Corrupt power is rewriting the boundaries of dissent

By James J. Devine

A thread runs through the events of this moment—thin, tensile, easy to miss if you glance too quickly. But pull on it, and a pattern emerges, binding together courtrooms in North Dakota, oil fields in Ecuador, social media platforms in California, and President Donald Trump’s unprovoked war in the Middle East.

What appears, at first, as isolated incidents begins to resolve into something more deliberate: a system, evolving in real time, that disciplines dissent and consolidates power across institutions that once claimed independence from one another.

Start with the most immediate danger.

In early April 2026, President Donald Trump publicly threatened catastrophic military action against Iran, describing a vision of annihilation that would leave “a whole civilization” erased.

Legal scholars and international observers responded with alarm, warning that the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure—power plants, bridges, the basic scaffolding of modern life—would almost certainly violate the laws of armed conflict.

The language was not ambiguous.

Nor was the implication: that the United States, long a self-appointed steward of international norms, was now prepared to discard them.

The threat was temporarily suspended, contingent on geopolitical concessions. A pause, not a retreat.

At the same time, a parallel conflict unfolded online. A small, Iran-linked media outfit—fewer than ten people by some accounts—had managed to seize attention across global platforms with a barrage of crude, fast-moving, AI-generated animations.

Their weapon was not precision but volume: bright, chaotic, meme-driven content portraying the American president as erratic and compromised.

The videos were propaganda, openly so, funded at least in part by a foreign government and riddled with distortions.

Then, abruptly, they disappeared from one of the largest platforms in the world.

YouTube terminated the group’s channel for violating its spam and deceptive practices policies. The explanation was vague; the effect was not.

One side of an information war lost a major distribution channel at the exact moment the other side’s leader was amplifying his own digitally manipulated imagery—depictions of himself as monarch, cleric, and conqueror—across a platform with tens of millions of followers and the imprimatur of the presidency.

The asymmetry is difficult to ignore. Propaganda persists on all sides, but enforcement—by private corporations that now function as the primary infrastructure of public speech—remains uneven, opaque, and largely unaccountable.

Silencing dissent is the first sign of tyranny. Shutting down criticism is a clear red flag, showing a move toward authoritarian rule where free speech and differing opinions are stifled to keep control. This often means punishing critics, branding them as foes, and cutting back political freedoms to dodge accountability.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a broader pattern that has been building for years, one that becomes clearer when viewed through the lens of the legal system.

Consider the case of Steven Donziger, a human rights lawyer who spent decades representing Indigenous communities in Ecuador’s Amazon. After years of litigation, those communities secured a multibillion-dollar judgment against Chevron for environmental devastation—one of the largest pollution verdicts in history.

Chevron did not pay. Instead, it turned its resources toward “demonizing” and destroying the attorney who helped pollution victims win the case.

The corporation pursued Donziger with extraordinary force: a racketeering lawsuit, disbarment proceedings, and a contempt case that resulted in nearly three years of confinement—far exceeding typical penalties for such charges.

In a move without precedent in modern American law, private attorneys connected to the corporation were appointed to prosecute Donziger when the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to do so.

International observers—including the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada, International Monitoring Panels to Evaluate Trials in the United States (IMPETUS), Amnesty International, plus dozens of Nobel Laureates—condemned various aspects of the process as unjust.

The message extended far beyond one lawyer. It signaled what could happen to anyone who successfully challenges entrenched economic power.

A similar dynamic played out in North Dakota, where a jury delivered a massive verdict against Greenpeace USA for its role in protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Though later reduced from a $667 million jury verdict to a $345 million final judgment, the scale of the financial penalty is staggering.

The case bore the hallmarks of what legal experts describe as a SLAPP suit—strategic litigation aimed less at winning damages than at exhausting and intimidating opponents into silence.

Using SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation), corporations have attempted to silence dissent by burying nonprofit activists in legal fees that drain their resources and push them towards bankruptcy.

The implications are structural. Few organizations, and fewer individuals, can withstand the financial and psychological burden of such litigation.

The goal of this SLAPP lawsuit was not merely to win in court but to reshape the calculus of dissent itself—to make opposition so costly that it becomes irrational.

These pressures are not confined to the United States. In Europe, proposed legislation has raised concerns among civil liberties advocates for potentially criminalizing certain forms of political expression.

Lawmakers in France and Italy are considering antisemitism laws that UN experts have warned could threaten freedom of expression, chill legitimate public debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and restrict academic and journalistic liberty.

Italy might become the first country to officially incorporate into national law the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, which equates antisemitism with anti-Zionism, even though opposing a Jewish state in the Middle East can simply be a call for an irreligious, secular democracy.

In conflict zones, AI-generated media floods the information ecosystem faster than it can be verified or debunked. Across jurisdictions, the same pattern recurs: the tightening of boundaries around what can be said, who can say it, and at what cost.

The Justice Department’s second attempt to pursue baseless criminal charges against James Comey is obviously nothing more than politically motivated retaliation. Comey is charged with threatening the President under 18 U.S.C. § 871(a) and for transmitting a threat across state lines under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c).

Charging the former FBI Director over a seashell arrangement posted on Instagram, allegedly coded as a threat against the president, stretches credulity and smacks of political vengeance. This isn’t about protecting anyone; it’s about chilling speech and settling scores.

Pro-Trump rabble rouser Jack Posobiec—who in 2022 posted “86 46”—claimed Comey’s post was a call for assassination, but his post referring to President Joe Biden (the 46th president) remains live to this day.

U.S. District Judge Louise Flanagan, a George W. Bush appointee based in New Bern, must 86 this ridiculous indictment and punish President Trump for abusing his power to take retribution against Comey over the FBI’s investigation of links between Russia and the 2016 Republican presidential campaign. This absurd abuse of power is infuriating because the process is the punishment.

None of this requires a centralized conspiracy. The alignment emerges organically from shared incentives.

Corporations seek to neutralize threats to their bottom lines. Governments, regardless of ideology, move to control narratives in moments of instability. Platforms, caught between regulatory pressure and reputational risk, enforce policies that often lack transparency and consistency.

The result is a convergence of power.

The legal system, once framed as a refuge for the powerless, becomes a mechanism that can be leveraged against them. Digital platforms, once heralded as democratizing forces, evolve into gatekeepers whose decisions can amplify or erase voices at scale. Executive authority expands into domains that test the limits of both law and precedent.

And threading through it all is a quieter transformation: the erosion of confidence in the possibility of meaningful dissent.

If a lawyer can be sidelined for winning a case against a multinational corporation, if an advocacy group can face financial ruin for participating in a protest, if political speech can be throttled or amplified by opaque algorithmic decisions, then the boundaries of acceptable resistance begin to contract, not through overt prohibition, but through accumulated risk.

This is how systems change—not always through sweeping declarations, but through the steady calibration of incentives and consequences that erode freedom.

The events of this moment—court verdicts, platform bans, wartime rhetoric—are not identical. But they are not unrelated.

They point in the same direction, toward a landscape in which the cost of dissent rises, and the space for it narrows.

The question is not whether dissent will disappear. It rarely does.

The question is what it will cost—and how many will decide it is no longer worth the price.