Tyrant's manual - an advanced study
There are several ways to deal with unruly dissenters:
1: You ignore them and ban them from speaking their mind publicly. You don’t have to imprison them to rob them of their freedom of speech. This method has been very effective to this point. Or was, until recently.
2: You ridicule them, attempting to make them the laughing stock of their neighborhood and given country. Also very effective until recently. But evidently working less and less.
3: You send your uniformed bullies, the police, after them, making sure any protester is beaten up with impunity. No policeman is punished, of course, but the protesters are... for being beaten to a pulp by your thugs. You make sure they're sentenced to long prison terms on triumphed up charges.
Even this has not worked that good recently, though. People keep returning to the streets and other venues, protesting against your tyranny.
4: You as a tyrant are now growing desperate. What to do, what to do. The velvet glove is off, that much is certain. Old methods or old approaches to tyranny are no longer working or working as great as they used to. You sit down with your advisers and co-conspirators. Your masters in the shadows bring forward a bold scenario, one they have yearned to put in motion for quite some time, and they have waited a long time for a willing tool such as yourself.
5: Invent a worldwide terrorist organization. Blow up a lot of people in several countries and blame it on imaginary enemies. Do a coup in a neighboring country to one of your major perceived enemies. Make that country wage a proxy war against that country. Use the establishment propaganda in your own country to its max capacity. strike the people in your country with panic and fear.
6: Now, you are cooking. You are now able to change laws at will, with the support of a mostly clueless and fearful mainstream population. The laws have always worked in your favor, have always been made by tyrants to benefit tyrants, but now you take it all a step further.
7: Your plan works better than you could dream of. You invade blameless countries. You bomb and kill children by the thousands. You pick up people from all kinds of places and incarcerate them without any kind of official process. And very few people react much to your tyrannical ways. Very few are protesting much at all, and you are styling, rolling over any dissent. You pick from a number of non-fiction and fiction regimes throughout history to make your own roadmap of tyranny and oppression. Dissenters can now be totally silenced without much added effort on your part. Any critical voice is either a terrorist or abetting terrorists and other vile enemies of the state. In a society dominated by fear you get your will across.
8: Congratulations. You're now ready to go to the next level. The control of the entire world, of every big and small aspect of the modern inhuman society seems to be within your grasp. Your dream of being king of everything you survey is now very close. You can taste the great reward in the saliva flooding your mouth.