Trump is the realization of decades of warning about ubiquitous private and public surveillance - that someday, all of this surveillance would be turned to the systematic dismantling of human rights and punishing of dissent.

23 years ago, I was staying in London with some friends, scouting for a flat to live in. After at day in town, I came back and we ordered a curry and had a nice chat.

2/

I mentioned how discomfited I'd been by all the CCTV cameras that had sprouted at the front of every private building, to say nothing of all the public cameras installed by local councils and the police. My friend dismissed this as a kind of American, hyper-individualistic privacy purism, explaining that these cameras were there for public safety - to catch flytippers, vandals, muggers, boy racers tearing unsafely through the streets.

3/

My fear about having my face captured by all these cameras was little more than superstitious dread. It's not like they were capturing my soul.

Now, I knew that my friend had recently marched in one of the massive demonstrations against Bush and Blair's illegal invasion plans for Iraq.

4/

"Look," I said, "you marched in the street to stand up and be counted. But even so, how would you have felt if - as a condition of protesting - you were forced to first record your identity in a government record-book?" My friend had signed petitions, he'd marched in the street, but even so, he had to admit that there would be some kind of chilling effect if your identity had to be captured as a condition of participating in public political events.

5/

Trump has divided the country into two groups of people: "citizens" (who are sometimes only semi-citizens) and immigrants (who have no rights):

crookedtimber.org/2025/03/29/t…

Trump has asserted that he can arrest and deport immigrants (and some semi-citizens) for saying things he doesn't like, or even liking social media posts he disapproves of. He's argued that he can condemn people to life in an offshore slave-labor camp if he doesn't like their tattoos.

6/

It is tyranny, built on ubiquitous surveillance, fueled by spite and grievance.

One of Trumpism's most important tenets is that private institutions should have the legal right to discriminate against minorities that he doesn't like. For example, he's trying to end the CFPB's enforcement action against Townstone, a mortgage broker that practiced rampant racial discrimination:

prospect.org/justice/2025-03-2…

7/

Trump Scrambles to Pardon Corporate Criminals He Once Prosecuted

First the gutted CFPB pronounced ‘Whites Only’ marketing legal again. Now Boeing wants to renege on the sweetheart deal of the century.

^{Maureen Tkacik (The American Prospect)}

By contrast, Trump abhors the idea that private institutions should be allowed to discriminate against people he likes, hence his holy war against "DEI":

cnbc.com/2025/03/29/trump-admi…

This is the crux of Wilhoit's Law, an important and true definition of "conservativism":

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l…

8/

Trump administration reportedly warns European companies to comply with anti-DEI order

The Trump administration has reportedly sent letters to European companies asking them to comply with a U.S. executive order banning DEI initiatives.

^{Tanaya Macheel (CNBC)}

Wilhoit's definition is an important way of framing how conservatives view the role of the state. But there's another definition I like, one that's more about how we relate to one-another, which I heard from Steven Brust: "Ask, 'What's more important: human rights or property rights?' Anyone who answers 'property rights *are* human rights' is a conservative."

9/

Thus the idea that a mortgage broker or an employer or a banker or a landlord should be able to discriminate against you because of the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, your gender, or your beliefs. If "property rights *are* human rights," then the human right not to rent to a same-sex couple is co-equal with the couple's human right to shelter.

10/

The property rights/human rights distinction isn't just a way to cleave right from left - it's also a way to distinguish the left from liberals. Liberals will tell you that 'it's not censorship if it's done privately' - on the grounds that private property owners have the *absolute* right to decide which speech they will or won't permit.

11/

Charitably, we can say that some of these people are simply drawing a false equivalence between "violating the First Amendment" and "censorship":

pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes…

But while private censorship is *often* less consequential than state censorship, that isn't always true, and even when it is, that doesn't mean that private censorship poses no danger to free expression.

12/

Consider a thought experiment in which a restaurant chain called "No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe" buys up every eatery in town, and then maintains its monopoly by sewing up exclusive deals with local food producers, and then expands into babershops, taxis and workplace cafeterias, enforcing a rule in all these spaces that bans discussions of politics:

locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doct…

13/

Cory Doctorow: Inaction is a Form of Action

In XKCD comic 1357, “Free Speech”, Randall Munroe offers a characteristically concise and snappy summary of one of the canonical arguments about free expression: “The right to fre…

^{Locus Online}

Here we see how monopoly, combined with property rights, creates a system of censorship that is every bit as consequential as a government rule. And if all of those facilities were to add AI-backed cameras and mics that automatically monitored all our conversations for forbidden political speech, then surveillance would complete the package, yielding private censorship that is effectively indistinguishable from government censorship.

14/

The main difference being that the First Amendment permits the former and prohibits the latter.

The fear that private wealth could lead to a system of private *rule* has been in America since its founding, when Benjamin Franklin tried (unsuccessfully) to put a ban on monopolies into the US Constitution.

15/

A century later, Senator John Sherman wrote the Sherman Act, the first antitrust bill, defending it on the Senate floor by saying:

> If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.

pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-…

40 years ago, neoliberal economists ended America's century-long war on monopolies, declaring monopolies to be "efficient" and convincing Carter, then Reagan, then all their successors (except Biden) to encourage monopolies to form.

16/

The US government all but totally suspended enforcement of its antitrust laws, permitting anticompetitive mergers, predatory pricing, and illegal price discrimination. In so doing, they transformed America into a monopolist's playground, where versions of the No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe have conquered every sector of our economy:

openmarketsinstitute.org/learn…

17/

Monopoly by the Numbers — Open Markets Institute

The Open Markets Institute uses journalism to promote greater awareness of the political and economic dangers of monopolization.

^{Open Markets Institute}

This is especially true of our speech forums - the vast online platforms that have become the primary means by which we engage in politics, civics, family life, and more. These platforms are able to decide who may speak, what they may say, and what we may hear:

pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e…

18/

These platforms are optimized for mass surveillance, and, when coupled with private sector facial recognition databases, it is now possible to realize the nightmare scenario I mooted in London 23 years ago. As you move through both the virtual and physical world, you can be identified, your political speech can be attributed to you, and it can be used as a basis for discrimination against you:

pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/ste…

19/