Kelley McDaniel was an award-winning school librarian. She is now retired and lives in Portland with her wife of 35 years.

I started shushing my family for talking about the genocide in Gaza after reading about the arrest and detention of Rümeysa Öztürk in Massachusetts in the spring of 2025.

According to the Guardian: “After she screams, an unseen onlooker can be heard responding. ‘Is this a kidnapping?’ asks the bystander, who appeared to be recording the arrest, footage that later circulated on social media. In separate security camera footage, the agents can be heard responding: ‘We’re the police.’ The bystander replies: ‘You don’t look like it. Why are you hiding your faces?’”

Öztürk, a student, was released after six and a half weeks in a Louisiana detention facility. 

From the Guardian again: “[Judge] Sessions said the government offered no evidence for why Öztürk was arrested other than the op-ed … [that] she co-wrote last year criticizing her university’s response to Israel and the war in Gaza.”

It does not a law explicitly prohibiting free speech to curtail people’s exercise of free speech. The arrest and detention of someone for expressing an opinion that the U.S. government disagrees with can have what’s called a “chilling effect.”

I have definitely felt that “chilling effect.” My wife, who is hard of hearing, was recently talking with a friend over Zoom about Gaza when I shushed her.

“Don’t talk so loud,” I cautioned. “You never know who is listening.” 

She was appalled. “We’re in our home! I’m just talking!”

The next time I cautioned my family not to say anything — outside of our home — was after Charlie Kirk’s murder last month. The things that he said did not align with our values as a queer liberal family, like, for example, the free-speech-chilling “Professor Watchlist” that he and his organization promoted. 

I think my first free-speech-chilling experience happened after President Trump’s election, but before he took office. I had an op-ed published in the Portland Press Herald on Nov. 15, 2024, “Transgender people are not your enemy.”

Since 2013, I’ve had approximately 10 op-eds and 20 letters to the editor published. After “Transgender people are not your enemy” was published, I received my first hate mail. I’m used to the usual trolls in the Press Herald’s online comment section, but I had never received personal hate mail before. “YOU are my enemy,” it said. 

We live in a climate where, as long as it’s targeted against one’s perceived enemies, such threatening behavior is tolerated.

The Trump administration, Republican lawmakers and conservative judges are effectively suppressing free speech with the “chilling effect” of arrests of pro-Palestinian students, the rise of book bans, the circulation of watchlists and even the vice president encouraging his supporters to “call out, hell, call their employers” so that people who say things that government leaders disagree with will lose their jobs. The “chilling effect” is real.

Attacks against free speech don’t only look like the FCC chairman’s threat against ABC and Disney. The “chilling effect” is much more insidious.

Do we really have the right of free speech if we consciously don’t use it out of fear of retribution by the government, its masked agents or its angry supporters? I don’t think so.

It’s taken me a long time to write this particular piece. I needed to understand what I had been doing, as well as why, and I needed to find the courage to speak up about this issue — even in the face of my fears.