I see that I am writing to you about more and less ruined, formerly free societies, these days.
I am seeing a new map of the world, that bears little relation to the tendentious, propagandistic Freedom. House’s famous ranking of free and closed societies. The map of the globe as written in liberty, is wholly shifting.
I am seeing this via travel. Traveling abroad is new again for me. I had not left the US for all the five years since “lockdown”, for security reasons; When I first began to be a “lockdown dissident” and then a “mandates” and “mrna injection” dissident, my husband, security expert Brian O’Shea, felt that I would be safer staying within the US. (He used to work with a security firm that, among other jobs, negotiated the release of hostages; believe it or not, if you are an American citizen/dissident, you still have more protections from security forces, or just from bad actors, doing dangerous things to you physically, if you are within the US, than if you are traveling beyond its borders.)
So I had a pent-up hunger to see the rest of the world, and to report firsthand on the state of liberty globally, especially in countries I had so loved, such as Canada, Britain, India, and the Netherlands. (I had wanted to accept an invitation to go back to Australia, which is among the beloved nations on my short list, but I was too scared I would be kept in a quarantine camp. This had really happened, for two weeks, to the dissident member of Parliament who was inviting me, so I regretfully declined to visit. Australia had arrested three internees who had tried to escape from a quarantine facility, so I feared any engagement with that system).
So far I have seen ruined nations, nations whose liberty and rule of law we thought would last for centuries if not millennia, and I’ve also seen newly booming nations, in terms of their hope, confidence and above all, their defense of their freedoms. There is a third category — that of nations in states of active struggle between these poles.
I count the Netherlands, from which I reported back to you already, as being in that state of active conflict: it is being repressed, and is fighting back. I am excited to visit Germany, at MEP Christine Anderson’s invitation, in September, as Germany is also in that category now — that is, sustaining a live resistance to active suppression of rights;— and I must see France too, for this same reason.
We have entered a new “world order”, much as people mystify or misuse this term, and I would argue that this new metric defines it.
It seems as if “lockdown”, and the global bid by the evildoers of 2020-2025 to enslave us all (they really need an historic name, a bit more descriptive than The Cabal), have had the effect either of sharpening citizens’ national will and honing people’s intentions to lead their nations, protect their rights, and defend their cultures, or else, in other nations, a tipping point has been reached: repressions went so far that the citizens were broken, in effect, and most lost the will or understanding even to fight.
In this regard — the world having been sorted anew into the categories of vigilantly, aggressively free nations, recently broken nations, and nations in states of vivid, dangerous, nail-biting struggle for liberty — we are definitely not in the pre-2020 world order.
The countries at the bottom of the freedom lists, if they were being properly revised, have shifted. We see Britain and Canada hurtling down the ranks, gathering momentum as they fall. We see that India moves rapidly upwards, to showcase its press freedoms and its robust democracy to the rest of the world; Hungary shows its mettle in defending its own culture and language. With the election of President Trump, America claws its way back up to the top, defending its borders and sovereignty and asserting at least in principle, a rejection of state censorship.
Many nations these days do better in terms of freedom than does the 16th century birthplace of free speech, England. Many indeed do better than the birthplace of 18th century liberty, France; Marine le Pen, the leader of the French nationalist/populist National Party, and frontrunner for the 2027 Presidential election, was found guilty — critics such as President Trump say, via courts “using Lawfare to silence free speech” — of embezzlement of funds, and she is being prevented from running for office, conveniently enough, for five years.
Russia scolds the West these days, with good evidence. The spokesperson for the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, representing a nation held up by the West for decades as an autocratic state, spoke out against the collapse of Democratic norms in France, and widened the Kremlin’s critique to Europe as a whole: “More and more European capitals are going down the path of violating democratic norms,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked to comment on the ruling.
“We do not interfere in France’s internal affairs and never have,” Peskov added. “But our observation of European capitals shows that they do not shy away from stepping outside the bounds of democracy in the political process.”
The reversals of fortune and fate continue. The nations that we always thought would uphold liberty, the old alliances, the post-1919, post-Paris Peace Conference world order, the world order that created allies out of Western nations in a proto-League of Nations format that sought to impose civilized transparency and open diplomacy on nation-states that had previously maintaining a precarious “balance of power” through threats of suppression and force — a world order that led in turn to the adoption by Europe of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights — or the “Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms” — have mostly caved.
That treaty guaranteed everything we would think of as “the West” for the next seventy years, ranging from free and fair elections to freedom from discrimination under law, to freedom of speech. (Incidentally, it is quite difficult to locate and share a digital text of the 1950 Convention on Human Rights. Even on the ECHR website, you have to click around quite a bit finally to find a weirdly xeroxed PFD version, from which quotes can’t be shared. Odd, or not these days, for a text that should be framed in every classroom in Europe. If its language of “Fundamental Freedoms” were indeed in every classroom, newsroom and university lecture hall in Europe, instead of buried in a weird PDF in a dry website, we could not even see the ridiculous debates, let alone the metastasizing of claims against speech and the encroachments on absolute rights, that Europe is sustaining, as everyone on that continent and in Britain would know that they are illegal.) But now, leaders of great Western nations are simply ignoring it.
Rolling out the harassment of UK critics of tyranny in 2025, and the targeting of the speech of British populations to petrify them, of course was the 2020-2025 plan.
Britain is now a showcase of collapsing democracy. New initiatives are killing British liberties on all sides, starting with speech; it’s clear that the path for the population to accept this, was paved by the 2020-2022 “lockdowns” that were so Draconian that at one point Britons were allowed outside for one hour a day. More than six people at another time, during UK’s “lockdowns”, were forbidden to meet together, in one of the more nonsensical iteration of magical thinking, designed not to make any epidemiological sense but to habituate the British public to arbitrary, restrictive State decisions.
I believe that this extended psychological torture so traumatized the British population in general that they had little will or presence of mind to fight the new restrictions rolled out now, without the excuse of a “pandemic”.
Britain is collapsing so fast now that the few voices remaining, seeking to defend journalism, free speech and other liberties, are stunned. (I’ll share some of the stories of the bravest and most noble of these remaining fighters for a free Britain, tomorrow.)
Vice President Vance warned Prime Minister Kier Starmer, leader of our traditional ally Great Britain, from the Oval Office, in front of the world, that without Britain restoring free speech, there will be no free trade: “Vance] said: “We also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British — of course what the British do in their own country is up to them — but also affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens.”‘ (This prompted the lamest “fact-check” I’ve seen for a while — the headline, “Fact Check: Yes, the UK Does Have Free Speech”, on the site Euronews.com. The article reiterated correctly that free speech is enshrined in Britain’s laws, but avoids addressing the fact that the nation is violating its own free speech laws.)
The Times — where I was a columnist, but a paper which, as far as I know, to this day still “cancels” me — reports that “Police Make 30 Arrests a Day for Offensive Speech” and fails, in what would be a serious editorial lapse in a sane journalistic context, to put the world “offensive” in quotation marks. Offensive to whom? Reporters and publishers in the UK are overwhelmingly not resisting wholesale chilling of speech, wholesale censorship; and these arrests for their part seek to create new pariahs, and to inject new forms of abject fear into the act of the simple use of the English language, in public.
Allison Pearson of The Telegraph just wrote a piece, seen by two million people since she published it yesterday, about a British woman named Lucy Connolly, who was denied bail, and is, as Pearson posted, “jailed for two years for a tweet.”
Pearson one of the last remaining UK opinion writers and reporters to speak up for historic British freedoms of speech and thought. She explained to me recently that in 2022 a new category of “offense” was essentially proposed by the British police, with the Orwellian name “Non-Crime Hate Incidents.” In 2023 Parliament approved the “code of practice.”
The Gov.uk website explains further:
“7. Non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) are recorded by the police to collect information on ‘hate incidents’ that could escalate into more serious harm or indicate heightened community tensions, but which do not constitute a criminal offence […]”. In other words, this is Orwell’s “pre-Crime”: a crime need not be committed for police to take action. Also the offense can be totally subjective — in the eyes of the observer:
“11. A non-crime hate incident (NCHI) means an incident or alleged incident which involves or is alleged to involve an act by a person (‘the subject’) which is perceived by a person other than the subject to be motivated – wholly or partly – by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic.” Also, you don’t have to cause measurable damages or harm to the person who complains, in order to have committed this non-crime offense: you need onluy to be the cause of an “incident” that “disturbs” someone’s “quality of life” — which could mean, something that hurts his or her feelings — or even results in something as mild as “caus[ing] them concern”:
“14. An “incident” is defined in the National Standard for Incident Recording (NSIR) as “a single distinct event or occurrence which disturbs an individual, group or community’s quality of life or causes them concern”. The NSIR covers all crime and non-crime incidents.”
So UK police have essentially invented their own “code of practice” — not a law — that allows them to round up and charge people whose views on social media “cause[s]…concern”.
But this “code of practice” contradicts and essentially guts the free speech provisions in the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as a fundamental British law: Article 10 of the Human Rights Act of 1998: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.”
Commonwealth nation Canada is further down along this timeline, and the new low of Canada (matched only by Australia) is clearly where “our evil overlords”, as some of my wittier friends like to call “Mr Global”, wish to drive Britain.
I flew, as I described to you in my last essay, to Toronto, in a planeload of illegal immigrants fleeing President Trump’s enforcement of basic immigration laws in the US. The mostly illegal immigrants, judging from my time waiting my own turn to enter the country, walked unhesitatingly through Customs and Border Patrol, barely explaining to the officials seeking to interview them, who was waiting for them or what possible means, other than Canadian benefits, they had of support. The officials looked frustrated and irate. There was nothing they could really do, to accomplish their jobs.
Riding in the car that picked me up from the airport, gave me a vertiginous experience of a post-freedom, formerly free Western nation. The dashboard let out a debilitating shriek, as we drive away from the airport. The driver explained that the shriek is emitted by “the system” when he drives out of the “sector” of the airport. I thought, of course, of fifteen-minute cities.
He explained further, as we slowed to a stop before a red light, that “the system” fines him automatically if he does not stop – if he dares to drive through on a yellow light. He also explained that it records us “for safety.” He seemed to catch himself as I was asking if all of this surveillance was intrusive. He had started to agree but then, remembering, it seemed to me, that he too was being recorded, the driver said slowly and clearly that it’s a really good system, because it “keeps insurance costs down.”
I thought of the fact that the major media in Canada is state-funded, and I could imagine the introduction of this kind of continual surveillance as being rolled out with the justification that it is designed to “keep insurance costs down.”
I could not tell if this was a private company bugging his car to keep their drivers in line, or a government/insurance obligation.
Either way, in in March of 2025, the Canadian government added ten additional “internet of things” forms of tracking or surveillance to citizens’ automobiles, including smartphone- based biometrics, in a pilot program “to deter theft”; these are a set of technologies which will also track citizens’ vehicles. The new forms of trackers include:
“Smartphone-based security using biometrics and proximity detection;
- Locking devices using artificial intelligence (AI) monitoring;
- A system to replace a vehicle’s starter relay;
- Fingerprint authentication;
- AI-powered steering wheel locks;
- Sensors with gesture recognition;
- A smart key fob protector; and
- Miniaturized devices that could disable vehicle components should theft be detected.”
You understand what this means; if these new modalities come to market, let alone are “mandated” by the Canadian government, it means the state, which in February of 2022 debanked the “freedom truckers” who protested against vaccine mandates, can simply remotely switch off your car; they can, for instance, make your fingerprints “unrecognizable” by the system, and thus make it impossible for you to open, let alone start, your own vehicle.
We drove into Toronto through outskirts that I remembered, having visited from time to time since 1993, for the publication of my first book The Beauty Myth, as having been open fields by Lake Ontario, dotted with residential apartment blocks. Toronto itself I remembered as having been human-scaled, architecturally and culturally friendly, and beautifully composed of streets of 19th century grey stone townhouses, interspersed with three or four-story residential buildings from the same era. Even downtown, I recalled, there had been Victorian townhouses, in spite of the building in between them of massive modern skyscrapers. I recalled side streets in which yogurt shops, restaurants featuring a range of ethnic cuisines, and mom and pop businesses such as hardware stores and shoe stores, tempted passers-by. Leafy, shade-dappled sidewalks had surrounded the University of Toronto, where I had spoken in the 1990s. The old-fashioned hotel where my publisher had housed me had had a faded elegance. I had been amazed that a 26-year-old first-time author was being accommodated in a place with heavy white linen tablecloths in the dining room, with brocaded red bolsters on the beds, with a pool in the basement, and with room service. I had barely experienced anything like it. I still remember my publicist, a lovely, kind young woman with short blond hair in a pixie cut, and the same huge ideals that I had myself at that time, and the impressive way she switched from English to French to English, as she shepherded me from radio station to TV show to radio station; the Francophone/Anglophone wars were in full swing.
Mostly I remember with deep fondness, the Canadians in my audiences: sensible, decent, reasonable people, curious and civil, thoughtfully engaged in ideas. They were liberal, in the best, old-fashioned sense of that word: they believed in open dialogue, and in the betterment of society. They were accommodating immigrants in large numbers in what was still a mostly-born-in-Canada society, and it was with a sense of generosity and a belief that anyone who came to those shores, could become part of that well-defined, proud and entrenched Canadian culture, with its distinctive, admirable values. They had no idea that immigration would devour that lovely culture.
I used to joke from the stage in those days that Canada was a sane version of America. I felt that Canada had many of our same values of democracy and liberty and free speech, but without the frenzy and distraction and division and extremism, that could mar civil relations in the US.
The open, grassy outskirts of the city that I recalled, were gone. In their place now loomed massive modern residential developments, towering dozens of stories high. One after the other after the other, they filled the space from the airport to the edge of downtown, in immense volumes, suggesting little effort to plan an aesthetic or even a human-scaled cityscape.
The lights were off in many of the apartments. My driver explained that foreign investors built those structures in order to launder money, essentially, but that many of the apartments were empty as it was more profitable for the investors to keep them so — some tax loophole – than to fill them with tenants. This was just one man’s explanation, but I did get an eerie sense of a lack of life in those buildings.
We arrived at downtown Toronto. I was unable to recognize most of where I was. Immense overdevelopment had afflicted even those charming streets downtown. Almost completely vanished were the stone townhouses with their mansard roofs; nondescript steep monstrosities now loomed. Everything now, I sighed internally, was Houston.
