07/04/2025
Censorship is often sold to the public as a necessary safeguard: to protect children, to prevent hate, to maintain public order, to stop the spread of “dangerous” ideas. But scratch the surface, and what you find beneath is not virtue—it’s a deeply rigged system of power, obedience, and selective silencing.
At its core, censorship isn’t about protecting society. It’s about protecting systems. Systems that profit from compliance and punish deviation. Systems that allow the rich and powerful to say and do anything—no matter how vile—because they can afford lawyers, lobbyists, and PR firms to sanitize their words and actions. Meanwhile, the average person, the artist, the dissident, the outsider, gets crucified for daring to speak an uncomfortable truth, write or create something transgressive, or even just challenge the status quo in fiction or thought.
It’s a pay-to-play game, and most people aren’t even allowed on the field.
The laws themselves are intentionally vague—terms like “harmful,” “obscene,” “misinformation,” “extremist”—all entirely subjective and left up to whoever happens to be in power or whoever screams the loudest. One day a book is literature. The next, it’s contraband. One day a comedian is edgy. The next, they’re a criminal. It’s arbitrary by design.
A glaring example of this weaponized vagueness is the Miller test, which is used in the United States to determine whether a work is legally obscene. It asks whether the material appeals to “prurient interest,” violates “contemporary community standards,” and lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” But here’s the problem: who defines that? What counts as “serious value”? What community? What standard?
We don’t live in a monoculture. Humanity is not a hive mind. What’s art to one person is trash to another. What’s disturbing to some may be necessary, cathartic, healing—or revelatory—to others. The idea that a judge, jury, or panel can speak for the full spectrum of human experience is both arrogant and terrifying. No single person, no institution, no temporary cultural consensus has the right to dictate what all of us are allowed to imagine, express, or create. The Miller test enshrines subjectivity as law, and that is a direct pipeline to censorship by personal bias and ideological agenda.
Why? Because vagueness is a tool. If the rules are clear, they can be challenged. But when they’re murky, they can be bent to punish whoever the mob—or the elite—decides is problematic. It’s not about principles. It’s about leverage.
Power uses censorship selectively. The rich, the famous, the politically aligned—they get passes. They can say horrific things or create deeply disturbing work, and it’s called “art” or “critique” or “nuanced.” But when someone without that protection says the same thing? They're “radical,” “dangerous,” “a threat to society.” The difference isn’t in what’s said—it’s in who says it, and how much power they hold.
And perhaps the most dangerous extension of this selective silencing is the criminalization of fictional content. Let’s be crystal clear: fiction is not reality. Fictional characters are not real people. No matter how disturbing, offensive, or upsetting a story may be, if there is no real victim—no actual harm—then there is no crime. To arrest, fine, or imprison someone for creating, imagining, or depicting something that exists only within the realm of imagination is not just absurd—it’s dystopian. It's a thought crime disguised as moral justice.
Storytelling has always been how we explore the limits of human nature. From Greek tragedy to religious parables to modern horror, fiction lets us confront the unthinkable in safe symbolic form. To censor it because it makes someone uncomfortable is to say, “you are not allowed to imagine this.” That is tyranny in its purest form—not protection, not justice.
Censoring fiction is not about protecting victims. It’s about manufacturing them where none exist. And in doing so, the state or the mob inserts itself as both victim and executioner. That is not moral clarity—it is authoritarian theatre.
This double standard doesn’t just suppress expression—it regresses society. When fear replaces dialogue, growth dies. When people are afraid to explore difficult topics, to express uncomfortable truths, to create controversial fiction, we lose the ability to process the darkest aspects of the human experience in any meaningful way. We become superficial, fragile, robotic. Culture becomes corporate. Art becomes propaganda. Expression becomes a risk—unless you’re already protected by money, connections, or ideological purity.
And the worst part? Many people cheer it on, thinking they’re on the “right side.” They don’t realize that once the mechanisms of censorship are normalized, those same weapons can—and will—be turned on them. The mob has no loyalty. The system has no conscience. Today it silences the people you hate. Tomorrow, it silences you.
Censorship doesn't care about truth. It doesn't care about safety. It cares about silence—the silence of dissenters, of questioners, of artists, of thinkers who don’t conform. And in a world where the loudest voices are the ones most shielded from consequence, we must ask: who gets to speak freely, and why?
The answer is clear. Freedom of expression isn’t distributed based on ethics or harm—it’s distributed based on power. If we don’t push back against that, if we don’t fight for the right to think, to speak, to imagine—even when it’s messy, uncomfortable, or transgressive—we are complicit in building a society that is as fake as it is afraid.
And make no mistake: a society built on fear of speech is one that has already lost the war for its soul.
This affects YOU! 🖤