The Grammar of Dissent

Executive power, surveillance, and the slow suffocation of democratic life

While headlines dwell on peace initiatives and National Guard deployments, Trump has issued a new executive order that is far more dangerous. It redefines dissent as extremism, collapsing the line between protest and threat.

The order on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” is not just a legal maneuver—it’s a cultural intervention. By treating “radicalization” and campaigns to “change or direct policy outcomes” as suspect, it erases the boundary between speech and action. In anthropology, speech is more than words; it is practice—the medium through which people take part in civic life. To criminalize persuasion is to criminalize citizenship itself. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio [1], only speech that incites imminent violence loses First Amendment protection. This order goes further, punishing possibility rather than conduct.

Surveillance doesn’t arrive later—it’s baked into the premise. The directive to disrupt networks “before they result in violent political acts” discards the Fourth Amendment’s standard of probable cause in favor of ideological suspicion. What is targeted is not crime but belief. This isn’t law enforcement—it’s containment before anything has happened.

Protest itself is turned upside down. Acts of dissent are treated as destabilizing, while state-aligned aggression is normalized. The order condemns “dehumanizing speech” and “doxxing,” yet its author has called opponents “vermin” and “human scum.” Those are not slips of the tongue but deliberate acts of boundary-making: drawing lines between insiders and outsiders, loyalists and enemies. In this framework, only the state decides whose speech corrodes and whose is permitted.

The pattern repeats in enforcement. Opposition speech becomes evidence of extremism, while similar rhetoric from allies is excused as patriotism. The moral vocabulary of democracy—protection, community, order—is claimed for one side and denied to the other.

History doesn’t whisper here—it shouts. In the 1960s and ’70s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program did not simply monitor activists. It sabotaged organizations, planted informants, spread falsehoods, and seeded mistrust. Black and Indigenous leaders carried the weight of constant suspicion, their movements forced to spend as much energy on self-defense as on political action. Hoover didn’t need convictions—he needed headlines. A decade earlier, McCarthyism had laid the groundwork: careers destroyed for beliefs and associations, not for actions. Suspicion became the operating language of politics.

After 9/11, that logic deepened. The PATRIOT Act widened surveillance far beyond terrorism, shrinking the Fourth Amendment to a technicality. Privacy, once considered a shared right, was reframed as a liability. Abroad, Putin’s “Foreign Agent” law suffocated NGOs by stripping them of funding and legitimacy—opposition silenced not by outright bans, but by attrition. Trump’s order borrows from these repertoires, adapting them to the American setting.

Money and paperwork carry the same weight as surveillance. What emerges is a quiet architecture of suppression. By threatening tax status, grants, and banking access, the state can weaken organizations without ever bringing them to court. Bureaucracy becomes a tool of punishment, applied quietly and with little oversight.

And surveillance does not work alone. By targeting networks before violence occurs, the order embraces the logic of pre-crime. But prediction is never neutral. Algorithms and intelligence reports are shaped by political framing. Once dissent is equated with danger, entire communities are marked not for what they’ve done but for what they are thought to believe.

These pressures surface in daily life. Activists hesitate, worried that ordinary organizing might be construed as “radicalization.” Neighbors grow cautious about sharing information. Groups fracture under suspicion. Funding disappears because access is quietly severed, not because support has vanished. Civic life grows thin and precarious.

This is how legal protections erode. Precedents like Brandenburg hold only in cultures that sustain them. When suspicion replaces evidence and agitation is equated with extremism, law becomes form without force. Tools built for one leader’s grievances remain in place, ready for the next to use.

Executive orders come and go, but the infrastructure they leave behind lingers. Institutions don’t forget the logic they’re taught. The real fight isn’t just legal—it’s cultural. The culture that sustains dissent is the one that sustains democracy. The rest is compliance.

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Endnote

[1] Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969).

Suggested Readings

American Civil Liberties Union. Free Speech Under Threat: Protest, Surveillance, and the Erosion of First Amendment Rights. Washington, DC: ACLU, 2023.

Arendt, Hannah. Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Boyd, Josh. “COINTELPRO and the Logic of Preemption.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7, no. 4 (2004): 555–581.

Brennan Center for Justice. Domestic Terrorism and the Use of Federal Power. New York: NYU School of Law, 2022.

Cole, David. Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Robin, Corey. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Strossen, Nadine. HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.