How 2025 Became the Year Of Accepting the Fascist Police State

Drew Wilson offers his retrospective of the year of 2025. Normalization of the police state really has become the theme of the year.

One of the things I’ve been wanting to do again is an article on looking back at the year that was.

It’s something that I apparently didn’t quite get to last year, but if I had to come up with a theme for what 2024 was, it would be the year of government control over speech online. Whether that is through link taxes, the uniquely Canadian Online Streaming Act, Online Harms legislative efforts, or age verification, 2024 well and truly was the year of government online thought control.

So, as I look back and ask what truly defined what made 2025 in the world of digital rights and technology, it became a challenge just based on the headlines. Yes, a major theme was the continued evolution of age verification as it became less about clamping down on porn sites and more about the decidedly broken technology being applied everywhere under the guise of stopping children from being exposed to “harmful” content or the dubious “harmful” and “addictive algorithms”. The thing is, that is just a predictable continuation of last years long running saga on this front.

Another theme I recall seeing off and on is the continuation of online harms. While the Online Harms bill certainly percolated under the surface, a lot of what made the original Canadian Online Harms bill so dangerous had been pulled away. So, while something worth monitoring, it isn’t the nuclear warhead on the internet that it once was.

Then there is the bubbling surveillance efforts through Bill C-2. Specifically, this is known as being lawful access or warrantless wiretapping. While that was raising concerns, there was a brief moment of relief when the Liberal Party of Canada briefly decided that there was too much political baggage with such efforts and split off the border security parts into a separate bill known as Bill C-12. That respite was rather brief as the Liberal party then, once again, began pushing Bill C-2 anyway despite having every reasonable reason not to pursue it.

Warrantless wiretapping is one of those debates that feels as old as time itself. For instance, in the US, there was the notorious room 641A where the main information wire flowing through the network had a splitter installed and a copy of all that information was fed directly to the NSA. All of this without a warrant or legal protection to do so. That happened as far back as 2003 – 22 years ago. The Canadian efforts for warrantless wiretapping dates back longer than my career which started in 2005. So, efforts to turn different countries into a surveillance state is far from anything new.

So, one could look back at the year that was and say that it’s just a continuation of various bad internet policies as government seeks to exert more control over the every day lives of people. The thing is, that just doesn’t sit well with me. 2025 was by no means just a continuation of bad policies. It really was a distinct year and I don’t think very many people are going to disagree with that sentiment.

So what made 2025 so unique compared to previous years? This is something that I think you’d have to peel back the headlines and dig into how the stories were shaped up. It’s the nitty gritty details that made for a sort of undercurrent that flowed beneath the headlines. What emerges is a general theme I’ve been seeing throughout the year. That is the theme of accepting that we are heading towards a police state. It’s not that these things are happening, but rather, that so many people are just shrugging their shoulders and accepting it. I would argue that is the theme that makes 2025 such a distinct year.

I mean, think about it. As far back as March, Trump began getting masked jackbooted thugs to disappear people into unmarked vans. In a normal society, this would be alarming developments where innocent Americans are being rounded up, kidnapped, smuggled into third would country prisons without due process, and tortured because they didn’t agree with what the president said or did. It’s something that just does not happen, yet this year, we have started witnessing such a thing begin to happen. Now, it’s happening at such a regular rate, people and the media just shrug it off as if government kidnapping people for thought crimes is just a normal every day thing.

It’s not just disappearing people that has become normalized. There’s the push to implement a 24/7 surveillance apparatus on social media as the government scours the web for thought crimes, trying to criminalize lawyers representing perceived political opponents, silencing people on the airwaves, the calls for the death penalty for political opponents, the installation of government political censors in news rooms, the media sane washing the president, Trump rewarding the media for their sane washing efforts with a website calling them liars, the government censorship of science journals, the arresting of judges for not ruling in Trumps favour, the arresting of Democrats for thought crimes, the seizing of 10% of Intel with more acquisitions being eyed, and so much more.

A completely sane person would look at all of that and ask how it is possible that society in the US has fallen so far into the gestapo that they live in today. Yet, as we close out the year, people will look at this sort of thing and just shrug and just say that it’s just politics. No it fucking isn’t you dingbats. This is the real time collapse of society as basic civil rights get stripped away by a man child that had absolutely no business running a country. While some people might look at this and argue that all of this insanity is just tied to US politics, that sadly isn’t the case.

A great example of this is the age verification debate. When it comes to age verification technology, when people ask what kind of deployment is needed, the correct answer continues to be “none at all”. Yet, as time goes on, fewer and fewer people that keep a sane mind in all of this. More and more people I’ve seen start arguing that age verification is the new normal (even though it isn’t) and that there should be some careful thought in implementing this technology (even though there is no such thing as carefully implementing such faulty technology). Even people I have respect for in the world of digital rights are increasingly saying that age verification is the future even though it absolutely should not be. As a result, I consider the idea of the government demanding biometric information and tracking everything you do just for the privilege of browsing the web becoming more and more normalized. Some even argue that basic civil rights is just a relic of the past and that we should embrace the police state where the government can monitor your every movement from now on.

If any of that sounds like an exaggeration, then I encourage you to look at what is going on in the UK where the government is, once again, pushing a digital ID law where you can’t even work without having one. The idea is that the government can track your movements both online and offline. The door of tying this to age verification is very much wide open at this stage. I remember telling others about this and I didn’t even get a chance to make a reference to 1984 before they were making those very same references.

What’s more, it isn’t just age verification that government is attempting to normalize. Indeed, with warrantless wiretapping, government officials are trying to rehash the exact same talking points used in decades past to try and sell the demolition of what’s left of the right to privacy. Specifically, the greatest hits of “crime is changing and so should police”, “this is just updating criminal law”, “police can’t keep up with the pace of crime”, “warrants are just unnecessary paperwork that should be done away with”, “it’s just meta data”, and “privacy rights are in no way impacted by this”. You know, the usual obviously bullshit talking points by the government. The reasoning of dusting off the old bullshit talking points is no accident. They figured if the public will believe the obvious bullshit talking points of age verification laws, why not feed these bullshit lines about warrantless wiretapping and see if that sticks too?

With all of that, I think a strong case can be made that 2025 is truly the year of accepting the fascist police state. Efforts to erode basic civil rights in this area is nothing new, but what is new is just how people are beginning to capitulate and say that it’s not worth fighting for basic civil rights. Instead, if there is a fight, it’s all about compromise and trying to get partial civil rights in all of this (even though there is no such thing. You either have things like the right to privacy or you don’t. There’s no middle ground in that.) For some, the fight is just lost altogether and there is an acceptance that basic civil rights is just going to get taken away, so why bother fighting at all? This isn’t asking people to “grow up”, this is asking people to give up everything. Big difference here.

In conclusion, the year of 2025 is the year of the public at large capitulating and accepting the fascist police state. Saying the wrong thing will get you either jailed, deported, or both. People are expecting to have their movements monitored by the government 24/7. The idea of a van pulling up to you and masked jackbooted thugs kidnapping is just something that happens in the US. It’s not that the government is doing these extreme measures to crush descent, it’s that the public is accepting that this sort of thing is just normal every day life now. That is what 2025 represents as far as I can tell.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.