this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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I would argue, that is the reason we got so many people to go out to No Kings.
Ok go ahead and surveil 7 million people, what the hell is that gonna do?
At that point you are just demonstrating your illegitimacy as a governing body while overloading your surveillance capacity with normal everyday people that are an overwhelming distraction from your authoritarian aims.
if you're the government, and you have a face matched to a name via driver's license, then you know where that person works. it wouldn't take much to draft a mass email to all employers saying something to the effect of "you will terminate the employment of the following list of names, or YOU will face legal consequences." and how many employers have we seen so far actually stand up to this sort of coercion?
it would actually only take a few high profile people losing their jobs and livelihoods to achieve the fear effect of "they fired one of our senior executives for being at the protest! i better stop going to protests"
and before you say that'll never happen, take another look at some of the things that, 10+ years ago, we would have said "it'll never happen here" that are literally happening here
i'm not saying don't protest--just realize this isn't your grandpa's america. or even your dad's, or yours. this is nazi germany, except with telescreens in everyone's pocket that they're willingly feeding every detail of their lives to
I think this is an unrealistic concern. If that happened, every single person fired will sue the federal government for first amendment violation in addition to other things a real lawyer could probably point out. It'd be like the Kimmel situation x100, and remember that even some prominent Republicans pushed back against that.