The USA is home to Black people cheering on SS Brownshirts and censorship—and that sentence should rattle the teeth.

We are watching a grim magic trick in real time: history in a cheap disguise, hoping nobody recognizes the smell. The Sturmabteilung once strutted through Germany claiming order, purity, and national pride, while quietly laying the groundwork for terror. Today, the uniforms are worn by ICE, the slogans rebranded, the authoritarian itch dressed up as “law and order” or “free speech for me, silence for thee.” Same playbook. New fonts.

What makes this moment especially tragic—and yes, grotesque—is watching descendants of the historically policed, censored, surveilled, and brutalized cheering for the very machinery that has never spared us. It’s a faith in exemption. A belief that proximity to power will work like a spiritual force field. It never does. The state does not reward loyalty from the disposable; it just delays the disposal.

Censorship is being sold as protection. Erasure is being marketed as morality. And some folks are clapping from the cheap seats, convinced the spotlight will never swing their way. But authoritarianism is an equal-opportunity eater. It does not stop once it’s full—it just sharpens its appetite.

This isn’t irony. It’s historical amnesia with a drumline. And history, patient as a vulture, always circles back to collect.

The strange thing about freedom is that it doesn’t ask who voted for it when it disappears.