In March, the Prairieland trials had begun to develop a baldly punishing and authoritarian tone. Daniel Sanchez Estrada had been sentenced 30 years of prison time for moving a box full of anarchist zines after the anti-ICE protest on July 4th, 2025 at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. Estrada wasn’t present at the July 4 demonstration; they were at home. Their technical convictions were “corruptly concealing a document or record” and “conspiracy to conceal documents.”
Here is what happened on July 4: Eleven activists held a noise demonstration at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas to set off fireworks in solidarity with the detainees inside the facility. The noise demonstration started peacefully but escalated, with reports of vandalism, spray-painting graffiti, and slashing tires in the parking lot. Armed officers arrived at the scene, and while there are conflicting accounts on what officially transpired, it was established that one officer drew his gun on the protestors in the parking lot, after which one of the activists, Benjamin Song, fired their weapon, resulting in that officer being shot and sent to the hospital. The officer survived and was released the following morning.
Since domestic terrorism has no concrete legal definition in America, offenders are usually charged instead with well-defined legal tangents like hate crimes, possession or unlawful discharge of firearms, treason and seditious conspiracy, and providing material support to terrorists. But in late 2025, Trump had issued an executive order to define “Antifa” as a Domestic Terrorist Organization (DTO). NPR for North Texas reports that the designation is the first of its kind in history, not used even for notorious, longstanding groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
The Associated Press writes “Antifa” is simply short for anti-fascist: “It is not a single organization but by definition a decentralized movement of far-left militant groups who are against fascism, and may confront or resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations.” The designation of anti-fascists as a DTO ultimately allowed the Prairieland trials a year later to be legally biased toward the suppression of free speech and harsher punitive sentencing since the anti-fascist activism was then associated with terrorism. In their trial, the Prairieland defendants denied association with a “leftist antifa terror cell”, explaining that most of them did not know each other prior to the demonstration at all and had met for the first time onsite. Benjamin Song defended anti-fascism as a general belief, saying: “What kind of people are not against fascism?”
For reference, the punishment for each one of the Prairieland protesters exceeds the lengthiest prison sentences given out for the attack on the Capitol on January 6 of 2021. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who was convicted of seditious conspiracy, was sentenced to just 22 years in prison. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right group the Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 18 years in prison (just over half the sentence for moving a box of anarchist zines). The FBI estimates 2,000–2,500 people entered the Capitol during the attack. Rioters vandalized, looted, and assaulted Capitol Police officers and journalists. Capitol Police evacuated and locked down both chambers of Congress and several buildings in the Complex. Rioters occupied the empty Senate chamber, while federal law enforcement officers defended the evacuated House floor. Pipe bombs were found at the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee headquarters, and Molotov cocktails were discovered in a vehicle near the Capitol.
On January 20, 2025, during the first day of his second term, Trump granted blanket clemency. Multiple January 6 defendants have since been involved in additional crimes after being pardoned including homicide, burglary, theft, stalking, child pornography, sexual assault on minors, and driving under the influence. By June 2026, at least 97 defendants had been re-arrested and charged with other crimes.
Pedantic and inconsistent interpretation of sedition law and resulting criminalization of activism are common behavioral responses of an unstable authority struggling to maintain power over its republic. For example, in the summer of 2020 in response to BLM, the Department of Justice issued a memo to prosecutors encouraging them to explore federal seditious conspiracy charges for activists and protestors. In the memo, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen writes that a federal seditious conspiracy charge “does not require proof of a plot to overthrow the U.S. Government, despite what the name might suggest.”
But in the case of the Capitol Riot, there was superficial collateral damage for the cult of Trump: Nine Oath Keepers were originally found guilty of seditious conspiracy to stop the presidential transition of Joe Biden. Clearly, the executive blanket clemency of all 1,300 convicted rioters is deeply hypocritical, considering the overly harsh sentences given to the Prairieland defendants, but the way that Trumpian cult-hypocrisy implements itself as systemic violence is in the legal justification and enablement for his whim. By this dimension, the state interaction with both Jan 6th rioters and Prairieland defendants is shockingly consistent.
The goal of the rioters in both cases is to deny the authority of a state institution. The goal of the state in both cases is to create power by rousing fear and flaunting its own consequential ability to legitimize and codify into law, arbitrary violence for the sake of “the safety of the republic”. The state then remolds the language of legality around itself to quell dissidents, both by pardon and incarceration, and to control the narrative of dissidents as either terrorists or heroes. Our perception shifts ever so slightly. We are no longer in control of our own reality.
But why bother with legality at all, when a racist agenda can clearly be executed extra-legally? “Legality” is the system of logic by which power establishes its existence. Legality is an ontological language which shapes our perception of human social organization, and our shared reality in all its parts. The pardons therefore impose a very dark message, even to the convicted January 6th rioters themselves. The same message is delivered when “Antifa” activism can be legally convicted as terrorism in a court of law: Reality itself bends the knee to power.
This is a classic play in the authoritarian playbook: State leaders ensure their own will to power by encouraging a punitive culture of obsession with national security, and an existential sense of the nation under attack. Regarding the psychological motivation for ordinary people to support or condone fascism and genocide, the Cohen Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies explains succinctly: “Trauma allows for the embrace of the irrational. Escapism fosters a minimum of self-respect and the ability to vent judgement against a world in which people cannot exist with dignity. Traditional lifestyles are uprooted or threatened by technological changes, wealth inequity, and unequal access to goods and services. Contempt for truth and reason reflects the despair of the follower who is socially and spiritually adrift and cynical. Providing a coherent explanatory narrative and political rallies reinforces a sense of belonging. That things “just happen” is unacceptable to the follower who, in turn, must believe the infallibility of the leader to reclaim their own pride and sense of worth.”
By pure fact of turnout, by commitment, intensity and length of the destructive conspiracy and by literal damage to property and body, the Capitol Attack was vastly more criminal than Prairieland, but the definition of “criminality” itself has already retracted its anchor to reality. The administration and the DOJ’s message is clear and unified in both the cases of Prairieland and Jan 6th: You are in immediate danger. Your world is coming to hands and guns. Desperate people are on the loose and you are also one of them. I will protect you when I can control you.
This is a bipartisan threat. It is of course, a very attractive narrative, given that this narrative promises safety, and only requires the individual to relinquish her own responsibility to the future, and abdicate her will. I began to understand my old coworkers. They weren’t just afraid or intentionally blind or materially bound. They were also suicidal. They accepted death.
They couldn’t physically leave Earth for various reasons, but there are plenty of ways to die while continuing to live and breath: Their affection for intellectual rigor and curiosity had been bent toward ends of violence, cruelty, and oppression. They no longer act in motions according to their own humane values, and their daily lives had departed (if not in process, then in result) from the defense of human goodness. Comforts such as well-stocked grocery stores and relaxing daily schedules resulted in individual depoliticization and then the motions of one’s will and soul are jellyfish in the water – subordinated by whatever ambient current can apply the most force, be it a market or a state.
I used to think that we all simply underestimated the soft trauma of daily life in our so-called capitalist democracy. That we didn’t fully comprehend that buying chicken at the grocery store is made possible by several layers of intraspecies and interspecies violence, subjugation, and exploitation. If we knew this, how could we endure the pain of condoning it? How could we drive cars? Fly on planes? Go to work and in a phrase, live our lives? But I think we don’t give ourselves enough credit. We know exactly what we are doing.
In the modern life, the deterioration of the respect one has for herself is begged all the time. For a wealthy modern American (and by that I mean one that is housed and fed), it is no longer possible to live a life strictly according to moral values. Very few of us actually shoot the United Healthcare CEO. But any desire for escape or transcendence which might manifest in action is violently tempered by numbing agents like escapist fantasies, past-nostalgia, material comfort, paralytic shame, and if none of these get you, it is the sheer desperation of the present. Very rarely can any of these be bypassed toward real political action. We retreat instead to suicidality of the spirit: the inability to imagine a dignified future, one in which our values are enacted by our lives.
Through my harm reduction group, I came to understand that anyone who wants to die, if awarded the true dignity of the private experience of their own pain, deserves to die. Life has become unbearable for them, and escape is a most rational choice, natural even. Perhaps it’s simply easier than surviving. Perhaps the possibility of a better future is unrealistic. Perhaps death would only require laying down. Nonexistence itself is endlessly defensible for the individual suffering. The insistence of such miserable ordinary people such as us to identify with the capitalist imperialist systems causing our own material misery is not proof of the individual’s ability to depart fully from rational thinking. It is a rational choice. It is logical pain relief, escapism – a very slow, and socially acceptable form of suicide.
When I quit my job in April, I had moved on from my confusion about the self-destructive nature of bystanders in the tide of empire. All people engage in acts of limited self-harm all the time. I could not understand anything, and I understood too much. I then came to fully identify with their desperation, worthlessness and desire to die.