James Greenberg
We’ve seen this coming. The rhetoric has been sharpening for years, and now the machinery is in motion. What began as insult—Democrats labeled as communists, Antifa, radicals—has morphed into a governing logic. The opposition is no longer just wrong; it is framed as dangerous, disloyal, un-American. The phrase “Hate America” has shifted from slur to strategy.
This is not just about name-calling. It’s about preparation. The machinery once aimed at migrants at the border has turned inward to target citizens. The same infrastructure—surveillance networks, detention centers, rapid-response units—is being repurposed for domestic repression. Anthropology teaches us that the state is not only a legal entity—it is a cultural presence, experienced through disruption, silence, and fear. Repression begins not with law, but with the quiet normalization of threat.
National Guard deployments are framed as public safety, but the intent is clear: punishment and intimidation staged for effect. These are not responses to crime; they are rehearsals in control. Legal cover is being sought not to protect rights, but to test the courts—how far can executive power stretch before it snaps? The goal is habituation: to make the presence of armed force in civic life feel routine. The state enters the neighborhood not through policy, but through performance.
October 18 is being framed not as a day of dialogue, but as a test of obedience. Protests are planned nationwide, but already the framing is hostile. Organizers are being branded as part of the “enemy within.” The phrase “Hate America” is being weaponized—not to describe foreign threats, but to smear domestic dissent.
Anthropology of ritual shows that public punishment serves to warn, to intimidate, to shape behavior. The protest becomes a stage, and the crackdown a script.
To show up, to speak, to dissent—each is recast as betrayal. Assembly becomes a threat, speech a mark of disloyalty, dissent a form of treason. Those in power present themselves as patriots and their opponents as enemies of the state. Participation itself is not only discouraged—it is criminalized.
The strategy is to divide America and persecute opponents. This is tyranny dressed up as governance. Civil rights are hollowed out, the Constitution treated as optional. Republicans, for the most part, seem to have received the memo. The silence is telling. The complicity is chilling. Repression does not produce clean lines. It produces victims—many of them unexpected.
When the social fabric is torn, it is not only the opposition that bleeds. Repression does not stop at partisanship; it sweeps up the innocent, the apolitical, the well-meaning. Your aunt, who was at the demonstration, who gives to Greenpeace because she’s against killing whales, is arrested and charged with belonging to a terrorist group. Is this really what we want? It is where we seem to be going. This is how repression works: it recasts dissent as disloyalty.
This is the anthropology of belonging. Citizenship is not just a legal status—it is cultural recognition. Repression redraws who counts as a citizen. Protestors are not merely punished; they are reclassified. The state decides who belongs and who doesn’t. That’s how exclusion works: not through formal bans, but through public warnings. Power doesn’t always declare its enemies—it performs them.
This isn’t bureaucratic drift—it’s choreography. Office closures, arrests, and rhetorical smears aren’t incidental—they’re staged. The point is not only to act, but to be seen acting. The state performs authority in ways meant to intimidate, to isolate, to instruct. The target isn’t just the protestor—it’s the bystander, the colleague, the neighbor who now hesitates. That’s how fear is cultivated: not through sweeping decrees, but through visible consequences. Power doesn’t just reside in law—it circulates through expectation, through silence, through the quiet recalibration of civic life.
The spectacle of control is deliberate. Office closures, delayed checks, suspended grants, and protest arrests are presented as proof that only one person can restore order. Governance becomes theater, with suffering turned into a civic performance. Anthropology of the state reminds us: power is not only visible in moments of violence—it is felt in the rhythms of fear.
What is at stake is not simply policy but the fabric of democratic life. When the rhythms of protest and civic participation are turned into instruments of control, government stops being a shared institution and becomes a weapon. Power works not only through force, but through the reshaping of trust, habit, and expectation. Americans are being taught to trade the expectation of rights for the uncertainty of favors. Citizenship is reduced to conditional obedience.
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