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I grew up in a country where people learned to whisper. Where the walls were rumored to have ears, and silence could mean survival. Under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship, truth was not a right, it was a risk.
My grandfather kept his catechism hidden and slept with his clothes beside his bed, ready for the knock that might come in the night. He practiced his faith in secret, holding Mass quietly in his home or in the homes of those he trusted, knowing that if the authorities found out, he would be dragged away to one of those prisons people rarely came out of alive.
He was Greek Catholic, a member of a church the regime outlawed in 1948 when the Romanian Church United with Rome was forcibly suppressed. Bishops and priests were arrested, its properties seized, and the faithful ordered to join the state-sanctioned Orthodox Church. Public worship was forbidden, but my grandfather, like so many others, continued underground. The Securitatea, the secret police, harassed him regularly and tried to impede his ability to earn a living, but he persevered. He risked everything for a simple truth: that the state may command our bodies, but not our souls.
The regime didn’t just demand obedience; it demanded humiliation. It wanted to break those who believed in anything higher than the Party. Neighbors were bribed with coffee, cigarettes, or soap to inform on one another. The state bought loyalty with scarcity. Fear became the national currency. Everyone watched everyone else, and no one was safe.
I thought I had left that world behind when I came to America, a nation built on dissent, debate, and the audacious idea that power belongs to the people. But lately, I don’t just hear echoes of that old world, I see its outline sharpening around us. The tone is different, the tools digital, but the tactics, the manipulation of fear, the turning of neighbor against neighbor, the normalization of cruelty, are hauntingly familiar.
We’ve watched a late-night host suspended for criticizing political violence, while regulators hint that satire can be “unpatriotic.” We’ve seen a former FBI director indicted amid open political vendettas, and state power used to harass opposition donors and organizations. We’ve even seen the National Guard deployed into American cities over the objections of local leaders, a gesture meant not to protect, but to intimidate. These are not isolated events. They are the creeping fingerprints of authoritarianism.
Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt outline four warning signs of authoritarian behavior: rejecting democratic rules, denying the legitimacy of opponents, tolerating or encouraging violence, and curtailing civil liberties. Protect Democracy’s Authoritarian Playbook expands on them: politicize the courts, spread disinformation, scapegoat minorities, corrupt elections, punish dissent, and erode trust in facts.
These are not abstractions to me. They are memories wearing new clothes.
In Ceaușescu’s Romania, people vanished quietly, journalists, professors, poets, priests, neighbors who asked the wrong question. They were labeled “enemies of the people.” Today, I see teachers, librarians, journalists, and public servants being targeted and threatened for doing their jobs. Entire communities live in fear of raids, of censorship, of losing their livelihoods for speaking truth. Once again, fear is being sharpened into a weapon.
And now, we are banning books, again. When I was a child, my parents and grandparents treasured their forbidden books, volumes hidden away or wrapped in paper, passed hand to hand like relics. The regime banned any book that encouraged free thought or questioned the state’s official history. Philosophers, poets, historians, silenced. The Party wanted to erase inconvenient truths, control what we knew, what we believed. Textbooks rewritten, truth disfigured. The goal was total control: not only of speech and action, but of memory itself.
Today, I watch history being rewritten here, sanitized to avoid discomfort, edited to erase the pain and courage of those who came before. Books about racism, slavery, and the long fight for equality are being pulled from shelves. The story of slavery is softened to obscure its cruelty; Reconstruction’s betrayal is downplayed; the horrors of the Tulsa Race Massacre, and so many others, are erased altogether.
But history does not disappear when you ban it. It festers in the dark, waiting for the next generation to stumble into its lessons, unprepared. When we refuse to learn from history, we guarantee we will repeat it. When we ban books, we blind ourselves. And when we blind ourselves, we become easy to lead, not toward freedom, but toward control.
Democracy is not self-cleaning. It does not maintain itself while we scroll, sigh, or say, “It won’t get that bad.” It depends on us, on ordinary people doing extraordinary things: voting, reading bravely, teaching honestly, questioning fear, and refusing to let lies go unchallenged.
Freedom rarely dies with a thunderclap. It’s bartered away quietly, one silence, one banned book, one rationalization at a time, until even our thoughts learn to whisper.
Those are the lessons I carry. And that is why I speak up, not because I enjoy politics, but because I know what happens when people stop believing that their voice, their truth, and their courage still matter.
We are not powerless. But we are at a crossroads. And the road we choose will depend not on any single leader, but on whether enough of us are still brave enough to defend the light.
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