The 6-Stage Playbook for Silencing Protest That's Underway in The US (Part 2 of 2)

Targeting organisers. Normalising repression. The chilling effect — the final stages are already unfolding

May 25, 2025

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What We’ll Cover Here:

Dear friends

Last week, I shared the first three stages of the playbook used to dismantle the right to protest — a pattern drawn from authoritarian regimes and already taking root in the United States. First, protest gets recast as a threat, then laws are rewritten to criminalise dissent and police powers are expanded to meet protest with force.

This second part continues the arc — into the targeting of organisers, the quiet normalisation of repression, and the chilling effect that follows. These are the final stages of the playbook as it’s being deployed in the US.

Stage 4: Target Organisers with Surveillance and Charges

Now attention turns to those who make protest possible — the organisers. The strategy here is to pre-empt disruption. To use surveillance, intimidation, and criminal charges to shut down protest at the planning stage.

Remember the UK’s five Just Stop Oil campaigners I mentioned in the first post? In July 2024, Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, and Cressida Gethin were sentenced to between four and five years in prison for holding a Zoom call to discuss a potential protest targeting the M25 motorway. They were convicted of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. And they were arrested before any action took place: no roads were blocked, and no protest ever happened.

Their sentences — among the harshest ever handed down in the UK for non-violent environmental protest — have been widely condemned.

“It is especially worrying that the law expands the powers of the police to stop and search individuals, including without suspicion; defines some of the new criminal offences in a vague and overly broad manner; and imposes unnecessary and disproportionate criminal sanctions on people organizing or taking part in peaceful protests.”

UN Human Rights Commissioner Volker Türk

The observations he highlights are not legal oversights — they are the point of the legislation.

By targeting organisers before protests occur, the state sends a clear message to would-be organisers: simply talking about arranging a protest can land you in prison.

In the United States, this is already in play.

Senior Legal Advisors Nick Robinson and Elly Page at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law write, “organizers of demonstrations involving civil disobedience confront expansive new theories of civil liability under which they can be held liable when others engage in violence.”

In other words, organisers of protests involving civil disobedience can now be held responsible if someone else at the protest is violent. Not because they caused the act — but because, under these expanding legal arguments, just being connected to the protest can be enough to make them a target in court.

As we saw in my first post, in Louisiana, proposed legislation would make it a crime not only to protest near so-called critical infrastructure, but to help organise a protest that does. Florida’s “anti-riot” law allows organisers to be charged with inciting a riot — a felony — even if the protest remains peaceful, simply because authorities claim they intended disruption. And in Oklahoma, anyone who “conspires” to protest near oil and gas facilities can face prison time and hefty fines, regardless of whether any actual damage occurs.

Which takes us to Mahmoud Kahlil.

He was a protest organiser and a lawful resident of NYC. But in March 2025, he was arrested by ICE, without a warrant, and is now facing deportation. No charges have been brought and he’s not alleged to have engaged in any activity legally prohibited to U.S. residents. He continues to be held in a Lousiana detention centre, while the court decides his fate.

This is not just a deportation. It’s a warning.

Mahmoud Kahlil is being used to send a message to other organisers: if you’re vocal, if you take a lead, if you help build a movement — the state will sideline you completely. Not through open legal process, but through executive manoeuvre and international deals.

You won’t be silenced in court. You’ll be removed from the playing field altogether.

This is how protest is dismantled before it even begins: not by banning the crowd, but by removing the people who would have brought them together.

Stage 5: Normalise Repression and Scale It

The next stage is not to expand repression, but to normalise it. To make what was once shocking feel routine. To slip it into the fabric of daily life, until it becomes background noise.

What was once outrageous will barely make the news. What once felt like a breach of civil rights will get brushed off.

All that’s needed is quiet reinforcement: frame peaceful movements as threats to order, and social consequences do the rest. Protestors are discredited. Peaceful demonstrators are framed as extremists. Employers quietly warn staff not to get involved. And the risk is no longer just arrest — it’s losing your job, your scholarship, your future.

Ultimately, although people still care about what's happening, they think twice about protesting.

Consider the Trump administration’s startling move against Harvard University. They’ve revoked Harvard's authority to enrol international students — jeopardising the legal status of over 6,800 students, and compelling them to transfer or exit the U.S. Unless, within 72 hours, Harvard hands over — among other things — “Any and all audio or video footage… of any protest activity involving a nonimmigrant student on a Harvard University campus, in the last five years.”

Student protestors at Columbia, Stanford, and Washington universities are also in the crosshairs. Some have been suspended, arrested, or barred from graduating — not for violence or vandalism, but for peaceful protest.

Stage Six: The Chilling Effect

We’re no longer waiting for the chilling effect in the U.S. — it has already arrived.

The Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities have for years been surveilled, harassed, or punished for dissent, and now it’s reaching the core of public life. Universities, workplaces, and the halls of power. Places we once believed were immune.

Protest hasn’t been banned — but it doesn’t need to be. Instead it carries too much risk.

People still believe in the causes. They still care. But they’ve seen what happens when others speak out. The surveillance. The threats. The headlines that twist motives. The careers quietly derailed. The visas revoked. The police waiting. So they weigh the risks — and decide to stay home.

Now, even the political opposition is falling silent.

Take Senator Cory Booker. He stood for 25 hours on the Senate floor in protest of the Trump Administration — a filibuster meant to defend democratic norms. And then, weeks later, he cast the lone Democratic vote to confirm Charles Kushner — a convicted felon and the father of Trump’s son-in-law — as ambassador to France. That’s not dissent. That’s retreat dressed in rhetoric.

The message lands: even the boldest voices are backing down.

And that’s how it happens. Not with sweeping new bans, but with silence. With fear. With compromise. Until protest is no longer forbidden — just absent.

That is what has happened in all Trump’s favoured authoritarian regimes, and it’s the point of what’s unfolding now.

What Comes Next?

Silencing protest always begins at the margins.

Certain people are easier to isolate — students, immigrants, independent journalists, small activist groups. They’re more visible, less protected, and easier to discredit without backlash.

And certain causes are always hit first: the climate crisis, solidarity with Gaza, the defence of LGBTQ+ rights. These are not the most dangerous movements. They’re the most convenient ones to suppress — the ones the public is most likely to accept force against.

Once the machinery is in motion, the net widens.

We’ve seen this in country after country. The space for protest shrinks at the edges, then contracts inward, until groups once considered untouchable find themselves targeted. Issues once seen as mainstream become politicised, then penalised.

And then the net tightens.

Look to India — the birthplace of Gandhi’s satyagraha (or “truth-force”) a philosophy of moral resistance that shaped global movements from Selma to Soweto. His methods — marches, boycotts, civil disobedience — were powerful because they combined moral authority with mass mobilisation.

No more.

Today, citizens critical of the government — especially Kashmiri journalists and activists — have been placed under surveillance, barred from travelling abroad, and in some cases detained without formal charges. No courtroom. No trial. Just a quiet entry onto a watchlist. The message is clear: travel is a privilege, not a right. Dissent a reason for restriction.

That same logic has already surfaced at US borders, and is poised to expand.

In the past, there have been cases where US citizens — particularly journalists, activists, or legal observers connected to migrant rights or cross-border protests — were questioned at the border about their political activity. Some were flagged in secret databases. Others faced secondary screening or had their devices searched. These incidents, while limited, revealed how border powers can be quietly used to police dissent.

What’s changing under Trump is the context. US-Canada border control has tightened. Militarisation at the border with Mexico continues to expand. Surveillance tools at borders are expanding. So the prospect of US citizens facing limits on international travel — not because of crimes, but because of political activity — is becoming increasingly plausible.

And with protest itself being reframed as extremism at the highest levels of government, it raises serious questions about what’s coming — especially for those visibly involved in protest today.

If you organise, attend, or even appear in footage from recent demonstrations, it’s important to understand that under Trump’s second administration, the risks of protest may be shifting. Not just police on the ground — but Customs and Border Protection. A flagged passport. A delayed boarding. A silent decision by a federal agency: not today.

This isn’t a certainty. But the machinery exists. The precedent is global. And in Trump’s America, the direction of travel is becoming harder to ignore.

If you’re involved in protest — or even adjacent to it — you need to understand how the ground is shifting.

The risks aren’t theoretical anymore. They’re situational. Uneven. And they’re being shaped through legislation, surveillance, and selective enforcement — all designed to make protest harder, riskier, and easier to punish.

This means weighing each protest decision — whether to attend, organise, or speak out — with full awareness of the risks now in play.

What once required only your conviction now also requires your caution, strategy, and a clear-eyed view of the landscape.

— Lori
© Lori Corbet Mann, 2025