The Mussolini Playbook In a Texas Courtroom
A federal court has imported the exact legal mechanism Italian fascists used in 1926 to criminalize their opponents. Americans are sleepwalking through it.
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On June 23, 2026, a federal judge in Fort Worth, Texas,sentenced eight people to prison terms ranging from thirty to one hundred years. A ninth defendant was sentenced separately on the same theory. They are now collectively known as the Prairieland Nine. Their offense, in the government’s framing, was domestic terrorism.
On the night of July 4, 2025, roughly eleven people stood outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, a facility holding more than 1,000 immigration detainees in a building rated for 707. The demonstrators set off fireworks, spray-painted cars in the parking lot, and called through a megaphone toward the windows where detainees waved back. At about 11:00 p.m., an Alvarado police lieutenant arrived alone. One of the protesters, a former U.S. Marine Corps reservist named Benjamin Song who had brought an AR-15 — legally, under Texas law — opened fire and wounded the officer. Song received a 100-year sentence for the shooting.
What the Justice Department did with the other eight defendants is the story.
Daniel Sanchez Estrada was not at the protest. He moved a box of antifascist pamphlets from his parents’ house to a friend’s apartment after his friends were arrested. He received thirty years.
Autumn Hill, whose prior political activity consisted of volunteering for a nonprofit and marching in a Pride parade, received fifty years. Her home had been where some of the defendants gathered the night before.
Savanna Batten, who arrived at the demonstration late and who Song himself described as having no knowledge of what was planned, also received fifty years. Her sister told the court that Batten dreams of opening a bakery.
Maricela Rueda, who used the megaphone, received seventy years — fifty for her role at the protest, twenty more for asking her husband to move the same pamphlets that put Estrada in prison.
The federal statute under which they were charged is 18 U.S.C. § 2339A, “providing material support to terrorists.” It was enacted in 1994 and used for thirty years against Al-Qaeda supporters and ISIS recruiters. It had never been used against American domestic protesters until this case. It does not require any organization to be designated as terrorist. It requires only that prosecutors connect the defendant to one of a list of predicate offenses.
The Justice Department’s theory, accepted by the court: spray-painting parked cars constitutes “depredation of government property,” a predicate offense. Consumer fireworks constitute “explosives.” Wearing matching black clothing constitutes providing one’s own “personnel” as material support to terrorism, because the indistinguishable appearance gave Song visual cover from which to shoot. The defendants did not need to know the shooting was coming. They did not need to want it. Their presence in similar clothing, the government argued, made them logistical support to a terrorist act.
This is unprecedented in American law.
It is not unprecedented in modern history.
What Italy Did in 1926
Italy did this first.
On November 25, 1926, Mussolini’s government enacted Law No. 2008, the “Act for the Defense of the State.” It was the centerpiece of what came to be called the Leggi Fascistissime — the “most fascist laws.” The 1926 act did three things. It reinstated the death penalty for political offenses. It created a Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State (Tribunale speciale per la difesa dello Stato), a parallel court system for trying enemies of the regime. And it formally criminalized antifascism.
Mussolini’s government, in its public framing of these prosecutions, called the defendants “terrorists.” The historical record on this point is precise. The fascist regime, in the words of one recent scholarly study, “maintained that force and repression were used only in cases where clear proof of culpability for ‘terrorist’ crimes was present.” The word in their mouths was the same word in the mouths of American prosecutors now. And in both cases, being opposed to fascism — you know, the thing the USA used to stand against — is grounds for being considered a ‘terrorist’.
The Special Tribunal operated in Italy from 1927 to 1943. During those sixteen years, it processed 6,929 antifascist defendants drawn from a population of roughly 101,000 Italians the regime had identified as political opponents. Most were not violent. They were trade unionists, journalists, teachers, intellectuals, members of the Socialist and Communist parties, and ordinary citizens who had expressed the wrong opinions in the wrong places. The Tribunal imposed 31 death sentences. It sent thousands more to confino politico — internal exile on remote islands and in mountain villages. The full apparatus of fascist repression sent roughly 15,000 Italians to internal exile between 1926 and 1943.
The most decorated targets included Antonio Gramsci, who would die in fascist prison after eleven years of confinement, and Sandro Pertini, who survived to become President of the Italian Republic in 1978. Both were tried before the Special Tribunal under the 1926 act.
Two features of the Italian system deserve close attention because both are present in the American case.
First, Mussolini did not repeal the Italian constitution. He did not abolish the ordinary criminal courts. He built, alongside the existing legal system, a parallel mechanism — the Special Tribunal — that operated under the procedures of military justice but maintained the formal trappings of European liberal jurisprudence. Defendants had lawyers. Verdicts were issued in written opinions. The regime insisted, in its propaganda, that what was happening was law, not violence. As one contemporary scholar of the period put it: “Rather than changing the existing criminal court system or amending the constitution, the fascists positioned the Special Tribunal as a parallel system of justice.”
This is the technique. Comparative law scholars call it autocratic legalism — the dismantling of constitutional protections through legal forms rather than against them. The forms remain. The function changes.
Second, the fascist regime named the agency that enforced the 1926 laws with extraordinary candor. Mussolini’s secret police was called the OVRA — Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo. The Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism. The state literally named its enforcement apparatus after the ideology it existed to suppress. That ideology was opposition to fascism. There was no ambiguity. The regime was open about what it was doing.
The American Adaptation
On September 22, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order designating “Antifa” — the contemporary movement whose name comes directly from the German Antifaschistische Aktion of 1932 and the broader European antifascist tradition that defeated Mussolini and Hitler — as a “domestic terrorist organization.” The order has no statutory basis. The United States has no domestic terrorism designation framework. The executive branch has no legal authority to make such designations. The order, by its own terms, cites no law. It is the political naming of a target.
Days later came National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which directed the entire federal government — Justice, Treasury, the IRS, federal law enforcement — to investigate, prosecute, and defund anyone the administration characterizes as connected to antifascist activity.
In December 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued an implementing memorandum directing federal prosecutors to charge “the most serious, readily provable offenses” in such cases and to seek terrorism sentencing enhancements as a matter of course. The same memo bypassed the historical role of the Justice Department’s National Security Division — the career attorneys who had vetted material support cases under every prior administration of both parties. The Prairieland indictment proceeded without them.
The Justice Department then used an existing counterterrorism statute, enacted thirty-two years ago for an entirely different purpose, against American protesters. The judges who ratified the novel theory were both appointed by President Trump. Judge Reed O’Connor characterized the Prairieland protest from the bench as not a protest at all but, in his words, “an assault on democracy.” The same week, federal prosecutors in Minnesota charged fifteen more people on substantially the same theory.
The government’s expert witness at trial was a researcher named Kyle Shideler, employed by the Claremont Institute, who had published a piece in The American Mind one week after the Charlie Kirk assassination titled “How to Dismantle Far-Left Extremist Networks” — explicitly subtitled a roadmap for the Trump administration. Shideler then, by his own account, conferred with prosecutors a month before the indictment was filed. He helped shape the indictment. Then he testified for the government about the tactics his own memo had recommended be prosecuted.
The American system has not created a Special Tribunal. It has not had to. The Justice Department reached into the existing federal criminal code, found a counterterrorism statute that did not require any organization to be designated, and used it against a category of Americans the executive branch has named as the enemy.
The mechanism is the Mussolini mechanism. The legal forms are intact. The function is the prosecution of political opposition under counterterrorism law. The defendants are called terrorists. The targets are antifascists. The vocabulary is identical because the technique is identical.
Why Americans Are Sleepwalking
Most Americans do not see this because most Americans have been taught that fascism arrives in jackboots, with slicked back hair. It does not. It arrives in court filings.
The Prairieland sentencings happened in a federal courtroom under a sitting federal judge in proceedings with defense attorneys, jury verdicts, and written opinions. There were no tanks in the street. The defendants did not disappear in the night. The forms of liberal jurisprudence were observed. The man who shot the police officer received the longest sentence, which is what most readers, scanning the headline, will register as the story. The eight other sentences, ranging from thirty to seventy years, will be filed mentally under “co-conspirators” without further inquiry. This is precisely the response the prosecution counted on.
Most Americans also do not see this because the targets are presented as unsympathetic. The defendants wore black. They used encrypted messaging. They were associated, in the prosecution’s narrative, with antifa. The press, in much of its coverage, has accepted the prosecution’s category labels without examining what they actually meant. To question the sentences is, in the framing that has prevailed in much of the news cycle, to defend cop-shooters. The fact that most of the defendants did not shoot anyone, did not want anyone shot, and in one case were not even present, gets lost.
And most Americans do not see this because the historical literacy required to recognize the pattern is rare. The Italian precedent is not widely taught in American schools. The phrase “Leggi Fascistissime” appears in no major newspaper’s coverage of the Prairieland case. The fact that the regime that invented the prosecutorial template now being deployed against American protesters called its enforcement agency the Organization for the Repression of Anti-Fascism — and meant it — is the kind of historical detail that ought to be in every editorial about this case and is in none.
Here is what every American needs to understand, even if the language is uncomfortable to hear.
A government that wishes to criminalize political opposition does not need new laws. It needs new readings of the laws it already has, prosecutors instructed to charge aggressively, and judges willing to ratify. Each of these conditions now exists. The legal theory that just sent nine Americans to prison for terms longer than most murderers serve was authored by an Israel-funded think-tank researcher, adopted by the Justice Department, and ratified by federal judges. The youngest of those nine defendants will, if the convictions stand, die in federal prison.
The United States in 1941 mobilized sixteen million people, spent the equivalent of four trillion present-day dollars, and lost 405,000 American lives in a war whose stated purpose was the defeat of fascism. American soldiers, including the Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team — whose families were imprisoned in domestic concentration camps — fought their way up the Italian peninsula and helped end Mussolini’s regime. The Office of Strategic Services trained antifascist partisans across occupied Europe. American occupation policy in Germany was explicitly named Entnazifizierung — denazification. The work was antifascism. The word for what we were doing was antifascism. The men who did it understood themselves to be antifascists.
Their grandchildren are now being sentenced to life in federal prison for being, the government says, antifascists.
The doctrine that has just been established in a Texas courtroom is a fascist doctrine. It is the same doctrine, applied through the same mechanism, with the same vocabulary, against the same political category. The country that defeated fascism by force of arms has now imported the legal model of the regime it defeated. American federal courts are administering it. American federal prosecutors are pursuing it. American federal judges are signing the orders.
If the Trump administration's prosecutorial framework gets applied at the same per-capita rate as Mussolini's, the United States will catalogue roughly 847,000 Americans as political opponents, prosecute approximately 58,000 of them under counterterrorism statutes, send 126,000 into some form of state custody outside the ordinary criminal system, and execute about 260 for political offenses.
As things now stand, voicing antifascist opinions can get you imprisoned for life in the United States of America, as can voicing views critical of capitalism, Christianity or the government itself. Unlike when this happened in Italy, there is no larger country coming to save us.
I offer all my news and analysis posts freely, but your support is necessary and appreciated. Please subscribe, paid if you can, and like, comment and share my posts if they move you. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Just four $25 tips per day keep me writing full time.
This is America's fascist version of disappearing dissidents through helicopter drops. The spurious indictments and draconian sentences amount to the sort of unusual punishment the 'terrorists' who framed our constitution tried to protect us from.
Keep reporting and writing, Alisa. We are reading.