They Have a Blueprint. We Need One Too.

A practical plan to defend dissent: transparency, litigation, and the long game of politics.

There’s an old authoritarian trick: redefine loyalty as patriotism and criticism as treason. And this week, the trick went live.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, the most powerful Republican in Congress, called the upcoming “No Kings” march an “anti-American” rally. Majority Whip Tom Emmer chimed in, branding it the “terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party. In other words, a march for democracy has officially been recast as an act of terrorism.

The timing isn’t coincidental. It comes just days after Ken Klippenstein exposed the leaked FBI/DHS intelligence bulletin warning that protests “against ICE or Trump administration policies” may be covers for domestic terrorism. That bulletin explicitly cites the new National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, Trump’s NSPM-7, as its guiding authority.

This is the Trump regime’s new operating system for authoritarian control. NSPM-7 instructs every federal law enforcement agency to “investigate and disrupt” entities expressing anti-American, anti-Christian, or anti-capitalist sentiment. That’s not a joke or a paraphrase. Those wildly broad phrases appear in the directive. It reads like a revivalist sermon rewritten by the FBI.

Under this doctrine, dissent is no longer protected speech, it’s pre-terroristic behavior. Activists, journalists, and NGOs are now subject to surveillance for what the memo calls “radicalization indicators.” If you criticize ICE, you might be a radical. If you oppose religious nationalism, you might be a threat. If you question capitalism, congratulations, you’re a suspect. Methinks I check all the boxes.

Klippenstein’s reporting forensically dismantled this machine. There’s a Threat Screening Center in a Virginia suburb, seven miles from CIA headquarters, where government analysts are reportedly compiling spreadsheets of citizens who meet these ideological “criteria.” They are watching, and they are not pretending otherwise. The office was designed for the post-9/11 “war on terror.” Trump has simply re-aimed it at domestic critics.

This is deliberate political choreography. Attorney General Pam Bondi has already issued directives citing NSPM-7 to justify a new anti-ICE crimes task force. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has declared Antifa “as dangerous as ISIS.” And FBI Director Kash Patel, yes, the same loyalist who helped rewrite Trump’s Ukraine narrative, is now signing intelligence bulletins that treat protests as “pre-attack environments.”

Speaker Johnson and his caucus are handing the propaganda script to the public. Call dissent “anti-American.” Conflate protest with terrorism. Demand “law and order.” Then let the federal agencies fill in the rest. The result is a self-feeding loop of moral panic: politicians invent the threat, the FBI validates it, and the public learns to fear its own citizens.

The irony, of course, is that the “No Kings” protest was explicitly conceived as a celebration of constitutional democracy, a reminder that no man is above the law. Yet the Speaker of the House now calls that idea unpatriotic. It’s almost poetic, in a darkly fascistic way: a movement founded on the rejection of monarchy being branded a threat to the Republic by people who’ve turned obedience into a civic religion.

If labeling dissent as terrorism weren’t enough, DHS has quietly armed ICE with foreign spyware. In an October 6 letter to Secretary Kristi Noem, Representatives Summer Lee, Shontel Brown, and Yassamin Ansari revealed that ICE has activated Paragon Solutions’ Graphite, a ‘zero-click’ hacking tool once linked to the surveillance of European journalists. The same administration calling protesters ‘anti-American’ is now importing spyware capable of reading their private messages. It’s not a metaphor anymore; it’s a dragnet.

This is how you criminalize dissent. It doesn’t arrive with tanks on the street. It starts with memos and watchlists and vague definitions of “anti-American activity.” It looks like banks quietly reviewing the accounts of advocacy groups. It sounds like HR departments warning employees not to attend rallies. It feels like silence, the kind that falls when people start wondering if showing up could cost them their livelihood.

We’ve seen this movie before. McCarthyism with better software. COINTELPRO in an age of metadata. Every time, the government tells itself it’s just protecting order. Every time, it ends up protecting power.

The “No Kings” protesters will march anyway. They’ll do so under the eyes of cameras and agents, perhaps even drones. And when they chant “no kings,” what they’ll really be saying is no permission required.

It’s no longer enough to show up once a month with a witty sign and a hashtag. The Trump regime has moved from rhetoric to infrastructure, memos, watchlists, spyware contracts. They are building the scaffolding of a surveillance state while calling it “law and order.”

The counter-strategy must be equally structured, equally disciplined, and absolutely lawful. That means strengthening civil-rights legal funds, supporting the journalists and whistleblowers exposing abuses, and flooding Congress and the courts with oversight demands. It means digital-security hygiene, encrypted messaging, privacy audits, public-records requests, and coordinated non-violent action that cannot be spun as chaos or crime.

They know precisely what they want: a state that treats dissent as disorder, dissenters as enemies, and opposition as a threat to be surveilled, frozen, and litigated out of existence. If they have a blueprint, we need one too, but one built on rights, on law, and on mass politics, not on the secrecy of a threat-screening center or the quiet activation of spyware contracts.

We have to be explicit about ends, not just grievances. We want a government that protects civil liberties, and we want accountability for public officials who use secretive national-security tools against Americans. We want immigration and law-enforcement policy debated in daylight, not enforced through back-room surveillance deals and ideological litmus tests.

It is important to think strategically about leverage. The levers of power are many and sometimes surprising: budgets, procurement, insurance, banking relationships, municipal ordinances, state attorney generals, and ballot lines. Organized, lawful economic pressure, divestment campaigns, local procurement pushback, worker actions coordinated with legal counsel, can make spying and repression costly. So can making prosecutions unpopular at the ballot box. The point is to make repression a political liability, not a technical inevitability.

Equally important is to organize at scale and for the long game. Democracy is not a single Saturday of noise; it’s a set of trained muscles exercised every day, registering voters, holding town halls, flipping local offices, litigating, reporting, and sustaining visible, non-violent pressure when abuses surface. We should plan our weekends, yes, but design our years. Prioritize durable wins: transparency laws, public procurement bans on spyware, judicial rulings that restrain warrantless surveillance, and electoral changes that make officials accountable.

This is not abstract. It’s tactical and it’s achievable if we stop pretending the only option is moral grandstanding and start treating civic defense as organized work. Begin with three parallel tracks: defend the people under immediate threat (legal funds, tech hygiene, rapid-response media); pressure institutions (FOIA, congressional demands, state bans); and build political power (voter registration, local office runs, and holding electeds to an enforcement-and-procurement standard they can’t duck).

Above all: refuse the premise that dissent is illegitimate. Keep showing up, peacefully, persistently, and everywhere they hope you’ll stay home.