BONUS:When News Sounds Like Weather

On normalization, numbness, and the narrowing of freedom—and what we must do before the concrete sets

Light Against Empire - The Podcast

What I’m Seeing

I have spent weeks reading, listening, and charting the patterns. What I see has frightened me more than any single headline. It is not just the acts of power that should trouble us; it is the storytelling around them—the way broadcast voices sand the edges off the abnormal until it slides across the screen like tomorrow’s forecast. “Another front moving through.” What should land like a siren arrives as a shrug.

I don’t write this from comfort. I write with trepidation. I can feel the old timbers of the republic groan. We are being trained to mistake a constitutional crisis for “more politics,” and we are learning too quickly.

What the Patterns Reveal

Here is what my research has revealed:

1) Horse-Race in Place of Guardrails

First, our media muscle memory is failing us. Strategy talk—who won the day, whose poll ticked up—has replaced the question that actually matters: What is this doing to the guardrails? We get theater in the first act, speculation in the second, and by the third the audience has gone home. The abnormal is packaged as routine. The stakes are treated as a segment.

2) The Firehose and the Numbness

Second, even honest newsrooms are drowning under the deluge. When power floods the zone with claims, news repeats those claims in order to correct them. But repetition is a narcotic. Say “crisis” enough times and the mind files it under weather. It is not a conspiracy; it is an ecosystem that cannot metabolize the speed of untruth. And so the public grows numb—tuning out, avoiding the news, drifting toward influencers who offer certainty instead of context. The result is deadly: people stop knowing the difference between an outrage and a precedent.

3) Law as Costume, Control as Procedure

Third, this normalization pairs perfectly with a more brutal tactic: weaponized legality. You don’t have to abolish the law to end the republic; you only have to empty the law of purpose and wield its husk against opponents. Dress the extraordinary in procedure. Call coercion a “process.” Force the camera to film a signature and call it consent. It looks official and it feels inevitable—two poisons that, taken together, dissolve the will to resist.

The Descent We Are On

This is where my fear hardens into conviction: we are on a headlong plunge toward an entrenched fascist hellscape that, if not checked in the next few years, will become nearly insurmountable. Not theatrical tyranny, but the quieter, more efficient kind—files opened, licenses revoked, audits launched, careers ended, then lives hemmed in by a thousand administrative cuts. The press will not be abolished; it will be drafted. Editorial judgment will bend to “security considerations,” to “public order,” to “balance.” Voice by voice, the chorus will be tuned. When the press becomes an organ of state, platforms like this one will become the holdouts—and then the next targets.

How the Net Tightens

Do not comfort yourself with the fantasy that the net will never be thrown over small publications or individual writers. I have watched that story progress in other places: first the major outlets are captured or cowed; then the smaller ones are accused of irresponsibility, incitement, or “misinformation”; then payment processors grow skittish; then advertisers retreat; then legal discovery becomes the bludgeon; then the little lights go out, one by one, to polite applause.

The Language of Anesthesia

I can already hear the broadcast cadence that will narrate it. Calm. Professional. Evasive. “Controversial steps.” “Unusual measures.” “Critics say.” The language of anesthesia.

Naming the Shape

I do not claim certainty about every fact that speeds by, but I am certain about the shape of the thing we are inside. It is the old story wearing a new suit. Power is consolidating. Institutions are being repurposed. The public is being taught to hear a siren as a lullaby.

What We Must Do Now

So what do we do? I am not naïve enough to think a paragraph can arrest the slide, but I refuse to offer despair as analysis. My conclusions are practical:

• Name the stakes in plain speech. Lead not with personalities, but with consequences: what rule changed, what right narrowed, who is newly vulnerable, where the remedy lies.

• Refuse euphemism. If it breaks a norm, say so. If it breaks the law, say so. If it turns the law into a weapon, say so.

• Restore continuity. Tie today’s act to last week’s precedent and next week’s likely move. Normalization thrives on amnesia.

• Protect the irregulars. Independent outlets, small papers, and platforms like this one must build redundancy now—mirrors, lists, alternative distribution, legal support—before the pressure arrives.

• Practice civic courage at human scale. Show up for hearings. Call the offices. Fund the suits. Teach your neighbors how to read a bill, how to file a request, how to document abuse. The small acts are not small; they are the scaffolding that keeps a roof over the public square.

A Discipline of Freedom

And there is one more thing—more spiritual than strategic. In an unfree world, the answer is not only to protest the chains; it is to live in such a way that your very presence refuses them. Stand so free, so unwilling to bend your conscience to the convenience of power, that existence itself becomes a rebuke. That is not poetry. It is a discipline. It is the practiced habit of citizens who intend to stay citizens.

The Counterargument—and the Smoke Under the Door

I know the counterargument: “The system has always lurched and recovered. This is another lurch.” Perhaps. But there comes a point when lurch becomes lean, and lean becomes collapse. I have no interest in guessing the hour after the roof falls in. The time to shout “fire” is not when the flames lick the rafters, but when the smoke first snakes under the door.

Naming My Fear

I am afraid. I admit it. I fear the day when this place—this stubborn little square of speech—draws a bureaucrat’s eye and earns a letter with a seal. I fear the day when the nightly news reads like the minutes of a tribunal. I fear how quickly people adapt to cages when the bars are draped with flags.

From Fear to Fellowship

But fear is not my final word. My final word is warning—so that fear has somewhere to go. My final word is fellowship—so that warning has hands and feet. My final word is resolve—so that fellowship can work in daylight and in dark.

If the Press Will Not Hold the Line

If the press will not hold the line, then we will. If the cameras will not state plainly what is at stake, then we must. If broadcast tone dulls the edge of danger, then our speech must sharpen it. Not to inflame, but to awaken. Not to perform, but to preserve.

The Window We Have

This is my conclusion, and it is not offered lightly: the slide is underway. The window to arrest it is measured in years, not decades. If we fail, the architecture of control will set like concrete, and chipping it loose will cost more than we dare imagine. If we succeed, it will be because enough people—readers, writers, neighbors—chose clarity over comfort and acted as if the republic depends on them.

And it does.

Guard the Last Corners

And if the day comes when the microphones hum in unison and the anchors speak with one voice, remember: there will still be corners where free people whisper the truth. Guard those corners now. Build them out. Light them well. Because once the storm fully breaks, they will be the first places the wind will try to snuff.

Why I Keep Writing

Until then, I will keep writing here. Not because I think words alone can turn the tide, but because speech is how we remember who we are. And remembering who we are is how we remain free long enough to fight.

Dino’s Homilies and Poetry Site

Further Reading: