What happens when persecution wears a blue suit and red tie? When repression is filed through bureaucratic memos and budget reallocations instead of tanks and teargas? In today’s political climate, both abroad and increasingly at home, a dangerous trend is accelerating: authoritarian regimes are learning how to persecute legally. They are not burning books in public squares. They are quietly changing statutes, cancelling or rewriting grants, trying to fix elections and stacking courts. The brutality remains, but it now comes with a cover page stamped “approved.”

This is what I call acceptable persecution, and it should concern every educator, policymaker, journalist, business leader, nonprofit director, and citizen who still believes in democratic governance. Acceptable persecution does not arrive with a dictator pounding a podium. It arrives with polite press releases and legislative summaries that sound reasonable to those who do not look deeper. It takes the language of justice and bends it until the words no longer mean what they once did. By the time the public realizes what has happened, the rules have been rewritten, the oversight dismantled, and the people silenced.

Rewriting the Rules: When the Law Becomes a Weapon

The first step in legalizing persecution is deceptively simple: change the laws. Authoritarian leaders do not always need secret police when they can pass a statute that criminalizes protest, restricts academic content, or authorizes sweeping investigative powers and arrests. The language is rarely blunt. Instead, it is crafted with deliberate vagueness: terms like “unpatriotic” “disruptive,” “illegal,” or “propaganda” are used to create broad and subjective categories of wrongdoing. This provides just enough legal cover to detain, silence, or defund dissenters, even if briefly, without technically violating civil liberties, at least on paper.

We see this in the United States through book bans disguised as parental rights, curriculum restrictions framed as protecting children, and protest limitations rebranded as public safety measures. The laws sound neutral until you look at who is being targeted. The people most affected are almost always those who challenge the dominant political narrative. What is dangerous here is not just the laws themselves but the precedent they set: if the government can narrow the scope of public discourse through legal means, then the line between democracy and dictatorship becomes almost invisible.

Courts as Cudgels: The Illusion of Due Process

The next step is judicial capture. Writing unjust laws is only effective if you control how those laws are interpreted. Authoritarian governments understand this and work diligently to stack courts with loyalists. In these systems, prosecutors and judges no longer serve as independent guardians of the constitution. They serve to manipulate the law to the political interests of those in power. The public still sees trials, appeals, and rulings, but the outcomes are predetermined long before the gavel falls.

This is the illusion of due process. The machinery of justice continues to operate, but only for show. If you are on the wrong side of power, your case may be delayed until it collapses from exhaustion, or it may be rushed through to deliver the harshest penalty possible. In a healthy democracy, the judiciary acts as a check on legislative and executive overreach. In a deteriorating one, it becomes a rubber stamp for persecution, legitimizing actions that would otherwise be condemned.

Bureaucracy as a Bludgeon: Choking Dissent with Red Tape

Once the courts are under control, the next tactic is to suffocate opposition through the slow strangulation of bureaucracy. This method is particularly effective in business, education, and nonprofit sectors. Governments or powerful institutions can use regulatory agencies to bury opponents in paperwork, stall permits, revoke licenses, or impose sudden compliance reviews related to “ROI,” “waste,” “fraud,” and “abuse.” These actions are often presented as standard oversight, but they are strategically targeted at organizations or individuals who pose a political or ideological threat.

This is persecution without the spectacle. No one is dragged away in handcuffs in this part of the strategy, at least early on. Instead, organizations run out of money, programs collapse, and organizational leaders burn out trying to navigate endless procedural obstacles. The beauty of this tactic, from the lawyer and judges’ perspectives, is plausible deniability. They can always claim they are simply following historical procedures. But when the rules are selectively enforced, bureaucracy becomes a weapon as dangerous as any law.

The Propaganda Machine: Justifying Persecution with Fear

Legal persecution cannot survive without public approval, and that is where propaganda comes in. State-controlled or politically aligned media outlets begin to reframe dissenters as threats. Independent publicly-controlled media outlets are close (e.g. public broadcasting). In their narrative teachers become indoctrinators and journalists become enemies of the people. Nonprofit advocates become foreign agents (still to come) although you could make the case that dismantling USAID represents this. Business leaders who oppose the regime become economic saboteurs (still to come) in response to opposition to tariffs and other economic anchors. The objective is to create a climate of fear and suspicion so that the public begins to see repression as protection.

When this narrative is repeated enough, acceptable persecution becomes common sense. If a group is portrayed as dangerous, then silencing them feels like a public service rather than an injustice. The repetition of these narratives across news outlets, social media platforms, and political speeches is not accidental. It is designed to make the persecution of certain groups appear inevitable and even necessary.

Financial Persecution: Starving the Opposition, Feeding the Loyal

One of the most effective yet least visible tools in this authoritarian playbook is financial control. By monopolizing the flow of public and private resources, those in power can punish dissent and reward compliance without passing a single new law. Grants can be rewritten to require ideological alignment. Contracts can be denied to companies, universities, or nonprofits that employ or fund dissenters. State or philanthropic funding can be slashed for organizations that speak out, while well-connected loyalists receive generous subsidies.

This tactic is especially insidious because it is easy to disguise as fiscal responsibility or merit-based decision-making. It creates a financial caste system in which opposition is punished with poverty and allegiance is rewarded with opportunity. In business, this can mean losing access to key markets. In the nonprofit sector, it can mean losing essential operating grants. In education, it can mean losing research funding or program budgets. All of these outcomes can be justified with a spreadsheet, which makes them far harder to challenge in court or the court of public opinion.

The American Temptation: Normalizing Authoritarian Tactics

It would be a mistake to believe that acceptable persecution is only a foreign problem. The United States has shown troubling signs of adopting and normalizing these tactics. Recent days have brought public threats to prosecute political critics (e.g. New York attorney general), attempts to strip funding from cities and institutions over ideological disagreements (e.g. Chicago and New York), and deliberate efforts to empower and politicize law enforcement (e.g. $150 billion for ICE). When these actions are met with little resistance, they do not remain exceptions. They become precedents.

A former president banning reporters from events, suing media outlets for accurate reporting to settle for large payouts, and calling for investigations into political opponents is not simply engaging in political theater. These actions are rehearsals for a system in which legality is weaponized and repression becomes standard operating procedure. Each time the public tolerates this behavior, it shifts the baseline for what is considered acceptable in governance.

The Real Danger: Consent to Repression

The most dangerous aspect of acceptable persecution is that it relies on public consent. When laws are framed as safety measures, when budget cuts are framed as accountability, when speech restrictions are framed as civility, people begin to see repression not as a threat but as a solution. This shift is subtle but deadly. Once the public accepts repression as routine, reversing it becomes almost impossible.

The question changes from “Is this just?” to “Is this legal?” or “Is this efficient?” That change in perspective is how democracies collapse without a single shot being fired. The erosion of rights is slow, procedural, and entirely legal—until one day those rights are gone.

What We Must Do

We cannot meet this moment with complacency. Educators must teach students to distinguish legality from legitimacy. Journalists must expose the mechanics of legal persecution, not just its outcomes. Business and nonprofit leaders must refuse to participate in targeted economic retaliation, even when compliance might protect their own bottom line. Civic leaders must recognize that defending democratic norms is not a partisan act but a necessary condition for freedom.

Transparency must be non-negotiable in funding decisions, judicial appointments, and regulatory enforcement. Court-stacking efforts must be resisted before they become irreversible. Communities must be educated to recognize persecution even when it is dressed in the language of policy and compliance. Most importantly, we must defend the principle that legality alone does not define justice.

What Paramount Did

Even in the cultural sphere, there are lessons in how to navigate and resist acceptable persecution. Consider what happened with Paramount during its merger process while under the shadow of the Trump administration’s regulatory authority. Industry reporting noted that Paramount delayed the release of South Park’s season premiere until after the deal was signed and merger approval secured. This was not about appeasing those in power forever. It was about ensuring that the infrastructure for satire and critique remained intact before inviting political heat.

When the episode finally aired, it targeted the politics of fear and division with the kind of unflinching humor that has defined South Park for decades. Had it aired while the deal was still under review, it could have provided the pretext for political retaliation, regulatory delays, or other forms of legal interference. The delay was a calculated act of self-preservation in service of the long game: defeat the threat to operational survival first, then speak the truth without compromise.

This is an example of timing as a tool of resistance. Paramount did not abandon the critique. They safeguarded their capacity to deliver it. In a climate where acceptable persecution thrives on silencing dissent through economic pressure, bureaucratic slow-walking, and political intimidation, this kind of strategic patience can mean the difference between being canceled and being able to keep producing work that challenges authoritarian narratives. Who knows, they may even revive other unapologetically critical voices, perhaps even uncanceling Stephen Colbert in some future moment when the space for sharp political satire widens again.

The lesson here is not that corporations are heroes of democracy, but that in a hostile political environment, even institutions driven by profit sometimes understand the value of preserving the ability to tell the truth. That ability, once lost, is far harder to recover than a single episode or a single season.

Conclusion

Acceptable persecution is rarely announced with fanfare. It is buried in fine print, hidden in grant criteria, or obscured by procedural delays that appear harmless until the damage is irreversible. It creeps forward not through mass arrests or public crackdowns, but through rules that seem neutral, budgets that seem routine, and court rulings that seem procedural. If we do not train ourselves to read between the lines, we will wake up to find we have been erased from the very systems we thought would protect us.

Acceptable persecution thrives in the shadows of public inattention. It feeds on our willingness to assume that legality equals justice, and on our reluctance to confront harm when it is neatly dressed in policy language. Shining light on it is not simply a matter of journalism or advocacy—it is an act of democratic survival. It is the work of pulling truth out from behind the paperwork before it becomes the official story.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned us that “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.” In our own time, the danger lies in accepting a quieter form of repression simply because it arrives without sirens or soldiers. When we allow targeted silencing to pass as governance, or targeted economic retaliation to pass as budgeting, we are not neutral observers. We are participants.

To resist this, we must make the invisible visible. We must teach students, colleagues, and communities to spot the mechanics of repression before they are normalized. We must question policies that punish dissent, no matter how polished their presentation. And we must refuse the comfort of quiet compliance, because in a democracy, silence is not safety—it is surrender.

The fight for justice is not only waged in the streets or in the headlines. It is waged in the contracts, in the regulations, in the court appointments, and in the budgets where acceptable persecution hides. The only way to defeat it is to expose it, name it, and challenge it while we still can. Because if we wait until the consequences are undeniable, we will have already agreed to them.

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Julian Vasquez Heilig is a nationally recognized policy scholar, public intellectual, and civil rights advocate. A trusted voice in public policy, he has testified for state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, while also advising presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. His work has been cited by major outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and he has appeared on networks from MSNBC and PBS to NPR and DemocracyNow!. He is a recipient of more than 30 honors, including the 2025 NAACP Keeper of the Flame Award, Vasquez Heilig brings both scholarly rigor and grassroots commitment to the fight for equity and justice.