In retrospect, I should have taken advantage of the mistrial to make my way to Waco—though, of course, nothing remains of the New Mount Carmel Center today but its name in history. On April 19, 1993, a fifty-one-day standoff between the federal government and a Christian millennialist cult believed to have a stockpile of illegal weapons culminated in the seventy-six fiery deaths now known as the Waco massacre. Later, critics would say that the federal government had gone about things all wrong: that the investigation was “shoddy,” the raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives ill-advised, the entire operation a bureaucratic publicity stunt. don’t trust the government, warns a poster at the memorial chapel that now stands at the site.
In some sense, the trial I flew to Texas to attend has everything to do with Waco. The government’s actions at Waco inspired a vengeful Timothy McVeigh to carry out the Oklahoma City bombing, which prompted the creation of federal “terrorism enhancements” extending the sentences for domestic crimes considered political in nature—and it is those sentence enhancements that the federal government now deftly wields to chill left-wing dissent. Terror charges are the scourge of contemporary activists, from the mink liberationists facing trial in Pennsylvania in May to the Stop Cop City music festivalgoers whose charges remain pending. And it was terrorism under consideration at the U.S. courthouse in Fort Worth, where nine defendants stood this winter accused of rioting, using weapons and explosives, providing material support to terrorists, and attempted murder at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility noise demonstration gone wrong last Fourth of July.
At 10:37 p.m. on a rainy July 4, 2025, a loose collection of friends, comrades, acquaintances, and strangers gathered outside the Prairieland Detention Center to set off fireworks they hoped would be loud and bright enough to catch the attention of detainees. It was set to be a typical noise demonstration, a type of peaceful protest in which participants make an impossible-to-ignore ruckus that simultaneously brings attention to injustice and reassures its victims that they are remembered. But federal officers had almost immediately called 911 on the demonstration, and the first officer to respond to the scene, Lieutenant Thomas Gross of Alvarado, Texas, pulled his gun upon arrival. According to his lawyers, defendant Benjamin Song then fired a shot at the ground that ricocheted into Gross’s shoulder. Gross fired back, and hearing the exchange of gunfire, the assembled protesters panicked and scattered—but almost a dozen people were rounded up that evening and in the days that followed. Soon, nineteen total were facing state and federal charges. Despite the chaos of that night, the narrative that emerged from the federal government was one of well-orchestrated malice: “Nearly a dozen violent assailants equipped with tactical gear and weapons attacked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, on July 4, shooting a local law enforcement officer in the process,” blared an ICE press release on July 8.
Though ICE’s acting director, Todd M. Lyons, was quick to refer to the incident as an “incomprehensible” escalation in violence, some of that escalation exists exclusively in the realm of rhetoric. The media has routinely alluded to the “Prairieland ICE shooting” as though someone died in the crossfire—but Gross, the supposed target of the demonstrators, sustained only minor injuries and was released from the hospital within just three or four hours. While two protesters had indeed vandalized vehicles and a guard structure with graffiti, the property damage they caused cost the Prairieland Detention Center less than $2,200 to repair. Before Judge Mark Pittman banned the defense from making a self-defense argument, it was clear that they were going to take issue with the fact that Gross himself admitted to being first to draw his gun at the scene. Then, in order to use the flashlight mounted to his weapon—or perhaps simply because he had been trained to shoot first and ask questions later—he had immediately begun to aim that gun directly at the backs of the panicked, fleeing protesters. Gross himself described that fateful choice as one of the “split-second decisions” he made “without fully being able to evaluate the scene.”
United States v. Arnold began with a false start: On February 17, its first day, the judge declared a mistrial when he deemed a defense attorney’s shirt too “politically charged” for the courtroom because it depicted civil rights leaders such as MLK Jr. and Shirley Chisholm, which the bloviating Pittman compared to an image of “Trump riding an eagle” with an ICE flag. But the consensus among the friends and family of the Prairieland defendants is that the judge had an ulterior motive: the desire for a new jury pool, after several of the seventy-five people called in that first day declared themselves strongly anti-ICE. The mistrial made for an inauspicious beginning to one of the highest-stakes and least-publicized political trials of the twenty-first century: the latest attempt by the Department of Justice to prosecute “Antifa” members at the federal level for domestic terrorism. The only problem is that the Antifa they describe does not really exist.
Hunted Like Wild Beasts
As many scholars, journalists, and fact-checkers have noted, Donald Trump and his allies are continually producing and repeating falsities that veer into the realm of urban legend—tales of Muslims in New Jersey cheering during 9/11, of Haitian immigrants to Springfield eating cats and dogs, of the Mob fomenting concerns about asbestos so they could profit from its removal—and the “Antifa terrorist” is another favorite stock character. Fearmongering about Antifa, which Trump described as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government” in an executive order signed last September, is a reinvigoration of a nineteenth- and twentieth-century storytelling tradition that conceived of the anarchist as an American political bogeyman. Just as was historically the case with anarchists and their heirs, the violence of the Antifa member is described in terms that far outstrip reality but legitimize some of our basest political instincts. Anarchist was once practically interchangeable with immigrant and Jew, making it a particularly convenient dog whistle, perhaps, for a Republican Party currently trafficking anew in antisemitism and xenophobia.
There was certainly an outspoken anarchist minority on the periphery of nineteenth-century American politics that advocated for, and attempted, revolutionary violence. But as historian Beverly Gage reports, there were only three major incidents in the United States between 1882 and 1906, next to 3,080 known lynchings in that same period. Economic elites were nonetheless successful in casting anarchists as “recreant undesirables”—subjects who were not just racialized, writes historian Tom Goyens, but also cast as “mentally impaired,” inherently violent, and untethered by the constraints of mainstream morality. After the 1901 assassination of William McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, Emma Goldman wrote of anti-anarchist sentiment rising to the pitch of a veritable moral panic replete with popular demands for full-scale “extermination.” True to Goldman’s assessment, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported it being a common contention that anarchists should be “denounced as public enemies and hunted like wild beasts.” A member of the Morgan banking clan—who were among the many financial elites who helped foment panic from above—opined that they should be shot like mad dogs before their “rabies” could further spread.
A member of the Morgan banking clan opined that anarchists should be shot like mad dogs before their “rabies” could further spread.
The federal government ably used the overblown reports of widespread anarchist violence to crack down on the whole of the American left. The single largest federal raid in American history was carried out on September 5, 1917, when agents raided Industrial Workers of the World strongholds across the country, charging defendants in Chicago, for instance, with a whopping 17,022 crimes—all nonviolent offenses related to wartime resistance. The subsequent Palmer Raids, notorious for their lawless brutality, resulted in between 3,200 and 7,300 arrests on January 2, 1919, alone. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer dismissed the arrestees as “the most radical socialists, the misguided anarchists, the agitators who oppose the limitations of unionism, [and] the moral perverts and the hysterical neurasthenic women who abound in communism,” and the federal government profited from the often warrantless arrests by parading the manacled, filthy, unshaven detainees through the streets in a narrative-affirming display of “Bolshevik terrorists.” Meanwhile, in March 1919, the landmark Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States denied First Amendment rights to antiwar agitators, and Abrams v. United States upheld the convictions of several leftist pamphleteers charged with sedition for the political leaflets they tossed from an upstairs Manhattan window.
Leftist groups were and are still regularly bludgeoned with the language of the century-old anarchist panic. Environmental activists who engage in direct action involving property damage and obstruction, for example, are routinely described, almost interchangeably, as eco-anarchists and ecoterrorists. The public outrage that accompanied 9/11 and the subsequent passage of the USA PATRIOT Act gave the government the means and the mandate to act on the longtime corporate narrative that cast environmentalists as a grave threat to political freedom when they were, in fact, a threat to profit margins. During a 2005 Senate hearing, Republican Senator James M. Inhofe declared environmental activists the “No. 1 domestic terror concern over the likes of white supremacists, militias, and anti-abortion groups.” An American Civil Liberties Union FOIA request from around the same time revealed that the FBI maintained an informal terrorist watch list keeping tabs on not just environmental activists but also “antiwar . . . protesters and on activists who feed vegetarian meals to the homeless.” Radical environmental activists were soon being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for property damage offenses. The more than 1,200 actions they carried out between 1990 and 2004 cost not a single human life but incurred huge penalties, while right-wing terrorists in the Timothy McVeigh tradition did bodily harm while only rarely incurring the “terrorism enhancements” that dog environmental radicals. Even in recent years, nonviolent left-wing activists have been punished far more harshly than, for example, the January 6 rioters.
Repression of this very sort gave birth to Antifa—but not in the United States. Antifa is short for antifaschistische, the German word for antifascist, which appeared in the name of a communist organization active during the Weimar Republic, as well as a number of short-lived groups that sprang up in postwar Germany to combat Nazi nostalgia (as well as the actual Nazis who still ran rampant in the former Reich) and issue popular socialist policy demands. Though the original antifa groups had dissolved by 1946, a new movement emerged in West Germany in the seventies among radical leftist autonomists, who still faced the unenviable task of fighting neo-Nazis and other far-right groups that had resurged in the late twentieth century. Squatters and autonomists found themselves in a similar position across Europe: In France, the UK, Norway, and beyond, leftist punks took on fascist skinheads in street fights outside music venues and on other community fronts. But these European antifascist groups were generally loosely strung and poorly structured, as were their American equivalents, which took perhaps their most recognizable shape in Minneapolis in the late-1980s with Anti-Racist Action, a collective that organized against racist street gangs. Although the Trump administration alleges that an organized, militant Antifa has emerged from this history of European and American organizing, the truth is less bombastic: While decentralized autonomous groups still come together to fight neighborhood fascists and resist state repression, and some refer to themselves as Antifa, these affinity groups are only connected to the history of Weimar and West German organizing in terms of their self-identification as anarchists. What links the older and newer antifascist groups is shared ideology, not direct organizational inheritance.
Our current wave of anarchist panic emerged on January 20, 2017, when a masked protester punched white supremacist Richard Spencer in the face at Trump’s first inauguration. That same day, several hundred demonstrators, under the moniker DisruptJ20, sought to obstruct the security checkpoints at the inauguration, an act of civil disobedience that a federal indictment later recast as “violence and destruction” in service of a riot. As 2017 progressed, more “incidents” accumulated: A No to Marxism in America demonstration in Berkeley devolved into street fighting between protesters and counterprotesters, the Avenue of Roses parade in Portland was canceled after counterprotesters warned that they would show up in droves to confront the ranks of neo-Nazis planning to join the festivities, and the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville led to an infamous clash in which dozens were injured and thirty-two-year-old counterprotester Heather Heyer was killed after a Nazi sympathizer drove his car into the crowd. Although even extreme right-wing groups have acknowledged that the only fatal attack by an antifascist activist resulted in just one death, a series of hoaxes in the late 2010s and early 2020s further fueled the narrative that leftist violence was always already occurring: Fake Antifa social media accounts advertised #PunchWhiteWomen in 2017 and attempted to incite violence during the George Floyd protests of 2020—the former organized by trolls on 4chan, the latter actually a ploy by white nationalist group Identity Evropa.
By 2020, the bones of the Antifa narrative were strong enough to prop up all kinds of ghoulish specters. Trump routinely described the BLM protests as having been astroturfed by “ANTIFA and the Radical Left” and bizarrely accused a seventy-five-year-old demonstrator brutalized by the police of falling “harder than was pushed,” asking whether the elderly man might be an “ANTIFA provocateur” engaged in a setup. Attorney General William Barr, meanwhile, spoke of “Bolshevik” urban guerrillas that hijack demonstrations, inspire violence, and “have various tiers of people from the sort of top provocateurs, down through people who are their minions and sort of run the violent missions.” Other prominent right-wing politicians, among them Rudy Giuliani, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan, and Mike Johnson, followed suit in accusing Antifa of “infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.” That spring, Trump announced that “the United States of America [would] be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” and a Department of Homeland Security intelligence report obtained by The Nation in August revealed a federal government doing its darndest to connect Antifa to Kurdish militant groups via podcast host Brace Belden, who fought alongside the left-wing People’s Protection Units, or YPG, in 2016 and 2017. That same month, seventeen-year-old vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse drove from Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and armed himself with an AR-15 to fight leftist “rioters.” His efforts to “protect businesses” in the city left two men dead and one seriously wounded. When Rittenhouse was declared not guilty in 2021, the Proud Boys shared memes depicting the far right triumphing over Antifa.
Officials in Trump’s second administration default Antifa as an explanation for so many disconnected things that it reminds me of my schizophrenic father, who blames the Illuminati for the Covid-19 pandemic. After the murder of political agitator Charlie Kirk in September, Republicans worked overtime to spin the narrative that he had been assassinated by an Antifa operative—then began a stochastic terror campaign connecting all of their political enemies to the amorphous anarchist group. If Antifa is indeed “just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TDA [Tren de Aragua], as ISIS, as Hezbollah, [and] Hamas,” as former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has claimed, and Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is right in describing No Kings protest attendees as the “Antifa people” of the Democratic Party, then it would seem that I don’t know my ninety-five-year-old grandmother (a regular attendee of No Kings protests) as well as I thought I did. In fact, it’s a wonder that no random liberals were killed in retribution for Kirk’s death. Just days after his killing, a prominent Proud Boy posted the following to X: “Who’s ready to go ANTIFA hunting? Because I know a few guys.”
But the truth is that even #Resistance to the obviously dubious Antifa narrative has been limited. All along, missish liberals and Never Trump Republicans have doggedly insisted that the far left is equal and opposite to the far right, effectively legitimizing the latter in their efforts to disavow the former. After the street-fighting incident at Berkeley, former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc A. Thiessen wrote scathingly in the Washington Post that “antifa is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis” because “both practice violence and preach hate.” The then-Democrat House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi added, “The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa . . . deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.” Their pandering, and other Democratic censures of left-wing aggression, has lent ideological cover to repeated Republican legislative efforts to curb legal dissent, including the Unmasking Antifa Act of 2018, which sought to introduce sentence enhancements for anyone apprehended using “black bloc” tactics such that anyone who “during the commission of an offense . . . wears a disguise, including a mask, shall, in addition to any term of imprisonment otherwise imposed under this section, be imprisoned for 2 years.” In 2019, citing the Berkeley incident and a scattered handful of acts of “intimidation” of far-right “journalists” like social media influencer Andy Ngo, Republican Senators Bill Cassidy and Ted Cruz introduced an unsuccessful congressional resolution demanding that Antifa be designated a domestic terrorist organization. In 2020, Republican Senator Rick Scott tried again, with the Stop ANTIFA Act, which would have specially charged the National Joint Terrorism Task Force with carrying out a nationwide strategy to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals” associated with the group.
Although Antifa might not be the “No. 1 domestic terror concern” of the Trump administration the way environmental activists were two decades ago, the legal apparatus has evolved over the years into one highly adept at criminalizing leftists—and the federal government clearly intends to get its money’s worth from the $8 trillion war on terror at home as well as abroad. The Antifa allegation in the Prairieland case comes on the back of the effort in 2023 to pin sixty-one Stop Cop City protesters with racketeering, as if the radical movement were a worker-owned co-op version of the Mafia. The RICO charges were dismissed in December on the grounds that the state had overstepped its authority, but state domestic terror charges are still pending. Before that, charges brought against those hundreds of DisruptJ20 protesters were dismissed, in part on a Brady violation, as the prosecutors had suppressed potentially exculpatory evidence. The Prairieland charges, which assert that an Antifa cell collectively conspired to carry out an act of domestic terrorism, take advantage of President Donald Trump’s September 2025 executive order designating Antifa a “terrorist threat.” These political prosecutions are nothing new—just ever more evidence of the Trump administration shedding its milk teeth and growing canines where the radical left is concerned.
A Conjuring in Texas
Given the long history of anti-anarchist sentiment, the Trump administration’s conjuring of Antifa last fall was an act of necromancy: the return of an ancient American antagonist to front-page news. Allegations of anarchist conspiracy still have the power to quicken the pulse of opportunistic prosecutors, who have made, among other things, the presence of anarchist zines in the homes of the Prairieland defendants central to their case in Texas. The defendants’ friends and families gathered each day outside the courthouse with a boxload of these “terrorist” materials on display: One such zine, prominently displayed, was entitled “Things to Consider When Loving Your Neighbor.” Their other “terroristic” activities outside the courthouse included poetry readings, picnics, and anti-repression workshops.
These political prosecutions are just more evidence of the Trump administration growing canines where the radical left is concerned.
Any anarchist would have reason to blush at and, frankly, aspire to the prosecution’s rendition in Fort Worth: book clubs for which praxis accompanies theory, anarchist pamphlets that actually inspire revolutionary action, and organized international anarchist solidarity in the form of Antifa. In reality, self-declared, diffuse anarchists in the United States probably number in the low five or six digits (though a much larger number of non-anarchists have adopted tactics and practices associated with the anarchist left, such as direct action and mutual aid). Their political struggles—against globalization, pipeline projects, industrial agriculture, white supremacy, militarized police, data centers, and war—have been culturally influential but rarely successful on their own terms, perhaps in part because of the limited amount of people willing to camp out long term at Cop City. If Antifa existed as the truly profound existential threat the government claims it to be, recent history might look a little different, with state and capital on the defensive. But for all the assiduous efforts of American anarchists and their close comrades—including student and labor activists, tenant organizers, prison abolitionists, and the Indigenous Americans and environmental activists who have led the major anti-pipeline crusades of the past decade—the vicissitudes of capitalism remain unequivocally the governing force of our country. Today the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center pumps out cops while the Mountain Valley Pipeline pumps two billion cubic feet of fracked gas per day.
To watch a trial is to realize the ways in which legal truth is produced by a storytelling competition. Prairieland was no exception: Although the defense argued that what happened last Fourth of July was the unintentional escalation of a protest organized by a loose group of friends and acquaintances, the prosecution countered that it was a deliberate attack by an organized Antifa cell. Throughout, Antifa was constantly coming into and out of focus—it never quite satisfactorily materialized. One cooperating witness previously identified her friends and acquaintances as Antifa members, then confessed on the stand to not really knowing what the term meant—she had simply gone along with the government’s language in entering her guilty plea, which claims that an “Antifa cell conducted an act of terrorism including attempted murder of police officers.” Another cooperating witness could not remember which of his former comrades he had identified as Antifa members, then confessed that none of them had used the term to describe themselves. Under cross-examination, a third cooperating witness stated, of the prosecution, “They think we are an organization called Antifa. That is not true.” They were instead, she claimed, all members of a loose LGBTQ+ affinity group that shared an “anti-fascist, anti-ICE, anti-government ideology which the government classifies as Antifa.” Again and again, the defense attorneys asked the cooperating witnesses if they or their friends were part of an organized group called Antifa; again and again, under oath, the witnesses responded, “No.”
The group’s avowed enemies likewise struggled with the concept. At one point, the prosecution claimed to have a red-and-black “Antifa flag” in evidence—but an FBI counterterrorism agent revealed he had to google the flag’s connection to the Spanish Civil War (in which leftists of all ideological stripes fought against the Franco regime), then revealed he still didn’t actually know what anarcho-communism meant. “You’re on the terrorism unit and you have to google what an Antifa flag looks like?” asked the defense. “I specialize in international terrorism, not domestic,” went the agent’s damning rejoinder.
But for every conceptual lacuna, it seems, there is a charlatan willing to fill it with dodgy answers for clout or a quick buck. Toward the end of its case, the prosecution called upon Kyle Shideler as an expert witness. Shideler is a director at the Center for Security Policy—a far-right, anti-Muslim “think tank” deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center—who frequently testifies before the federal government on the plots and ploys of left-wing “terrorists.” Shideler was also responsible for helping the Justice Department craft the very definition of Antifa used in the Prairieland indictment—a definition that has now been turned into a legal precedent. “I told them what I believed to be an accurate definition of Antifa, and they used it,” Shideler explained. Later, the defense would systematically discredit Shideler, pointing out his total lack of academic credentials, peer review, hard data and data verification protocol, bias prevention, and knowledge about the evidence in question. “It’s not a hard science,” the man replied, adding that he engages in “open source research” looking at anarchist blogs online.
The courtroom takedown will likely have little effect on Shideler’s propagation of nonsense: He has already briefed a handful of government agencies as a self-proclaimed “expert” on Antifa and now has the Prairieland trial under his belt too. Shideler has had his eye on Texas since last July—even admitting the possibility in court that a guilty verdict could boost his career. His lengthy testimony was a master class in the paranoid style of American politics. When confronted on his interpretation of the zine If We Go, We Go on Fire, which is about grief as a source of political motivation, Shideler retorted that it is about “sharpening grief into a weapon.” He also mistakenly thought that the Emma Goldman Book Club was a secret anarchist reading group; when confronted with the fact that it is public-facing and its members regularly share titles about film and horticulture, Shideler replied that gardening is “not inconsistent with self-defense” and can be part of “material support” for terrorism. He described Signal as a “hallmark of Antifa,” though he himself also uses the app—as do many folks in the highest echelons of the federal government, as an infamous 2025 government group chat leak demonstrated. The judge would later chastise the defense attorneys for mouthing “What the fuck?” while Shideler spoke.
But actually—what the fuck? Shideler’s career as a policy analyst depends on his ability to convince others that an Antifa violent and hell-bent on terrorism exists, and the federal government is listening. The left would do well to listen too. In an article published by the Claremont Institute shortly after the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Shideler urges the creation of a “Far-Left Violent Extremist” category of domestic terrorism that “must explicitly include ‘anti-fascist’ (Antifa), anarchist, autonomous Marxist, socialist, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, and Communist extremists,” as well as “individuals, groups, networks, and movements based on these ideologies that utilize single-issue activism on topics like animal/environmentalist extremism and abortion as cover for their efforts.” It is an attempt to use cultural hysteria to further restrict First Amendment rights—to make a No Kings demonstration tantamount to Antifa direct action because it had to have been organized by some group of people. In the paranoid worldview of Shideler’s ilk, all political solidarity looks like conspiracy, and all resistance looks like organized terrorism. Already in the fall, Stephen Miller was referring to the milquetoast Democratic Party, propagators of some of the weakest solidarity in the game, as a “domestic extremist organization.”
“Say a Little Prayer”
The government’s story was so convoluted that the defense rested its case immediately after the prosecution, contending that the government had not met the burden of proof and didn’t warrant a response. But the prosecution’s fabulation would prove successful: On March 13, the jury agreed with the government’s narrative on almost all counts, including the terror charges. If the nine federal cases progress to appeals, as they are likely to do, the factual findings produced by the first trial will be very hard to overturn; that Antifa exists and orchestrated a terroristic attack on the Prairieland Detention Center on July 4, 2025 is for now the official story, and will likely remain so.
The jury found almost every defendant guilty on almost every count: Eight were found guilty of riot (for, among other things, the property damage at the noise demonstration), providing material support to terrorists (e.g., by wearing black bloc attire), carrying an explosive (in the form of fireworks), and carrying an explosive during a riot. Benjamin Song, the defendant accused of shooting the officer, was also found guilty of attempted murder of an officer and three counts of discharging a firearm during a violent crime. Two of the nine netted additional guilty verdicts for conspiracy to conceal and corruptly concealing documents (in the form of anarchist zines). The still-looming state case will decide, among other things, whether removing someone from a Signal chat counts as tampering with evidence. It was a slate of verdicts widely decried as a death knell for democratic resistance. For all the fetishism of the independent Texan spirit that I encountered in Dallas-Fort Worth, it turns out that the state is remarkably hostile to any actual criticism of the government. Judge Mark Pittman insisted, with no apparent sense of irony, that “politics stop at the courthouse door.” Of course, everything had to stop at the courthouse door for an X-ray and pat-down anyway, and so long as politics came dressed in business casual and left his cellphone in his car, I’m pretty sure he made it in.
Back on the first day of the trial, following the declaration of the first “and last” mistrial of his career, Pittman advised the would-be jurors to “say a little prayer on your way home.” I suppose I was inspired: The day after the mistrial, I got tipsy in a tourist bar at the Fort Worth Stockyards and went to church for Ash Wednesday. The Gospel reading that night—the first day of Lent—was from Matthew. “Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them,” says Christ. “When you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing.” I could not help but think of the noise demonstration in which the nineteen Prairieland defendants were arrested standing in solidarity with ICE detainees. I thought of the noise demonstrations I have attended myself, moved by the anonymity of my comrades. Black bloc is sometimes castigated by critics as evidence of cowardice, but I see it as an act of great humility: the severance of the connection between the self and the radical act, meaningful in an era dominated by revolutionary cosplay for social media likes. I don’t know the names of most of the people I have protested alongside, and they don’t know mine. Far from being fellow members of some close-knit Antifa cell, we are strangers to one another as often as we are friends.