Words.
They are one of the things authoritarian regimes fear most. Not armies. Not money. Words.
Words can name what power wants left unnamed. They can expose what is hidden, turn private fear into a public question and challenge the stories those in power prefer. That is why regimes of every kind — fascist, communist, theocratic, personalist — have sought to control language. Control the words, and you begin to control how people understand reality.
The question is never abstract: Who decides what may be said?
In the United States, the First Amendment was designed to make the answer clear: The government cannot simply silence ideas because it dislikes them. But practice is always more complicated than principle.
During Donald Trump’s second presidency, the conflict between the White House and the press has sharpened again. Trump has repeatedly attacked news organizations over coverage he considers unfair, turning “FAKE NEWS” from a complaint about accuracy into a broader challenge to the legitimacy of critical journalism itself.
That rhetoric has increasingly been accompanied by concrete restrictions on access. On September 18, he announced that CNN, MS NOW and Politico would be banned from the White House. The next day, reporters from those outlets were denied access.
Calling a news organization “fake” is not, by itself, censorship. Political leaders are free to criticize journalists. But when criticism becomes a sustained attempt to delegitimize the press, the terms of the debate can shift. Scrutiny can begin to look like bad faith, and investigation can be framed as an attack.
And access matters. Journalists need to be present to question officials, observe decisions and report on power. When access is withdrawn in response to critical coverage, rhetoric can become a practical constraint on journalism.
Watching this as a Bulgarian journalist, the dynamic feels familiar.
During the years in which Boyko Borisov — Bulgaria’s long-serving former prime minister, who served three terms between 2009 and 2021 — dominated public life, he frequently responded to journalists with ridicule or dismissive language.
In February 2020, after reporters questioned him about his conflict with then-President Rumen Radev, Borisov compared the journalists following him and asking questions to “misirki” — female turkeys — and imitated their calls: “tur-rur-rur.” The remark was not an argument about the accuracy of their reporting. It was a way of mocking the journalists and the act of questioning him. The word “misirki” then moved beyond the original remark and entered everyday political and public language, increasingly being used as a derogatory term for journalists.
That distinction matters. A journalist’s basic function is to ask questions, including questions a politician may not want to answer. When that act itself is mocked or portrayed as illegitimate, pressure on journalism does not necessarily begin with censorship. It can begin by making the journalist — rather than the question — the problem.
But power does not always need to control language directly. Sometimes it can teach society to do it for itself.
An ideology can do something more subtle than command belief. It can teach people to hear a word not for what it describes, but for what it supposedly reveals about the person speaking. A description becomes a signal; a question becomes a political stance; a neutral statement becomes evidence of which side you belong to.
As political disagreement hardens into social identity, people begin monitoring and correcting one another, increasingly aware of which words might place them in the wrong camp. At that point, political parties do not need to invent every division — they can benefit from boundaries society has learned to enforce against itself.
Language stops being only a way to describe reality and becomes a tool for sorting people.
This is quieter than state censorship. No law is passed, and no official issues an order. The pressure operates through social and professional consequences — through the fear of being misunderstood, condemned or excluded.
This distinction matters deeply to me. For more than four decades under communism, the Bulgarian state tightly controlled public information. But control relied on more than state institutions. Neighbors watched neighbors, friends noted careless remarks and relatives warned one another about using the wrong words. The system taught citizens to police the speech around them — and, ultimately, their own.
America’s constitutional protections provide a limit on government power that communist Bulgaria lacked. They do not, however, shield anyone from social consequences or ideological polarization.
History trains the eye to see that the space for speech can shrink in different ways. Political power can discredit the press from above. Ideology can encourage society to police language from within. And political division can make that self-policing useful to those competing for power.
The mechanisms differ, but together they can change what people are willing to say — and eventually, what they allow themselves to think aloud.
Societies revise their vocabulary, and challenging discrimination matters. But there comes a point where people stop asking whether a statement is true and ask only whether they are allowed to say it.
Nobody has to formally ban the sentence.
A journalist simply decides not to write it.
The most consequential form of censorship may not always be someone else silencing you. Sometimes it is the moment you begin to silence yourself.
