r/DemSocialistAlliance

The sentences expose the class character of the judicial system and the advanced stage of the assault on democratic rights under the Trump administration. The punishments handed down by federal judges in Texas far exceed those imposed on all of the fascist militants who participated in the January 6, 2021 coup attempt. While President Donald Trump pardoned more than 1,600 participants in the attack on Congress, including members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convicted of violently assaulting police officers, anti-ICE protesters, the vast majority of whom did nothing but light fireworks and vandalize government property, have now been condemned to decades behind bars.

Benjamin Hanil Song received a sentence of 100 years in prison. Maricela Rueda was sentenced to 70 years. Cameron Arnold, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Bradford Morris, Elizabeth Soto and Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada received sentences ranging from 30 to 50 years.

The sentence imposed on Sanchez-Estrada is particularly revealing. Although he was not present at the protest itself, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for “corruptly concealing a document” after his wife Rueda, from jail, requested he remove some anarchist magazines the couple had in their home. His punishment alone exceeds the sentences received by numerous January 6 foot soldiers who were captured on video violently assaulting police officers while participating in an effort to overturn a presidential election. Fascists seeking to establish a dictatorship are rewarded, while opponents of mass deportations and state repression are branded “terrorists” and sentenced accordingly.

The speech delivered by Trump on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence expressed both the terror gripping the capitalist oligarchy and the political conspiracy ahead of the midterm elections.

Speaking before the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota, Trump declared war on a substantial and growing section of the American population. There is, he asserted, “a resurgence of the communist menace in our land,” which he called “a mortal threat to American liberty... the greatest threat to our country, including World War One, World War Two, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.”

He continued: “Such doctrines can be given no quarter in a democracy.” Socialists, he stated, stand outside the nation: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” And he pledged, “for all to hear, that the citizens of the United States of America will vanquish communism quickly.”

The logical corollary is that socialists must be treated as enemies of the state, against whom the methods developed over a quarter century of the “war on terror” can be turned. The direct target of Trump’s fascist diatribe are those who supported and voted for members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in Colorado and New York over the past month, which Trump and the right-wing media have presented as the imminent communist takeover of America. 

In the two weeks before Trump spoke, nine young people who participated in a Fourth of July protest last year outside the Prairieland immigration detention center in Texas were sentenced in federal court to prison terms of 30 to 100 years, convicted at trial on charges including “material support for terrorism.”