No, I'm not a brownshirt fascist. I'm a politically leftist professional journalist, a former Business Week correspondent, winner of a 2019 "Izzy" award for Outstanding Independent Journalism, a Graduate of the Columbia Grad School of Journalism and a two-time Fulbright Scholar in Shanghai and Taiwan.

What I have in common with some of the thugs who engaged in an act of insurrection or sedition in a violent assault on Congress on Jan. 6 that led to the deaths of five people and brought Congress to a halt and had its members holed up in safe rooms in the Capitol basement is that like reportedly dozens of these white nationalist fascists, I am and have since at least March 2019, been on the FBI's Terrorist Watch List.

We Americans (unless we're Muslim or have Arabic names) don't hear much about that Watch List normally unless there's a plane hijacking or a terror bombing, but the FBI, during a federal court case last year disclosed in the course of discovery that the list (three lists, actually including a "No Fly List" of people who are banned for boarding aircraft), established in the wake of the 9-11 attack in September 2001, currently contains over a million names.