2025: The Year the Government Stopped Pretending It Cared About Freedom 

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Some years chip away at freedom. Others tear the mask off.

2025 was the year the government stopped pretending it was constrained by the Constitution—when executive power expanded openly and unapologetically, surveillance became ambient, dissent became dangerous, and the machinery of militarized government embedded itself into daily life.

Under Trump 2.0, the erosion of civil liberties gave way to something more brazen: the dismantling of constitutional government itself.