Good to be back with you. I lost a day to an allergic reaction—my body has fought everything it touches since I arrived on this planet—so the newsletter did not get out. But I am back on it, because what happened in two Texas federal courtrooms this week is not the kind of thing that we can ignore.
Yesterday, a federal judge in Texas sentenced eight people to between thirty and one hundred years in prison for a protest outside an ICE detention center. The government called them an “Antifa cell.” One of them, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, was not even at the protest; he got thirty years for moving a box of antifascist zines. Compare that to the people who stormed the United States Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election, to kill the vice-president, beat police officers, and erect a gallows. The longest sentence any of them received was twenty-two years, and every last one of the roughly fifteen hundred convicted has since been pardoned or had their sentence commuted. This government punishes the people who oppose it far more severely than those who attack it on its own behalf.
Here is what the Texas defendants actually did, according to the record. On July 4 of last year, a group gathered outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado. Fireworks were set off. The property was vandalized. And one person, Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist, fired a weapon and struck an Alvarado police officer in the neck. The officer survived. Song was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to one hundred years. Of course, a person who shoots a police officer should face serious charges, but 100 years is more than people get for murder. But the others did not shoot anyone. They set off fireworks. They were sentenced to fifty and seventy years on conspiracy and material-support theories—the prosecution’s argument being that because the group planned together, a shooting was foreseeable to all of them.
Sanchez Estrada's sentence tells you what this is really all about; he wasn’t accused of attending the July 4 protest at all. His conviction was for moving a box of his own antifascist literature—zines, pamphlets—which the government charged as corruptly concealing documents. Thirty years for relocating the reading material that the First Amendment protects. His wife, Maricela Rueda, got seventy years, in part for asking him to move the box. When a sentence that long attaches to the handling of a cardboard box, the box is not the point; instilling fear is.
The frame holding all of this up is the word “Antifa,” and I can speak to that word with some authority, because I live in Portland, the city the far right has spent years casting as its headquarters. So let me tell you what it actually is. Antifa is short for anti-fascist. It is not an organization. It has no charter, no membership rolls, no leadership structure, no cells. The Klan has cells. The Proud Boys have an organizing system. “Anti-fascist” is a description of a position, the way “pro-democracy” is a description of a position, and it has roots here in plain history: in the 1980s and 90s, when neo-Nazi activity in this city turned deadly and an Ethiopian immigrant named Mulugeta Seraw was beaten to death by white supremacists, ordinary Portlanders decided that when those people showed up, they would show up too. There was no meeting to authorize it. People simply refused to let the city be claimed.
That history matters now because the government has done something with the word that the law does not actually permit it to do. In September of last year, the administration issued an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. But you cannot designate an idea as an organization, and there is no federal charge of domestic terrorism under existing United States law. The designation created no new crime. What it created was a permission structure: a way to take anyone who dissents and file them under a category that sounds like membership in something. The PBS report on the sentencing said as much, noting that Antifa is a decentralized movement, not a single organization, and that no domestic-terrorism statute exists to charge it under. The prosecutors offered little actual evidence at trial that the defendants belonged to anything at all.
Now hold the two cases in the same hand. The people who came to the Capitol came to stop the peaceful transfer of power. They chanted about hanging the vice president. They built a gallows. They assaulted officers, and one of those officers later described the mob trying to take his service weapon to kill him with it, screaming to do exactly that. Fourteen leaders of armed extremist groups were convicted of seditious conspiracy, a charge one step short of treason. And the President pardoned or commuted all of it. Every sentence. Then his Justice Department turned to a group of protesters in Texas and asked for, and received, sentences several times longer.
Read individually, each case looks like a discrete legal outcome—this jury, that judge, these facts. Read together, they describe a function. The state is teaching a lesson about which violence it will forgive and which dissent it will destroy. Show up to keep this administration in power and break a police line, and you will be called a patriot and sent home. Show up to oppose it and set off fireworks, and you will lose the rest of your life. The pardons and the sentences are not two separate stories. They are one policy, expressed twice.
This is also why I cannot treat the smaller absurdities as comic relief. National Guardsmen are stationed at the reflecting pool in Washington, warning tourists that touching the water could land them in jail; a foreign reporter’s crew caught one delivering exactly that threat to the reporter! It sounds like a farce. It is not a farce. It is the same instinct—to criminalize ordinary presence, ordinary objection—operating at low stakes, while the Texas sentences show you the same instinct operating at maximum stakes. The reflecting pool tells you what they want. The hundred-year sentence tells you what they will do once a judge lets them.
One thing I want you to be able to verify, rather than take from me, is the characterization of the trial judge’s politics. It has circulated widely, but I am not stating it as fact here because I have not confirmed it to my standard. What I can confirm is the record itself—the charges, the sentences, the absence of any domestic terrorism statute, and the pardons. That record is enough.
If you have been waiting for the moment when the stakes become concrete, this is it. Not an abstraction about democracy in peril, but a number you can hold: one hundred years for a protest, a full pardon for an insurrection. The people who run this government have already shown you, in the plainest arithmetic available, whose freedom they consider expendable. The only open question is whether enough of us are looking at the arithmetic before the next person gets sentenced for touching the water.
