Meet Emily van Lidth de Jeude, an artist who lives on an island and has the most adorable chicken coop you’ll ever see. Those URLs start with emilyartist.ca now; until recently it was emilyvanartist.noblogs.org. But that site, there for many years, is down now, and not coming back up. Why? Well, her email address used to end with @autistici.org (it’s gone too now), and therein lies the story.

It’s because the Trump administration declared that the “Autistici/Inventati” collective hosting Emily’s website and email was a terrorist organization, and blasted them off the Internet with legal nuclear weapons. Here is the A/I collective’s statement. A more compact journalist narrative is Als de Amerikaanse regering je tot terrorist heeft bestempeld: deze Italiaanse internetprovider kwam vorige week op de sanctielijst which is in Dutch but it machine-translates nicely. Emily’s own take, on her blog, is Canaries of Hope. It’s been professionally and personally devastating, vanishing her online history and nuking her email network.

Canadian eco-social practice artist Emily van Lidth de Jeude in her studio, 2023, working on a series about wildfires. Beside her on the floor stands a portrait of her Ukrainian grandmother.

I suppose most people reading this saw the Autistici/Inventati news story and shook their head at yet more MAGA malfeasance. Me too. But then I found out about Emily’s story, initially on her Fediverse feed, and that made it concrete. The wastrels in Washington can reach across the ocean and silence a Canadian creator on an Italian website. With no prior legal process, nor any way to resist, and without fear of consequences.

They can probably do the same to you if you displease them sufficiently. They’ve done it once now and from their point of view it went flawlessly, so why wouldn’t they do it again and again and again? The only reasonable assumption is that they will.

It might be the case that if A/I had been in the US, they could have mounted a defense based on Section 230, but I’m no lawyer.

I’m also no DNS expert; but I know some good ones. So I asked if there were any countermeasures available to non-US entities. The answer: “Nope.” I asked “What about a national domain like .ca?” Still nope, any national registry could be targeted by US legal warheads.

So, I could be taken down by this time tomorrow, just like Emily was. And like her, I’d have no comeback. You too, maybe. I remember, back during the Cold War, we described our part of the planet as “The Free World”. Hard to defend that label now.

This is a politics and policy problem. So in the big picture, the only way to prevent this kind of abuse is for the Americans to stop electing ignorant corrupt lawless narcissists. Starting this fall of 2026.

In the meantime, follow Emily online, she’s fun. And have a look at her art, some of it might look good where you live.