In September, Bari Weiss had a modest position in the media landscape as the proprietor of the Free Press. It’s a relatively minor news outlet combining center-right commentary on America’s culture wars with a fanatical devotion to defending the State of Israel. In October, David Ellison, the owner of media behemoth Paramount Skydance, bought the Free Press for an eye-popping $150 million and appointed Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News.

As the New York Times notes, it’s hard to escape the impression that this was done not just because of Ellison’s ideological affinity with Weiss, but as a tactic for currying favor with the Trump administration. Ellison has been “courting Mr. Trump’s support” for “a hostile bid to outmaneuver a rival company, Netflix, and acquire the media behemoth Warner Bros.” But Trump has used recent episodes of CBS’s 60 Minutes to “suggest he is displeased with Mr. Ellison’s stewardship of CBS.”

Bluntly, it looks very much like Weiss, who’d previously run a small magazine that devoted a lot of its time to accusing advocates for Palestinian rights of antisemitism, was brought in as a kind of political commissar to minimize the amount of programming on 60 Minutes that would displease Trump. And that suspicion was massively reinforced on Sunday, when Weiss blocked 60 Minutes from airing a long-planned segment on human rights abuses that the Trump administration and Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele conspired to commit at El Salvador’s notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration extra-judicially deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants and asylum-seekers to El Salvador, where Bukele had cut a deal with Trump to keep the deportees in CECOT in exchange for direct payment from the United States. The legal rationale was that the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 allowed such deportations without judicial oversight in a time of war, and that the U.S. was “at war” with the Venezuelan drug gang Tren de Aragua.

About half of the deportees had no criminal records of any kind, and according to an examination of ICE’s own records done by Human Rights Watch and meticulously confirmed by the team at 60 Minutes, only about 3% of them had a record involving violent or even potentially violent crimes. They were classified as Tren de Aragua members on the basis of a points system, where detainees got points for having tattoos that immigration officers suspected of being gang-related, even though experts on Venezuelan gangs consistently say that Tren de Aragua doesn’t use tattoos to signal membership and there are no tattoos that reliably correlate to membership.

The video leaked, and it may end up being the most watched 60 Minutes segment in recent memory. If so, it would hardly be the first time that a political commissar assigned to a media organization ended up being so incompetent that they achieved exactly the opposite of their intended effect.

Ironically, the former CECOT prisoner interviewed at the beginning of the short segment seems to be on the same side of Venezuelan politics as the Trump administration. He came as a refugee, complaining of the authoritarianism of the Venezuelan, regime. He had no criminal record—not, he says, even a parking ticket. Instead of coming to the U.S. before claiming asylum, he waited in Mexico until it was time to go to California for his scheduled asylum hearing. Nevertheless, he was detained. His tattoos and his Venezuelan nationality seem to have the been the primary “evidence” that he was a Tren de Aragua “terrorist.”

When the deportees arrived at CECOT, a commandant told them that they should know they were now “in hell.” They were forced to their knees, beaten, and had their heads shaved. They were warehoused 40 to a cell, with no blankets or pillows, and lights shining down on them twenty-four hours a day. They were never allowed outside. Detainees described guards routinely hitting their genitals. The only water they could drink was the same dirty water from the toilets and shower. They were never allowed to go outside. And, they were told when they first arrived, they would continue to live in these conditions until they died. The man who’d waited patiently in Mexico until his asylum hearing in the U.S. recalls being told by the commandant that he would “never see the light of day again.”

Fortunately, that turned out not to be true. The Trump administration initially stonewalled when a judge ordered the return of one of the other deportees, claiming that it had no control over what happened in El Salvador’s prisons—never mind that it was literally paying the Bukele regime to take these prisoners. The prisoner in question, Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, was eventually returned, though, and after a few months, the Trump administration, apparently realizing that it did control these men’s fate, took all 250 of them out of CECOT and sent them Venezuela as part of an exchange for 10 Americans held in Venezuelan prisons. Even so, the ones who appeared in the 60 Minutes segment were taking a real and obvious risk in appearing on camera to document the abuses, especially given that the Trump administration has been engaged in military aggression against Venezuela, repeatedly killing Venezuelan citizens and loudly threatening to forcibly impose “regime change” on the country.

As 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi noted in an email to her colleagues protesting the decision, “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices.” The news team had jumped through every normal hoop and then some. 60 Minutes had been promoting the segment for days before Weiss stepped in to nix it, claiming that it “wasn’t ready.”

A key part of her rationale was that it lacked “critical voices” due to the refusal of Trump administration officials to be interviewed by 60 Minutes. But as Alfonsi argued, the authoritarian consequences here are hard to miss. “If the standard for airing a story becomes ‘the government must agree to be interviewed,’ then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.”

And as bad as that is, it’s even more disturbing that this standard was imposed by an Editor-in-Chief seemingly hired in order to curry favor with the Trump administration. The whole thing looks unsettlingly like state censorship with more steps.

In the ten years since Donald Trump came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower and started the first of his three runs for the presidency, many commentators of the “resistance liberal” variety have made dubious or exaggerated analogies between Trump’s brand of authoritarianism and fascism. That’s never been entirely convincing on an analytical level, and overstating the similarities can lead to defeatist conclusions at a time when it still appears that Trumpism can be defeated through conventional politics. We don’t want people to flee the country. We want them to stay and organize for a political program that can defeat the forces represented by Trump.

Even so, in the last year the administration has often been brazenly authoritarian, dealing very real blows to civil liberties and constitutional government. Just as not having brain cancer doesn’t mean that you don’t have any life-threatening condition at all, the dissimilarities between Trump’s America and literal fascism don’t mean that what’s going on right now doesn’t pose a serious threat to liberal democratic norms. And this CBS scandal is exactly what creeping authoritarianism looks like in practice.