The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy

Western governments seem determined to eliminate free speech and push their populations into rebellion

The crackdown by allegedly democratic governments in the West against online platforms that publish material they dislike is gathering steam.

On Friday, a left-wing jurist in Brazil ordered the suspension of Elon Musk’s X after the social media company ignored a mandate to designate a “legal representative” in that country.

This comes on the heels of the arrest, by an increasingly authoritarian French government, of Telegram founder Pavel Durov on a number of charges — most of which revolve around Telegram’s stated unwillingness to censor speech that the French government dislikes, such as criticism of mass migration and French president Emmanuel Macron.

These incidents indeed represent a crossing of the Rubicon, the end of free speech as western societies have understood it for centuries.

It turns out that liberal democracies are every bit as willing to practice censorship and engage in mass propaganda as other forms of government, such as right-wing dictatorships or Communist tyrannies.

Liberal democracies always claimed to be different.

They’ve always congratulated themselves on their commitments to certain fundamental principles — of which freedom of speech, religion and association were paramount.

Now it seems some liberal democracies, such as Canada in North America and some states in the EU, have abandoned those principles.

They are increasingly hostile toward traditional religious belief and reject outright, in many cases, the notion that free individuals may associate with whom they choose.

In July 2024, one notorious enemy of free speech, the EU’s so-called “Digital Commissioner” Thierry Breton, actually tried to forbid Elon Musk from interviewing a candidate for president of the United States, Donald Trump, on his social media platform, on the grounds that such an interview might spread “disinformation” that the EU’s autocrats might dislike.

As the far-left Washington Post observed:

“While freewheeling internet companies have long clashed with authoritarian regimes — Google in China, Facebook in Russia or pre-Musk Twitter in Turkey — Western governments until recently generally did not regard social media and the vision of free speech they promoted as being fundamentally at odds with democracy. Politicians and regulators recognized there was bad stuff on the internet, decried it and sought ways to mitigate it. But banning entire social networks or arresting their executives simply wasn’t something liberal democracies did. Now, for better or worse, it is.”

Make no mistake: the battle over control of the Internet will end up being the defining struggle of our era. Western governments are, in many cases, siding with the Communist government of China in cracking down on unauthorized ideas.

This battle thereby pits the authoritarian oligarchs that control western governments against their own people.

As these so-called liberal democracies continue to devolve into new forms of post-Stalinist tyranny, the people in these nations will have no choice but to rise up and take back control of their governments .

This is what is happening right now throughout western Europe and North America.

Brexit, the rise of populist parties in France, Germany, Italy and even Denmark and Sweden, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and his continued candidacy in 2024, the push-back against lunatic “diversity” mandates and climate control initiatives — all these are signs of a massive populist rebellion against liberal autocracy.

People walk on the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate on November 10, 1989.

If they are not careful, the western oligarchs trying to squelch free speech may find themselves going the way of the Communist dictators of the late 1980s and early 1990s, driven from power and tried for human rights violations.

The Thierry Bretons of the world should meditate long and hard about what happened to fellow autocrats such as Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, the tyrants who once ruled the “democratic” government of Romania.

People will only tolerate assaults on their freedom for so long.

Eventually they will use peaceful means, as they did in Eastern Europe, to drive the tyrants from power.

Robert J. Hutchinson is the author of numerous books of popular history, including Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth (Thomas Nelson), The Dawn of Christianity (Thomas Nelson), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible (Regnery) and When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City (Doubleday). Email him at: roberthutchinson@substack.com