Chill Factor
Trump & Co. have no compunction about perverting the law to protect and extend their autocratic power. Did you think they did?
About two weeks ago, a federal judge in Texas sentenced nine anti-Trump activists to prison terms ranging from 20 to 100 years after they were found guilty of charges stemming from a Fourth of July 2025 protest at the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, south of Fort Worth. The Guardian describes what happened, in what sounds like a straightforward account:
The demonstrators arrived late at night with a plan to set off fireworks as part of a noise demonstration to show solidarity with those detained inside. A few of the protesters spontaneously broke off from the main group and vandalized cars in the parking lot, a guard shack, slashed the tires on a government van and broke a security camera. When a police officer arrived on the scene and drew his weapon, one of the activists fired an AR-15, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.
The man who fired the AR, Benjamin Song, is the defendant who got 100 years (for attempted murder and related charges). Song claimed that he fired because the police officer had his own weapon drawn and looked like he was about to shoot a protester. Per The Guardian, that police officer “admitted during trial his weapon was pointed at the back of a person who was fleeing the parking lot.”
Four of the defendants were acquitted on attempted murder and firearms charges, but eight of the nine were convicted of providing “material support for terrorists.” Five of them got 50 years in prison for that charge, for rioting, and for charges related to explosives. A defendant named Marciela Rueda got an extra 20 years—that’s 70 in all, just to be clear—for “corruptly concealing a document or record.” Her husband, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, who wasn’t even at the protest, was convicted of moving a box of left-wing political pamphlets and zines featuring what the prosecution called “anti-government and anti-Trump sentiments” at his wife’s request, after her arrest. He was sentenced to 30 years.
I think I speak for a lot of Americans when I say: holy fucking shit.
I’LL BE THERE FOR YOU
Much as I sympathize with the sentiments and goals of these protesters, once you cross the line into violence and engage in the destruction of property—let alone fire a battlefield-type weapon at a law enforcement officer, let alone hit him—you have to expect that you are going to be charged. That is one reason (and not the only one) why I advocate a strict policy of non-violence in political protest. The reasons are both moral and practical, but in short, when you turn to violence, you give the state an enormous advantage and allow it to easily justify the harshest kinds of retribution, at least in the eyes of many, from state-sponsored violence in return to throwing you in federal prison for a hundred years. (If you’re interested in more on this thinking, you can read about it in detail in Chapter 9, here.)
OK. But per above, most of the “Prairieland Nine” did not engage in violence at all, and that’s not what their convictions were for; they were for providing material support and for conspiracy. And their sentences seem wildly disproportionate to their crimes.
Barbara McQuade, formerly US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan under Barack Obama, noted that the judge in this case departed from usual procedure in “stacking” the various sentences sequentially rather than allowing them to be served concurrently. “I would have expected lengthy sentences here, more in the ballpark at 15 to 25 years, but nothing like 50 to 100 years,” McQuade wrote in an email to The Guardian.
Indeed, these punishments are far harsher than the lengthiest prison sentences resulting from the January 6th attack, which were the 22 years that Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio got for seditious conspiracy, and the 18 years handed down to Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers. But of course, Trump later pardoned both of them.
Beginning to see the pattern here?
In fact, I would remind you that Donald Trump pardoned some 1500 convicted insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the whole government, some of who committed horrific, violent crimes against law enforcement. and even led to the death of one Capitol Police officer, Brian Sicknick. In fact, not only did he pardon them, he now holds them up as great patriots, and tried to take $1.776 billion of taxpayers’ money to reward them for their actions and to marshal them to his side for future violence on his behalf. This from the party that fetishizes law enforcement (fine print: empty gestures only) and ostentatiously claims to “back the blue.”
Trump’s pardons go far beyond that, of course. He has pardoned literally hundreds of friends, donors, and other supporters whose gratitude is of great use to him—some 1700 in total over two terms so far, even as he also directs his DOJ to arrest, charge, and prosecute his foes with ruthless ferocity.
In other words, Trump is openly abusing the justice system on both ends.
In addition to the J6ers, many of Donald’s pardons have gone to those involved in the fake elector scheme in 2020, and to white collar criminals who committed financial crimes, such as money laundering and bank and wire fraud, a stark departure from previous administrations. (And they say Trump has no empathy!)
In other words, what we are witnessing is a literal embodiment of the maxim: “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.” That saying, which neatly encompasses the mindset of an authoritarian ruler, is variously attributed to Oscar R. Benavides, president of Peru from 1933 to 1939, and Getúlio Vargas, president of Brazil from 1930 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1954. Some trace it back even further, to the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero. (“Amicis omnia, inimicis leges.”) What is not in doubt is that Donald Trump fully embraces it, even if, as a functional illiterate, he has probably never heard the actual words.
THE COMPANY YOU KEEP
It’s not surprising—and in fact par for the course—that an authoritarian regime would use the law to punish its opponents and use that same perverted “rule of law” to reward its supporters.
But besides the draconian sentences, one of the most alarming aspects of the Prairieland case is the government’s attempt to portray any opposition to the Trump administration as domestic terrorism, and to gaslight the American public into believing that that opposition is part of a highly coordinated illegal rebellion.
The Guardian writes that the nine Prairieland defendants “were loosely affiliated with one another through a local left-wing book club and gun group.” But in order to obtain such harsh sentences, the DOJ took great pains to depict them as co-conspirators in a vast, insidious network of violent left-wing revolutionaries, even though that depiction is wholly at odds with reality. At least three of the defendants weren’t involved in any planning of the July 4th protest, traveled separately to it, and left when guards at the ICE facility asked them to do so.
But that didn’t matter: the mere fact of their opposition to Trump was portrayed as proof of criminal behavior.
During the trial, prosecutors highlighted many of the zines that the book club read as evidence of the conspiracy and ideology that linked the demonstrators. That evidence was met with widespread criticism from legal observers who said that it amounted to criminalizing freedom of speech.
The Trump administration characterized the defendants as members of “antifa,” its mythical all-purpose term for anyone it dislikes, even though that means casting itself in the role of the fascists. (It seems fine with that.) Lately, though, Trump has reverted to the older, McCarthyite label of “communist” with which he, as a fossilized product of the 1950s, is more comfortable.
Even though many of the protesters did not know each other, or were loosely affiliated, prosecutors said the attack on the officer was premeditated and part of a conspiracy. They also said the activists were part of a “North Texas antifa cell,” which was seen as part of the administration’s effort to criminalize “antifa,” which is not an organization but rather a constellation of left-wing views.
Bonus irony: Prosecutors representing an administration that is fanatically pro-gun and sacralizes the Second Amendment argued that the fact that these defendants legally owned firearms and brought a cache of them to the protest was part of what made them so dangerous and constituted a conspiracy. (Unlike, say, the right-wingers on the steps of the Michigan State Capitol in 2020, or Kyle Rittenhouse, who actually shot and killed two people with his AR.) They also argued that the defendants’ use of the encrypted messaging app Signal was proof of conspiracy. Of course, the whole reason people use Signal is because they are rightly worried about the Trump administration reading their private messages and using those messages against them. Now that administration is cutting out the middleman by citing that very tactic as proof of criminality.
Well, at least they didn’t accidentally loop in Jeffrey Goldberg.
The Trump administration’s reasons for spinning fairy tales about “antifa” are manifold, including the obvious Orwellian desire to create a scapegoat for fearmongering purposes, but also the more concrete desire to unlock legal tools—such as expanded wiretapping and surveillance—that come with the designation of a group of people as a terrorist organization, particularly one with links to foreign governments.
Just to be clear: there ain’t no such organization as antifa, and certainly not one coordinating with an international communist conspiracy. But the mere fact that I even had to write that plays into Trump’s tiny little purple-bruised hands. Also just to be clear: the intrusive measures that the Trump administration is seeking are not designed to protect anyone from terrorism, even if were in play. They are designed to suppress dissent and opposition and to ensure that the Trumpified Republican Party remains in power indefinitely.
You can read all about it in any left-wing zine.
FRIENDS: THE ONE WITH THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE LAW
In a bitter irony, Trump has long claimed that the Biden administration “weaponized” the DOJ and other arms of the federal government against him with the various civil and criminal prosecutions he faced after leaving the White House in January 2021. He even got his Congressional minions to stand up a special committee, the unironically-titled Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, to grandstand over that claim.
Of course, the Biden White House did no such thing, and it’s not even worth dignifying that lie with a rebuttal, though if you want one, there are plenty out there. Let’s just say that holding someone accountable for their crimes is not weaponization but the rule of law as it is meant to operate, and leave it at that. Moreover, the mere fact that Trump—with a huge assist from his pals on the Supreme Court—successfully gamed the judicial and political systems to beat the rap in all the most significant cases (except E. Jean Carroll’s) suggests that even if there had been “weaponization,” it was pretty ineffectual, doncha think? I didn’t see Trump getting sentenced to 100 years in prison for fomenting violence or any of his other crimes.
Now, of course, Trump is doing the exact thing he libelously accused Biden of: shamelessly turning the full power of the presidency and the entire federal government against his enemies, real and perceived, big and small, under the cover of “enforcing the law.” But as we always say in these pages, page one of the fascist handbook is to accuse your enemies of your own crimes.
This punishment of the administration’s foes goes beyond active protest and into simple speech. I invite your attention to the pressure that caused CBS and its new Trump-friendly owners to fire Stephen Colbert and cancel his show over an anti-Trump joke, and on ABC to do likewise to Jimmy Kimmel for the same reason, including threats against the company’s broadcasting license. The GOP’s loudly proclaimed commitment to free speech, like its loudly proclaimed defense of the police, turns out to be pretty fungible.
And it’s not just limited to comedians either: ask Jim Comey, who in September 2025 was charged by Trump’s DOJ with making false statements to Congress while under oath. (The case was thrown out.) More recently, he was charged with making threats on the president’s life for photographing a bunch of seashells arranged to spell out “86 47”—not even arranging them himself, but merely photographing them. (That case that is still pending, though the DOJ’s lead prosecutor recently stepped down and had to be replaced)
But to be fair, those seashells were two weeks away from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
In case you missed the point, Trump HATES Comey and has pressured two successive Attorneys General to find a way to ship him off to Devil’s Island without even a Blu-Ray of Papillon to keep him company. Which is pretty ironic, since—as I have previously observed—Don should be sending Jimbo a gift basket for getting him elected president in 2016.
But Trump’s irrationality notwithstanding, his unrelenting vendetta against the former FBI director is a measure of his vindictiveness and absolute willingness to pervert the DOJ and other arms of the federal government to serve his petty aims, and his more ambitious aims too, like staying in office forever as president-for-life.
DON’T SPEAK (F/T GWEN STEFANI)
The intent here, of course, goes far beyond mere punishment of these individuals: the real goal is to create a chilling effect on others who might get the bright idea to protest the injustices of Donald and his merry band of dipshits. Duh. The administration is afraid of dissent in the streets, in the papers, on TV, and on the web, and it goes to great lengths to suppress it.
Indeed, Trump and the modern American right-wing more broadly are keen to jump straight to the most draconian measures possible in response to even the mildest protest or provocation. (OK, maybe not the MOST draconian. We’re not yet at Tiananmen levels. But I wouldn’t be shocked if we get there as the elections of this fall and 2028 approach. After all, federal agents are already killing people in the streets—ten so far, as of this writing.)
Recently, amid the fiasco that was Trump’s makeover of the Reflecting Pool, in which he claimed the disastrous flaking paint job and infestation of algae were the result of sabotage, the DOJ arrested three-time US Olympian David Hearn simply for touching the water in the pool and charged him with vandalism. Currently, the regime has erected a chain-link fence around the pool—to my knowledge, the first time in history that it has been subjected to that, for political reasons—and deployed National Guardsmen to protect it. Because nothing says “freedom” like fencing off a national monument and stationing armed troops around it.
As some wag quipped online, there have now been more arrests over the Reflecting Pool fiasco than over the Epstein files.
And don’t forget Sean Dunn, the DC man who was charged with assaulting a police officer for throwing a Subway hoagie at a body armor-wearing Customs and Border Protection officer on the streets of Washington last summer. The DOJ wanted to charge Dunn with felony assault but could only get an indictment on a misdemeanor. (Dunn was subsequently acquitted, proving that a hero ain’t nothing but a sandwich.) Bonus irony: Dunn himself was a DOJ employee—and Trump critic—who wound up fired as a result.
Prosecutions like the seashell absurdity and the Reflecting Pool nonsense and the hoagie fiasco only serve to highlight the weakness and snowflake-level fragility of this administration and its supporters. But 100 years in prison ain’t no joke. Even those more minor legal attacks entail significant financial, professional, logistical, and emotional costs for the targeted individuals, and indicate a truly unhealthy climate of political repression and assault on free speech.
The Guardian notes that the administration is continuing to bring these kinds of indictments against anti-Trump protesters, including criminal conspiracy charges against 15 activists in Minneapolis for allegedly interfering with ICE, and the conviction of three activists in Spokane, WA over protests at an ICE facility. (A similar case in Chicago collapsed after federal prosecutors were revealed to have engaged in misconduct involving the grand jury.)
The Minneapolis case is the result of a presidential directive Trump issued last September called NSPM-7, which ordered the Justice Department to investigate left-wing activists and organizations as domestic terrorists. The Minneapolis protesters were charged with “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers,” even though the indictment listed no such injuries. What is in the indictment? The notation that the defendants went to a meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, which is a 100% legal political party, much as MAGA Nation (and possibly Jonathan Chait) would like you to believe otherwise.
Per The Intercept, other so-called evidence of “conspiracy” cited by the government in the Minneapolis case “includes activists having a bullhorn, carrying a radio, tracking the license plate numbers of ICE vehicles, wearing a sweatshirt and hat with left-wing political messages, and using a devil emoji in a Signal chat.”
DON’T LET THE TERRORISTS WIN
As Americans, we now live in an openly authoritarian country—which is something that Black people, immigrants, people with unpopular political or religious views, and other marginalized and vulnerable communities in this country have had to cope with for centuries. Now it is the norm across nearly all American demographics, except Big Lie-believing UFC fans whose ringtones play Lee Greenwood. To be sure we are not at the level of Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey, for example, and it would be hyperbolic to suggest that we are. But perhaps being No. 2, we try harder.
My own very limited experience of traveling or soldiering in authoritarian regimes—Cuba, East Germany, Vietnam, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, Iraq—does not remotely approach the experience of actually living there in an ordinary civilian way, and I can’t say I’m super excited to be getting that life experience now, so late in the game. Let’s just say it wasn’t on my bucket list.
When it comes to the Prairieland Nine, one hopes that if a rational administration comes to power in the near future (or far—I’ll take it), these outrageous sentences will be commuted to more fair and just punishments, ones that fit the crimes in question, and not a sadistic, disproportionate attempt to crush dissent and terrify anyone who objects to the ruling government. In the meantime, it’s very clear that the Trump administration wants you to watch your fucking step. But it’s also very clear that they are, to use the vernacular, shit-scared that the American people want them out of office and are going to go to the polls and vote that way this November and two Novembers from now. And they are going to do everything they can to try to stop that.
******
Photo: The Prairieland detention center in Alvarado, TX. Credit: Tony Gutierrez/AP.
“Chill Factor” written by Chrissie Hynde, performed by the Pretenders, off their 1986 album Get Close.