Pretty much the title. I certainly believe Trump, Maga, the Military, and the Police will, sooner or later, probably sooner, get around to at least attempting to deanonymize and round up online antifascists and leftists and imprison them. How organized and effective that attempt is I am less sure of.
To be very transparent, this is something I’m pretty sure I’d be on the hook for. I have a long log of anti trump, antifascist, left sentiments, and am 75% sure I’ll be disappeared at some point in the next 4 years as I have no plans of shutting up. The only reason I’m not 100% sure is because of how expensive it would be. But hey, maybe it’s less expensive than potentially losing power? So I don’t know.
Never? Not likely? Maybe? Very? Extremely? Definitely?
Thoughts?
Everyone’s like “it won’t happen” but I remember post-9/11 a specific Linux news site got hit with claims of radicalism and some folks who frequented the site got put on watch lists. For interest in Linux.
There was a reason folks like me were against all the surveillance from the PATRIOT Act back then, and this is why.
EDIT:
Similarly, the Bush admin had the FBI spying on Quakers, the only religious group that anti-violence is such a central tenet to their religion that they by default are considered conscientious objectors and cannot be drafted into the military without violating their beliefs.
Post-9/11 the government thought peaceful Quaker anti-war activists were dangerous.
That was post-9/11 in the War on Terror years… It can happen here.
Sources:
Linuxjournal gets “extra surveillance:”
Quakers being spied on by FBI:
Online? No. Online disorganized leftists aren’t actually leftists, they’re leftist sympathizers. You need to be in a leftist org to actually be a leftist.
You’re not a threat unless you’re actually doing stuff.
What would the charge be?
Suspicion of terrorism, or nothing at all. If the libs are right they wouldn’t care about charges anymore. But since libs are so rarely correct, the government can hold you for 72 hours without charge and the patriot act has a whole list of charges that require no evidence for an arrest. Also statistically you live within 100 miles of a US border if you’re in the US, meaning border patrol can arrest you for any reason or no reason indefinitely.
get around to at least attempting to deanonymize and round up online antifascists
They already know exactly who you are. People dont understand how pervasive online surveilance and profiling is. AI makes it simple to compile dossiers on everyone.
Ah yes, as always, the ever-knowing magical AI. Because all the secrets of the universe can be aggregated using just few multiline prompts to the ChatGPT.
Not chatGPT. But AIs are good at one single thing and that is pattern recognition. And there is a lot of data to train and use those AIs on. Decades of data from your PCs, phones and tablets is on NSA servers. And yes, the NSA did shit like recording you through your notebook camera or recording your phone calls with your first girlfriend.
AI will probably never replace human workers/engineers/artists/…, but sorting through your online history is exactly what AIs excel at.
Also Dragnet policies are used by the police for a long time now. This is pretty much just that. Imo the main question is more if they want to burn that data on this task, because once they do this some people will adjust and it will get harder to get new data.
It’s a proud fascist country now. Be prepare for ANYTHING.
Likely. The federal government has SharePoint sites with information gathered about journalists and other activists who are pro immigration. To my knowledge, these individuals have not officially been disappeared.
Personally, I would be worried if I was you. The first Trump term can’t be compared as he had some guardrails with his recommended cabinet picks from the traditional GOP. Now that those GOP members have been expelled from the party, those guardrails are no longer there. His cabinet picks are loyalists and is a stress test to weed out any non-loyalists in Congress.
His cabinet picks will have free will to do what they want as long as they do two things: 1) praise Trump for the popular things they accomplish and 2) take the fall or blame other groups if it’s not popular.
And it’s not the government coming after these groups that is most worrying. We all see the lengths regular citizens would go to right a perceived wrong. January 6 case in point.
We’ve all seen this film before. It doesn’t have a good ending.
Not likely. This is hyperbole.
What is most likely going to happen is that any right-wing, MAGA cultist and whatever. They won’t be penalized for any harassment or antagonizing behaviors committed by them to those they don’t like.
That’s the reality.
Unless you’re doing actual organizing, unlikely. The DNC isn’t friendly towards Leftist orgs either, though MAGA groups themselves may become more millitant.
I don’t think it’s very likely. Even if it was even remotely affordable or feasible he actually needs opposition to define himself and his base ‘ruggedly independent’ and as ‘freedom fighters’.
If he’s going to go after anyone at all I think it will be high profile people for maximum media impact.
Unlikely.
It all comes to how anonymous you are on the net. I’d say having a mainstream social media account is right now a high risk if you live in the US, specially considering that Kethamine Karen owns one one of them.
This to say that deanonymizing you might be cheaper than you think, making it more likely than we all expect. If you want to keep using tnose socials, I’d start by deleting my accounts and creating new ones using new data (such as disposable mails or aliases that forward to your real email)
Of course, a trusted vpn is a must in these cases. And there is a lot you should be doing on top of all this.
Right now, if you want to keep your anti-trump line, be prepared to be treated as an enemy, so consider the deanonymation a highly likely possibility.
If you just post stuff on the Internet, you don’t have to worry. At least this type of stuff.
It isn’t November 2016 anymore. Trump has been president before and whatever you think of his first term, you already know (roughly) what tends to happen when he is president (if you are too young, there is a near-infinite amount of news articles, social media discussions, wiki articles where you can look it up). I somewhat understood fears like this in late 2016 when a Trump administration was an unprecedented phenomenon, but now?
This time is quite different, actually. First, he learned his lesson about hiring institutionalists as his secretaries and advisors since they would push back against more questionable ideas, now he’s surrounding himself with yes-men like RFK jr, Kristi Noem and the likes. There have also been precedents set like the infamous “official act immunity”, and just many more lessons learned from 2016 in general.
There’s also just much more co-ordination now in general with the whole Project 2025.
Trump has plenty of establishment picks lined up as well.
We had the same fearmongering in 2016. Trump will do some dumb stuff Reagan style but he will not end the world.
But in 2016, he didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t expect to win. It’s very different this time around.
And when do you think he started to know what he was doing? 2017, 2018, 2019, never? If not in any of these years, then why would he know it in 2025?
the heritage foundation is surrounding trump with money and advisors so that they can finish the work that they started in this country in 1980. (they’re the people who created project 2025)
they’ve been successful with other countries and that’s taught them how to get things done within the frameworks of other governments and they’ve also been successful in this country with sympathetic administrations; so they have plenty of experience in making things happen.
