No Avoiding Fascism Label after This Week’s “Antifa” Sentencing

coverings that concealed their identities — designed to hide each individual’s identity…making members indistinguishable from one another to law enforcement…All turned off their phones…to prevent tracking…They used an encrypted messaging app to coordinate with each other that had auto-delete functions,"

What laws do any of this break? fHow are first aid kits with tourniquets illegal? How is the defendants’ masking and identity concealment any different from ICE practices?

Song was given a 100 year prison sentence for the attempted murder. One perpetrator was sentenced to 70 years, five to 50 years, and one to 30 years. Do you see 50-year sentences in the above evidence?

Compare this to the sentencing of the near-1600 insurrectionists who attempted no less than the overthrow of the government of the United States on January 6, 2021. The most severe prison sentences handed out were 18 years for Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and 22 years for Proud Boys leader Enrico Tarrio. And they, along with all of the lawbreakers, had their sentences commuted or were pardoned. Evidently incapable of seeing dichotomy, FBI Director Kash Patel says in the press release, “Acts of violence against our law enforcement partners will not be tolerated" — except against the Capitol Police.

Some appropriate degree of prosecution was to be expected, certainly the attempted murder (the police officer survived). That the sentences are beyond extreme and the premises of the prosecutions dubious sharply tell us that the Justice Department under Trump is his willing accomplice in converting the country to a fascism where the law is whatever the leader says it is.

First, the DOJ was acting on only the President’s executive order, not a law that designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Second, there is no classification of domestic terrorism in the U.S. Code, so the pertinence of international terrorism sentencing guidelines is made-up law. Third, the defendants denied that they were members of Antifa — not an organization, remember. They said what brought them together was a book group of the Emma Goldman reading society that reads books by revolutionary authors. But Trump’s obsession with “Antifa terrorists”, as acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called them, must be honored.

You can see what’s coming. Trump last fall signed NSPM-7, a national security directive vastly expanding federal powers against “domestic terrorism”. It allows the Department of Justice, FBI, Treasury, IRS, and Department of Homeland Security to act against individuals or groups before any violence occurs. That says arrests of protesters on only the presumption that it might. What NSPM-7 has the whole of government looking for apart from violent conduct to prosecute are any outcroppings of…

”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.”

Views are these subjects are no longer permitted.