The Test Case | This American Life | Episode 891

Key Takeaway

Before adopting—or repeating—a sweeping label about a person or group, separate the story from the actual test: What specific conduct occurred, what evidence supports it, and what legal or practical standard is being applied? Today, practice this on one charged claim in your feed. Write down the claim, the concrete facts offered, and what remains inference. This episode shows how symbols, affiliations, and narratives can dominate attention even when a case turns on narrower actions.

Episode Overview

This American Life follows the trial arising from a July 4 protest outside Prairie Land Detention Center, where a police officer was shot and nine defendants faced terrorism-related charges. Reporter Zoe Chace examines the government’s attempt to characterize the group as an Antifa cell, the defense’s account of a protest that spiraled, and the unexpectedly narrow legal basis on which the convictions ultimately rested.

Full Transcript

Transcript of The Test Case | This American Life | Episode 891 from This American Life. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

from WBZ Chicago. This is American Life. I'm Harry Glass. Yes. We need the police to come out to Perry Land Detention Center. I don't know what's going on outside. They just told me to call. Okay. You don't know what's going on? No, sir. I think they doing fireworks. There's a 911 call on the 4th of July a year ago around 11 p.m. Alvarado, Texas, about an hour outside of Dallas. The woman calling works at the Prairie Land Detention Center. She's at the front desk there and she's calling because a bunch of people have suddenly shown up outside wearing black seed masks lined up on the other side of this long barbed wire fence.

They're setting off fireworks. It's really loud. This facility is a detention center for ICE full of people being held on immigration charges. Somebody in the crowd outside has a megaphone starts calling out to the detainees inside. Espiransa, hope you are not forgotten. More fireworks go up. Oh, somebody's trying to get in. Can you hurry up and send somebody? Yes, ma'am. Someone's trying to get in. They outside walking the perimeter. I don't know, sir. Okay. All right. We got him in route. Okay. Call us back if anything changes.

Okay. Bye-bye. Bye. A police officer rushes out to the facility. Lieutenant Thomas Gross from the Alvarado PD. As soon as he switches on his siren, the dash cam activates in his car and his body cam turns on. He turns into the prairie line parking lot and in the car headlights you can see somebody has sprayed buck ice on a guard jack. Then as he pulls up he sees somebody running in front of his car. HEY STOP. HE jumps out of the car drawing his gun in one hand walkie-talkie in the other.

And this next thing happens almost immediately just 6 seconds after he gets out of the car. [ __ ] I'm hit. I'm hit, he yells. He's shot in the upper shoulder by his neck. He fires back three times. Shooter runs off and hides in a field, Sunflower Field, actually. They're all around the detention center. Then cops of all sorts arrive. Local police, sheriff's office, Texas Rangers, and they start arresting people. Some are on the streets walking nonchalantly away as if they just happen to be here, they are not involved.

They have backpacks which the cops try to search. Take out the goddamn backpack. Sam, if you move, you will be shot. Do you understand me? I am taking off your backpack. Everybody's on edge cuz an officer has been shot. The police officer, it turned out he was not badly hurt. The bullet injured his shoulder, came out his back just below his neck. He was released from the hospital later that night. The guy who shot the cop had disappeared into the sunflower field. He hid there for a whole day.

Eventually, some friends snuck him out. They were all caught. What happened that night on the 4th of July, one year ago, it all ended up in court. It became this major trial where two very different stories were told. The defendants say this was a protest gone wrong. Nobody was supposed to get shot. In other words, this was like tons of other anti-CE protests that have been happening all over the country outside ICE facilities where people gather and make noise to communicate with detainees. But the FBI director, Cash Patel, had a different view.

Here he is talking to Fox News host Larry Cuddlo. This was a coordinated planned attack by dozens of individuals to murder police officers. And Larry, a police officer was actually shot in the neck. These guys came and staged a scene at a detention center using fireworks, then brought in long guns and rifles. They were kitted out in bulletproof vests and masks and opened fire at law enforcement. But that was confident. Who's behind this? This is breaking news, Larry. Just hours ago, a a grand jury indicted two members of an Antifa affiliated cell.

20 individuals have been charged so far. But the key here is for the first time, we have charged these two individuals with material support to terrorism for their involvement in Antifa. And yes, Antifa exists. It's a terrorist organization. Guy at the Fox House interviewing him that made a lot of sense. So, let's just just one more moment on that. People on the left and the far left say that Antifa doesn't exist. It's a state of mind. Blah blah blah blah. I mean, if they're not real, then how come two people were united?

They have to be real. It's not a state of mind. Soon, 13 more people were charged with material support to terrorism. The indictment in this case saying this was the work of a North Texas Antifa cell. This came out a month after Charlie Kirk's assassination. You may remember in that shooting, a bullet casing was etched with the words, "Hey, fascist, catch." And a big part of the administration's response back then was to target Antifa as a domestic terror group in a national security memo, setting policy for the entire federal government.

This Texas case with these defendants was a chance for the administration to lay out their best argument that Antiva is in fact a terror group operating here and now in the United States. And okay, just stepping back for a second right here in America, whether you believe or not that Antifa even exists is tied to a whole other set of beliefs. And just to generalize here for a second, Blue America says Antifa does not exist as an actual functioning organization. Lots of reporting backs this up.

And going into this trial, the administration has not been able to point to any leaders or infrastructure or any of the normal things that a terror group has. Meanwhile, Red America and right-wing media say, "Of course Antifa exists. Just look at all these activists around the country dressed in black, vandalizing stuff, wreaking havoc. How could that not be a thing?" this trial in Texas. This was going to be the place where we're going to finally fight this one out in public and figure out is Antifa real.

So, how the government make the case? Was it convincing? The trial was not recorded. But that did not stop our producer, Zoe Chase, who's never one to shy away from a fool's errand. She was there for 3 weeks in the courtroom writing down everything that happened in notebooks as the government tried to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Also, she got to know one of these supposed terrorists who is a hard to describe mix of being a longtime church lady married to a guy who loved Dungeons and Dragons.

Her gnome dear was candied dynamite. We heard the arguments, we hear the counter arguments, we hear the verdicts all this hour. Stay with us. This is American Life. Act one, the trial. Okay, so from the start, this trial was pretty unusual. For starters, they had a hard time convening a jury. Lots of potential jurors either had strong opinions about ICE or about protesters or about Antifa. And on day one, the judge, who's a bit of an intense character, called a mistrial because of a shirt that one of the defense attorneys was wearing.

So, they had to start the entire thing over, this time without giving attorneys chance to question potential jurors. We did a little story about this on our show a couple months ago. And the judge also decided to move the trial upstairs into his courtroom, the courtroom he's accustomed to, a much smaller room. I'll let Zoe take things from here. Here's Zoe Chase. The courtroom was packed. Nine defendants, each with like two lawyers. So, a lot of lawyers, plus the prosecution, plus everyone else, reporters and family members and law students and interested observers, all jostling, a little fighting.

The court sketch artist sat basically on my right knee on the first day with his huge easel spread out in front of us like a sail. Judge Pitman likes to open trial days with little homalies. He says, "I urge you all to remember the saying from General Patton." This will be our watch word for the trial. You cannot be disciplined in the great things and undisiplined in the small things. The judge wants things done a certain way. Once you find your seat, he says, "Stay in it." So, we begin.

The prosecutors make their opening statement saying this was an Antifa attack. They are career government prosecutors in the Northern District of Texas. They are matterof fact and colorless. And then the defense gets to make their opening arguments and they're all showmen to one degree or another. They make their case over and over because nine defendants. This was just a protest, they said that went off the rails. The prosecution starts rolling out its evidence the next day in pretty dramatic fashion. They wheel in a cart full of boxes, like an Amazon delivery.

The boxes were tall and skinny. Looked like someone had ordered a bunch of curtains. I didn't know what was in them. They bring in a parade of law enforcement to walk through everything they found that night. Each item entered into evidence. The officers walked through body camera footage and dash camera footage of the defendants being arrested and searched and the cops finding a lot on them. Take this one minivan. They'd stopped this van not long after the shooting. The side windows down. Gone on the ground.

There's a pistol on the floor of the car. The driver, Megan Morris, has her hand on the steering wheel. She looks miserable. She's dressed all in black, long gray hair, and glasses. She also has a loaded mag in her pocket. Is there any other guns in the car? There's some in the back seat. In the back seat, we see an AR-15. What the [ __ ] They're clearing the guns of ammo, and piling them up on the hood of the car, one on top of the other.

There's body armor, loaded magazines, another AR-15 in the trunk. Hey, just hang out right here. Um, this is just like a straight coordinated terror attack on the ICE detention facility. We got like six people, trauma kits, plates, ARs, all sorts of stuff. So, just hang out. What the [ __ ] bro? What the [ __ ] dude? This is [ __ ] crazy, bro. This is like a straight coordinated terror attack on Prairie Land. I know, dude. This recording where the officers are like, "Bro, this is a terrorist attack." It was a point of contention in the trial.

The defense tried to get it excluded, arguing the officer's comments could bias the jury. That's just their random opinion that this was terrorism. The judge was like, "Well, what they genuinely thought in the moment, seeing what they were seeing, is relevant. I'll allow it." So, this is what the boxes were. Every time the officers had to introduce a new piece of evidence, they shook a gun out of a cardboard box. Guns started to pile up around the small courtroom. semi-automatic rifles and pistols and Glocks alongside body armor, trauma kits, and mags.

In the top margin above my notes, I just have a star and the words, "All these guns." It looks bad for the defense. I also have notes on family members looking freaked out and upset. One of the sisters of a defendant keeps whispering, "What's going on? Like, why isn't the defense doing more to object to all this stuff?" A few stickers make it into evidence, too. Make America not exist again, one of them says. The defense gets up and the way one of the lawyers explains the guns is like, come on, this is Texas.

We all have these. These are all legal guns. And these people have guns for a reason. When out protesting, the lawyers argue these guys encounter counterprotesters on the right who are armed. So, they're armed. They often bring them. Most importantly, they point out the guns in that van. They never left the van. Now, they are forced to say this while standing in a courtroom sort of ridiculously filled with firearms and ammunition. Even in Texas, this has got to be a little much. It's like an armory.

One of the defense attorneys later said to me, "Yeah, would it have been better if they just had bells and whistles? If their intent was just to make noise? Would it have been better if they weren't dressed like they were storming the Bastile? Yes, it would have. This brings me to act two. I'm going to call act two the expert. So, one of the main ways the prosecution was going to try to show this was an Antifa terrorist cell was by calling an Antifa expert to the stand.

There's going to be a key moment in the trial. I reached out to the Antifa expert to talk and the prosecutors bringing him on and neither got back to me, but some of the defense attorneys did. They loved to talk about this case, especially as it turns out, the guy who was going to lead the cross-examination of the Antifa expert, Patrick Mlan. Mlan and I meet up most days after court at the hotel bar. The day he was going over his prep for the Antifa expert, we were at a nicer place, the Fort Worth Club downtown.

It's members only. You have to ring a doorbell to get in. MLAN's not a member. He just has a friend who is. I find them in the back corner. You don't need anything else? I'm going to keep picking, but no, I don't need Well, you know what? I'll have another Guinness. Another Guinness. I'll have another Guinness. He says Patrick Mlan is as Irish Chicago and looking as his name. Big and burly, 67 years old. He looks like the Marine that he is. His text messages are set to auto sign off.

Seerfi Patrick. He's a former Republican, a devout Catholic. He has 10 kids. He's a regular at the March for Life every year. Tonight, he's also brought along his own terrorism expert, someone he plans to bring as a witness, a woman named Anne Speckard. He and Speckard are going to hammer out the best way to discredit the government's Antifa guy. Anne Speckard stands out here a bit. She's definitely the only person in the Fort Worth Club with a flowery hair clip, almost counterculture looking. She's a terrorism scholar.

She's studied ISIS and al-Qaeda and other groups. She's worked with the UN and NATO and other international organizations. So, are you going to take the stand or are you just helping him prep? Okay. Yeah, there's a 95% chance she'll take the stand. only only reason she wouldn't take the stand is if he was just totally so horrible that yeah I wouldn't need you yet if the government's Antifa expert is so terrible that he needs no rebuttal there'll be no need for an to take the stand they don't expect that just while we wait for our drinks here I'll explain who the government Antifa expert is his name is Kyle Schneiderler bald and quite literally e-headed he sits with the prosecution ution every day.

He works for the Center for Security Policy, a think tank in DC that truthfully is most known for advocating conspiracy theories about Muslims, or I guess if you believe those theories, then as brave truth tellers. Shidler has advocated for the government to treat Antifa as a terrorist group. And in the last 6 years, Shidler's trained cops all over the country in what he calls the Antifa threat. He's also testified before Congress. So the question is how are they going to deal with this guy when he takes the stand?

So So where are we going with this? Annne Speckard has a bunch of questions they can ask him on the stand which she's written out like how does one join Antifa? Is there a membership list? Are there dues? Is there a leadership structure? An oath? The basic stuff terrorist groups have? Because if you join ISIS back in the time of when they had their caliphate, then even now you hold your hand up and you give your bay, your pledge of allegiance to whoever the uh khalif is.

If you're joining a group, she says, you probably know you're joining a group. There's no group here, right? Can you show me the Antifa groups? I mean, if if he asks me about Hamas, I can tell him how you get into Hamas, what you do when you're in Hamas, uh where the Hamas website is that actually says Hamas. But with Antifa, he just talks amorphously like these uh autonomous uh groups, but there's all kinds of autonomous groups. The US government disagrees, of course, that Antifa does not meet the definition of a terrorist group.

Patrick Mlean announces he's going to mulch on all this and go get some shutye. He says he's been sleeping in his Dallas office lately. As though they're building the hype, the government saves their Antifa expert for the last few days of trial. Everyone watching has been waiting for him to take the stand. Finally, Kyle Schneider takes his place in the witness box. So what is Antifa? The prosecutor asks. Shidler really begins at the beginning. The word Antifa is actually a contraction of sorts. He says an abbreviated contraction which is a common German phenomenon.

Stands for anti-fascist action and it stems from the VHimar Republic in Germany. This goes on for quite a while. In the middle of a section about the history of fighting with the police over the autonomous squats of West Germany, the judge tries to hurry him along. No offense to the professor, he says, but this isn't the place for a lecture. Shidler, who's not a professor, seems incapable of following the judge's instruction not to lecture. I fill a notebook with Antifa's post-war rise, basically. Finally, we get into the present day and these defendants.

Shidler ticks through the classic hallmarks that show this group is what he calls Antifa. He talks about how before that night everyone communicated over signal, an example of operational security, opsac. And that night they all went out dressed in black. Another common tactic of Antifa, he says, called black block. Originally known as Durvartza block, he says the idea is if everyone dresses in black, the police can't tell who's who or who did what. After an operation, the Antifa tactic is to take off the black clothing and blend back in.

He says the prosecutor mentions that one defendant had tied his long-sleeved black shirt around his waist when he was arrested a few miles away. And that's an example of deblocking, if you will, he asks. Yes, says Shidler. That's that's what I would expect to see. Then there's the book club. Shidler spends some time on this book club that some of the defendants were in, the Emma Goldman book club. Emma Goldman was a famous anarchist from the early 1900s. He says, "This is sort of an Antifa front, the above ground part of the organization." Shidler says, "Anytime you're a clestined organization, that is an organization that cannot recruit openly, like maybe they don't admit they exist, you have to find a way to recruit other people with which you have a shared ideology." Shidler lists off some of these zenes the book club was reading, classics of an anarchist library, like I don't bash back, I shoot first and destroying white nationalism.

And what about these red and black flags found rolled up in one of the garages? The prosecutor asks. When they introduced the flags as evidence, an FBI agent stood up with the flags to demonstrate how they'd be hung, if they'd been hung, which they weren't. He waved them wildly at the jury, like it was the finish line at NASCAR. Shidler explains, "Yes, that's an Antifa flag. The red and black is iconography related to the Spanish Civil War when the anarchists were engaged in direct action against the fascists.

Finally, it's Patrick Mlan's moment. Time for cross-examination. Mlan approaches, asks some questions about Shidler's credentials for this, pointing out he's never held a position at a college or a university. He's never published a peer-reviewed paper. Then he gets to this Mlan. There is no national leadership of Antifa, is there? Shidler. It would be inconsistent with their ideology. Is that a no? It would be inconsistent with their ideology. So they do not. No. Okay. They don't have membership roles. It would be inconsistent with their ideology. So no.

Just for the sake of efficiency, if there is a yes or no answer, could you lead with that? Sure. Okay. Thank you. And no dues or hierarchy in anything that you would call Antifa, right? No, they're opposed to it. If I were to summarize how Shidler's seeing this, I think he's saying Antifa is not a typical terrorist organization with leaders or membership lists or headquarters because it's anarchist. They don't like organizations. They operate as affinity groups. Mlan points out, however, that none of the defendants ever refer to themselves as Antifa in their own private signal chats.

Shidler says they don't think about groups and organizations. That's what's counter to their ideology. From MLAN's point of view, that's crazy. Shidler saying the fact that they don't say they are Antifa is the proof that they're Antifa. And if there really was a plan to shoot police officers, as the government says, a plan to destroy government property with fireworks. If this plan really existed, why isn't that in the signal chats? Did anybody talk about harming another person? Mlan asks. Shidler says, "I would expect the discussions of that type to take place personto person and not necessarily appear in an encrypted chat." Then another defense attorney comes up and circles back to some of the other zenes and stickers that have come up like be gay, do crime, and AAB, all cops are bastards.

Typical Antifa, Shidler says. There was also a zen on horiculture that attorney points out. Foraging and horiculture, yes, says Shidler. So what? Gardening is part of the Antifa platform. Not as such, Shidler says. But it's consistent with a community defense approach. The judge speaks up. He sounds mad again. Just because I own a copy of Mine Comp doesn't make me a fascist or a Nazi, does it? Not unless it's consistent with your other behavior, Shidler says. What if I own a copy of Das Capal? Does that make me a communist?

Not unless it's consistent with your other behavior. What about a copy of The Vantage Point by Lynden Johnson? Does that make me a Democrat? No, sir. Not unless it's consistent with your other behavior. If I own Antifa literature, that doesn't make me an anti-fascist necessarily, does it? I hope not, sir. I have quite a bit of it myself. The judge's impatience made Shidler's testimony play sort of ridiculous in the room sometimes. I thought every so often I look at the jury. It's a pretty mixed group.

Old and young, white and Hispanic, men and women, mostly expressionless, sometimes sleepy. One day, one of them came in in a Darth Vader sweatshirt. Why? Who knows? I never can read them. Outside this courtroom, the Trump administration is making all sorts of big claims about Antifa. The national security memo that instructs government agencies to treat Antifa as a domestic terror group, a major national security priority, claims Antifa is this big organized network with institutional funders. This violence, it says, does not emerge organically. Presidential aid Steven Miller has said it is structured.

It is sophisticated. It is wellunded. It is well planned. So it's fascinating to see that once they got to court, they dropped all that. Shidler and the government never tried to present any evidence showing some kind of national coordination or structure or planning or funding. Shidler did point to a crowdfunding link tree at one point. Instead, what the government argues is that the defendants all do things that come from a sort of anarchist playbook, wearing dark clothes, reading anarchist literature, and that's what makes them Antifa.

The people within the group don't have to join a group or say they're in a group or maybe even know that they're in a group at all to be Antifa. I walked outside. It was a beautiful Texas spring day and people are in a good mood. Across from the courthouse, there's a little demonstration in support of the defendants every day. Mostly sympathetic activists and friends, a handpainted banner that says, "Show trial is draped across the trees, and there are little tables of Z and free vegan food." When court's over, the families spill across the street to talk about what happened inside.

Sometimes they feel like talking to us. Sometimes they don't. Today, Antifa expert day. They feel great. Some lawyers also felt great. They'd actually been on a high for a few days now. We have half the government's case in and we've been basically kicking their ass. This is Brian Brufard. He's co-consel Patrick Mlan on this case. You guys are pretty confident right now. I can't even say we're because nobody knows what a juryy's going to do, right? But but my feeling is the government has made a lot of mistakes.

Their witnesses have made a lot of mistakes and the way that that has come out I think is pretty favorable. Brian Bufard's a former Navy Jag. He defended someone accused of terrorism before, a prisoner at Guantanamo who'd been tortured for years at CIA black sites. He is deeply suspicious of the government and this trial really bothers him. It's a prime example to him of the DOJ becoming a tool for punishing people who disagree with the president. I I've got I've got a lot tied up in this for me.

Um I I find the the corruption of the justice system to be just just horribly psychologically painful to to see going on that you're so freaked out by what's happening to the Justice Department. Freaked out is not the word. Furious is the word. um what what is going on right now with the Justice Department is unspeakable in my view. That's why he wants to win this case so badly. Now, the Antifa expert, that part went well, he thought, for his side. So well, in fact, that they end up not calling up their own expert at all.

They never put their terrorism scholar Anne Speckhard from the bar on the stand. But the government had another maybe more powerful argument for the existence of Antifa, which I'll tell you about when we come back. Zoe Chase. Coming up after the break, we hear from an alleged member of this alleged terror cell, and she seems very different from what the government says she is. That's in a minute. Chicago public radio when our program continues. This is American life. Myra glass. Today's program, the test case. We're devoting the whole hour to this first of its kind trial of people that the government says are part of an Antifa cell on charges that could send them to prison for decades.

We've arrived at act three of our show. Act three, the cooperator. Okay, so originally 16 people were charged in this case. Nine of them went on trial and the other seven they plead guilty to material support to terrorists. They admitted this in the documents that are part of their plea agreements. Some of them signed statements agreeing that what happened outside the detention center was an act of terrorism carried out by an Antifa cell and the people involved that night adhered to an anarchist Antifa ideology. That of course seemed good for the government's case.

Also, five of them appeared in court to testify for the prosecution. One of the five in particular stood out to Zoe. This was a woman named Lynette Sharp. She was older than a lot of the others, 57 years old. And just to say what her involvement was in all this, she was not at the detention center that night. She had planned to go, but then she couldn't make it. But remember how the guy who shot the cop hid in a sunflower field the whole night and then eventually got snuck out by a couple friends?

That was Lynette. She fished him out of the field and then hid him from the cops. The authorities tracked her down a few days later, arrested her. She's been locked up since. And she agreed to talk to Zoe again. Here's Zoe Chase. When the cooperators appeared in court, they were brought in in prison stripes. They mostly seemed to be in some degree of anguish over what they were doing, testifying against their friends. It was hard to sit through. There was something about Lynette, though. She was chatty.

It seemed like she couldn't help it kind of. She knew so much about these people's lives. At one point she had said that three of the defendants were in a thrpple. Not a word I expected to hear in the Northern District of Texas, I guess. But then also when the prosecutor had her ID the defendants one by one, she broke down in tears. They were lined up right in front of her. "I love them," she said to the prosecutor. So I went to talk to her.

I wanted to know what this group might have looked like on the inside. And I wanted to know how she'd gotten to this point in her life, pleading guilty to a terrorism charge. I drove out there with her lawyer, Aaron. You go through a bunch of nothing, and then there's the jail, long, low buildings, barbed wire around, couple Texas flags flying, and Aaron takes me inside. Hello. Can I help you out? I am here for an attorney visit to see Miss Lynette Sharp, and she's with me.

They lead us into a small room. There's a big clear plastic divider cutting it down the middle. A guard opens the door on the other side of the divider and brings Lynette in. She's in the orange and white prison stripes. There was a small speaker stuck into the plastic that we talked through. Hey. Hi. I I [clears throat] want to ask how you are. You know, I I can't complain. If I did, who would listen? Well, I'm asking. [clears throat] I'm okay. Yeah, I had my mic pointed at the wrong part of the speaker.

It'll get better later. Sorry about that. I think when Lynette was arrested, she had spiky pink hair. Now it's a gray ponytail. She has glasses and hearing aids. I have to say, I talk to people a lot about their politics for my job. Why do you believe the things you do? It's never simple. It's built over their lifetime. There's not one thing that leads you to it. I feel like I need to do something a little unusual here, which is tell you Lynette's story from the beginning.

So, I want to start this part of the story here. Alleged Antifa cell terrorist at age 5. Lynette grew up outside Fort Worth in the early 70s. She was a tomboy, played dirt cloud wars in the streets, she rode bikes on the neighbors horses. I was lucky enough. She liked being out of the house because the situation in the house wasn't good. Her parents fought a lot, drank a lot. They even tried to kill each other a couple of times. Her mom shot her dad twice.

He survived. She tried to poison him several times, too. My parents were fighters, and that's where I get my fighting spirit, I think. Um. Wow. And so, how did she try to poison him and how did you even know that happened? My mother never hid anything from us. Uh, she used Miracle Grow and put it in his spear. Didn't work. And I don't remember what she used the other time. Lynette didn't want to stick around. She got together with this guy and moved out of state and they had a kid together.

But it was a similar relationship to her mom and dad's. As much as she thought she was nothing like them, she was feeling sort of miracle grow in his beer herself. It scared her. She moved back with her parents, moved out again, and eventually left that guy. At this point, she gets really into church. Something about it really appealed to her, being part of a group. Maybe because she says she just never felt a part of her family at all. And Lynette is a people person.

This is the first big group that she dives into, the church. I went to church constantly. I found a church and was there every time the doors were open and uh just really immersed myself in that. It was Pentecostal, but women could wear pants, which she liked. Things calmed. She met another guy, a clean, non-abusive, nice guy named Marshall. Nerdy, played Dungeons and Dragons and video games. They got married. And at first she says it was great, but slowly, even though this was a really different relationship from her first one.

It also began to feel like a trap to Lynette. She already had one kid. Then her husband's kids came to live with them and she got pregnant. And right then, her husband kind of disappeared into his computer. And that's when it got to be too much. I started really having a hard time with everything. She called the pastor's wife for advice. She did tell me when I told her what was going on. She said, "Why are you doing all of this?" Cuz I was doing everything.

And she said, "Why aren't they doing this and that? They can do their own laundry. They can make their own lunches." And I'm like, "I just thought that's what I was supposed to be doing." And she said, "No." Like that's what the housewife does kind of thing. Yes. And so she kind of gave me permission to say, "Hey, I'm not doing this anymore." After that, she says they started living separate lives side by side. Separate. There are many more dramatic chapters of Lynette's life lived in these bright, intense strokes.

Her daughter gets pregnant at 16. She figures out that one of her stepkids is abusing her daughters. Eventually, her stepson is arrested. She ends up taking in a kid who's severely autistic and raising them. And Lynette and her husband come together to deal with these crises and then grow apart again. They get close for a while when they join a new group. Of all things, it's a motorcycle club. This is another turning point. Lynette gets really into the motorcycle club. It was a motorcycle club of Marines.

Her husband served in the Marines and he got really into it, too. Kind of got him out of his depression and it helped him a lot. Made him want to be a more functioning person for them and for me. Mhm. Um, and then for the x-rated portion of our show, we found out that we like different sex than we'd been having. You found that out together? It was kind of a It was a weird thing. A lady in the club posted something on Facebook uh about something about a sexual thing and I commented on it and Marshall texted me immediately and said, "Did you mean that?" And I said, "Yes." And uh so we started talking and that made us realize we'd been having sex wrong the whole time.

I um I I mean I want to ask like what you mean, but you don't have to get into it. We liked sex that wasn't vanilla. Uhhuh. Right. You like more hardcore things. Yeah. And you found that out because this woman posted something and you commented and he texted you. Yes. Wow. Facebook. Lynette was still going to church but now in her Sons of Anarchy t-shirt. They didn't know what to make of her. probably and Lynette's next chapter of self-realization. Maybe you saw this coming. She's watching Amber Heard in this movie, The Rum Diary and realizes actually she's always liked girls and she gives Marshall an ultimatum.

Either I can smoke weed in the garage or we're having an open relationship. One of those cuz I'm losing my mind here. I need relief. I need like fun. He wasn't happy with either option at first, but then he got what she was asking. Really? I want to explore having sex with women. Like I've never been able to explore my sexuality in that way. And he said, "Oh, well that's fine cuz men." Cuz men. Yeah. And so then we would go out on dates and look at women together.

That was a high point. Lynette is a person who goes all the way when she's into something. But however hot Amber Heard is in the Rum Diary, in Lynette's mind, Lynette is still a church lady in suburban Texas. She's a conservative at this point in Lynette's story. It's 2011, 2012, and she's paying more attention to the news now more than she used to. And Barack Obama is running for office again. I remember when Obama was elected for the second time, I cried. I thought we were all going to be under Sharia law any time.

Like that's what our that so many people in my life felt that way. And uh the pizza gate stuff was going on then. And did you believe in that? I did. Lynette didn't like Trump either, though. Things like the grab them by the [ __ ] tape. No thank you. And it wasn't long before basically presidential politics kind of caught up to her personal politics, which is true for a lot of people, right? National politics became intertwined with people's actual identities. The Me Too movement was a thing for her.

Oh, and also around then, I went to college. just forgot that part. Then there's the repeal of Roie Wade that happened. She was fighting with her friends and family over it. Right when Roi Wade, they were going to get rid of Roie Wade and I knew it. And I knew it was coming and then I'm like, "This is bad." And people were like, "You're just blowing it all up out of proportion." But you were starting to find yourself on a little bit of a different planet than the people around you.

Yes. In 2022, she started going to protests for the first time. There's something very only in America about Lynette's life, I think. How fast it moved, how many eras she went through, embodying each one. I kept thinking of this old article for Miz Magazine from 1972 by Jane O'Reilly. It was called Click, the housewife's moment of truth, about all these realizations women were having about things they didn't actually have to do. We are all housewives. We'd prefer to be persons, the article said a year before row.

Lynette was that housewife. Click. Decades later, here she is on her own motorcycle checking out girls with her husband. And then Ro is struck down and it feels personal. Lynette has come to truly hate the idea of men controlling women. That's how she saw it. It's around this time when she finds her last club. It's a group of people in the Dallas Fort Worth area. She meets them through a local LGBT center. They do self-defense classes. Some of them are in a book club, the Emma Goldman book club, where they read radical literature and zi.

Many of them are part of a local gun club, the socialist rifle association, where they do target practice and learn about gun safety. Soon she was spending most of her time with them. How did that happen? that they became your closest friends. Um, well, they were the ones that, you know, in in person life, I mean, I didn't have a job. A lot of these people didn't have jobs. Uh, we don't love capitalism and a lot of them are so very neurodeivergent that they just couldn't work.

And a lot of them were younger. Um, and uh, yeah, it felt like it felt amazing to know that there were other people that actually cared about something other than themselves. Um, that were willing to, you know, help other people for free. I mean, they they gave their time. We met the homeless. We helped disabled people. Um, I would lead meditations because I was I love meditation. And they taught me how to eat vegan food that wasn't horrible. This, of course, is the alleged Antifa cell that's on trial.

There were so many ways to be in a group in this group. And Lynette loves groups. Like that gun club, for instance. A few people in the group were transgender. There was a sort of ethos around like if people who hate us have guns, we're going to have guns. Lynette got super into that. Joined the member welfare committee. Lynette also joined a writing group. They called themselves the resistance writers. They had a lot of potlucks obviously and karaoke nights. What did you sing? That was the best times we had.

I sang everything. I I sang so many things. Uh I love Pink Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken. Uh I told them that used to be I think a lot of people think that and I used to as a song from like in a personal relationship, but to me it was like my love song to the world. um that we are going to we're not going to be broken that we're going to keep fighting and if you look at the lyrics it's just it's a great song.

It was like she was having a sort of love affair but with a bunch of ideas. One person in particular she grew really close to was Ben Song who everyone called Champagne. Song Champagne went by any all pronouns with this group of people. During the trial, most people used he him, including his lawyer, and I'll do the same. In this group, a lot of people looked up to him. He was really into self-defense. He taught martial arts to many of them. He taught gun safety to many of them with the Socialist Rifle Association.

He went to a lot of protests. He'd been in the Marines. He was soft-spoken, but very confident. Song was the one that night who would fire the shot that hit the police officer. What was your relationship like with uh with Ben with Champagne? It was very close. Um I remember telling him that you know he was my best friend and all this [ __ ] that we were going through. Um really I know that I wasn't his best friend, but I don't know. I just felt very close to him.

I I admired him. I respected him a lot. Mhm. It wasn't a perfect person going to their house. It was a mess. Uh, you know, these kids are and I do I do think of those kids a lot. I don't mean to I don't mean to, you know, denigrate them or anything, but they were um I learned so much from them, but at the same time, they're so young and sometimes their lives weren't working very well. And so, it just, you know, it's it's a lot easier sometimes to focus on the world's problems than your own.

Yeah. And so I did that a lot. I think I think a lot of us did. Lynette was investing so much in this group of people and pulling away from the family stuff that frustrated her, like finding services for her autistic kid, for instance. She tried and tried and it kept not working. She stopped trying. She and her husband were back to living separate lives. I I remember I was on the way home from something like at 2:00 in the morning one night and I was thinking about what I was doing the next day, some other thing we were going to do and I was like I for the first time in my life I'm doing what I want to do with my time.

I'd never really been free like that before and it didn't last long. Now we are at that night July 4th 2025 when everything happened. Lynette had been in some of the signal chats where people were making plans. But that night, her husband and her daughter were fighting, some kind of a breakdown, felt like she needed to be at home. She was awake when people started messaging, trying to figure out what had happened. She heard people had gotten arrested. She heard a cop had been shot. In one hand, I must have known, but I didn't know.

Like, I think I'd already read the reports that were out saying there had been a but I just didn't believe it. an officer involved shooting. Yeah. I just thought and I didn't know. I just knew I needed to go. So, if I could help anyone, I wanted to go help. Um I guess I just have a hard time understanding why it was so unbelievable if like he did have a gun there. Like, isn't that sort of like it it is believable that he would shoot someone if he had a gun, right?

If he did, it was because of something had happened either. It was like un unavoidable. Um you know, I didn't know. I just knew that I couldn't imagine that happening and for no reason. Like there had been something that went wrong. Then the next day, Lynette gets a message from Song. He was still hiding in the sunflower fields near the detention facility. Could she help get him out? He had his phone in a Faraday bag, which blocks your cell phone signal so you can't be tracked.

A lot of defendants brought those that night, which was more evidence the prosecution pointed to that they were a terrorist cell. Ben kept taking his phone out to message Lynette, which I have to say does defeat the point of the bag. I did. I knew. And he told me, "I've done a very dangerous thing." And I said, "I know. I love you, friend." Why do you think he messaged you in particular? I don't know. Oh, I think because he knew that I would be there for him, that I felt kind of unanch anchored in my own life, um that I was, you know, pretty much lived for the cause or for my friends and that I would I would help him.

Lynette and this other guy pick up Song at the side of the road. He's dirty. He's hungry, dehydrated, freaked out. Doesn't know where to go. Lynette and some others helped get him set up in an apartment. someone was cats sitting in. I mean, of course, at that point, we knew we were doing something very, very dangerous and very wrong. I don't know why we thought we could get away with it, but then I went home after that and for the next four days, I don't think I did much of anything.

I just laid in bed and I don't remember. Did you know in those four days like, "Oh, my time, this community, this this chapter, this era is over." I don't know. I really really wasn't thinking. I know that sounds crazy, but I just think I disassociated for most of the four days. Eventually, they came. Law enforcement raided her house, arrested her. It was dramatic. She says they rolled a big tank-like thing up onto her lawn. Lynette was charged with providing material support to terrorists. In jail, she faced a big decision.

Should she cooperate, plead guilty, and help the government? that would give her the best chance of a shorter sentence. Of course, that would go against everything she and her activist friends were all about to talk to the feds. But of course, there was another huge consideration, one that actually surprised her after she got arrested. All of this affected my family a lot more than I thought it would. We'd all been so distant for so long. I kind of felt like I was, you know, they wouldn't miss me much.

Uh, that turned out not to be true. Lynette's family both needed and wanted her back. Her husband, Marshall, was devastated. Her daughter was suicidal. Her autistic kid was moved to Austin to live with her other daughter. They were fighting and it was just really chaos at home. She was despondent over what to do. And I just was in my cell just going over, I can't do this. I can't I can't talk. I can't plead. I can't like that. I'd be a snitch. I'd be a traitor.

My family was begging me to do it. She tried to channel in her head what song would say. Where she finally ended up is that she thought he would understand what she had to do. She had to get out of as much trouble as she could. So Lynette's lawyer started to talk with the government about a plea deal. And Lynette was fine with talking about all the details of that night, everything she had done. But there was one sticking point. At what point did they start talking to you about Antifa and what did you make of that?

Right away. And I'm like, uh, I am anti-fascist. I said there there's no group called Antifa. I said, but I am anti-fascist. I said, I don't like fascists. And if you do, well, I think that's when Aaron interrupted me. I was about to call him a fascist. Aaron, Lynette's lawyer, was there during all these little talks. They're trying to make this. The government seemed fixated on getting her to say she'd been part of an Antifa cell. They proposed the following language. Lynette Reed Sharp adhered to an Antifa revolutionary anarchist or autonomous Marxist ideology that is anti-law enforcement, anti-immigration enforcement, and calls for the overthrow of the US government law enforcement authorities and system of law.

Antifa is a militant enterprise. One cooperator did agree to that and in fact read it out loud in the courtroom. Lynette was like, "No way. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to perger myself. Weren't a terrorist group. It was really just a protest. It was a noise demonstration, which I told them from the very beginning that there's no Antifa group that were just a group of friends that were going to a protest." Yes, they read anarchist zines and philosophy and went to a shooting range and they were serious about it.

But at the same time, Lynette says there was some element of plain dress up to the whole thing with all the accuchar that went along with it. The government proposed new language about Antifa cells. Lynette and her lawyer again said no. Here's the language they finally ended up with. Lynette Sharp adhered to an anti-fascist, anti-ICE, anti-government ideology. She was fine with that part. quote, which the government classifies as Antifa. So, she's not saying there was an Antifa or that she was part of it, but she agrees that the government thinks there is.

No other cooperator's plea agreement is so pointed. As part of the deal, she'd get a maximum of 15 years in prison and wouldn't be charged with anything other than material support. she could maybe get a lower sentence recommendation from the government to the judge depending on how helpful her testimony was to their case. The day she was taken into court to testify, Lynette was completely on her own. The baiff let her in with a chain around her waist. What was it like to walk into the courtroom and see them?

Oh, it was hard. Um, I mean, I couldn't see them very well when they were seated. Yeah, I could see song immediately. And um I could tell from his face that he just didn't hate me. And his face I felt like he was he was definitely trying to convey to me that he was he didn't hate me. He he was very open face, very smiling, very, you know, um and no one else had any emotional. And then I got emotional, of course. And then the prosecutor asked, you know, you're getting emotional.

Why is that? I'm like, because I love them. And he said, they're your friends. And I said, yes. And I if if I'd have been quick on my feet, I would have said, probably not anymore. I didn't think about that till after. But it was it was emotional. It was hard. Why? What was the hard part about it? Uh just because I do love them and I am afraid that they are angry at me for talking and uh I guess I had hoped to see a little bit of warmness or something that I didn't see from anyone other than Song.

When Lynette spoke, even though she was a witness for the prosecution, I have to say a lot of what she said, it really seemed to support the defense's narrative of what happened. This was just a book club. This was just a protest. She said, quote, "They think we are an organization, I guess, called Antifa. We are not." I I thought I can't really help Song anymore, but I thought I could help the rest of them. The other cooperators, all in their own ways to varying degrees, undermined the idea that this was an Antifa plot.

They testified they were surprised someone got shot. They testified the plan had been to set off fireworks. One of them testified that right after Ben Song shot the cop, Song raced past him in the dark, holding his rifle, yelling, "Oh [ __ ] oh fuck." And then he ditched the rifle and ran off, which seemed like something you might yell if you had not meant to shoot a cop. None of it seemed great for the prosecution's case. Which brings us to the last act. Act four, the verdict.

So, here we are at the end, and the defense team that I've been hanging out with is psyched. After the cooperators testified and the Antifa expert, who they think maybe isn't an expert, they felt very confident that the government did not prove their case. They were so confident after the prosecution arrested, the defense rested, too. They didn't put on a case at all. As usual, I was hanging out with Patrick at the end of that day. So, what'd you think of today, my friend? You all did it.

You rested. You didn't call a single witness, right? That is that is a factual statement. I was looking for something more analytical and incisive. I mean, it's either brilliant or Mhm. it's a colossal mistake, right? I don't know which it is. By deciding to rest, they were sending a signal to the jury about how weak the government's case was. All the defense lawyers agreed to the move. Things had gone so well for them. There was nothing to add, and bringing their own case risked opening the defendants up to new lines of attack from the government.

Just trying to make them look bad. Closing statements happen the next day. The prosecution repeats what they've been saying for weeks. At one point they put up their own ven diagram. Antifa, the Emma Goldman book club, the Socialist Rifle Association, all overlapping at the words direct militant action. The delivery is dry and emotionless. The defense is the opposite. They're at a high Attakus Finch inherit the wind level. It was exciting to watch. It was like watching the climactic scene of a movie over and over written by different authors.

Fireworks on the 4th of July. Brian Bufar begins MLAN's co-consel was all this was ever intended to be. Noise, lights, and a message of hope to the foreigner who resides in our land. One notable moment came from Ben Song's attorney, the shooter's attorney, who made the case that Song did not intend to hit the police officer. He had fired his gun as quote suppressive fire. Song, who served in the Marines, saw Lieutenant Gross jump out of the car with his gun drawn and pointed at someone running away.

And so, his attorney said he fired his gun to force the police officer to take cover. Song's attorney showed a video to the jury of bullets hitting the ground, forcing little puffs of smoke into the air. The bullet that hit the officer, he said, was a ricochet. And then it's over. The defense attorneys are in such a good mood, a handful of them head over to the Fort Worth Club down the street, the exclusive membersonly spot. I know my way around there. It's off the record, but I can say the feeling around the club chairs is relief.

I happened to be waiting around in the courtroom hallway when the verdict came in. One and a half days later. Remember, there's no recording in there, so I don't have tape of it. I can tell you it was like an icy wind blew down the hall. The verdict is in. All the defendants families hustled into the courtroom and the reporters. The jurors filed in. One of the jurors was crying. The judge read the verdicts. Eight of the nine defendants had been charged with material support for terrorists.

Every single one of them was found guilty. In fact, they were found guilty of almost everything. They were charged with riot using explosives. Fireworks count as explosives. And then there were the attempted murder and firearms charges that went with that. Only Ben Song, the actual shooter, was found guilty of those. Everyone was facing very long prison sentences. I run out of the courthouse into the street so I could start taping. One of the dads is out here, Ed Kent. a used car salesman from around Dallas.

Talked to him a bunch during the trial. His daughter, who was 24 years old, had taken a plea deal. She testified for the prosecution. He'd come to court almost every day. A reporter asked him, "What's the reaction in there?" It's horrible for the parents shaking and trembling and, you know, realizing their child's going to be in jail for a long time. Yeah. You know, terri terrible. It's just terrible for the parents. He'd already been through these emotions of realizing his daughter wasn't coming home for years.

I'd be crying if I was in their situation. I've cried over my daughter's situation a number of times, you know, by myself. But it, you know, it's like to say that, you know, it was a travesty of justice is not maybe true either cuz the there's they all were foolish. [ __ ] your daughter. That's a friend of the defendants screaming at Kent because his daughter was a cooperating witness or a snitch as they saw it. I spotted Brian Bufard, the defense attorney, headed toward his car.

He was carrying a white button-down shirt on a hanger, a shirt he brought for his client to wear in court. That was rough. What do you think? I mean, I think they got it wrong. I think that they uh did not parse through reasonable doubt the way that the law would have them do it. Um I certainly don't dispute that that is their verdict. But yeah, it's just hard to hard to take right now. Yeah. He hangs up the shirt in his car. The sun is blazing down on our heads.

God bless America. It's hot out here. What do you think of um you know they everybody's guilty of terrorism? Yeah. Material support. The material support. Uh what does that mean? Well, it means the government is going to be emboldened to continue to uh use the law in this way. Uh which is a danger to everybody as as everybody ought to know. So now how are you? [sighs] Pretty rough. Not so good. Later he told me it was one of the worst days of his life losing this case.

Every defense attorney is appealing this verdict. But they're kind of in a weird situation in a way I didn't fully understand until the end of the trial. The main questions of this trial, is Antifa a terrorist organization? Are these defendants Antifa? Are not actually the questions that were put in front of the jurors. The jury actually had to answer a much simpler set of questions. Providing material support to terrorists. It's 18 US Code Section 2339A. It's a law that expanded dramatically after 9/11. And strictly speaking, you can be charged with it if you do something as simple as do more than $1,000 worth of damage to a federal building intending to violate the law.

That's it. That's all you need. The prosecution argued they did that. The graffiti, the slash tires in the parking lot, the broken security camera. The prosecution also argued two other things that would qualify, but the graffiti tires and camera damage on their own would be enough, which is to say the entire Antifa portion of the trial that wasn't necessary to prove their case. The judge actually pointed this out toward the end of the trial. After sitting through day after day of the government storytelling about Antifa flags and symbols and zenes and book clubs and clothing and signal chats, the judge asked the prosecutors a question.

Is it necessary to prove this stuff about Antifa? He said, whether it's Antifa or the Methodist Women's Auxiliary of Weatherford, why does it matter? It doesn't. The jury doesn't have to believe the Antifa part at all in order to convict them of material support to terrorists. So all of that was in March. Sentences in the Prairie Land case came down a couple weeks ago. For everyone who was accused of material support to terrorists, six of them got 50 years. One of them got 70 years. The one defendant who wasn't accused of material support, he got 30 years.

His crimes, he moved a box of Zen and other stuff after the night at Prairie Land and was convicted of conspiracy to conceal documents. He was not at the actual night of the fireworks. None of them had a prior criminal record. Ben Song, who shot the officer, got a hundred years. The material support to terrorist charge can jump you to pretty large sentencing numbers. One defense attorney at sentencing pointed out that 30 years is what you give murderers or cartel members. [gasps] For comparison, the highest sentence any of the January 6th riers got before they were all pardoned and released was 22 years.

Most of them got a lot less than that. None of them were charged with material support to terrorists or anything terrorism related. But the severity of these sentences, that was the judge's decision. There were two sentencing judges. At sentencing, they talked about deterrence, sending a message to anyone else with a similar ideology. One former federal prosecutor told me, "The government probably sees this case as validating their Antifa narrative. It can exist in a courtroom, even if they weren't actually convicted of being Antifa. There's already another case like it in another state.

The charging documents are filled with claims the defendants are part of Antifa using some of the same language that was used in Texas. But if you look closely at this case, the Prairie Land case, at what was actually in the charges, at what was said in court, at the way the plea deals were written in the end, and at what the defendants were convicted of, it doesn't prove anything about Antifa at all. Zoe Chase. By the way, Lynette Sharp, who Zoe interviewed in jail, who plead guilty as part of her plea deal, was sentenced a couple weeks ago.

She got nine years. At her sentencing, she apologized to Lieutenant Thomas Gross, the police officer who was shot. And she apologized to her family. To be human is to make mistakes, she said, sometimes terrible ones. They take away our freedom in the name of liberty. Why can't they all just kill? Why can't they make us feel? Our program was produced today by Zoe Chase and edited by David Casten. People put together today's show include Adrien Lily, Molly Marcelo, Katherine Rayondo, Stone Nelson, Ruth Patito, Nadia Raymond, Ryan Ry, Varski, Francis Swanson, Christopher Sala, Nancy Updike, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Woo.

Our managing editors, Sarah Abdam, and our executive editors, Emanuel Barry. Special thanks today to Towani, Osama, Kim Pascal, Thomas Bzowski, Chris Kofer, James Lester, Marquita Clayton, Brad Sauer, Javier Dehanon, Lydia Kosa, Luis AC, the DFW support committee, Young Mlan, Adam Federman, Amber Lowry, Kelsey Mitau, Jose Pieri, Janet Raymond, David Weiss, Lacy Chrysler, Randy Ray, and Dylan Duke. This American Life is equipped to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks today to This American Life partners, Helen Ingram, Scott Young, and Daniel Williams to hear our many bonus episodes and get lots of other stuff, including lately this weekly newsletter that I've been writing where I tell you what's happening behind the scenes of the show and I recommend a movie or TV show.

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It was a noise demonstration, which I told them from the very beginning. I'm Glass back next week with more stories of this American life. We're going to blow up. Next week on the podcast of This American Life, when a beloved tree was mysteriously cut down in a national park in Britain, people across the country were outraged, called it slaughter. They said things like, "This feels like losing a close family member, and RIP, beautiful tree. I wish I'd got to meet you." But the suspect could not care less.

My understanding, he said, was that it was just a tree. The very serious and entirely ridiculous criminal trial over a murdered tree. Next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station.