450 Years in Prison for Saying “Anti-Fascist"
How the Prairieland Eight got convicted as domestic terrorists
The federal government’s first-ever domestic terrorism convictions linked to “Antifa” came thanks to an “expert” witness who has never spent a day in government or academia, as non-public court transcripts I obtained show. He instead cut his teeth at various pro-Israel advocacy groups.
Shortly after Hamas' October 7 attacks, he said in a social media post: "I would like every protesting communist scumbag to go to Gaza so the IDF can turn them into pink mist…"
His name is Kyle Shideler, and he is the worst of the worst kind of Washington expert. What he lacks in perspective and real world grounding he makes up in ideological fanaticism and deskwork. Before his current position at the right-wing fever dream factory called the Center for Security Policy, he spent years parroting Israel’s national security worldview: the “counterterrorism” mindset of pre-crime paranoia, in which threats lurk everywhere and the preemptive “security” crackdown they supposedly demand becomes its own form of oppression.
This paranoia was on full display at the trial of the Prairieland Eight
Last July 4, the eight protested Donald Trump’s immigration war by targeting the Prairieland Detention Center, an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas. Seven of the eight gathered at the detention camp for a “noise demonstration” and began vandalizing cars and the facility walls, spray-painting graffiti and setting off what the government describes as commercial-grade fireworks to show support for the people locked inside. When local police arrived, one of the seven, 32-year-old Benjamin Hanil Song, shot Alvarado Police Lieutenant Thomas Gross in the neck. Gross survived.
Police later recovered 11 firearms, body armor, and tactical gear. The government charged Song with attempted murder. But the rest of the defendants were swept up not so much for what they did, but for what the government said they collectively were: a “North Texas Antifa cell.” One of the targets, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, wasn’t even present that night. He was convicted of concealing documents — for moving a box of political zines. He was sentenced to 30 years.
The eight were sentenced to a combined 450 years in federal prison:
Savanna Batten — 50 years
Zachary Evetts — 50 years
Autumn Hill — 50 years
Meagan Morris — 50 years
Maricela Rueda — 70 years
Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada — 30 years
Benjamin Hanil Song — 100 years
Elizabeth Soto — 50 years
As my attorney, a career public defender, told me, these are longer sentences than her clients have gotten for murder.
Laws were clearly broken; but the sentences turned on what the defendants said and believed, which the prosecution cast as proof of Antifa membership — a case that rested largely on one man: Shideler.
His job on the stand was to convince the jury of two things: that Antifa is a real, organized terrorist enterprise, and that these eight belonged to it. That task was complicated by the fact that the defendants had never actually called themselves Antifa.
When he was pressed on this point and asked during cross-examination why, if they were Antifa, had they never used the term, Shideler replied: “Clandestine organizations very rarely do that.”
Welcome to the paranoid mindset of counterterrorism, where everything is a network, every network is a threat, and the absence of evidence is just evidence the network has good operational security. Silence isn’t innocence; it’s tradecraft. No leader means a decentralized cell. No membership list means superb security hygiene. It’s a worldview that can never be wrong, because every fact and its opposite confirm it.
Shideler was baptized into this worldview on the job. By his own account on the stand, he “lived over my parents’ garage for a little while” after college, took a job as a news director at a radio station “for a short period,” and did “some blogging and writing” before being recruited by Stand With Us, the Los Angeles pro-Israel group, where he was responsible for “managing their database of extremist groups and individuals.” From there he went to the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a foreign-policy nonprofit that bills itself as operating “from an unabashedly pro-America and pro-Israel stance,” where he studied Islamic movements “with a particular emphasis on the Muslim Brotherhood.”
In 2014 he was hired at the Center for Security Policy, the Frank Gaffney–founded think tank best known for promoting the Iraq War and claiming “Sharia law” is the leading domestic threat to the United States. He left for a stint at the Middle East Forum — a Philadelphia outfit whose stated mission is to “protect Western civilization from the threat of Islamism” — then returned to the Center in 2020, where he now directs Homeland Security and Counterterrorism research, which as far as I can tell means tracking left-wing Americans.
Under cross-examination, Shideler acknowledged he had authored an article on combating far-left extremism whose subtitle, a defense lawyer pointed out, was “A Roadmap for the Trump Administration.” It ran in The American Mind, a publication of the conservative Claremont Institute. He conceded his work isn’t peer-reviewed and rests on “open source research” — material one can “find on the internet” — which, he agreed, carries “both false information and true information.”
Somehow, some way, Shideler ended up being the Justice Department’s expert witness to explain “Antifa” and the grave threat it poses.
The Justice Department parroted Shideler’s view of America, announcing that the Prairieland Eight are “part of a larger militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups primarily ascribing to an ideology that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and the system of law.”
The overthrow of the United States Government! It would be funny if it wasn’t so creepy.
But how did people who’d never even used the word get labeled terrorists?
They did say they were “anti-fascist,” and to Shideler that was enough. Per the court transcript:
Q: We did hear them say that they're Antifa, to the extent that they're anti-fascist, right?
SHIDELER: Yes. It would be consistent with an anarchist/anti-fascist ideology to not consider organizations. They don't think about groups and organizations, that's sort of counter to their ideology.
The membership test he described is not coordination, not dues, not a roster, not a chain of command; he conceded under oath that none of those exist. But it was enough that they’d said they were “anti-fascist,” which Shideler argued was an abbreviation of “Antifa.”
Last October, when Shideler testified for the first time before the Senate, he made the link between activism and free speech. “We are not talking about speech,” he told the subcommittee. “We are talking about manifestos describing how to overthrow the government and how to do that with violence.”
That is the argument he carried into the courtroom — that the wrong zines, wearing black, using the Signal app, and covering your face are not expressions but the operational signatures of a terror cell.
When a defense lawyer offered an analogy — the Knights of Columbus also hold secret ceremonies — Shideler agreed that doesn’t make them terrorists, “not unless they commit terrorist acts.” Pressed on whether the defendants’ encrypted chats ever discussed harming people or property, he allowed they did not, then explained the absence away: he’d “expect the discussions of that type to take place person to person,” not in a recoverable chat.
He even admitted he had reviewed exactly one “Antifa chat” in his career — this one — and that his expectations about what such groups do were “based on what the documents say should be done,” not on any direct experience.
Even the presiding judge, Trump appointee Mark Pittman, seemed to grasp the danger of treating belief as evidence. He asked Shideler whether owning a copy of Mein Kampf made him a fascist, or Das Kapital a communist. “Not unless it’s consistent with your other behavior,” Shideler answered each time. Then Pittman asked whether owning Antifa literature would make him an anti-fascist — and the government's Antifa expert volunteered that he owns "quite a bit of it myself."
The Prairieland case is likely to be the first in a series of similar prosecutions. Trump’s September 2025 executive order designating “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization that “explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government” supplied the language. The Prairieland Eight indictment, unsealed weeks later, tracked that order almost word for word. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the time of the indictment that the case marks the beginning of a broader effort to “systematically dismantle” the movement. Shideler himself says that the Justice Department sought his help in defining Antifa during the case.
The irony is that Shideler has warned about this exact tactic — building a public narrative to put political enemies behind bars — except when he was the one warning, he was accusing the other side of doing it. In a March 2023 thread on X, he argued that the prosecutions of January 6 were not really about their conduct but about how the media manufactured a narrative of the protestors and rioters as a threat to overthrow the government.
January 6, he lamented, “couldn’t be the story of a rowdy protest that got out of hand” because of the partisan dynamics at play.
So why couldn’t this be the story of another rowdy protest that got out of hand?
I’ve enclosed a copy of the non-public court transcript containing Shideler’s remarks below. I always try to publish the underlying documents so you can make up your own mind — help me continue doing so by becoming a subscriber or by contributing to my GoFundMe here.
— Edited by William M. Arkkin
Excellent work, as usual, Ken. What I'm looking for is an explanation of how the jury fell for this? This was a jury trial, no? How could the jury fall for this crap?
I’m wondering what kind of experts their defense put on, and why they weren’t able to counter this shoddy logic.