Censorship is flooding our society.

However, like soma in Brave New World, many Americans are pacified by what we see online. TikTok videos, watching other gamers, and videos of the cute things that wild animals do on Instagram. If it’s the mainstream news, we’ll see a car crash, a house fire, the weather, traffic reports. If it’s political, it is too often framed as though it’s the same old, same old—similar to the mid-1990s welfare reform debate or the discussion around the Iraq War in 2002-2003, rather than focusing on Americans’ and American residents’ constitutional freedoms, human rights, and freedom of speech at stake.

Some Americans are in a state of shock, hoping that in three and a half years things will get better. Others are in a state of denial, pretending that things aren’t actually on a blitzkrieg train to fascism. Others say, well, it’s not pretty but in the end society will benefit. Then, of course, the diehard MAGAs, with Dr. Panglossian eyes, think that we are now living in the best of all possible worlds.

Yet, this begs the question: What kind of times are we living in?

The country that claimed it started modern democracy has now seemed to have begun its trip into the dustbin of history, heading toward authoritarian fascism.

Where people who pick blueberries and harvest fall crops are disappeared by masked men.

Where protesters are thrown to the ground if they are Americans. If they are not citizens, then they could be rounded up, detained for hundreds of days, and deported.

Where media heads, less beholden to the concentration of power, are cancelled for criticizing the wannabe dictator’s MAGA movement. But wasn’t there a right-wing push against so-called "cancel culture"?

Where federal scientists’ jobs are eliminated and the public is told to question vaccines that save millions of........

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