BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen
In a Hot Type column from a year ago, I asked one simple question: How many is enough?
It was in response to innocent men being shipped to a brutal Salvadoran prison – they were portrayed as criminals, most weren’t. In cruel photos with Kristi Noem, they were portrayed as subhuman. They, of course, were not.
I opened the How Many Is Enough? report with a reminder from the 1961 film, Judgement At Nuremberg, when a Nazi judge begs the US judge who headed his tribunal to believe him when he said, “Those people… those millions of people… I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it!”
To which the US judge responds, “It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”
I retell that story because the events of recent weeks should expunge any doubt that fascism in America is accelerating.
Using the little-known NSPM-7 memorandum, an alarming Trump directive from September 2025 titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence aimed in particular at anti-fascists, activists in America are being sentenced to prison sentences rarely seen in US history.
NSPM-7’s definitions were so broad that the critics who actually noticed its arrival warned how it could be manipulated to intimidate activist groups and this week’s events support their alarm.
This week, a group of Texas activists were convicted of terrorism in relation to a Fourth of July protest last year. Eight protesters at the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, were sentenced on Tuesday to between 50 and 100 years in prison. One of the protestors, Benjamin Song, was convicted of attempted murder after prosecutors said he opened fire and wounded a police officer.
A ninth person, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, the husband of one of the protestors, was not present at the demonstration, but he received 30 years in prison after being convicted of moving boxes containing political zines after his wife called him from prison.
“It’s the machinery of the fascist state,” said author and philosopher David Livingstone Smith, who has written multiple books on dehumanization. “This is kind of like a lynching. It’s a warning: ‘fall into line’.”
Smith said it hearkens back to the Nazi term, gleichschaltung – which means a coordination, or synchronization, a bringing into line. The term defined how the Nazis established totalitarian control of the entirety of German society between 1933 and 1934, by methodically destroying any opposition to Nazi ideology.
“Recall that term, Gleichschaltung. ‘Watch out, this could happen to you. We can come for you.’ They can come for you and me, so yes, all this stuff is accelerating.”
In a report warning how the US Government is arresting people on the “basis of a fiction”, How Fascism Works author Jason Stanley wrote: “In the first prosecutions of the Trump regime’s targeting of alleged members of ‘Antifa’, the court decided that these young people were terrorists who deserved to spend essentially the rest of their natural lives in an American prison. Though one of them did shoot a police officer, the rest were guilty at most of graffiti and setting off firecrackers.”
He noted that the US is a “global outlier in the length of its prison sentences. For example, the United States is the global leader in the average sentence length for homicide, 40.6 years – compared to 6.1 years for France, 5.3 years for Scotland, and 9 years for Switzerland… Of course, there is no such thing as Antifa. It is not an organization.”
Smith cautioned that “ICE is developing a very extensive surveillance apparatus.”
He is referring to the new report by Mijente, Just Futures Law, and Surveillance Resistance Lab – Who’s Behind Ice? Oligarchs, Immigration Enforcement and the Threats to Democracy. The report revealed the “dangerous convergence of two trends… the first is the Trump administration’s aggressive acceleration of the use of technology and artificial intelligence to rapidly expand immigration enforcement and military force. The second involves an unprecedented amassing of economic and political influence by a small group of tech oligarchs. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has provided a clear pathway towards the current administration’s active construction of a new security state.”
The report identified contracts between ICE and 11 surveillance tech companies, contracts worth $513 million in 2026, driven by Palantir’s surveillance technology and the Anduril defense company.
And although this week’s headlines have focused on the malicious prison sentences that occurred in Texas, the NSPM-7 directive has been used extensively in the US.
“Labeling domestic organizations as terrorists not only puts targets on the backs of those disfavored by the government, it also suppresses their speech, association, and advocacy, and is likely to dampen civic participation, including voting,” wrote US national security analyst Mary B. McCord. “This is dangerous to public safety and to constitutional rights, and it weakens our democracy.”
McCord is a lawyer and a former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the US Department of Justice. In response to the Texas sentences, McCord told Byline Times: “The sentences are completely off the charts. There is no parity with the sentences for similar crimes, and certainly no parity with regard to the treatment of the January 6 defendants, all of whom were pardoned or had their sentences commuted or cases dismissed. Although the violence certainly warranted criminal charges against those responsible, the message, both from the DOJ in overcharging the case and the judges in their excessive sentences, is to chill people from engaging in the exercise of First Amendment rights. That is also the objective of NSPM-7.”
Its designation of the boogeyman “Antifa” as a domestic terror organization – even though it doesn’t exist in America in any meaningful way – has led to dozens of charges against ICE protestors. Among those recently charged: 15 protestors in Minnesota, with the NSPM-7 memorandum referenced by the Justice Department as being the directive that led to their arrests.
According to the Trump-nominated US Attorney for Minnesota, Daniel Rosen, the directive tasks federal investigators to “to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation”, those known as ‘Antifa’. But when queried at the press conference announcing the arrests, he was unable to define ‘Antifa’.
“What is Antifa goes beyond, I think, the scope of what this indictment is,” he responded. “But what I can tell you is that we have plenty of people that self-identify in that way, and you might want to ask them that question.”
I’m sure I’m not the only person reading those words who self-identifies as anti-fascist, and I’ve spent the last year visiting anti-fascist war memorials in Europe. I’m certain that among the tens of thousands of sites – war cemeteries, dedicated monuments, and town center landmarks – the remains of brave anti-fascists are turning over in their graves at what has become of America.
“We have hard times ahead,” said David Livingstone Smith. “And frankly, there are a lot of people who try to reassure themselves: ‘Oh, the Midterms. Oh, the next election.’ I really suspect we’re past that now.”
I asked him, in all this bleakness, where is our counter directive? We’ve witnessed Trump back down multiple times when faced with push back – why else the existence of the TACO acronym (Trump Always Chickens Out) – so where is our pro-democracy memorandum?
“Philosopher Cornel West likes to say, ‘I’m hopeful, but I’m not optimistic.’ If you’re not hopeful, there’s no point in doing anything at all,” Smith said. “There has to be some possibility. So all I can say is learn, push back, and each one of us is situated in some way where we can push back in some sphere. Everyone has some way to push back.”
Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs bimonthly on Byline Times Substack. She is a #1 Amazon bestselling author, the co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast, and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 102 countries.
Leave a comment