The White House has a blacklist.

McCarthyism has returned. It's much worse this time.

Yesterday, we sounded the alarm. And you answered.

In response to my call for a federal investigation into Trump’s revenge Executive Orders — targeting me and others for constitutionally protected speech — thousands of Americans spoke up. You subscribed. You shared the story. You made sure this moment didn’t go unnoticed. And so many of you contributed to our legal defense fund at EndPresidentialRevenge.org.

I cannot tell you how much that means to my family.

But this is just the beginning.

The White House has a blacklist, and it’s putting democracy in grave danger.

Seventy years ago, Senator Joe McCarthy rose to power by accusing Americans of being “un-American.” No proof. No trial. Just the power of the microphone and a list. Writers. Artists. Veterans. Public servants. Their names were circulated. Their jobs were taken. Their reputations destroyed.

Contemporaries came to call it “the blacklist.”

Now, it’s happening again. But this time, the list is coming from the Oval Office. And the penalty isn’t just reputational; it’s legal. The President of the United States has ordered federal agencies to investigate private citizens for criticizing him, myself included.

We need to be honest about what this looks like.

Being on the new blacklist isn’t just an inconvenience. It can wreck lives before an investigation has even begun. Yesterday I decided to talk about that openly for the first time. I sat down with my friend Nicolle Wallace on Deadline: White House to open up about what it’s really like to go through this: the social isolation, the professional consequences, and the emotional toll of standing up when others stay quiet.

You can watch some of our conversation here…

Here’s my big worry, and it’s what I said to Nicolle:

“It’s as easy as the President signing his pen to a piece of paper to order a revenge investigation against an American right now.”

There is no limit to where this could go. The only limit is how many times Donald Trump can scrawl his name on an executive order — directing a federal review against anyone, simply for speaking out. That is not democracy. That is not America. That is authoritarian by its very nature and certainly not something I imagined I would see in my country.

How do we stop it? By standing up.

My wife and I wrestled with whether to push back against this revenge order — or wait to see if it all just went away. We don’t want more drama in our lives, we don’t want public scrutiny, and we don’t want more retaliation from this Administration. But we realized that if we didn’t say something, it would be that much easier for this White House to ruin more lives.

Without pushback, they’ll see it as a permission slip to do it again. And again. And again. Let me be very clear: this is not just about me. Or Chris Krebs. Or anyone else on today’s list. It’s about who ends up on the list tomorrow and whether any of us will be safe if dissent is redefined as “treason.”

I will have a lot more to say in the coming days. For now let me just put this forward: we cannot allow the return of the blacklist. Not in this country. Not while we still have a shot at preserving the republic. America will celebrate its 250th birthday next year. For 249 of those years, we were the paragon of free speech. We were a nation that lived its values by welcoming truth, now matter how pleasant or unpleasant it was.

If you’re reading this, you’re our best hope to preserve that tradition of dissent.

More soon. More truth. More reason.

But for now, thank you.

— Miles