Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.

I'm Adam Johnson.

You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter and Blue Sky at CitationsPod. Facebook, Citations

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appreciated as we are 100% listener funded. We do these news briefs in between our regularly

scheduled full-length episodes. And today, Adam, we really wanted to talk about the ongoing

assault on free speech that we are seeing, maybe the most kind of nakedly fascistic

time that I can remember. People are literally being disappeared off the street because of thought

crimes, because of either leadership or participation in anti-genocide protests, or literally

writing an op-ed in a student newspaper, people are being kidnapped

by secret police in front of their families in the dead of night, off the street, and while

there has been some vocal opposition to this, we're also witnessing an incredible silence from

centers of power and people with influence.

Yeah, silence are really kind of half-assed denunciations, I think is kind of the way you sort of,

there's a lot of box checking going on and we'll discuss that box checking, but it seems very low

on the partisan party list. And there are, there are, of course, ways of gauging this, ways of figuring

this out. I mean, first things first, there's been very muted response

with respect to the most influential Democrats

in the country.

There hasn't been any condemnations or mentions

from former presidents Joe Biden of Barack Obama,

...