An Iron Curtain is Descending On Us

Over the last five years, American, British, Canadian and Brazilian governments unleashed unprecedented waves of repression against political opponents using martial law, military occupations of major cities, government censorship of the internet, nationwide manhunts, televised raids and extended detentions without trial. Most of those arrested were guilty of political speech and protests generally far less violent than leftist riots by regime supporters.

Three of those leftist governments, the Biden-Harris administration, the Starmer and Lula regimes, unleashed crackdowns after taking power using various pretexts. The fourth crackdown, in Canada under the Trudeau regime, took place during an election year.

The pretexts, J6, Brazil’s election protests or the UK’s anti-migrant rallies, are far less significant than the pattern of leftist regimes taking power and launching crackdowns against opponents who disputed elections or, in the case of the Starmer regime, protested against policies.

Governments that moan about “authoritarianism” abroad eagerly adopted every element of the authoritarian playbook from endless investigations of political opponents like Trump and Bolsonaro to declaring states of emergency over political protests and censoring speech. They often justify their authoritarian measures as necessary to stop their “authoritarian” opponents.

The leftist regimes that have taken to locking up people who merely express support online for opposition political protests are not averse to chaos, social unrest or riots. Before J6, Kamala Harris and every prominent Democrat and media outlet had endorsed BLM race riots. In the years since, leftist mobs have routinely invaded the United States Capitol, intimidated members of Congress, occupied their offices and fought Capitol Police officers in the name of every cause from banning oil to supporting Hamas with little result other than light slaps on their wrists.

In the years before Trudeau used martial law to silence truckers protesting against vaccine mandates, BLM rioters had been allowed to block streets in Canadian cities with the backing of the regime. No less a figure than Trudeau had ritually knelt to the race rioters and their cause.

Before and after the Starmer regime launched a ruthless crackdown on opponents of mass migration, Hamas supporters had rallied and rioted across London and other cities, threatening Jews and proudly flying the flags of Islamic terrorist organizations officially at war with the UK.

None of these Muslim mobs were hunted, rounded up and sentenced to years in prison.

Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, who had defended his officers warning Jews not to be present near Muslim terror rallies because they were “visibly Jewish”, vowed to use terrorism laws and unleash the “full force of the law at people” for protesting Muslim migrant violence.

The only ones who can’t face terrorism charges for political rallies in the UK are actual terrorists.

The law that Rowley, along with Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood of the Starmer regime, follow might best be described in the words of a former Latin American strongman, “for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”. Starmer’s actions have shown who his friends in Hamas bandanas are and they have also shown that the law is reserved for his enemies.

In the first stage of authoritarianism, the law is applied unequally, in the second stage of authoritarianism, inequality is written into the law, and in the final stage, the regime is the law.

America, the United Kingdom and many other formerly free nations are falling under the shadow of the first stage of authoritarianism. Numerous ‘Reichstag fires’ are used to declare temporary states of emergency during which civil rights and limitations on government powers do not apply. These experiments in totalitarianism took off during the pandemic, but did not begin then.

Trump’s election victory and the success of Brexit led to the launch of censorship regimes in America and the UK. Free speech on social media virtually disappeared for ordinary people and became the province of a handful of opposition media outlets and influencers big enough to merit special exemptions from the rules inflicted on everyone else.

In America, once the home of free speech, the Biden-Harris administration and its liberal and leftist political allies have taken to arguing that the government has a ‘free speech’ right to take away the free speech of the people by telling social media monopolies to censor them.

In a 6-3 pre-election ruling, the Supreme Court allowed government agencies to resume the practice that censorship apologists have termed ‘jawboning’ of federal agencies telling social media monopolies to censor administration opponents. According to the Biden-Harrs administration, one of the “cornerstones” of its “power” is to “persuade Americans—and American companies—to act in ways that the president believes would advance the public interest.” And sometimes the public interest requires censoring politically incorrect jokes.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted. A furious media lambasted the social media founder for undermining the administration’s contention to the Supreme Court that Facebook and other companies had been acting independently, rather than obeying government diktats.

CNN condemned “Mark Zuckerberg’s election-season gift to Republicans”. The issue, media outlets argued, was not speech, but, as media outlets insisted, “disinformation” or “misinformation” that threatened “public health” or “national security”.

Free speech is at least still a subject of debate in America even as it has disappeared overseas.

The UK’s Online Safety Bill, originally billed as protecting children, mandates that social media platforms censor whatever the Starmer regime and Justice Minister Mahmood may deem to be hateful or harmful content. Platforms will be required to scan even encrypted messages and use algorithms to see to it that no one sees disapproved political speech anymore.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who had no objection to Muslim mobs targeting Jews, claimed that he did “not feel safe” after opposition anti-migrant protests and demanded government censorship that would go even further in silencing critics across the internet.

In Brazil, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a controversial figure who helped the current leftist regime seize power, banned Twitter and leveled massive fines on any Brazilians who use the service. As the New York Times described him, “Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, has taken up the mantle of Brazil’s lead defender of democracy. Using a broad interpretation of the court’s powers, he has pushed to investigate and prosecute, as well as to silence on social media, anyone he deems a menace to Brazil’s institutions.”

That is what democracy has begun to look like in what used to be the free world.

Elections in which the two sides are held to very different standards of speech and tactics are held under the shadow of mass media propaganda and government censorship of opponents. The final results are determined by media outlets, unelected officials and partisan judges. If public dissatisfaction with the establishment is so high that the conservatives win despite mass fraud, bloc voting and every dirty trick in the book, the left spends four years rioting in rage while its unelected officials, including judges, find every possible way to undermine the government.

If the leftists win, they promptly declare an emergency and claim that democracy is threatened by free speech, popular protest and the existence of any opposition to their unlimited power.

The only thing free about any of this is that there are still elections and people are still allowed to vote in them. But democracy, as residents of North Korea’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea could tell you if they had any free speech, isn’t actually freedom. Bringing democracy to Iraq just turned it into a totalitarian Islamic state run by the Shiite majority. In actual free countries, people have more political freedom than just casting a ballot once every few years.

A democracy without a meaningful political opposition able to speak out, advocate for its views and protest is like a race with only one runner. It’s the end of a contest, not the beginning of one.

“I avail myself with relief of the opportunity of speaking to the people of the United States. I do not know how long such liberties will be allowed. The stations of uncensored expression are closing down; the lights are going out,” Winston Churchill had warned in a speech about Nazism in 1938. Eight years later he returned to America to deliver an even more famous speech.

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” Churchill warned. “In these States, control is enforced upon the common people by various kinds of all-embracing police governments, to a degree which is overwhelming and contrary to every principle of democracy.”

Under the iron curtain, the “great principles of freedom” had been abandoned under which the people of any country have “free unfettered elections with secret ballot” and “that freedom of speech and thought should reign; that courts of justice, independent of the executive, unbiased by any party, should administer laws which have received the broad assent of large majorities.”

Churchill’s warning was ridiculed by leftists in the same timeless fashion that they do today. Labour parliamentarians introduced a censure motion against Churchill for ruining relations with the USSR while the New York Times argued that American democracy and Communism “have much to learn from each other.” The Times has certainly learned much from Communism.

“The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” a recent New York Times column argued. It rests alongside recent Timesentries such as “The First Amendment is Out of Control” and “Elections are Bad for Democracy.” What is good for democracy? Tyranny and lots of it.

That iron curtain no longer hangs only over Russia and China, but over Churchill’s England, and the places in America where he once spoke, along with the rest of the world.

“Alexander the Great remarked that the people of Asia were slaves because they had not learned to pronounce the word ‘No,’” Churchill reminded Americans.

“No” has become a forbidden word to the people of the formerly free world.

When Churchill’s Englishmen tried to say “No” to PM Keir Starmer, they were locked up. The world watched as their homes were broken into in televised raids.

When Canadian truckers tried to say “No” to PM Justin Trudeau, he declared martial law.

And when Americans tried to say “No” to Biden-Harris, they were sentenced to years in prison.

An iron curtain is descending on us. It tricks us, lies to us, manipulates us, gaslights us, propagandizes at us, and when that fails, it outlaws us, censors us and it imprisons us because those who would make us into slaves in their utopia fear one word above all else.

“No,” a word that shattered the original iron curtain can shatter this new one too.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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