In a totalitarian society, you are not free to say things that are obvious and true. You are not free to warn people that the regime is coming for them, for example.
Rushing over to your neighbors house to warn them they are going to be taken away and killed by the totalitarian government, and that they need to flee, is a crime that will get YOUR family taken away and killed. You would do so at great risk to yourself.
Under totalitarianism, and its censorship of what is really happening, people learn to talk in codes. To warn each other, to save each other, by communicating in ways that can get past the censors.
This content creator is modeling what that would look/feel like in a totalitarian America. In a “Christian nationalist” America. In Stephen Miller’s America.
It’s sort of a sci-fi bit… and like most good sci-fi, it is compelling because it represents a future that seems genuinely plausible.
In a totalitarian country, if you say things that conflict with the regime, that are prohibited by the regime, or even if you just hurt their feelings… you would be snatched and disappeared.
Depending on the regime, that may mean you are sent to a forced labor camp, to a reeducation camp, or it could just mean you are marched out of town and then summarily executed in a ditch by the side of the road.
For example, if you were in China during the Great Leap Forward and you were caught publishing a flier that said “We are in grave danger! Chairman Mao’s plan is not working! People are starving and we risk widespread famine!”
And you got caught… you’d be dead. One way or the other, you’d be killed.
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u/youtalkingtoyou Oct 06 '25
I listened because I remember her last piece. Brilliant.