The arrest of Don Lemon and three other black journalists by federal agents on January 30, 2026, represents another crucial step in the blooming American autocracy. The journalists have been charged with allegedly violating the FACE act, a law ratified in 1994 that is oddly meant to safeguard the rights of people seeking an abortion from being blocked but also protects worshippers from having their rights of religious freedom infringed. I say ‘oddly’ because the Trump regime will not be enforcing much of this law as written if say the far-right were to prevent women seeking abortions. Instead, this law is being weaponized with cherry-picking of its verbiage as a pretense to undermine the constitutional rights of journalists enshrined in the first amendment.
If it seems that the federal government’s case for these charges is flimsy, it is because it is not about enforcing the law, it is the meant to send a clear message to journalists and anyone seeking to act in opposition to what is happening in this country – speak up and we will come for you. Just like everything else this administration is doing right now, they are testing the waters. So, they come for the minority journalists first to test the palatability and response from the public. They imprison four black journalists because they know the uproar will inevitably be less than if they were white journalists. Now they will sit back and watch the response to see if the pushback against the shitstorm they created is something they can counter or not. If the response is less-than vigorous, they will do the same with baby steps and imprison perhaps a more fringe white journalist and then proceed from there. If the pushback is too great, they will wait until people forget, modify the approach in some way until they find an approach that works.
The regime has been using this approach with the extra-judicial executions that ICE and DHS have been involved with. Before Renee Good and Alex Pretti, there was Keith Porter and dozens of other Hispanic and Asian minorities that died during their apprehension or while in their custody. They did not have to test the waters for the palatability of the deaths of minorities because of course this has been standard operating procedure by US law enforcement since slave patrols began in the 1700s. Push the envelope. Watch the response. Adjust accordingly and then push again. Eventually, it is normalized and becomes assimilated into your daily life until what first made you blink does not make you blink anymore. If you do not think this is how human psychology works, you need only look at the Columbine mass shooting. I was alive when that happened and it was the sickening, keep-you-awake-for-days kind of moment. Now? It is hard to remember even a third of the school or mass shootings in the last year. It is so horrendously mundane and so it will be with the deaths of American Citizens and the harassment and imprisonment of journalists if allowed to continue.
They do not even need to imprison all journalists to shut them up. The point is to scare every other journalist and make them second guess every word they use, every paragraph they write and every story they pursue. The Trump regime wants them all to be thinking “How will this come back on me if I frame this story this way”. There are lots of tools available to harass and get journalists to self-censor. Midnight phone calls to intimidate, threatening colleagues, friends and family members, pressuring companies to fire offending journalists to de-platform them and affect their livelihoods, weaponize the justice department to devastate individuals financially in legal battles. Every single one of these things are already being used against journalists and news corporations.
Autocracy must control the message. It does not work when there are enough loud and credible journalist sources run counter to the regime’s message. The videos of the Minneapolis executions run directly opposite the party line and narrative created by Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino and Tom Homan and this has created a situation where even some individuals that have historically believed the government’s rhetoric or gave them the benefit of the doubt have started to doubt their honesty.
But what if the platforms circulating those sources were silenced entirely? What if Youtube, TikTok and every news agency was forbidden from publishing them or punished severely with fines, firings or imprisonment? I would encourage everyone to read up on the treatment of the press during the Pinochet regime from 1973-1990 – especially the murders and disappearances, the control of the press during the rise of Nazi Germany beginning in 1933, the Russian propaganda campaign leading up to the Ukraine invasion in 2022 and Maria Ressa’s excellent book covering her recent experience with the Duterte Regime in the Philippines. Need an example in our own country? See Bari Weiss’ caving to remove stories from CBS that cast a bad light on the Trump Regime. It is already happening here. Push the envelope. Adjust accordingly and push again. Remember when Jimmy Kimmel was suspended in 2025 for five days and then rehired? That was because the uproar and consequences were too great for ABC and Disney.
This is exactly the level of uproar that needs to meet every instance of their pushing the autocracy envelope. We must affect what matters to these companies – money. Stop clicking on links when you see the offending news agency that caved. End subscriptions. Subscribe to their competitors that are not caving. If your senator or congress person is only paying lip-service and not putting the voting where their mouth is, vote them out and run a progressive who will. Write messages of support, volunteer your time or donate to the Civil Liberty Unions to protect free speech, protest outside the courthouse, offer pro-bono work if you have the skillset. Share this news and others like it with others whenever you can because the algorithms are against it, and you cannot assume they are hearing about it. Make them hear. The arrest of these four journalists is not even the opening salvo in the war on the news and who gets to dictate the truth, but it is a scary step. Do your part, however small you think it is – it matters. Nobody is allowed to be apolitical anymore.
References:
Journalist treatment under Pinochet Regime in Chile https://iranwire.com/en/politics/61048/
Control of press in Nazi Germany https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-press-in-the-third-reich
Censorship in Italy under Fascism. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-press-in-the-third-reich
Russian censorship https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/06/18/russia-growing-internet-isolation-control-censorship
The Face Act – https://www.justice.gov/crt/freedom-access-clinic-entrances-places-religious-worship
Bari Weiss Caving to Trump https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/cbs-editor-in-chief-bari-weiss-pulls-60-minutes-piece-on-trump-deportation-policy-hours-before-air
Jimmy Kimmel Suspension https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/government-pressure-to-suspend-jimmy-kimmel-was-an-abuse-of-power
Media Intimidation: https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/06/media/good-night-good-luck-george-clooney-trump-edward-murrow
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