Michael, you’re asking two separate questions and I’m afraid I’m going to give you unsatisfactory answers

What are we, the American people going to do about it?

We, the American people, don’t know.

I have no doubt hundreds of thousands of Americans are seeing the current status quo as untenable and trying to find a path out of it. Tens of millions of Americans are recognizing the US is a dangerous place to live and the government is antagonistic to the public, and are wondering how they personally are going to survive.

We are in a fascist police state where power is consolidated in the Department of Justice (law enforcement and district attorneys) and the courts, whether captured or just wanting to cooperate with the people they know, are more than yielding. The encroachments of our freedoms by the federal government are a combination of pressure to religious conformity (specifically to a narrow range of Protestant Evangelical values) and also to make it more difficult for the people to start an insurrection. That is to say they know they’re unpopular and are panicking.

Also, in the case of FOSTA, EARN IT and whatever the DoJ is cooking up to kill encryption, they’re old people scared of technology they don’t understand. It’s as much a fear of a robot uprising and malicious haxxorz as it is of trafficked kids.

When it comes to tech solutions, get yourself on a VPN. Get familiar with encryption options that are not contingent on what’s built into your operating system. Know that Law enforcement doesn’t arrest you for what you did but who you are, and once they decide you’re no longer one of the good ones they’ll search for cause to oubliette you. That said, avoid drawing the attention of law enforcement to yourself.

What can we do to forcibly restore our freedoms and rights if we have truly lost them?

The answer to that is well above my pay grade, and requires an insurrection scholar (yes, we have those) to work out some next steps (rather than rioting and razing precincts). Again, some people are thinking about this, seeing that rioting and looting aren’t functional in the long term, and not rioting doesn’t accomplish anything, and more people will die and more liberties will be lost while we watch. So far, I personally have not been privy to any organized insurrections that exist, or ones that are organizing. And that’s likely because they’re laying low while they rally. But I also recognize that movement towards revolution is a slow and complicated process, more than I personally understand, despite my efforts to study historic ones and how they developed.

That said I personally do plenty of research in the name of fiction writing. And that may eventually draw attention to my otherwise boring self. That said, they’ll find some esoteric thing I done wrong and our justice system will put me away for twenty-five years, because more warm bodies in prisons suits it, even if that would increase the burden on the state budget. They don’t care. For now, alleged Antifa crimelords and BLM leaders seem to be their primary targets, and I’m not one of those.