A Daily Reid: SCOTUS Drops and Political Prisoners In America
This is an autocracy, and they are jailing political dissidents here
Before we get to the Reid in chief, let’s start with some breaking, morning…
SCOTUS Droppings
The Supreme Court dropped a bunch of decisions this morning, so let’s go through them briefly:
The majority ruled in favor of E. Jean Carroll and against Trump’s latest attempt to set aside the civil jury verdict that he did indeed sexually abuse and defame her. Good on E. Jean!
They ruled that the regime cannot fire Lisa Cook from the Federal reserve (at least for now) but that they can fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission (payback perhaps for not letting Decrepit King Donald do massive tariffs???)
Per the Roberts Court, with Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett siding with the three liberal justices, states can count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day, even if they arrive five days later. A rare moment of decency for Roberts. Barrett wrote the decision.
Remember the saying the Supreme Court has no army, and therefore they cannot enact their rulings by force? Well about that …
A series of slickly produced videos show agents clad in suits and sunglasses striding confidently in slow motion. They usher VIPs into armored SUVs, as specially trained dogs sniff out explosives and officers toting assault rifles keep watch.
The scenes evoke Hollywood films about the Secret Service, but the real-life protectees are not the president or the first family: They’re the justices of the Supreme Court, and these videos are part of an aggressive recruitment pitch for officers to defend them.
The staid Supreme Court now has sizzle reels and even a pithy tag line from a dulcet-toned announcer: “The highest court. A higher calling.”
It’s often said that the Supreme Court has no army. Yet, with little fanfare, the size of the Supreme Court’s police force has begun mushrooming. For years, the force sat at fewer than 200 officers, but now officials are aiming to more than double the ranks of the agents and officers who protect the justices and the Supreme Court’s building.
The push for a rapid security buildout stems from the substantial threats to the justices at a moment of growing political violence in the U.S. and the sense that the system has just not been up to the task of keeping them safe. That’s a belief that appears to be shared by at least some of the justices themselves.
“The justices are averse to the intrusion into their personal lives that comes with increased security, but they are resigned to the need for it both personally and for the court as an institution,” said one former court staffer, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the court’s security practices.
Huh… well I guess when you are recreating a monarchy, with the goal of being the hands to the king, you need an army, after all…
Welcome to the Police State of America
If you sacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 on behalf of a losing president, Donald Trump, the current regime, lead by the Supreme Court-approved chief insurrectionist, considers you a hero. Your crimes — however violent — have been washed away by a blanked presidential pardon. But if you protest against the mass kidnapping, internment and deportation of nonwhite immigrants, the torture of men, women and children in American concentration camps for unwanted Black and Latino immigrants, or the murders of anti-ICE protesters, expect to face decades in prison.
That is what has happened, in America, in the year 2026, under the equal parts vicious and absurd Trump regime.
Welcome to America. We have political prisoners here.
It is all-but illegal here, to say “no” to ICE … “no” to mass kidnapping by masked federal agents. “No” to fascism. Literally, “anti-fascism” has been designated as terrorism. It’s a Bizarro World not unlike the Israeli state, where even throwing rocks at the military forces securing the occupation makes you a “terrorist,” even if you a child.
50 Years for Protesting
This story is not making nearly enough news. From PBS NewsHour:
In two federal courts yesterday, a group of protesters received unusually long sentences after the Justice Department accused them of being members of the far left movement Antifa. The sentences range from 30 to 100 years in prison, longer than the harshest sentence handed down to any of the convicted rioters in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021.
All of those people have since received pardons or commutations from President Trump.
Here is a clip of the full story, including an interview with former prosecutor Paul Butler:
Here is the government’s press release detailing the names and allegations against these Americans, who are now, by any normal understanding of the term, political prisoners:
Today, the Justice Department announced that eight North Texas Antifa Cell operatives were sentenced for their roles in rioting, using weapons and explosives, providing material support to terrorists, obstruction, and the attempted murder of an Alvarado police officer at the Prairieland Detention Center on July 4, 2025. This is the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa following President Donald J. Trump’s executive order designating the group as a Domestic Terrorist Organization in September 2025.
Benjamin Hanil Song, who was convicted of the attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, was sentenced to 100 years in prison. Together, the Prairieland terrorists received a combined sentence of 450 years in prison:
Maricela Rueda was sentenced to 70 years in prison;
Cameron Arnold was sentenced to 50 years in prison;
Savanna Batten was sentenced to 50 years in prison;
Zachary Evetts was sentenced to 50 years in prison;
Bradford Morris was sentenced to 50 years in prison;
Elizabeth Soto was sentenced to 50 years in prison; and
Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
To be clear, this regime has invented a faux “terrorist organization” called ANTIFA, which is merely a loose confederation of people who oppose FACISM. The term “Antifa” is simply short for “anti-fascist.” And so this government has decided that opposing fascism is terrorism. And so is opposing capitalism, adhering to the belief that multiple genders exist, not being a right wing Christian, and even not weeping for Charlie Kirk. Here is part of Trump’s executive order laying all of this out:
There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism.” These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as “fascist” to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution. This “anti-fascist” lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. As described in the Order of September 22, 2025 (Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization), the groups and entities that perpetuate this extremism have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations. For example, Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin engraved the bullets used in the murder with so-called “anti-fascist” rhetoric. [Emphasis added]
The idea that a government formed by the leader of a violent insurrection designed to literally overthrow an election and thus overthrow the government is insane beyond explanation, and Orwellian in the extreme. But it’s only the beginning of the Hell we are trapped in.
From The Guardian:
“Americans should not make the mistake of believing Sanchez’s sentence only threatens immigrants, leftists or so-called antifa members – they’re just the low-hanging fruit, not the endgame.”
The prosecution was closely watched because it was the first case to go to trial after the Trump administration vowed to crack down on “antifa” – which is not an organization but a constellation of leftwing ideologies. Prosecutors claimed the demonstrators were part of “antifa” and filed a broad terrorism charge against them, allowing the Trump administration to claim they had successfully convicted antifa terrorists. The actual terrorism charge the government got a conviction on, however, is not connected to ideology.
Of the other seven defendants, five of them received 50-year prison sentences. That includes two people who were not involved in planning the protest, arrived late and left when guards asked them to. Sanchez-Estrada’s wife, Maricela Rueda, was sentenced to 70 years in prison. Benjamin Song, the lone person who fired at a police officer and hit him, was sentenced to 100 years in prison. All are likely to pursue an appeal of both their sentence and conviction.
“The government wants to take her entire life away because she attended a protest. Nobody died,” Lydia Koza, whose wife, Autumn Hill, was sentenced to 50 years in prison, told the Associated Press.
Those punishments are unusually long, sentencing experts said. Both of the judges overseeing sentencing – Donald Trump appointee Mark Pittman and George W Bush appointee Reed O’Connor – stacked the sentences for the multiple convictions.
“It’s relatively unusual to see that kind of stacking,” said Mark Osler, a law professor and sentencing expert at the University of St Thomas in Minneapolis. “Usually the sentence for the core offense is pretty harsh in the federal system, frankly, and there’s no need to pile things on.”
O’Connor explained his harsh sentences as necessary to send a message. “The need to deter this type of conduct is high,” said O’Connor, who also called the attack an “assault on democracy”, according to the Associated Press.
The clear message is: do not protest. Do not resist. Let the people be kidnapped, and shut the hell up, except for voicing support for Trump.
30 Years for Moving a Box of Zines
Peep this fresh hell:
The Trump administration attacking the right to publish or report information is a given at this point. The president has threatened journalists for everything from questioning the wisdom of his failed war with Iran to touching the peeled lining of his renovated reflecting pool.
Tantrums like those may now feel routine, but this week marked a new front in Trump’s war on information: Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of zines he didn’t even write. He’s one of eight defendants sentenced on Tuesday to a combined 450 years — the first prison sentences against so-called “antifa” handed down under the framework of NSPM-7, President Donald Trump’s sweeping “counterterrorism” memorandum to clamp down on dissent from the left.
The prosecution’s theory was that Sanchez moved the zines, which discussed anarchism and other anti-government ideas, to conceal evidence in the case against his wife, Maricela Rueda. Rueda attended a July 4, 2025, protest at the Prairieland immigration jail in Texas where a police officer was shot. (She was not accused of shooting him or having anything to do with the shooting but was herself sentenced to 70 years.)
But that nuance is cold comfort: It assumes that simply possessing years-old political pamphlets that said nothing about the protest or shooting could somehow constitute evidence of a crime. Sharing the political ideology of the shooter, the government contended, meant Rueda and her co-defendants were culpable for the shooter’s actions — and by allegedly attempting to prevent officers from finding out about Rueda’s ideology, Sanchez shared in the blame as well.
We’ve reached the point in the erosion of the First Amendment where the government considers possession of anarchist zines and membership in a terrorist cell to be more or less the same thing. Once the box of zines was discovered, there was no need to prove Rueda planned or had any idea that anyone would be shot at the protest.
What’s worse is that this will likely only ramp up the administration’s efforts to criminalize being in possession of information. Whatever you may think of former CNN host Don Lemon, he’s no anarchist or extremist, and the content of his broadcasts bears little resemblance to the zines Sanchez was convicted of transporting. And yet, after indicting him and independent journalist Georgia Fort on frivolous charges relating to their livestreaming of a protest at a Minnesota church, the government sought a warrant to obtain the identities of subscribers to their YouTube channels.
Do you see where we’re going here? This regime is attempting to prove that ANTIFA exists by prosecuting people who protest this regime and calling them ANTIFA, and then pretending that the “terrorist organization” they invented is real, and prosecuting anyone who does anything that can be designated as protest as part of a terrorist organization they made up, despite there being no domestic terrorism statute on the books — not for the neo-nazis, not for the Klan, not at all. Only for left wing organizations that oppose mass deportation, mass kidnapping on our streets, and capitalism-driven man made poverty. They are literally making it illegal to be anti-Trump.
It’s giving Putin’s Russia.
LaMonica McIver Facing 17 Years For Conducting Oversight
Remember LaMonica McIver, the New Jersey congresswoman who was indicted for trying to conduct oversight over the private immigrant gulag in Newark, New Jersey? Yeah, her case is still ongoing, and she is enduring the possibility of 17 years in prison, while heavily pregnant. Even the “under his eye” crowd doesn’t seem to have a problem with that. Perhaps they have their eye on giving her child to a fake Christian woman in green…
The ACLU and other groups have joined Congresswoman McIver’s defense.
A Country That’s Hard To Love
Robert Deniro put is so well at the recent Rise Up and Sing protest rally and concert in New York: America under Trumpism is really hard to love.
We have to bring this nightmare to an end. As imperfect as the Democratic Party is — and it is imperfect — we need to put them in control of both houses of Congress so that oversight and legislation can be brought to bear to slow this autocracy down, before it’s too late, and we are Russia in full.
Let’s make America lovable again.
We’ll be talking more about these subjects tonight on The Joy Reid Show, 6-8 p.m. Eastern at thejoyreidshow.com or streaming LIVE, here at Joy’s House!
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Yeah. These convictions and the outrageous sentencing is stunning. I live in Mississippi—born and bred—and I think 90 percent of folks down here have no earthly idea what is happening. And, sadly, I am not sure they would care if they did know. Many good people down here, but there is so much ignorance and delusion, not to mention religious nuttery. Thanks for all your hard work, Joy.