https://criticalresistance.substack.com

03/17/2025

This isn’t media bias. This is regime architecture.

The crackdown has begun—not with jackboots, but with a quiet, systemic erosion of truth itself.

While the country debates headlines, the scaffolding of dissent is being dismantled—quietly, deliberately, and in plain view.

• Journalists are being blocked from press briefings and subjected to surveillance by federal agencies.
• Protesters are being detained under terrorism laws and having their immigration status weaponized against them.
• Investigative outlets are being sued into silence, threatened with economic retaliation, and labeled as political adversaries.
• Trump is openly threatening those who challenge his narrative—whether in the streets, in the courtroom, or the newsroom.

This isn’t just political hostility—it’s structural warfare. And it’s accelerating.

Every society that slipped into authoritarianism followed this same sequence:

Control the story → criminalize dissent → collapse civic trust → rewrite reality.

And if you think the First Amendment will save us, you need to understand something deeply uncomfortable: It already isn’t.

What’s happening now is not erosion of norms. It’s replacement of norms.
And what replaces them will not be democratic.

We have already entered this replacement phase. Trump’s DHS is increasingly using immigration enforcement as one lever among many to target activists, students, and dissenting voices, often justified by vague national security claims. Project 2025 further amplifies this threat by recommending rigorous ideological vetting, expanded surveillance, aggressive investigations of perceived domestic threats, and greater control over federal agencies—all creating conditions that structurally enable the systematic suppression of political opposition.