If we want to know who's really in power, then perhaps one way to know is to think about who or what we cannot openly criticize in a reasonable manner...
...without being shouted down.
...without being publicly shamed.
...without being called false names.
...without losing our reputations.
...without made into social pariahs in our own communities.
...without being ostracized in our own nation.
...without having our speech curtailed or even silenced.
...without being fined.
...without losing our jobs.
...without being imprisoned.
...without being forcibly "re-educated".
...without unjust corporeal punishment.
...without being "disappeared" in the middle of the night.
...without being publicly executed.
...without being (shall we say) "canceled".
In China, it is the CCP.
In North Korea, it is the Kim family.
In Russia, it is Putin.
In Iran, it is the ayatollah.
In many Middle Eastern nations, it is Islam.
In the US, are we still able to openly criticize in a reasonable manner people, organizations, institutions, the government, and so forth without significant cost to us or our families?
[O]ne theme in particular dominated all others: the growing tyranny of the majority, the ever-increasing and most formidable barriers raised by the majority around the free expression of opinion, and, as a result, the frightening oneness of American thinking, the absence of eccentricity and divergence from the norm.A perfect liberty of the mind exists in America, said Tocqueville, just as long as the sovereign majority has yet to decide its course. But once the majority has made up its mind, then all contrary thought must cease, and all controversy must be abandoned, not at the risk of death or physical punishment, but rather at the more subtle and more intolerable pain of ostracism, of being shunned by one's fellows, of being rejected by society.
Throughout history kings and princely rulers had sought without success to control human thought, that most elusive and invisible power of all. Yet where absolute monarchs had failed, democracy succeeds, for the strength of the majority is unlimited and all pervasive, and the doctrines of equality and majority rule have substituted for the tyranny of the few over the many, the more absolute, imperious, and widely accepted tyranny of the many over the few. (Richard Heffner, Democracy in America)
