Would America silence dissenters? I’ve been reading Heather Cox Richardson since the middle of 2024. Frankly, I thought she was way too optimistic last year. Her philosophy as a historian was that she knew of worse times and that the United States has enough resilience to overcome the awful. But since the last election and particularly since the inauguration, she seems to be more concerned about what is happening and what might occur. This piece from mid-April 2025:In a strange twist, I was actually researching the extraordinary powers of the Department of Homeland Security… for a radio show when Forbes broke the news that the DHS was looking for help compiling a database of “media influencers.” DHS leaders want the database to include journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers, and so on, and to include the “sentiments” of the people in it.
While DHS spokesperson Tyler Q. Houlton tweeted that monitoring the media is normal practice and that “any suggestion otherwise is fit for tin foil hat-wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorists,” many people have helpfully pointed out that, in fact, this is a move straight out of Putin’s playbook, and that media influencers with the wrong “sentiments” get arrested or attacked, or they disappear.
There is no way now to know which interpretation is the right one.
But I do know that it’s a funny thing as an American to realize that saying or writing something could lead to imprisonment, torture, or death. It happens in other countries, of course, and it has certainly happened here at times, but it has never been part of our lives that we had to worry that our own government would, in a systematic way, silence dissenters.
Nah, not here! Right?
The first reaction to this realization is denial: there is no way this could happen. And then it gets personal: there is no way this could happen to me. And finally, the personal turns the idea into a bit of a joke: the concept that I would be important enough to silence just proves that the idea is ridiculous.
But then you wonder. Perhaps every person thinks they’re safe right up until they hear the door slam against the wall.
And it goes on. She’s been put on a Professor Watchlist, “a project of 501(c)3 non-profit Turning Point USA. The mission… is to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom. Professor Watchlist is a carefully aggregated list sourced by published news stories detailing instances of radical behavior among college professors.”
HCR wasn’t all that concerned about being on the roster until I understood how frightened other people were about my inclusion on it, and I suddenly saw that maybe the fact that our government supported the sort of folks who were policing universities meant that the watchlist was a very different thing than I had become accustomed to.
AmeriNZ
My good buddy Arthur, who was born in the US, but who now lives in New Zealand, wrote in response: “The regime absolutely intends to target US citizens who don’t bow down before the convicted felon to send them to an El Salvador death camp. That means that it’s absolutely rational to stay quiet and say nothing—were it not for the fact that there’s no safety in silence, as folks 80 years ago would attest to, had their own fascist regime not ended them. Moreover, the harsh truth is that once something is posted online, it’s forever: Nothing is ever actually ‘gone’ and cannot be erased. So, anyone who has ever criticised the Republican God-King is already on a List. If we’re doomed anyway, why no go out with a fricking bang?”
A US citizen told to self-deport: “‘They want immigrants to be uncomfortable here.’ Nicole Micheroni, an immigration attorney and U.S. citizen born and raised in Massachusetts, has not heard from the Department of Homeland Security since it told her to leave the country.”
Who, me?
Common Sense: “As independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported, White House Senior Director for Counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka said in an interview with Newsmax that the divide between the [regime], which has sent hundreds of people to a notorious foreign prison without trial and disobeyed a Supreme Court order, and those who oppose its actions boils down to a disagreement between those who ‘love America’ and those who ‘hate America..’
“‘We have people who love America, like the president, like his Cabinet, like the directors of his agencies, who want to protect Americans,’ said Gorka. “And then there is the other side, that is on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens, on the side of the terrorists….
“And you have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them?” Gorka said. “Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.”
All of this has gotten me a bit discombobulated. I’ve written some, let’s say, less-than-complimentary posts about the current regime on my little blog, which gets a little over a thousand views a week. But surely, I don’t need to worry. Little ol’ me?
Certainly not. Probably not. Maybe not. Maybe? Despite being a political science major in college, I’d rather write about the arts and music than about politics. But this is the hand we’ve been dealt, so we play it.