The 6-Stage Playbook for Silencing Protest That's Underway in The US (Part 1 of 2)
Reframing protest. Rewriting laws. Removing limits on force. The playbook is active — and Americans need to pay attention.
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Dear friends
For over 230 years, Americans have enjoyed the First Amendment right to gather peacefully with others — to express your views, to demand change, to object to what your government is doing.
The right to protest is deeply bound to the freedoms of speech and assembly. Together, they give every American the legal footing to stand in a public square with a sign, to chant with a crowd, to march for justice.
And you’ve shown up in droves. From the anti-Vietnam protests of the 70s, to the Women’s March in 2017, the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, and recent HandsOFF! protests — you've rallied, filling streets, campuses, and capitol steps when it mattered most.
Protest is woven into the fabric of American democracy. It’s how change has been pushed forward again and again. And you expect that right to continue. That the Constitution will continue to protect you — at least until there’s a formal, recognisable constitutional crisis.
Most people seem to believe that unless and until it's officially declared a constitutional crisis, their rights will hold. Like there's some clear, dramatic line that once crossed will signal the moment to worry, to resist, to adjust.
That line does not exist. And waiting for it is a mistake.
You need to move past asking if the United States is in a constitutional crisis, and start acting as though it is. You have to act as if the crisis is already underway, because if you wait for full confirmation — for headlines or legal rulings or unanimous outrage — it will be already too late. Your window for effective action will not only be closed, but bolted shut behind you.
I write from the UK, a country still widely seen as a beacon of free speech. And yet, in 2024, five climate protestors were sentenced to four and five years in prison. Not for violent action. Not for blocking roads. But for planning a protest that never even took place.
If this can happen here in the UK, it can happen anywhere. And right now, there may be no country where the stakes are higher in relation to protest than in the United States, under President Trump.
This isn’t a theoretical problem. It’s not some abstract warning. The reality is that protest in the US is already far more dangerous, far more surveilled, and far less protected than most Americans realise.
In these posts I lay it all out for you: just how far in the US already is, and what to watch for next. I’ve broken it into two parts — not to draw things out, but to give you space to take it in. There’s a lot to absorb, and I want you to have time to sit with it, to really think through what it means for you and your community. Part two will be out next week.
From Putin to Orbán, and the UK
Donald Trump has expressed open admiration for several authoritarian leaders known for suppressing dissent. Vladimir Putin is perhaps the most notable.
Under Vladimir Putin’s reign, protest in Russia has been dismantled. What was once a visible part of civic life has been reduced to a high-risk act of personal defiance. Public dissent now carries the weight of criminal suspicion, surveillance, and exile. Even protesting as a single person holding a blank sign can lead to arrest.
The result is a society where most structured opposition has been eliminated. Opposition leaders are dead, imprisoned, or in exile. Independent media has been gutted. Non-governmental organisations that promote human rights, transparency, or civic participation have been forced to register as “foreign agents” — a label that marks them as enemies of the state, subjects them to surveillance, fines, and closure, and primes the public to view them with suspicion. And the public has learned to weigh the costs of speaking out.
What’s most striking is how what has happened in Russia has spread. It’s now a blueprint for dismantling dissent without declaring dictatorship — easy to borrow, easy to adapt.
And borrowed it has been. Modi’s government in India has systematically used it to suppress protest. Viktor Orbán's Hungary is a textbook case. Bukele has used it to quickly consolidate control in El Salvador.
And it is in action in the UK.
Britain’s tradition of lawful dissent was world renowned. From suffragettes chaining themselves to railings, to the anti-Iraq War marches of 2003, the right to protest in the UK has long been part of the unwritten contract between citizen and state. It’s a civic space others have admired, even envied, but today, that reputation lies broken.
In 2023, the CIVICUS Monitor downgraded the UK’s civic space rating from 'narrowed' to 'obstructed'. This places the UK in the same company as El Salvador, Hungary, and Serbia, where protest rights, press freedom, and civil society are all under active threat.
And although not to the same degree, there’s also been a narrowing in civic space in other democratic cornerstones of Europe — Italy, The Netherlands and Germany, where four foreign nationals face deportation for participating in demonstrations in Berlin.
Protest is not banned in one sweeping move. It is eroded word by word, law by law, headline by headline — until even planning a protest becomes grounds for prison time.
If you’re in the United States right now, you need to be paying close attention.
What happened in Russia? What happened in India? What Bukele pulled off in El Salvador? Stop asking if these things could happen in the US. They already are —adapted, repackaged, and moving faster than most people realise.
Stage 1: Reframe Protest as a Threat
It starts with a shift in language — from protest as a democratic right to protest as a threat. A danger to safety. To public order. To you, the people.
At first, it’s subtle. Protesters are cast as inconvenient, irrational, irresponsible. Then the tone hardens. The more dangerous the story, the more leeway the state has to respond.
That’s the first move. And in the US — like much of the developed world — it’s already embedded in political speech and media coverage.
This is the global playbook for narrative control. Wherever civic space is shrinking, these are the terms you’ll hear, echoed by governments and the press. Not just generic labels like “thugs” or “anarchists”— but targeted smears, tailored to the cause:
Pro-Palestine → anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas, terrorist sympathisers, Islamists, hate marchers, extremists, foreign agitators,
LGBTQ+ rights → woke agenda, gender ideology, groomers, anti-family, degenerates, LGBT propaganda, moral corruption
Racial justice → Marxist, anti-police, CRT extremists, anti-white, divisive, race agitators
Climate protests → eco-terrorists, green fanatics, climate cult, globalist pawns, radicalised youth, job destroyers
Pro-democracy → deep state pawns, Soros agitators, CIA-backed, traitors, unpatriotic
Migrant rights → open borders lobby, invasion enablers, America-last, NGO smugglers
“Domestic violent extremists” is a key term — used in DHS and FBI briefings to describe upcoming protests, especially on Palestine and climate. It’s intentionally vague, allowing pre-emptive force.
Trump has leaned hard into this. In 2020 he labelled Black Lives Matter protesters “thugs” and “anarchists”, accused them of “domestic terror,” and threatened to deploy the military under the Insurrection Act — just to clear peaceful demonstrators from public squares.
Now, he’s turned the same rhetoric on pro-Palestinian students, calling them “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American”. His executive orders promise to use “forceful and unprecedented steps“ to combat protest framed as extremism.
This is not careless language. It’s strategic. Redefine protest as extremism, and the full counterterrorism arsenal — surveillance, detention, militarised force — can be used to counter it.
Stage 2: Expand and Weaponise Legislation
The next step is legal restructuring. Not sweeping bans, but steady, technical rewrites — small amendments, vague regulations, new offences tucked into broader bills. Changes often sound procedural or practical and seem minor, but can have a major impact .
In the US, this has been building for years. Since 2017, 345 anti-protest bills have been considered in 45 states. Fifty of those have been enacted, with 40 more pending.
Many expand the definition of a “riot.” In Florida, for example, a 2021 law backed by Trump reclassifies protests that block traffic or involve more than 25 people as “aggravated riots”—a second-degree felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Organisers can be charged with incitement. Drivers who hit protesters are shielded from liability. Police are given broad powers to arrest based on what they claim they perceived, not what they can prove.
Other laws go after protest locations. Seventeen states — including Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana — have adopted or proposed legislation that criminalises protest near “critical infrastructure.” That category now includes pipelines, highways, and public utilities. In some cases, even organising a protest near one of these sites can trigger felony charges. These laws are based on model legislation circulated by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council—a corporate-backed group that hands state lawmakers copy-paste bills.
These aren’t isolated bills. They are part of a coordinated legal shift — one that turns protest into a criminal minefield, and organisers into easy targets.
Meanwhile, those who defend protest—the ACLU, legal aid clinics, civil rights lawyers like Perkins Coie—are under pressure too. Trump has attacked them publicly, suggesting that legal defence itself is suspicious. The message is simple: don’t get involved.
The First Amendment remains intact on paper. But the legal landscape has changed so completely that protest becomes a calculated risk. The line between lawful assembly and criminal offence now shifts depending on who you are, where you are, and what you’re standing for.
Stage 3: Expand Enforcement and Police Powers
Once the legal framework begins to criminalise dissent, the machinery of enforcement moves into place. Protest is no longer treated as a civil liberty—it’s managed as a threat. Police powers expand. Surveillance deepens. Protesters are seen not as citizens, but as risks to be neutralised.
This shift didn’t begin with Trump. It began after 9/11.
In the name of counterterrorism, the US government built a vast security infrastructure: mass surveillance programs, predictive policing models, enhanced sharing across agencies. The logic was pre-emptive—identify and disrupt threats before they could emerge.
At first, the focus was external. But by the mid-2010s, that same infrastructure was quietly turned inward. Federal agencies began applying counterterrorism tools to domestic protest.
DHS bulletins from 2015 show federal agents monitoring protest movements, scraping social media, and generating threat assessments based on flyers and Facebook posts. Protest organisers were tracked —not because of anything they’d done, but because they might pose a risk. Surveillance included undercover attendance at meetings, data-sharing between local and federal law enforcement, and real-time monitoring of online activity.
When Trump came to power, he inherited all of it. He didn’t build the system—but he understood what it could be used for.
In 2020, federal agents in unmarked uniforms seized protesters off the streets of Portland and forced them into unmarked vans—no badges, no explanations, no due process. Trump defended the tactic and threatened to deploy it elsewhere. What began as surveillance became abduction, rebranded as policing.
Since then, the toolkit has only expanded. Protest zones are now routinely scanned with facial recognition, monitored with stingray devices that intercept mobile signals, and mapped using geofencing warrants — enabling police to collect location data from anyone nearby, regardless of whether they were protesting. Police are emboldened too—some states have moved to criminalise filming them or increase penalties for “disrespecting” an officer.
And the punishments are escalating. After property damage at the recent Tesla protests — typically a misdemeanour — the FBI launched a domestic terrorism task force to investigate. Five activists are now facing prison sentences of 5 to 20 years. Trump posted on Truth Social that he hopes they receive the maximum term — and serve it in El Salvador’s CECOT prison.
This is where protest becomes high risk. Not because the laws are unclear, but because enforcement is designed to intimidate, disorient, and punish. The state already sees you as guilty. The only question is how hard it wants to hit.
In the second part (next Monday), we pick up the thread — moving deeper into how organisers are targeted, how repression creeps in quietly, and how fear starts to do the work of silencing protest on its own.
These are the final moves in a familiar playbook, already played out in other authoritarian countries. But in the US, the script is still being written. What happens next hinges on how people choose to respond.
Don’t see this as just a snapshot of where the US is, but a guide to what’s likely around the corner. Because once you see the pattern, you start to notice the signs. And that gives you a chance to act while the window’s still open.
— Lori
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Outstanding research! Thank you.