America at 250: 50-year sentences for progressive protesters. Freedom for millionaires.

A few months back, the Donald-Trump-fried chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, urged broadcasters to air patriotic programming for America’s 250th birthday — including regular on-air recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance.

I couldn’t find any reports about TV or radio stations that have actually done this. Maybe they’ve figured out that the bit at the end — that stuff about “liberty and justice for all” — has been rendered into utter baloney by Carr’s strongman boss.

For anyone who still believes the myth that the United States’ criminal justice system is the envy of the world, I say: Let them come to Fort Worth. In northern Texas, a crime committed by one man with the “wrong” politics gave the Trump regime the ammunition it craved for a free-speech crackdown that makes a mockery of America’s birthday bash.

Ironically, it was July 4, 2025 that a crew from the small but tight-knit left-wing community in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex ventured 30 minutes south to the Prairieland Detention Center run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to protest the squalid conditions and overcrowding there.

The protesters dressed in black; some brought fireworks or medic supplies. The evidence shows they committed some minor crimes — vandalizing a vehicle, for example. But when local police were called, one man — Benjamin Song, an ex-Marine known to local activists as “Champagne” — committed a serious offense, firing a gunshot that wounded a town police officer in the neck. The officer later acknowledged he was pointing his gun at a fleeing protester when Song fired his weapon.

The Prairieland incident came right as the Trump regime was striving to brand “antifa” — a loose ideology that fascism should be resisted by any means necessary — as some kind of highly organized terrorist cell. FBI agents fanned out across DFW, ultimately building a riot-and-terrorism case against nearly two dozen leftists including the group — now known as the Prairieland 9 — that stood trial this winter at the Fort Worth federal courthouse.

Among the evidence that prosecutors presented to bolster their contention that the protesters were part of some kind of terror cell included their black garb, their Signal chats in which they discussed plans for a “noise protest” at Prairieland, or their decision to bring medical supplies with them to the demonstration, which occurred at a time when anti-ICE protests were meeting violent responses. One of the alleged co-conspirators wasn’t even at the protest; he’d moved a box of anti-fascist magazines before agents visited his home after his wife called from jail.

Tamera Hutcherson, a local activist who attended much of the trial as a paralegal for defendant Savanna Batten, told me by phone Saturday that the case against Batten “was based on the fact that she showed up to the protest wearing black, she had medical supplies on her, which included a tourniquet, and that she was there for a noise demonstration to set off fireworks.”

Batten, Song, and the other seven were convicted in March, and their sentencing was decided by the trial judge — Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee — and his colleague Reed O’Connor, a federal jurist so well known for his right-wing rulings that the Trump regime and allies like trillionaire Elon Musk look for excuses to bring cases before him.

In this case, O’Connor was happy to say the quiet part out loud: that a repressive government is seizing on this case to send a message to anyone who wants to aggressively protest mass deportation or other abuses. He called the protest “an assault on democracy,” adding: “The need to deter this type of conduct is high.”

Still, courtroom observers were stunned when the sentences came down. It wasn’t a total shock when Song, convicted of attempted murder, was given 100 years, but Batten, the black-clad medic, got 50 years — a virtual life sentence for dissent — as did several others. Daniel Sanchez Estrada, the magazine mover, got 30 years.

Hutcherson, who was in the courtroom for last week’s sentencing, called O’Connor’s comments “chilling...to have the judge say this out loud, it really sunk in.”

What’s sunk in is that the federal government is pouncing on the Prairieland 9 convictions to unleash a crackdown on left-wing protest that will make America’s past sins like the Palmer raids, McCarthyism, and the trial of the Chicago 7 look like child’s play.

In recent days, we’ve seen federal charges against the Minneapolis 15 protesters who monitored the Minnesota ICE raids in Signal chats, and an indictment against two Atlanta protesters against the “Cop City” police training center — even after a local judge had essentially laughed state charges against them out of his court, When a state prosecutor offered evidence of criminality that the Cop City demonstrators wore black clothes and masks, Judge Robert Flournoy said, “Oh, that sounds like ICE.”

» READ MORE: Trump’s insane pardons are killing any faint flicker of justice in America | Will Bunch

There’s a lot going on here. The Trump regime — which last fall designated “antifa” (again, not an actual group) as a terrorist organization, abusing its vast post-9/11 powers as many of us feared they would — is aggressively clamping down on the First Amendment protected right of dissent, ahead of November midterms when its dictatorial-minded leader will stop at nothing to keep his party in power.

But these 50-year prison sentences, which carry the sauerkraut stench of German cooking, circa 1933, are also an exclamation point on the death of even pretending there is anything resembling impartial criminal justice in America. We are now a land where left-wing dissenters will spend decades behind bars reading about the latest millionaire fraudster or Republican apparatchik to get out of jail free.

Look, we’ve always been more than delusional about praising U.S. justice as the supposed envy of the free world despite the reality that rich kids or celebrities like the late O.J. Simpson who hire the best lawyers can walk free after people die, and white collar crime is treated as a sport, while Black, brown, and poorer defendants form the backbone of one of the planet’s highest incarceration rates.

But the Prairieland most-of-your-life sentences didn’t happen in a vacuum. They are the counterweight to Trump’s Day One pardons for the roughly 1,500 right-wing rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, who stormed and vandalized the U.S. Capitol in an insurrection blamed for 5 immediate deaths, with more than 140 police officers injured.

And that’s not all. Trump has individually pardoned and granted clemency to well over 100 or so others in his second term — including just about every high-ranking Republican who’d been convicted of a federal crime, bigtime donors to his political campaigns, or those who hired the president’s friends for big bucks.

At the same time that the Prairieland 9 were getting frontier justice, the New York Times reported that Trump’s Justice Department quashed a criminal probe into the circumstances behind the president’s clemency for a multi-millionaire named David Gentile. The private-equity executive had been sentenced to seven years in prison and ordered to pay $15.5 million in restitution for a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded small investors, Many lost their life’s savings — arguably a greater harm then anything that happened at the Texas ICE detention center.

But Trump granted clemency to Gentile after just two weeks in prison. Prosecutors were looking into the relationship between Gentile and a retired priest from Queens who has become a top supporter and personal friend to Trump, and who lobbied the president for Gentile’s release. But higher-ups reportedly told New York mid-level prosecutors to end their probe into questions like whether the priest was paid.

In a matter of months, Trump has exploited the existing cracks in the federal justice system to make it a blunt instrument of personalist dictatorship — a “purge” for his criminal friends or bad guys willing to make a donation, while depriving those who dissent of their liberty.

I’m just barely scratching the surface, as Trump’s injustice department also conducts high-profile investigations into law-abiding political opponents including top Democrats or people like former FBI chief James Comey. Or consider this: No action has been taken against Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who’s been publicly identified as the killer of unarmed Minneapolis motorist Renee Good. When a Syracuse, N.Y. woman ID’ed Ross and asked why he has not been indicted in an Instagram post, federal agents entered a voting place where she was working as a poll worker and ordered her to take the inarguably true post down.

The nation’s founders who declared American independence 250 years ago this week strongly believed that justice was the backbone of their experiment in democracy. The Bill of Rights that they’d enact in 1791 is largely about the right to a fair trial, avoiding unlawful searches and seizures, and the essential liberty of protesting an unjust government. More than two centuries later, the White House seems more governed by George Orwell’s 1984, as they criminalize left-wing “thoughtcrime.”

“I think it’s very symbolic...that this protest happened on the Fourth of July,” the Texas activist Hutcherson told me. “This year is the 250th year of America being America. And when we think about the inception of this nation, it was because of protest, it was because of dissent. And so it feels very contradictory, that because someone has leftist or anti-fascist views that now they can be deemed criminal or a terrorist to the U.S. government. You know, we’re not seeing the same energy given towards people that have right wing views.”

The firecrackers of dissent that went off on Independence Day 2025 over an ICE gulag in Texas were much more of a tribute to what America was supposed to be than whatever Trump detonates over his morally empty National Mall on this July 4. In a United States with liberty for billionaires and justice for none, what are we even celebrating?

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