Last week, eight anti-ICE protesters were sentenced at the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas, receiving a combined 450 years in prison. The sentencing has provoked much condemnation in Europe, and rightly so. Thirty years for moving a box of pamphlets. Fifty for showing up at a protest wearing black. The sentences handed down in these cases, as many have noted, are longer than any given to the participants in the January 6th assault on the Capitol. The collective 450 years of prison time for eight protesters is staggering for a liberal democracy. “Only in America,” as the expression goes. Or Iran, or North Korea.

Or perhaps Europe. While we may shake our heads in disbelief at what the Trump administration does, we should be asking ourselves whether we aren’t heading in the same direction.

So how exactly does vandalism while wearing black become terrorism? The Prairieland cases are being sold to the public via an ongoing campaign of rhetoric that harnesses the power of the word “terrorism” and directs it towards the political left. But their legal scaffolding is built from several decades of legislative mission creep that has built two separate but inter-related legal mechanisms, described below, which in tandem have promoted deliberately vague and dangerously expansive understandings of terrorists and terrorism.

Europe is busy erecting the same legal scaffolding of repression, and risks sleepwalking into precisely the same devil’s bargain.

Semantic Hijacking 101

To convince voters that America faces “violence in the streets” plotted by leftist terrorist groups, the Trump administration has adopted a predictably Machiavellian rhetorical strategy. First, commandeer an emotionally charged word. Then, expand or distort the concept it conveys. Finally, repurpose it to further your own agenda. Call it semantic hijacking. It’s not a new tactic, and it has been used on both ends of the political spectrum. Today the political right in America is hijacking “political violence” to include verbal insults, and “radical left” to include anyone resisting the MAGA policy platform. Most significantly, since it can drive sentencing decisions like Prairieland, they are hijacking the concept of terrorism.

Defining terrorism is notoriously challenging, but most definitions agree on the core elements succinctly captured by Ronald Reagan in a 1986 radio address. “Terrorists intentionally kill or maim unarmed civilians,” he explained, distinguishing them from freedom fighters, who “do not need to terrorize a population into submission” and instead “target the military forces and the organized instruments of repression.” Terrorism’s moral power resides in the core evil of such acts – terrorizing and killing civilians rather than persuading them through nonviolent political or legal mechanisms. It is a morally and politically useful word because it uses the core strategy of liberal democracy itself by elevating the procedural over the substantive – we can agree that the tactics are evil without taking sides on the substance of the underlying dispute (just as you can support someone’s right to practice a religion that you believe to be false). Terrorism targets civilian populations to scare them into submission, and most people morally reject deliberately killing the innocent as a means of compulsion. So bombing a subway is terrorism. Vandalizing a police station is not.

But the Trump administration has applied the term to drug trafficking, protesting, illegal immigration, and even graffiti. Some of these acts are illegal, but they are not what we have traditionally meant by terrorism. By pretending otherwise, the administration hopes to redirect public outrage towards excesses committed by political opponents and away from its own policy choices. That’s how semantic hijacking works – when the word expands into new territory, it brings its moral valence with it. By moving the goalposts of terrorism to include left-wing protest, they hollow out the concept and then fill it with whatever suits their agenda, in this case morally equating progressives with the kinds of people who bomb trains and kill babies.

And a decades-long drift of opportunistically vague legislation has put US Federal law on his side and handed him a powerful toolkit for stifling dissent.

The Unbearable Lightness of Terror

Legally, the concept of terrorism has been hollowed out since the 1990s by legislation that paves the way for massive sentences for relatively banal crimes like moving a box of pamphlets.

First, the convictions themselves were based in part on Federal statutes drafted in 1994, 18 U.S.C. § 2339A entitled “Providing material support to terrorists.” This statute criminalizes the provision of aid or resources “knowing or intending that they are to be used in preparation for, or in carrying out” a list of predicate offences. The definition of material support has broadened over the years, and now can include funding, training, personnel (including oneself, i.e. showing up) or even offering someone a ride. The list of predicate crimes has also expanded and ranges from using biological weapons and genocide to violence at international airports or depredation against, or destruction of, government property. Anyone committing a predicate offense is deemed to be a terrorist, regardless of context or motive – there is no coercive intent component.

The sentencing phase then raises the stakes. Federal Sentencing Guidelines (U.S.S.G. § 3A1.4)  provide that if the court finds that a crime is committed with terroristic intent, then the sentences can be dramatically increased. Terroristic intent is very broadly construed and includes crimes intended “to retaliate against government conduct.” Moreover, findings in the sentencing phase are subject to the lower “preponderance of the evidence” standard of proof. Thus in Prairieland the wearing of black shirts was construed as evidence that the defendants were part of an alleged North Texas Antifa Cell (the existence of which is questionable) and used to help establish terroristic intent. The result is a “terrorism” conviction leading to a 50-year sentence for slashing the tires of a police car.

Note that the legal machinery at work here does not rely on proving the existence of a terrorist group, plot, or movement. If the predicate crime is established, that is enough. And if on the preponderance of the evidence the judge believes that retaliation was part of the motive, the sentencing enhancement kicks in without a terrorist in sight.

It’s Not What You Do, It’s What Side You’re On

Ironically, political rhetoric has not only embraced calling specific acts terrorist but has simultaneously attempted to harness the moral power of terrorism by shifting the focus from terrorism to “terrorist.” George W. Bush’s infamous threat following the September 11 attacks – “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” – was indicative of this approach. It sent a clear message that neutrality was complicity. It implied that protesting US responses to the attacks was tantamount to aiding the terrorists. In this worldview, dissenters are terrorists. Using the term in this way construes terrorism as if it were an ideology or an identity, rather than as a tactic. It becomes a generic term for “bad guys,” a black box that demagogues can fill with all our deepest fears without having to actually prove anything.

Trump’s 2025 executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization builds on this approach. Legally it was pure theatre, since there is no statutory mechanism to designate domestic terrorist groups, but it has had very real consequences. The White House has instructed officials to investigate liberal donors and created a special task force to channel all available resources towards disrupting domestic “terrorist” networks. Law firms started to advise donors to exercise “enhanced diligence.” Given the outcome for the Prairieland Detention Center protesters last week, they are right to. The case showed the power of terrorist group designations even when they have no legal framework; the designation provided the catalyst for including terrorism-related charges as well as the evidence to justify the charge to the public.

This can have profound long-term political consequences. Fear of being investigated for association with an “Antifa-aligned” group will likely trigger a cascade of self-censorship, choking off financial support for progressive policies. The sentencing of the Prairieland protesters will only heighten the reticence of Americans to speak up against the administration’s tactics. The next election may not need to be rigged; alternatives to MAGA will already have lost.

It Can Happen Here

Here in Europe the danger is magnified in several ways.

Firstly, most European countries have refused to adopt the US’s maximalist approach to free speech protection. Instead, laws in Europe evaluate speech restrictions using proportionality analysis. The European Convention on Human Rights explicitly permits proportionate restrictions on expression to protect public safety or prevent crime. This heightens the risk that governments will invoke the spectre of terrorism to portray speech restrictions as proportionate security measures.

Moreover, Europe has been just as lax as the US in permitting expansive and vague legal definitions of terrorism. The UK and Italy both define terrorism to include serious property damage. France allows a wide range of crimes to be qualified as terrorism if their aim is to undermine public order. Several definitions include creating a serious risk to human life even without the intent to kill. The EU’s own Counter-Terrorism Directive defines terrorism to include extensive destruction of public facilities if “likely to … result in major economic loss.” In addition, the EU maintains a list of such designated terrorist organizations, and the Directive instructs member states to criminalize various forms of support for them. These are all useful tools for prosecutors to fight terrorism, but they are overinclusive and ultimately facilitate the weaponization of national security concerns to criminalize dissent.

What has not helped the situation is the lack of an internationally agreed definition of terrorism. The UN’s Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism has been deadlocked for more than two decades, and the definition offered by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in 2011 has not gained broad acceptance even by legal scholars, much less governments. The vacuum is easily filled by vague definitional criteria coupled with expansive notions of complicity via material support. The Prairieland sentencing decision demonstrates where such vagueness can lead.

In Fact, It Is Happening Here

The risk of semantic hijacking in Europe is not hypothetical. Last summer the UK government banned Palestine Action outright, though only some of its members had damaged property, and none had caused a single death or injury. In February 2026 the High Court found the ban unlawfully disproportionate, and the Court of Appeal reinstated it on 15 June as a “proportionate interference.” (For an in-depth discussion see here.) While the courts have struggled over the measure’s proportionality, nearly 3000 protesters have been arrested in the UK merely for demonstrating support for Palestine Action. And last week four members of the group received enhanced sentences for property damage deemed to have a “terrorist connection” because the protesters meant to influence the UK government, which is of course the goal of any protester.

Other European countries have similar dynamics. Several criminalize the expression of support for terrorist groups and apply the laws broadly. And momentum is growing among right wing political parties to push for designating Antifa as a terrorist group. Last September a slim majority of Dutch MPs voted to request the designation, blaming Antifa for a handful of unconnected property crimes. The government refused, noting that Antifa lacks a sufficiently centralized structure to merit the designation. And last year 79 MEPs called for including Antifa on the EU’s list of terrorist groups.

When deployed ruthlessly, semantic hijacking can effectively foreclose nuanced thought and criminalize dissent. European leaders tempted to weaponize it should remember that such tools will outlive their creators. Overbroad definitions, group designations, material support convictions, and draconian sentences due to “terrorist connections” can be useful for ensuring national security. But the tools we use today to fight real terrorists are what the Nigel Farages and Jordan Bardellas would use to rebuild their countries in Trump’s image. In that dystopian Europe, we may find that we can all be labelled “terrorists.”