Scott Pelley’s Commencement Speech on how freedom of speech is under attack, is getting much deserved attention. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo expands on it. The process of silencing voices in opposition to Trump is well underway — so how can we tell when there is nothing to see or hear?

I want to start this week with a comment about the meta-news environment. It’s a point that may not surprise you. But it shapes everything we’re seeing today and does so with an uncanny silence.

Quite simply, lots and lots of things are not being said or reported because people are afraid to say them. “Afraid” may be too strong a word in some cases, though the fuzzy, murky spectrum separating “fear” from something more like calculation is a key feature of what is happening. I’m far from the first to note this.

But when people do note it it doesn’t get a lot of attention because there’s not a clear empirical basis for it. What’s your basis for noting, at a society-wide level, what people aren’t saying? How do you prove — or, perhaps better to say, illustrate — that reality?

And yet it is happening and it’s not difficult to see it observationally if you look closely in any one place. emphasis added Marshall discusses the evidence of things not seen — and why that is happening. …The basic mechanism is this: The White House does X.

In the world we knew before January, that would spur a reaction. Maybe that reaction would be successful in beating back the original action, and maybe not. But people would talk about it.

The affected group would complain, put out press releases. Maybe that would generate news articles. Maybe that wouldn’t matter, or maybe it would; it would depend on the various mechanisms through which public opinion and political power work.

But now the progress of those steps gets disrupted early on because people worry that, if they complain, the White House will do more of X. The possibility and reliability of retaliation casts a vast penumbra on the spectrum between fear and simple silence. emphasis added Here’s an example: A couple weeks ago, I published a piece on how the Trump administration had frozen all grant payments to Northwestern University.

I was among the first to report this. A reporter named Max Kozlov at Nature may have reported this first. He’s been one of the lead reporters on this whole issue since January.

My point isn’t to claim credit for an exclusive. It’s to note that a lot of people at Northwestern, even people in the sciences, first found out about this from my report. That’s an astonishing fact.

This kind of cut-off of grant payments is totally unprecedented in the roughly 80 years of the relationship between the U.S. government and research universities. And that cut-off is existential for the research components of these universities if not the universities themselves. And yet a significant number of people didn’t even know it was happening at their own university, let alone in the broader research community or the public at large.

emphasis added Marshall sums it up with this: I’ve seen this most up close in the scientific research world. But logic and my limited reporting in other realms makes clear this is happening across the board. In most cases it’s not yet “fear” in the sense people experience in deeply repressive regimes.

It’s the simple reality that the White House has a lot of power and is willing to use it. So even if the administration is already harming you, it could and likely will harm you even more if you make trouble or speak out. At scale that’s a transformative reality.

emphasis added Read the whole thing — Marshall has more to say than the snippets I’ve quoted here. The old movie cliché that “It’s too quiet” should be ringing alarm bells. The media certainly is not.

If you want more, James Fallows has an incisive analysis of the language of intimidation and two ways to respond to it: Kristi Noem vs. Harvard: What Their Language Reveals. Silence is not the only option: a determined response is critical. We are dealing with an administration that uses thug-speech.

After dissecting the words of Noem, Harvard, and the ruling of a judge, Fallows goes back to Jimmy Carter and the importance of what he calls “public language”. Nearly fifty years ago, in what I consider the best speech of his presidency (I’m biased), the late Jimmy Carter said this, at the University of Notre Dame’s commencement in 1977, about the importance of public language in standing up for human rights around the world: I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon.

But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words, and of the ideas that words embody. In our own history, that power has ranged from Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream." In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us may realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted.

The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted. Carter’s words, in this speech and others, endure as a marker of that bleak moment in US history—Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation and energy shock, the works.

But they also summon the ideals that shone through the best moments of the country’s past, and might again guide its future. We are at another bleak moment in the nation’s history. What Carter described as a “totalitarian” threat—people being punished for dissident words—has become a staple of our evening news.4 We look for the words, and actions, that can bring us to better times.

Read the whole thing. Speaking out has never been more important. Words as well as actions matter.