I want to begin with a clarification that I suspect I will have to make more than once in this column, because this is, unfortunately, what my working life has become: I am not angry. I am concerned. There is a difference, and I think the difference matters, and I think the people who are most eager to dismiss what follows are the ones least interested in understanding it.

The New Newmanton News is censoring me.

I recognize that this claim invites a certain kind of response from a certain kind of reader — the kind who will note, with what they imagine is devastating cleverness, that this column is currently being published. In a newspaper. Which they are reading. I am aware of this. I have, in fact, been aware of it since before I began writing this sentence. But I would ask that reader to sit with the point a little longer before congratulating themselves, because the existence of this column does not, in itself, constitute evidence that suppression is not occurring. One wonders whether those who have never had their intellectual independence quietly managed from above are truly equipped to recognize the contours of such a thing.

Let me be precise, because precision is something I value, and something I believe this newspaper values only selectively. Every column I have submitted since the beginning of my tenure has been published. I acknowledge this. What I am asking — what any intellectually honest observer ought to be asking — is: at what cost? Under what pressures, visible and invisible, does a writer learn to understand, before he even sits down at his desk, what may and may not be said? Is the absence of a spiked column really evidence of freedom? Or is it evidence, rather, of a more sophisticated kind of control?

I raise this not to be dramatic. I raise this because I believe in the free exchange of ideas, and I believe that belief is under assault in this city — from the Restorationist Alliance, from the Coalition for Historical Accuracy, from the school board's Track B advocates who have decided that one version of the past is the only version a child should be permitted to encounter. The same instinct that drives those efforts drives, I would argue, the quiet atmospheric pressure I feel each time I submit a column to this publication. The instinct is: some things should not be said.

Of course the Tahumake deserve a full accounting of their history. I have said this. I have said it in this column. I said it once at a forum that Dr. Montoya-Nakamura was also attending, and she did not thank me, which I found instructive. But the question of historical recognition is entirely separate from the question of whether a working journalist in New Newmanton can express a dissenting view without wondering whether the environment around him has been carefully arranged to make certain dissents feel unwelcome, impossible, or professionally costly — even when those dissents continue to appear, on schedule, in print, without alteration.

It bears asking: if a newspaper publishes every column a writer submits, unchanged, without cuts, without requested revisions, without so much as a single editorial note — is that transparency? Or is it the most refined possible form of the thing I am describing? I leave that question with the reader. I find that I must.

I have been writing this column for long enough to understand that intellectual honesty is, in this city, a minority position. I do not say that to flatter myself. I say it because it is demonstrably true, and because the demonstrable truth of it is exactly what I am not permitted to say — except that I am, as you can see, saying it, in a newspaper, right now.

My editors have not responded to this characterization. I interpret their silence as confirmation.

I do not expect this to be received well. My columns rarely are.