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“A group of Texas protesters convicted of terrorism charges received harsh sentences of at least 50 years in prison Tuesday in a closely watched case that was widely seen as a test case of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent.” {The Guardian 23 June}https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/23/prairieland-ice-protesters-texas-sentenced
Four sentences of fifty years, another of seventy, and one of a full one hundred years. These were not mere protesters, as several of them committed extreme acts of vandalism at a detention centre in Alvarado, Texas, and an officer was targeted with an AR-15.
These are not heroes, and vigilantism is not to be celebrated or encouraged. Thus, while I do not wish to condone the heavy-handed actions of the Trump regime and ICE in their treatment of human beings, I cannot shed any tears for these individuals, though I am not entirely convinced that the sentences fit the crimes.
The left-wing militant groups of the 1960s and 1970s were, so far as I can tell, far more organised and did employ violence, yet many of their members ultimately received relatively light punishments, if any at all, and some later found positions in academia. Bill Ayers, for instance, who perhaps should have spent a lifetime in prison, but the world did not spin off its axis because he was released. Patty Hearst, to use another example, would never see the light of day again if that sordid affair went down today.
The testimony in this case revealed that these were largely unorganised, or at best loosely organised, rabble-rousers. These lengthy sentences are thin cover for the regime and its cult followers in the general population to eventually label all dissent under the almost entirely mythical banner of ‘Antifa’, and therefore criminal.
What people need to realise, but are not getting at all, is that there is an absolute chilling effect created by the far right’s ceaseless bemoaning of ‘woke’ bogeymen. Why is it that these right-wing populist types are forever championing freedom of speech, yet spend so much of their time attempting to silence others? Very simply, they care about their freedoms, and not yours or mine.
At some point during the past decade, I do remember, a handful of left-wing radicals did begin calling themselves ‘Antifa’, and a few of those same types used ‘woke’ as a descriptor. A very small number of ideologues, largely concentrated in academia and similar circles, and yet the other side hath successfully used those labels to demonise mainstream liberals, Democrats, anyone to their left, and anyone who criticises their god-king Trump.
It is the ‘you are either with us or against us’ mentality of a movement centred upon a sick man who demands complete loyalty from the citizenry and all around him, and who will go to greater and greater lengths to secure that loyalty as his desperation grows. With millions of dangerous people — cult followers — all too eager to back him up, and most of the general public too tired and cowed to offer any resistance.
And when the #MAGA militias start slaughtering ordinary people left and right, we shall partially have these morons from the far left to blame for helping make it possible.
These are not heroes being sentenced today. They are not to be celebrated, and they are too foolish to realise that they are playing directly into the hands of those who would enslave humanity for their own enrichment (in which they are largely succeeding). Useful idiots for a corrupt government held hostage by international criminals.
Violent thugs are violent thugs, whatever it may be that drives them. The flip side of the same coin as the thugs who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Congratulations. Enjoy thy prison stays.
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Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.
