An old friend I still love and try to respect wrote me The Email. You may have gotten one, or been cornered by a family member or by a professor. The subject line was “Can’t Wait Any Longer” and the contents blasted me for supporting some of the president's policies.

It is all happening just like with the Nazis when people like me just stood by and let it happen. Worse yet, he wrote, because I write for The American Conservative, I am aiding the downfall by dedicating myself to praising Trump’s “amazingness.” He questioned my commitment to the First Amendment because I did not think Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension was a national crisis and because I support enforcing immigration law. The words slapped on me may sound familiar to you, and if you have not been condemned as a fascist individually, you should recognize what my friend wrote from any taste of social media or mainstream media you’ve gotten lately.

Here’s a slightly revised version of what I wrote back to my friend.

Let’s start with some uncomfortable facts. Chief among them is Trump is deporting fewer people than Obama. He’s just “louder and meaner,” as the Washington Post said this summer. “You have seen the blizzard of scary images,” said the Post, “immigration agents taking parents away in front of their kids, masked officers raiding neighborhoods, men detained in remote centers, but here is the surprising fact behind the mayhem: Donald Trump has deported fewer people per month than Barack Obama did, and barely more than Joe Biden during a similar span last year.” The media you consume just front-pages the Trump story and more or less ignored the Obama and Biden ones.

The same was for Trump 1.0’s immigration cause célèbre, “kids in cages.” You remember, right? Trump separated families at the border and locked children in cages. Yet you ignored the fact that the policy started under Bill Clinton and continued under Obama through to Trump. What really happened is Bill Clinton’s 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which set broke records for numbers of immigrants detained. Next up was George W. Bush’s 2005 Operation Streamline, a plan to prosecute all illegal entrants without exceptions. But to avoid logistics snarls and bad optics, the program made exceptions not written into the law for adults traveling with children. Naturally large numbers of economic migrants started showing up with somebody’s child in hand as a “get out of jail free” card.

Caught off-guard by an influx of asylum seekers from Central America, the Obama administration in 2014 established then-legally permitted family detention centers to hold parents and children in cages, indefinitely if need be, to deter others. If kids came without their parents or in the hands of human traffickers, or if their parents were criminally dangerous, they were held alone. The program ended with a 2016 court decision that ordered the release of most detained families and largely prohibited the family detention facilities. Adult men, women, and children would be detained separately in the future. Children and adults cannot legally be detained together, though such detention was permitted in the Obama era and earlier under the Flores Settlement.

Most parents arrested at the border are criminally charged with illegal entry. Due process laws do not allow children to be kept with their parents because the child is not being prosecuted. That’s why the policy continues even today, though you do not hear about it. Today you bleat on Facebook in empty symbolic opposition to the nasty rhetoric from Trump—you “resist” by spelling it tRump, don’t you?—and demand the United States not enforce its immigration laws. (But what about us being a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants?)

You demand we somehow abolish ICE, just as a few years ago you wanted to defund the police and let people breaking the law run wild. I watched a mob shatter windows of uninvolved businesses in support of what you believed. But you are the one who likes to invoke Kristallnacht when you cherrypick slogans from a very different, very complex history. Best to read deeper into Orwell then the triggering parts of 1984; in his Politics and the English Language, he bemoaned that the “word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”

And Jimmy Kimmel is back on the air. If our government is controlled by authoritarians, they are very bad at it. Many people claim the couple days’ boycott of Disney was responsible for Kimmel’s return, which eviscerates the theory that Disney feared the government so much they canceled Kimmel in yet another step on the road to authoritarianism. If the government threat was ever real, they could just follow through on it now.

I’ve been to real authoritarian countries, and read many books cover-to-cover about the rise of Nazism. Real authoritarians do not act slowly; they bring the weight of the state down harshly and quickly. They shoot comedians; they do not force them off the air for all of six days. They torture their political enemies. They control the Internet. Yet I visited Iran and could read my blog there at a time when our own State Department was firewall-blocking its employees’ access to my site and had removed my book on Iraq from its library. I was no longer welcomed by The Nation, a very liberal outlet, after I opposed an editorial of theirs literally condoning punching Nazis in the head to silence their free speech after Richard Spencer was so assaulted at Trump's first inauguration.

A few years ago then-liberal Twitter banned me, as they did many others up to and including the president himself, a tactic called “deplatforming” that liberals proudly promoted. My specific offense was to criticize journalists for carrying the government’s propaganda leading into the Iraq War. I was only reinstated to what is now X by Elon Musk after I wrote an open letter to him. People defending my cancellation said to me, “Hah-hah on you, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies.” (Nor did it, apparently, when ABC earlier deplatformed Roseanne and Bill Maher.) I don’t hear them say such things about Colbert and Kimmel. Just that Sinclair and Nexstar, private companies, are run by fascists. For what it’s worth, Kimmel himself once commented that Roseanne deserved to be canceled. He tweeted Barr was “obviously not well” and sarcastically asked people to remember “mental health issues are real.”

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You just hate Trump. He says things that he cannot enforce to anger people he does not like; it’s called hyperbole. But close to half the people in America voted for him and are seeing many of the policy changes they wanted, especially on immigration. Biden made similar dramatic changes, allowing some 10 million people to cross the southern border. But nobody complained about that because it wasn’t “authoritarianism”—which is to say you agreed with it. And, by the way, why do you support illegal immigration so vehemently? It must be human rights, though no other country allows such unfettered immigration, especially the ones you faux want to immigrate to, like Canada with its strict points system (including French and English language tests) that will exclude most Americans.

Oh, I get it, maybe you support illegal immigration because you like having your lawn cut cheaply and your TexMex cooked up at a discount by someone earning sub-minimum wage. Or maybe it has something to do with supporting the trafficking of women and girls that runs hand-in-hand with the “good” kind of illegal immigration. You ignore the loss of over 7,000 children inside America, some potentially to sex traffickers, due to Joe Biden’s immigration policies. Hopefully you don’t support “human rights” as implemented in New York City, where nearly every block has its Asian “massage parlor.” Does it feel good that the young girl behind the curtain paid to grope at men is doing it to pay off a smuggler's debt?

Your “deeply held beliefs” are mostly shallow and based more on media manipulation and emotional exaggeration than facts. And you fail the most basic test of all—that free speech must be defended no matter its content or who is speaking. So I’ll see you around, old friend. Maybe go a bit easier on the social media until then.