Hey there! I’m half-Romanian. My mom married my American dad in the old country and was one of the very few to leave the country during the time of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She was stateside when the fascist-communist style of governing fell in Romania.

For those not in the know, Ceaușescu was a despot who was so hated, he didn’t even hire his own countrymen for bodyguards. After decades of abusing and stealing from Romanian people, the countrymen got fed up with him, dragged him and his wife out in the streets, and publicly shot him.

Fun fact: it actually happened around this time 40 years or so ago.

To me, they were funny stories. Or sometimes they were, but they always had a weirdly dark undercurrent about them. Let’s take a look at what I mean by this, shall we?

One such story was how my grandfather waited in line for three hours in order to get an ugly-looking fish to eat for dinner. My grandmother was so horrified by the fish, she threw it out the window. The fish landed on the roof of a restaurant, and it stank up the place.

Of course, my grandmother was the loudest complainer of this.

We didn’t talk about how it took three hours of waiting in line for a fish that no one wanted to eat. We also didn’t talk about how this meant the house went hungry for a short time.

Other stories were about schooling, how police would pick up truant students, or how teachers would beat kids who misbehaved. Mom would often say schooling was great. She would tell me that in communist Romania, they all had nothing.

So the biggest status symbol was what you learned, and the worst fate of all would be to work on a collective farm. No cap, she would still use the threat of, “Do you want to dig ditches like a peasant or a farmer?!” if I didn’t do my homework.

Despite there being no collective farms in America, it still worked on me. The farms she spoke of sounded like hell. The status symbol of a good education was very real back then.

Of course, Nicolae and his wife were famous for being “educated,” as in, stealing research papers done by others and awarding themselves degrees.

The Secret Police were a thing when Mom grew up. She told me that people she knew growing up “disappeared” thanks to them and that they were never heard from again. Some of those people were my relatives.

But somehow, she made this sound funny to me as a kid, too.

She’d talk about how people would ask the secret police on the phone what they thought of a conversation, or how they would follow you, walking, while pretending to read a newspaper. They were famously inept. I mean, how silly is that?

Still, the policing had an odd effect on the people—an effect that is still very ingrained in older generations. There was an eerie paranoia in Romania during this time, not unlike what I’m starting to see now firsthand with stories about ICE.

At one point, Mom dated a guy who seemed very nice superficially, yet he wouldn’t say what he did. My grandfather didn’t like him but couldn’t figure out why. They split up because something didn’t feel right. Neighbors later said that he was a member of the Secret Police.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Romania was the media mom described. People would read the paper and simply assume the opposite of what the paper said, because they were so used to the lying from the state government.

The TV had two things: classical (or folk) music and the talking heads of the state. Ceaușescu’s wife had a show where she would tell people to save more money, conserve electricity, and maybe cut down on toys for children.

The media was entirely state-run, and nothing out of the ordinary was allowed in the country. At one point, ABBA came to Romania. Mom and her friends thought that ABBA were the wildest, most untamed rock stars ever.

I am shocked Mom didn’t faint when she saw Twisted Sister or Alice Cooper, but then again, she may have just assumed they were ugly girls or a comedy act.

In a dictatorship like Ceaușescu’s, you didn’t really have much right to speak the truth. And sometimes even when you were supposed to know what to say, no one filled you in so everyone just rolled with it.

Mom, at one point, worked for the Embassy as a translator and tour guide for government-sponsored visitors. She knew her route well, but one day, they had to change the route.

It was the same day as her boss auditing her. If she said she didn’t know anything about something, it could land her in jail. So, she made shit up to tell the visitors, such as…

She finished the tour and was promptly applauded by a very confused but entertained auditor. Neither could actually correct themselves without losing face and having issues, so they just kept up the lies until the guests left.

Keeping up appearances wasn’t just for tour guides. It was also for restaurants, which were mostly for foreigners and the upper class. The restaurants would offer guests massive menus. When the guest would order, they would inevitably find out that all but one or two of the dishes were unavailable.

Eventually, my mom had to teach my dad to ask the waiter what he would suggest. She also had to warn him not to eat the steak there, since he broke a Swiss Army knife on a steak served to him in a restaurant. It was an illusion of luxury for visitors, and an illusion of good food for Romanians.

In Romania during the Ceaușescu regime, you were not allowed to stand out. Some things, like mandatory uniforms for everyone, actually make a lot of sense to me because they force people to stop seeing clothes as a divider between in-groups and out-groups.

But what got me more was the uniformity in everything, even hairstyles. Mom would tell me that the only people with beards were priests. If a man grew a beard and wasn’t a priest, no he didn’t. The police would stop him, shave it off, and then potentially beat him.

Needless to say, when my American dad went to Romania with his giant beard, everyone stared in awe. Many have never seen a person with a beard without a priest cloak before.

We now have record numbers of people going to food banks for their own take on “ugly fish,” with some families waiting hours on end for food. We’ve also started to see people have their own alleged “Secret Police” incidents with ICE on dating apps.

But what really gets me is the lying.

The lying on the news. The lying on the “official Epstein files,” which is something so Ceausescu-like it’s actually stunning. Seeing the federal government get caught in the act of falsifying documents related to the president is wild and something that actually did happen in the Golden Age of Ceaușescu.

Perhaps the most Ceaușescu-like thing I’ve seen so far was hearing Trump tell parents that they should drop the number of dolls their kids get this holiday. That was something that I would have sworn I remembered hearing Mom tell me that Ceausescu said.

America doesn’t feel free anymore. It feels oddly dictatorial, and in those societies, there is no reason to trust the government, the media, or anything similar anymore. We’ve seen CBS and the New York Times pull state-run media types of propaganda.

This is a sentiment that I’ve started to hear from a lot of people lately, especially with the release (and later redaction) of the Epstein files. I mean, some of those pieces of “evidence” involved false victims, false suicides, and false offenders.

Make no mistake about it: Romania was communist on paper, but a fascist dictatorship in practice. The number one rule of a dictatorship is that truth cannot prevail. The moment the truth is acknowledged is the moment the dictator is in trouble.

This is why the Epstein files matter and why technocrats have been working so hard to censor free speech that calls out bigotry. Without us speaking up, they can keep the Orange Ceaușescu in power. With us speaking up, it gets a lot harder—and a lot less permanent.

So, if you haven’t spoken about it yet, share the leaks. It helps keep Ceaușescu out of office.