The American 1st Amendment is called First for a reason

What will occur to let us know when the United States becomes a full dictatorship? How will you know we’ve moved beyond an authoritarian, wannabe king to a true totalitarian despotism? How would you know? 

The answer in today’s 21st Century America may be surprisingly simple: when one becomes too afraid to sent a text to a friend or relative criticizing  Donald Trump and his regime, and when one realizes they’re too scared to post anti-MAGA comments in a social media feed. We can tell it’s now a dictatorship when one looks around in a coffee shop or a restaurant first before whispering condemnation of those tyrants in power. Eventually one will be afraid to say anything negative in public with all the mass surveillance in play.

Publicly placed cameras many of us supported at first to help identify and catch criminals so we feel safer in the streets become turned against the very public they were installed to protect. When armed troops and other federal agents make us the enemy. When assemblies of peaceful protesters are beaten, rounded up, and detained as “enemies, trash, vermin, traitors, radical left terrorists, and invaders” and the Democrats are labeled “Communists,” you’ll know you are living in a dictatorship. If people become too fearful to challenge Christian nationalism, Christian Dominionist theology, and White supremacy, to scared to take a stand for anything woke or DEI, then we’re run by dictators and their gangs.

When regular people start disappearing, when more police than ever before are funded and appear everywhere and appear more heavily armed, we’re in a dictatorship. The state becomes criminal when it turns on us, We the People, and declares we’re the “real” criminals. When one notices there mysteriously seems to be more room inside the prisons for more and more “criminals,” one realizes it’s what happens in other countries where tyrants seize power. When the internet is so tightly controlled it’s used to spy on everything everywhere more than any capitalist corporation would ever care to, it may be too late. When AI becomes the boss tool of the state, and when the economy slides into fitful neglect with increasingly frequent power outages, we will all know we abide under the boots of tyrants. Those boots may well be those of sophisticated, armed robots networked under AI bosses.

The Trump regime quickly established an authoritarian presidential administration. It’s not the first authoritarian, or more accurately, semi-authoritarian regime established by American presidents. Past presidents Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, just to name three, established administrations quite authoritarian in some regards while remaining democratic for the most part. None of them sought to overthrow the US Constitution and the American democratic republic. They sometimes viewed their enhanced power as temporary measures to resolve a crisis. They also greatly expanded democracy to the people.

Jackson took on the Big Banks and help found what became the Democrat Party. Lincoln helped establish the Republican Party, preserved the Union, and ended chattel slavery. FDR revolutionized the nation to save us from both pro-Soviet Communists and pro-Fascist Business Plotters and dragged us out of the Great Depression to help defeat the Axis empires to win the Second World War.

FDR also had Americans of Japanese, German, and Italian descent rounded up and held in internment camps and their properties confiscated in a grotesque violation of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Roosevelt also overstayed; running for and winning a fourth term even while in poor health. Abe Lincoln waged all-out civil war against the Rebels who started it, suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and crushed a Sioux uprising in Minnesota and hung 38 Sioux warriors in the largest mass execution in US history. Jackson ran roughshod over the Supreme Court and did as he wanted including having the Cherokees and other Native Americans from the Atlantic Southeast rounded up and marched all the way to barren reservation camps in Oklahoma. So many died along the Trail of Tears many agree it was clearly a genocide.

Richard Nixon was somewhat different as he allowed paranoia and desire for power to corrupt him. His was an “Imperial Presidency.” Nixon clearly sought to stay in power, but he didn’t want to set himself up as some kind of King. Many thought George W. Bush would set himself up like some kind of American Dictator after 9/11 and the passage of so many acts restricting liberties. He expanded the Global War on Terror around the world. But he held off on invading Iran, and once his second term was nearing the end, he did not seek to suspend elections and welcomed Barack Obama into the White House. In fact, George Bush was so done with being president he couldn’t wait to get the hell out. He was a powerful president who expanded the powers of the Executive Branch, but he certainly wasn’t any dictator. 

Donald J. Trump, however, lusts after power, revenge, and wealth to the point he’s been handing out red Trump 2028 hats for a third and thus illegal term. Nearly every action he has taken since in power has been to do what he wants when he wants as he wants, constitutional checks and balances be damned. His alliance with the billionaire oligarchs, especially with the Tech Bros with their domination of AI and social media, further increases his power. In some ways this is similar to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis cozying up to German bankers and industrialists in the 1930s. Those ubercapitalists often despised the Nazis in private, but, hey, Hitler was good for business and was rebuilding German military might. After a good, cozy snuggle, however, these German business titans found themselves at the mercy of the Nazis. The Gestapo and the SS, for example, both battled and intrigued with other sectors of the mafia state for control over these industries. We see similar happening within the USA these days.

Eventually, and in a short period of time, anyone who openly criticized the governments of Fascist and Communist regimes were quickly rounded up and taken away. If this pattern continues, it is only a matter of time before we Americans will be too scared to openly challenge the MAGA mafia cult entrenched in our governments and businesses. 

As a reminder, here is the full text of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights of the the United States Constitution as it was adopted on Thursday the 15th of December 1791:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

These exact same words still stand today. Are we just gonna give it all up because we’re too scared?
 

William Dudley Bass
Monday 29 September 2025
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth

Copyright © 2025 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.