What, me worry? - free speech & indies

[Hopscotch]

This is not meant to be political but to ask, Could indies be targeted?:

US writers at growing risk of crackdown on free speech, says PEN America
Guardian   24 Apr 2025

"Writers in the US are at growing risk amid a worldwide crackdown on free speech that has begun to spread to countries previously renowned for unfettered expression and openness..." according to PEN America's "annual Freedom to Write index report, which showed that the number of writers jailed worldwide had jumped for the sixth year running to 375 in 2024, compared with 339 the year before...."

The report "records China as once again the biggest jailer of writers,...Iran is the second highest incarcerator,...Israel is in fifth place,...[followed by] Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey...While making no explicit mention of threats to free speech" in the U.S., "its text clearly hints at the potential for a future clampdown."

"'As geopolitics continue to shift and authoritarian tendencies spread to countries that were once considered safely anchored in openness, we are seeing that free expression, and therefore writers, are increasingly in the crosshairs of repression in a much wider range of countries,' says the index...."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/24/pen-america-writers-censorship

[Bill Hiatt]

Unless you're writing nonfiction that a certain politician could construe as defamation, I don't think you have to worry. That same politician is running into all kinds of issues right now. I think the number of non-political fights he's going to want to pick in the foreseeable future will be very limited.

The US has gone through periods of time during which freedom of expression has been more limited. But the overall trend has been in favor of freedom, at least in most instances. Some things, like pornography, have been put into a separate category.