Detroit — Threatened speech, shuttered businesses, reduced consumer choice.

I’ve borne witness to all. The U.S. is emerging from a dark era in which politics spread into every corner of our daily lives — darkness that ultimately enraged the working class, rekindled core Republican groups like small business, renewed civil liberties, and returned Trump to office.

On a grassroots level, I have engaged with everyone from autoworkers to restaurateurs who have felt the cold hand of government in chilling ways, and I’ve experienced it personally (as a cartoonist, businessman, and consumer). Those lessons have given new energy to restore liberty and government accountability, as seen in the first executive acts of the Trump administration, on January 20.

The U.S. has watched aghast as California’s misguided forestry policies made Los Angeles a tinderbox. California regulatory policies are spreading across the nation like wildfire.

In the past four years, the climate cult, led by California regulators and the federal EPA, declared war on our most personal possessions. Gas-powered cars, gas stoves, incandescent light bulbs, and diesel trucks were targeted for elimination. Automakers drowned in EV losses, laying off thousands. Autoworkers, once the base of the Democratic Party, swung to the GOP in the key swing states of Michigan and Ohio.

“EVs were probably the No. 1 issue among autoworkers,” Autoworkers for Trump founder Brian Pannebecker — a fixture at Michigan rallies introducing Trump — told me. The incoming EPA chief, he said, “knows what Donald Trump wants, and a lot of it is easing regulations.”

Ending EV mandates is central to Trump’s “Unleashing American Energy” Executive Order signed Monday: “It is the policy of the United States. . . to eliminate the ‘electric vehicle (EV) mandate’ and promote true consumer choice. . . by removing regulatory barriers [and] terminating state emissions waivers that function to limit sales of gasoline-powered automobiles.”

Cancel culture engulfed newspapers, satirical websites, and cartoonists. I’ve been a writer and syndicated cartoonist for 40 years, lampooning everyone from Trump to Al Sharpton. Yet I was never threatened with personal harm until the fall of 2024, when I penned a cartoon lampooning Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.).

Fiercely anti-Israel, Tlaib has defended the slogan “from the river to the sea” and has tacitly supported Hamas and Hezbollah hostilities against the Jewish state. When Israel blew up Hezbollah pagers, I penned a caricature of a quizzical Tlaib with a damaged pager on her desk.

The cartoon ran in client publications across the country, including National Review. She and her supporters triggered a national, robo-email campaign against me and NR demanding the cartoon’s retraction. My inbox was buried under hundreds of copycat emails that read:

I am appalled by the dangerous cartoon published by National Review, drawn by Henry Payne, that targets Rep. Rashida Tlaib for her identity as a Palestinian and a Muslim. I demand a retraction and apology from both National Review and the cartoonist.

The campaign spread across social media, with Democratic politicians piling on including Representative Anastasia Ocasio Cortez (N.Y.), Representative Jerry Nadler (N.Y.), Senator Gary Peters (Mich.), and more. The email’s inflammatory language provoked much worse. I received hate mail promising violence:

You nasty mother****** for writing that cartoon of Rashida. I hope your mother gets f***** in the ass you b****. FREE Palestine!!!

And another:

I know people like you think you’re untouchable, but one day you WILL have to meet your maker. Oh, I can’t wait until . . . you suffer unspeakable loss. I will find you and remind you karma is kicking you in the balls and you deserve everything that is coming to you.

We cartoonists are all too aware of the fate of twelve staffers of the satirical French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo who were murdered for lampooning Islamic extremists. I moved quickly to protect my family, calling local police to step up patrols around my house.

I received dozens of emails in support, and National Review stood firm. So did the New York Post despite censorship pressure from Big Tech and the Biden White House. So did Elon Musk, when he rescued Twitter.

The “Restoring Free Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” Executive Order signed Monday exalts the First Amendment as “essential to the success of our Republic” and says that it “enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference.”

Thousands of small businesses unnecessarily went under during Covid as government crippled commerce with absurd, unscientific mandates. My family’s business was one of them.

Payne Controls, a West Virginia–based engineering firm started by my father 65 years ago, had survived recessions and his passing. But it would not survive Covid shutdowns in 2020–21. Economic and medical experts argued for a commonsense approach to restrictions on schools and businesses but were censored and silenced.

Restauranters were hardest hit under the made-up-out-of-thin-air science of six-foot-distancing. In one instance, the state arrested a female immigrant proprietor for serving indoors, even as the governor defied her own order at another establishment.

The restaurant industry mobilized for common sense. “I have never seen more anger toward a politician than my fellow restaurateurs currently have towards Big Gretch,” the head of one of the state’s premier restaurant groups told me. “She singlehandedly caused us to layoff thousands of hard-working young people.”

Such proprietors are behind Trumps’ call Monday in the Capitol for “common sense.” And they also are also behind his “Initial Recission of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions” Executive Order, signed January 20, which commences policies that “restore common sense to the Federal Government and unleash the potential of the American citizen.”

Common sense like the revocation of the race-obsessed Biden Administration’s Executive Order “Ensuring an Equitable Pandemic Response and Recovery,” meant to address the “disproportionate and severe impact of [Covid] on communities of color.” Covid didn’t target Americans by race, it discriminated by preexisting conditions such as obesity and age.

Or the recission of Biden’s 2021 order establishing the federal Covid-19 Response Team, which oversaw implementation of the controversial vaccine mandate on large employers. The Supreme Court ruled the mandate unconstitutional in 2022.

Candles have been lit against the darkness.