Voltaire never wrote this. The thought — and the sentence it was smoothed out of — belongs to Kevin Alfred Strom, an American neo-Nazi broadcaster, who said it on his American Dissident Voices radio programme on 14 August 1993: “To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?” The familiar wording is not even Strom’s own — it is an anonymous internet rewrite, first documented credited to Voltaire in 2007.
“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize” is not Voltaire. It is an anonymous paraphrase of Kevin Alfred Strom, "All America Must Know the Terror That Is Upon Us," American Dissident Voices broadcast, 14 August 1993. Oxford's Voltaire Foundation lists it among one-liners Voltaire never said; fact-checkers found no trace of it in his collected works or correspondence. — Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Voltaire. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Evoking the world of Kevin Alfred Strom — American white nationalist broadcaster · founded National Vanguard, 2005. Theme: "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The real source
Work
All America Must Know the Terror That Is Upon Us
Broadcast
American Dissident Voices, 14 August 1993
Author
Kevin Alfred Strom (b. 1956)
Popular wording
An anonymous later paraphrase — first documented credited to Voltaire in 2007
To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize? We all know who it is that we are not permitted to criticize.
Radio broadcast transcript, 1993
This is the actual passage the meme descends from, and the context is not incidental. PolitiFact describes the 1993 broadcast as antisemitic ↗, and Strom’s next line makes the rhetorical question point at a specific group. Recast as a Voltaire epigram, a piece of conspiracist antisemitism is laundered into Enlightenment wisdom about free speech — which is precisely why the misattribution has been so durable.
📻
Broadcast transcript (archived on a white-nationalist site)
The sentence this meme derives from was first delivered in a 1993 radio broadcast by a living, identifiable author, so it is in copyright in the United States — nothing here is public domain, and the Voltaire label does not make it so. The popular reworded version has no identified author at all: it surfaced anonymously online by 2007, and its copyright status is simply unresolved. Quoted here in brief excerpt for criticism, comment and fact-checking.
Fact-check
Why Voltaire gets the credit
This is a double error: the wrong author, and words he never wrote. Voltaire is one of the internet’s great quote magnets — an anti-clerical wit with a reputation for aphorisms about free speech, which makes almost any clever line about censorship look plausible over his name. (The most famous “Voltaire” quote of all, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” was written by his biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall in 1906.) Here the borrowed authority did real work: it moved a line from a neo-Nazi broadcast into mainstream circulation.
Repeated in good faithRep. Thomas Massie, John Cusack, and countless memes Amplified it
Massie tweeted it over Voltaire’s name at Anthony Fauci in January 2022, drawing a False rating from PolitiFact ↗; actor John Cusack retweeted an antisemitic cartoon carrying the line over Voltaire’s name in June 2019, then apologised (“Made a mistake retweeting that — as i said — and sorry”). There is no reason to think either knew the source — that is the point of a laundered quote.
Most misattributions are harmless — a nice thought lands on a famous name and nobody is worse off. This one is different, because the misattribution is the mechanism. Strom’s question was not an abstract principle about power; it was posed in an antisemitic broadcast, and the unnamed group it points at was the point. Stripped of that context and stamped with Voltaire’s name, it becomes an Enlightenment maxim about free speech that anyone can repeat in good conscience.
That is what makes it worth tracing rather than merely correcting. Two Voltaire scholars, the Voltaire Foundation, an etymologist and three fact-checking outlets have all independently reached the same conclusion, and the man who said it first has claimed it in public. The line has better documentation than most quotes people do get right — the difficulty was never evidence, it was that the true source is one almost nobody wants to cite.
The false attribution isn’t a footnote to this quote’s history. It’s the reason the quote travelled.
A note on the other “Voltaire” free-speech quote
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is also not Voltaire’s. It was written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in The Friends of Voltaire (1906), as her own summary of his attitude rather than a translation of anything he wrote. Voltaire’s reputation as the patron saint of free expression rests substantially on sentences other people wrote for him — which is precisely the reservoir this 1993 line was able to tap.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
b. 1956 · American white nationalist broadcaster · founded National Vanguard, 2005
Kevin Alfred Strom is an American white nationalist and neo-Nazi activist, born in 1956 and later based in Virginia. He worked as a broadcast engineer for the National Alliance under William Luther Pierce and hosted American Dissident Voices, a weekly radio hour espousing antisemitic views, going on to found the splinter group National Vanguard in 2005. He pleaded guilty in 2008 to possession of child pornography and was sentenced to 23 months in prison. He is named here purely as a matter of documented provenance — this page traces where the sentence came from, which is a separate question from anything else about the man or his politics.
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Cite this page
Kevin Alfred Strom, “All America Must Know the Terror That Is Upon Us,” American Dissident Voices (radio broadcast), 14 August 1993. The familiar wording is a later anonymous paraphrase; earliest documented attribution to Voltaire, 2007 (Barry Popik). Cf. Nicholas Cronk, Voltaire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 122.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize’?” Last verified 14 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/to-learn-who-rules-over-you-simply-find-out-who-you-are-not