As a professor who prepares future English teachers, I often return to the dog-eared copy of Orwell’s 1984 I first read in high school. The marginalia from my teenage self—highlighting passages about thoughtcrime and crimespeak—now reads less like notes on dystopian fiction and more like premonitions of our present moment. Those penciled exclamation marks and underlined warnings about language as a mechanism of control have become, for me, a map of our current political landscape. What once seemed like literary hyperbole has transformed into pedagogical reality as my students and I navigate an increasingly restricted intellectual landscape.
The words we forbid reveal the thoughts we fear. When the Trump administration issues executive orders labeling discussions of race, gender, and ethnicity as “divisive” and “anti-American,” they are not merely regulating speech but attempting to excise certain modes of thinking from our collective consciousness. When government documents characterize acknowledgments of racism, patriarchy, and white supremacy as “distorted narratives” that undermine national unity, they engage in what Orwell called “reality control”—the ability to hold power by controlling the past and, through it, the present.
This linguistic sleight-of-hand is not unprecedented in American history. In 1798, the same generation that enshrined freedom of speech in the Constitution passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, criminalizing “false statements” critical of the federal government. The fragility of their commitment to free expression revealed a fundamental contradiction in the American experiment: we simultaneously elevate and fear the power of words.
More than a century later, during the First World War, the Sedition Act of 1918 made it illegal to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government or military. Poets, journalists, and academics found themselves imprisoned for the crime of arranging words in patterns that challenged authority. The journalist Walter Lippmann observed that the government had effectively declared that the truth is what it says is true. These historical precedents are cautionary tales, but they are also templates for our current moment, replaying with new technological capabilities but the same fundamental fear of uncontrolled discourse.
Today, another century later, as the Trump administration moves to invoke the still-existing Alien Enemies Act, I think of James Baldwin’s warning that “ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” The power to determine which ideas may be spoken is inseparable from the power to determine which realities may be acknowledged.
In my classroom, where I teach students who will soon lead their own English classes, these are not abstract concerns. When I prepare them to teach George M. Johnson, Angie Thomas, or Aiden Thomas, I am acutely aware that these texts engage with precisely the “divisive concepts” that current executive orders seek to banish from educational spaces. The study of literature—with its insistence on confronting complex, often uncomfortable truths—is increasingly positioned as an act of intellectual rebellion.
The chilling effect is already visible. My colleagues in numerous states have been asked to revise syllabi to avoid “controversial” texts. Teacher candidates in my classes question whether analyzing certain works might endanger their employment. International students are growing hesitant to express their perspectives on American culture, aware that the Alien Enemies Act could transform critique into legal vulnerability.
This is the insidious genius of thought policing: it operates most effectively when externally imposed censorship transforms into self-censorship. As Margaret Atwood observed about her own dystopian vision, The Handmaid’s Tale, “true dictatorships come in bad times, when people are ready to give up some of their freedoms to someone—anyone—who can take control and promise them better times.”
What the United States is witnessing is precisely this bargain being struck in our educational institutions and public discourse. The promise of harmony through silence is seductive, especially in turbulent times. But this tranquility comes at the devastating cost of intellectual honesty and historical reckoning. When educators begin questioning what truths they can safely teach, when students hesitate to explore controversial ideas, when researchers shy away from uncomfortable questions—the machinery of thought control has already accomplished its purpose without firing a shot.
The language of these executive orders—with their Orwellian inversions where acknowledging historical racism becomes “divisive” while enforced silence becomes “unity”—represents what the author Toni Morrison fought hard against. In her essay, Peril, she argued that authoritarian regimes, dictators, and despots “are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media. Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public. Writers who are unsettling, calling into question, taking another, deeper look. Writers — journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights — can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace, and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.
Morrison’s warning resonates in our current climate, where legislative efforts to restrict classroom discussions about racism, sexual identity, and historical injustice are framed as protecting children or promoting neutrality. These measures construct an artificial reality where America’s complex history is flattened into a sanitized narrative devoid of meaningful conflict or moral complexity. The danger in this approach is not just what is explicitly forbidden, but what gradually becomes unthinkable. When entire vocabularies for describing lived experiences are deemed “inappropriate” for educational settings, we are not protecting innocence but manufacturing ignorance—a far more insidious form of control than outright censorship because it masquerades as concern while doing the work of suppression.
Literature has always understood what authoritarian impulses often miss: that language constrained becomes language empowered. When words are forbidden, they gain rather than lose their potency. Every banned book becomes a beacon; every criminalized thought becomes a rallying cry. And this is exactly why Morrison said “The historical suppression of writers is earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself. And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear sings that something important has taken place.”
As an educator committed to preparing English teachers who understand the power of words, I believe we must resist this renewed effort to criminalize thought through language. We must insist that critical engagement with uncomfortable truths is not divisive but essential—not un-American but fundamentally American in its commitment to the proposition that ideas, like people, should be judged not by their conformity but by their content.
The lesson of the Sedition Acts echoes through literary history: when we criminalize thoughts and opinions, we do not strengthen democracy—we betray its most essential promise. A truly literate nation is one confident enough to read its own story critically, brave enough to revise its narrative when necessary, and wise enough to recognize that its greatness lies not in what it silences but in what it amplifies. As citizens, our resistance must be both intellectual and practical: teaching banned books, supporting affected colleagues, challenging restrictive policies through legal channels, and insisting that genuine education requires encountering ideas that unsettle rather than merely affirm. The classroom must remain a space where difficult truths can be spoken—not because divisiveness is the goal, but because unity without honesty is merely another form of oppression.
Truth Dr. T!!👏🏾👏🏾💪🏾