Political scientists have a fairly dry checklist for what makes a regime oppressive: it silences dissent, it turns state power against its own people, it treats international law as optional, and it punishes anyone—institution or individual—who tries to hold it accountable. Read as a list, it sounds abstract or like something that happens elsewhere, in a dictatorship in a Third World country maybe.
For Americans, such a definition no longer feels abstract anymore.
Let’s start with the silencing. Since the war on Gaza escalated, human rights groups and journalists have documented, for years now, a pattern of pro-Palestinian content—protest footage, on-the-ground reporting, even the straightforward accounting of civilian deaths—being throttled, flagged, or removed from major platforms. Meanwhile, incitement and dehumanizing rhetoric spreads with far less friction. Independent researchers have called it out repeatedly. Platforms deny doing it on purpose.
The silencing isn’t limited to algorithms, either. Last month, the White House revoked press credentials for CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, physically barring their reporters from the building over what the president called unfavorable coverage. A federal judge has since ordered access temporarily restored, calling the move a likely violation of due process, but the message had already landed: cover this administration the wrong way and you can be locked out of the room where the decisions get made. A press freedom advocate called it part of a broader pattern meant to intimidate journalists and deter critical reporting. When the people paid to tell the public the truth are the ones getting the door closed in their faces, “free press” starts to feel like a technicality rather than a guarantee.
Then there’s the gap between what the government does and what the country actually wants. This summer, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) forced a vote to strip billions in U.S. military funding to Israel. This was no fringe gesture but a real floor fight that split both parties and forced members to go on the record. It lost. But the fact that it happened at all, that a sitting republican congressman felt he had to make Washington answer for the money it kept sending regardless of what constituents were saying, is itself the story. Institutions are moving in one direction while public sentiment visibly pulls in another, and the institutions are winning anyway.
And there’s the reach outward. When the International Criminal Court issued warrants tied to the Gaza war, Washington didn’t argue the law. It sanctioned the court itself, freezing officials’ bank accounts, cutting off their email, warning American staff they’d be arrested for traveling home. A body created specifically to stand outside any one government’s control got treated like an adversary for doing its job. If that’s what happens to an international court, it’s not hard to imagine what happens to an ordinary citizen who speaks too loudly.
Actually, it’s not hard to imagine because it is happening on a daily basis, especially for those who protest the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Last month, Donna Ganger—the mother of Renee Good, a U.S. citizen shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis in January—testified on Capitol Hill that she’s a registered Republican who voted for Trump because she believed that these agents were there to protect citizens, not to treat her own family like the threat. She didn’t get an apology. “This is madness,” she concluded.
Every day, millions of people in America live the reality of a police state. They are afraid to leave their houses for fear of being detained by ICE, thrown into horrific holding centers, and sent back home to civil war or family abuse or even deportation to a third country they know nothing about. ICE has become something closer to a domestic enforcement arm than an immigration agency, and “wrong place, wrong time” is a real category of harm now, not a hypothetical one.
What does it mean to raise a child in a country where simply existing in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong moment carries risk? Where even a global court gets its accounts frozen for trying to hold power accountable?
It’s a strange kind of irony that at the UN last month, Trump denounced “the fanatical Iranian regime” for spreading “carnage and chaos” and called for its “complete economic isolation” over how it treats its own people. He’s not wrong that repression deserves condemnation. He’s just describing, almost point for point, the pattern playing out here at home—press outlets barred from covering their own government, citizens shot by agents meant to protect them, and dissent treated as the threat rather than the right.
The distinction between “oppressive regime” as a concept in a textbook and “oppressive regime” as the texture of ordinary life—for millions of people living in this country right now, citizens and non-citizens alike—has ceased to exist. Describing the disappearance of that distinction—calmly, specifically, without exaggeration—feels like the first form of resistance available to someone who isn’t a lawyer, a lawmaker, or a judge.
Regimes like this have ended before, usually because enough ordinary people refused to stop saying what they saw. That’s the piece I want to hold onto, even on the days when fear wins out.