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‘WHAT WAS CRIMINALIZED HERE IS DISSENT, NOT TERRORISM’:
COUNTERSPIN INTERVIEW WITH DOROTHEE BENZ ON PRAIRIELAND  
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Janine Jackson
August 29, 2026
FAIR - Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
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_ Corporate media attached the label “far left” to the name
Antifa, as though being anti-fascist is somehow now beyond the pale.
Doing that, they legitimized government efforts to take the First
Amendment activities, and make them suspect. _

Nine of the Prairieland protesters received sentences ranging from 30
to 100 years; one received a 30-year sentence for moving a box of
zines., (Photo: DFW Support Committee)

 

JANINE JACKSON: In addition to the visible, horrific murders in the
streets by ICE agents, at least 52 people
[[link removed]]
have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in the US,
between Trump’s inauguration last January and June 4 of this year.
Reasons include unsanitary facilities, inadequate food, substandard
health infrastructure and delayed—which is to say, denied—medical
care.

That would include Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva
[[link removed]],
a Venezuelan man who died while being transferred between detention
facilities in Georgia. ICE says it was cardiac arrest. His family says
ICE refused to allow him to take medications with him when they
snatched him up.

The people subjected to these lethal conditions have not all been
charged, much less convicted, with any crime. But corporate news media
are hard at work suggesting to us that somehow, for some reason, we
shouldn’t seriously value their lives. And we shouldn’t seriously
question their killings. And we should get ready for more.

A whole lot of people are not accepting that. And some of them
gathered outside the ICE Prairieland Detention Center
[[link removed]]
in Alvarado, Texas, last year to say “no,” and to show solidarity
with the people detained, with a noise demonstration.

[FAIR: Prairieland Was a Test, and Corporate Media Failed]

_FAIR.ORG (__7/22/26_
[[link removed]]_)_

When one protester saw a police officer pulling his weapon, he fired
his own rifle
[[link removed]],
wounding an officer. That man, Benjamin Song, has now been sentenced
to 100 years in prison. And he was asked in court if he would deny
being part of Antifa. According to NPR North Texas
[[link removed]],
Benjamin Song “defended anti-fascism as a belief.” “‘What kind
of people are not against fascism?’ Song said.” Well, those eight
defendants were sentenced to a combined 450 years in prison,
[[link removed]] including Daniel
Sanchez Estrada
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who wasn’t even there.

Prairieland is a test of this country’s aspirations toward democracy
and, more immediately, a challenge to a press corps that insists that
it is free. A new piece at FAIR.ORG
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looks at how the corporate press are meeting this moment. We’re
joined now by its author.

Dorothee Benz [[link removed]] is a
social justice writer, organizer and an ordained minister dedicated to
fighting white Christian nationalism. She joins us now by phone from
Inwood. Welcome back to COUNTERSPIN, Dorothee Benz.

DOROTHEE BENZ: I’m delighted to be here.

[New Republic: The Prairieland Sentences Are a National Emergency]

_NEW REPUBLIC (__6/25/26_
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JJ: My planned first question was: I would hope that anyone paying
attention could see how monumental
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this Prairieland case is—for free speech, for democratic
participation, for fundamental human rights. Tell us what you found
that the major media, that many of us still look to, what did that
corporate media do with this case? And why does their emphasis, or
their erasures, why does that matter?

DB: It actually took me quite a while of digging to figure out how bad
the case was. I mean, the corporate coverage was so anemic and so
missing a couple of really important points that I had to keep digging
before I even understood the problem.

Because the case itself is deeply problematic. It’s built on a legal
theory that relies on a made-up category that Antifa is a terrorist
organization, and that people are guilty of material support of
terrorism, that is not problematized in the media at all. And there
were also tremendously significant procedural irregularities in the
case that really made it pretty much a show trial in a lot of ways.
And none of that is really apparent in the corporate coverage.

I would say that the corporate coverage came down to three big
omissions. One is framing the issue at stake in the Prairieland trial
as one of violence, and not protected First Amendment activity. All of
the headlines and all of the leads were basically “violent
protesters” and “part of an armed assault” and things like that,
as opposed to a protected First Amendment right to protest, and a
right to have political opinions. And therefore they missed the story,
that what was being criminalized here is dissent and not terrorism.

[FAIR: Under Trump, Criticism Is Now Criminal]

_FAIR.ORG (__10/3/25_
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And then the second problem, really, and this is I think the deepest
problem, was failing to understand and question the legal theory
behind the case, which is built on the idea of “material support for
terrorism,” whereby terrorism here is this made-up entity of Antifa.

And it’s one thing for Donald Trump to say Antifa is terrorist
[[link removed]].
It’s another thing for a judge to throw people in jail for decades
on that same theory.

And then, lastly, I would say everything comes down to Antifa,
understanding what Antifa is and isn’t, and how it is constructed
for the purpose of criminalizing dissent. And the media missed that
entirely.

JJ: I just feel like we’re going to hear NSPM-7
[[link removed]], and we
can spell that out, but we’re going to hear it again and again
invoked as if it was a real thing. And to me, I go back to when “war
on terror” was taken out of quotation marks, because it used to be
kind of a thing that like, what is this actually? And then, suddenly,
media just said, “OK, it’s a thing.” And I’m concerned that
this domestic terrorism definition is just going to be silently slid
into the language that people are accepting that they hear. And it’s
so dangerous.

[Brennan: Trump’s Orders Targeting Anti-Fascism Aim to Criminalize
Opposition]

_Brennan Center (__10/9/25_
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DB: Absolutely. And I think Antifa is the symbol of that.

So all of the major news stories were quick to say Antifa is not a
membership organization, which is kind of implied in the way Donald
Trump talks about it. But then they went on to describe it as a
“loose network” or an “ideology” or something like that. And
none of them were able to say that it is a right-wing bogeyman
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that’s made up exactly for the purpose that it’s now being
deployed to do, which is to take a whole bunch of people whose
political opinions the right doesn’t like, lump them together, call
them dangerous, call them violent, call them terrorist, and therefore
make them vulnerable to these kinds of prosecutions. Nobody said that.

And they also attached the label “far left” to the name Antifa, as
though being anti-fascist is somehow now beyond the pale. And in doing
that, they inadvertently, I think, legitimize the government’s
effort to take the First Amendment activities, to take political
opinions that are anti-fascist, that are pro-democracy, that are
pro-dissent, that are anti–ethnic cleansing, and make them suspect,
and therefore make them vulnerable to prosecution in exactly this way.

JJ: And I wonder, why would not a press corps that is invested,
presumably, in presenting a range of disparate views, how would you
not see that as an alarm? How would you not be alarmed by, and get to
work fighting, a declaration that says we’re going to call
particular viewpoints “terrorism,” and we’re going to treat them
like crimes? To me, that’s where a press corps would leap up. And
that’s not what we’re seeing.

DB: No, it’s not. And I think it starts with the press being, I’ll
just say “intimidated,” I don’t know if that’s really the
right verb, by the call “terrorism.” Whenever the government
shouts “terrorism,” rather than stick their necks out and maybe
invite some backlash, they’re going to just take that pretty much at
face value, and then sort of nibble around the edges, but not contest
the central claim of it, right?

Because the central claim here was A) that Antifa exists, right, as
opposed to being this entity that’s made up for the purpose of
criminalizing dissent. And then B) that people who wear all-black
clothing—as those of us in New York do every day—read anarchist
books, have left-wing literature in their homes, that that makes them
part of Antifa, which then in the equation means it must be violent,
and therefore it must be terrorist. And that “terrorist” label
just, I think, spooks the press, and then they back down. And that is
not a good sign.

JJ: I think it spooks people, too. I think once you put that label
“terrorist,” something shuts down, and somehow ‘under the
jail’ isn’t bad enough. And I think interrogating that whole
language has got to be part of what we’re doing.

And I guess that leads me to my question of what do you think a vital,
independent, engaged, humanist, critical press corps would be doing
right now? What would we be doing? Folks are in the streets, folks are
working, but we could have media that support that work. And what do
you think that kind of press corps would look like?

[ITT: FBI Files Counter Government Argument in Texas “Antifa”
Trial]

_IN THESE TIMES (__3/26/26_
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DB: Well, at first I think it would look like accurate and 360-degree
reporting. So much of the work that I did in writing this piece was
actually in finding out what the case itself was. Usually when I write
a piece for FAIR [[link removed]], you can see
what the facts of the case are, and then you can see the corporate
spin on it. This was like, I had to dig well beyond corporate sources
to even understand what the case was. And the more I dug, the more
appalling it looked. So things that the INTERCEPT
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or IN THESE TIMES
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or other independent outlets reported are perfectly capable—like,
the NEW YORK TIMES could report the same things. So these things just
need to be reported.

And then, secondly, I would say corporate media, any media, needs to
unpack terms and claims that are left intact and create a bias. In
this case, the idea of “material support for terrorism.” There’s
a whole body of law
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around “material support.” But no one ever explained that term,
let alone that applying it to this idea of Antifa was creating an
entire legal fiction on which people were then convicted.

That sentence that I just said is nowhere in the press. And that’s
really the alarm bell that should have gone off. Police lie. Police
lie all the time. And reporting “he said, she said,”—if that;
there wasn’t a lot of the “she said” in these stories, even—is
not the same as saying, “This is not true. This is a novel legal
theory that is dangerous and is not based in existing law at all.”

Pretending that these kinds of show trials and show
prosecutions—Prairieland is one thing, but the folks that were just
arrested in Minneapolis, the folks that were arrested in Ohio, this is
not the first or the last. Pretending that these are something other
than political prosecution is not serving us well.

And I’ll say that, in many ways, our elite institutions, in the last
year and a half, have really failed us. The law firms that caved to
the demands
[[link removed]] of
the administration, the universities that caved
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not even talk about the Democratic Party, the corporate media. While
ordinary and often extremely vulnerable people, who don’t have the
resources or the lawyers that any of these institutions have, have
stood up with incredible integrity and courage to challenge human
rights violations and to challenge the narratives propping them up.

[Slate: Minneapolis Just Showed the Entire Country How to Take the
Constitution Back]

_SLATE (__7/27/26_
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We need our media to do the same thing, to defend the right to dissent
along the way. Whether it was the student encampments
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or the detainees at Delaney Hall
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and their incredibly courageous hunger strike and labor strike, and
the protesters outside. Everybody in Minneapolis
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If 70-year-old Lutheran church ladies can be in the streets
challenging ICE, then certainly corporate media can get it together to
deconstruct these novel legal theories that are being used to
criminalize dissent.

JJ: I’m going to bring you back to ways forward in just a second,
but I’ll just hold you on media for a minute. I think a lot of the
time, media criticism gets, maybe not bogged down, but misdirected by
individual personalities: “Well, this person said this, but do they
really believe it?” Or even by meta concerns: “Should we be
consuming media at all? Why don’t we just touch grass?” But
pretending that news media don’t shape our ideas and our
understanding, not least our understanding of our political capacity,
seems to me like whistling past the graveyard.

I remember a person from RADIO FOR PEACE INTERNATIONAL saying that
people told him that if he didn’t like what was on the radio, he
should just turn it off. And he said
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“OK, I’ll turn it off. But my neighbor might not turn it off. And
the radio might tell him to go kill the leftist next door.”

I believe in media hygiene; I don’t think we should soak ourselves
in it. But I don’t think we can ignore journalism, and just pretend
that it doesn’t affect us. So there has to be a way to integrate our
media criticism into the other social justice work that we do.

DB: Absolutely. I mean, media literacy is important. Media criticism
of corporate media, and understanding their interests and their
structural location in the larger story of who this country is, is
important, and holding them to account. And it’s not like everything
that they do is always terrible, but their structural biases are, at
this moment, really extremely dangerous.

JJ: Yeah, to gird ourselves against. And that’s just part of the
work that we’re going to need to do if we plan to stay alive and
fight.

Going forward, these are difficult and dark times. You are a hopeful
person. And I just wonder, what do you say to folks who just want to
lay down and pull up the covers, right? There’s a lot to do, and
there’s a lot of reasons to do it.

[Dorothee Benz]

_Dorothee Benz: “It’s up to us to connect with our neighbors, and
build something collective that together, on scale, will change the
world.”_

DB: Yeah. Well, I certainly understand wanting to just pull the covers
over my head. There’s a lot of days that start like that for me as
well.

But I would say a couple things. One, what came to mind, as I was
thinking about this conversation today, was Howard Zinn
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“You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” And I was thinking
about it in the context of challenging the media to abandon their faux
objectivity
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The idea that there is such a thing as objectivity. That somehow
reporting this trial as though it was something other than a sham is
somehow doing a service to objective journalism. I was thinking of it
in that context, but it really is in the context of what we’re all
called to do every day. You’re on this train, and you’re either
fighting fascism or you’re abetting it. So that’s the one thing I
would say about that. Maybe that’s not too hopeful.

But the other thing is that we know that ordinary people can do
extraordinary things, and that when we do them together collectively,
the power of nonviolent noncooperation on scale has literally failed
empires. It sent the British packing
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It brought down
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the Berlin Wall. It ended apartheid
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in South Africa. We know we have that power. And it’s not up to any
of us to bring down the Berlin Wall by ourselves, but it’s up to us
to connect with our neighbors, and build something collective that
together, on scale, will change the world.

JJ: That’s a beautiful place to end on. We’ve been speaking with
Dorothee Benz. Her piece
[[link removed]],
“Prairieland Was a Test, and Corporate Media Failed,” is up right
now at FAIR.ORG. Thank you so much, Dorothee Benz, for joining us this
week on COUNTERSPIN.

DB: Oh, my pleasure.

 

_Dorothee Benz_ [[link removed]]_ is a
social justice writer, organizer and an ordained minister dedicated to
fighting white Christian nationalism._

_Janine Jackson is FAIR’s program director and producer/host of
FAIR’s syndicated weekly radio show CounterSpin. She contributes
frequently to FAIR’s newsletter Extra!, and co-edited The FAIR
Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the ’90s (Westview
Press)._

_FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging
corporate media bias, spin and misinformation. We work to invigorate
the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press
and by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest,
minority and dissenting viewpoints. We expose neglected news stories
and defend working journalists when they are muzzled. As a progressive
group, we believe that structural reform is ultimately needed to break
up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public
broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information._

* Prairieland
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* antifa
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* corporate media
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* First Amendment
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* Civil Liberties
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*
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*
*
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