter-protesters. When one cop drew his weapon, a protester in the nearby woods shot him in the shoulder.

At trial, eight defendants – Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Benjamin Hanil Song, Savanna Batten, Meagan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, and Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada – were convicted of rioting and explosive charges, and “providing material support to terrorists.” They are much like protesters anywhere: teachers, engineers, tattoo artists, animal-lovers, anti-ICE advocates, parents, straight, queer, trans, vegan. Some had organized the action together, some produced anarchist zines and belonged to a book club named for anarchist Emma Goldman, who 99 years ago this month was arrested on conspiracy charges for organizing against the First World War draft; some were members of a Socialist gun club; some weren’t even at the protest.

From the outset, the regime played hardball. The DOJ called them “members of a North Texas Antifa cell“; the indictment said Antifa “is a militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups primarily ascribed to a revolutionary anarchist or autonomous Marxist ideology.” They were held on multimillion-dollar bonds in squalid jail cells, denied medical care, frequently strip-searched; two trans women were held – unsafely, illegally – in men’s facilities. State agents ransacked homes, detained children, used flash-bang grenades to intimidate, went after anyone in their political orbit, often unearthing new charges. It was, one defendant said, “a nightmare made real…seeing the prosecution jump from lie to lie,” abuse to abuse.

The case became a sinister “laboratory” where constitutionally protected free speech and civil disobedience became “rioting” and solidarity became “conspiracy.” Fireworks were “explosives,” a home where friends gathered a “staging area,” black clothing and the use of encrypted Signal a way “to aid and abet those engaged in illegal acts.” A home printer became “a printing press” producing “insurrectionary materials” – anti-fascist zines, handouts of “8 Things You Can Do To Stop ICE,” packets of vegetable seeds, poems, patches, bumper stickers of swastikas X-ed out and “Zines Are Not A Crime.” A teacher had home-made first aid kits he used to bring to school in case of a shooting; feds used their presence as evidence protesters had planned violence.

The shocking sentencing hearings were held by two judges, one each appointed by Bush and Trump, in two Fort Worth courtrooms. They were inexplicably scheduled even before either judge heard long-filed motions to overturn convictions in a trial, lawyers argued, “saturated with evidence designed to evoke fear, political bias, and guilt by association” and widely deemed “untethered from credible evidence or witness testimony.” Prosecutors folded into the case people who didn’t help plan the protest, weren’t there, or left when police asked them to. An attorney for Hill cited no evidence they believed in violence; Hill was so conscientious they stayed after the fireworks went off to pick up trash left behind; she still got a 50-year sentence.

The case ostensibly centered on the alleged attempted murder of the cop shot in the shoulder. Marine Corps reservist Benjamin “Champagne” Song said they were in the woods and fired “a warning shot” to distract the cop when he drew his gun on another protester; citing Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Song said, “I never want to see good people, standing for what they believe in, gunned down.” Song charges the state is imposing “collective punishment, guilt by association” on other activists, and the facts of the shooting remain unclear; feds first said there were multiple shooters and rounds fired, then said they have no medical records from the hospital where the cop was reportedly quickly released. Still, Song was given a 100-year sentence.

Batten, Evetts, Hill, Morris, and Soto each got 50 years for rioting, providing support to terrorists, and conspiracy to use an explosive ie: attending a loud protest. Said Soto, trying to laugh, “I guess they didn’t like my book club.” Rueda was sentenced to 70 years for also conspiring to “conceal documents” by asking her husband Sanchez-Estrada, not at the protest, to remove a box of zines from their house. “Being guilty of possessing literature is a concept fundamentally incompatible with a free society,” said one advocate. “We don’t need a constitutional right to possess only what the government likes.” Sanchez-Estrada got a 30-year sentence for moving the box. “I am a father, a husband, a teacher, a poet,” he told the judge. “I am many things, Your Honor, but I am not a terrorist.”

Many observers noted all the sentences were far harsher than those handed down to Jan. 6 rioters – who were then pardoned – or even the longest sentences for murder or rape – this, though prosecutors offered almost no evidence of the alleged crimes. And despite their obsession with the lethal threat posed by imaginary Antifa forces, even the judges questioned the need to mention “antifa” to jurors, who in turn seemed to reject Judge Reed O’Connor’s narrative of “an ambush” and “assault on democracy” by acquitting everyone but Song of attempted murder. One legal expert said that fortuitous rejection underscored how easily prosecutors can fashion or twist the law to create a “conspiracy”; said one attorney, “People should be scared.”

In total, 22 people have been charged in connection with the Prairieland protest. Five others took plea deals, another five have state charges pending, three more were indicted last month. Regime lackeys have gleefully touted their rare victory, with a hyperbolic DOJ press release blaring, “Leader of Antifa Cell Members Sentenced to 100 Years in Prison for Terrorist Attack on ICE Facility.” After the trial, Pam Bondi gloated they’d taken down “Antifa” – repeated 16 times – to “finally halt their violence on America’s streets.” After sentencing, Todd Blanche celebrated the regime’s “swift and uncompromising justice.” Of villainous Antifa, he crowed, “Their violent extremism has no place in our country,” presumably because only the fascist kind does.

As young activists mull lives stolen – and tenuously bank on appeals or pardons – their family, friends, supporters voice horror at “the absolute travesty” of the lies that led to their convictions and sentences. “We’ve fallen so far so fast it’s nose-bleed inducing,” said one. Another insisted, “The outcome of this trial is not the end. It is the beginning.” Autumn Hill’s wife Lydia Koza said she is “livid in the face of this grotesque distortion of anything that could ever have called itself due process…There is no ‘appropriate’ sentence for a wholly fictitious crime.” On their loved ones “being thrown away for the rest of their lives,” one noted the regime’s own actions “have proved the righteousness of their actions…This sentencing is a punishment for solidarity itself.”

Finally, from Flying Penguin, a grim reminder the Prairieland fates mirror that of too many in a nation and world whose history is rife with ‘other righteous “crimes”: BLM protesters, Black Panthers, AIM activists, civil rights marchers, union workers, “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” To wit: “Today’s news is Andrew Jackson, ordering Congress to criminalize antislavery speech. Today’s news is Stalin’s Article 58, where ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ was a crime that meant whatever it needed to. Today’s news is the McCarthy-era ruling that upheld the conviction of Americans for organizing and teaching political theory.Today’s news is South Africa’s 1967 Terrorism Act, making terrorism anything that endangers ‘law and order.’ Today’s news is Trump and a white police state.” Warns Sanchez-Estrada, “People need to be aware – it’s not just the defendants on trial.”

Defendants clockwise from top left: Estrada-Sanchez; Song and Gibson; Hill and Koza; Batten; Sanchez; Elizabeth and Ines Soto; Morris and Hill Composite Image from Dallas-Fort Worth Support Committee