The answer lies in the pattern replicated in every Western country tilting towards centralized power. The pattern is straightforward. If you want control, you start with speech. Information. Dissent. Faith. Anything that gives people power. You control it through laws couched as safety. Censorship as protection. Surveillance as a service. Compliance as a requirement of the public good.
Take the UK. Police arrest street preachers for reading scripture in public while allowing the Islamic call to prayer on loudspeakers in city centers. They knock on doors over memes. Police detain citizens for opinions. The UK recorded 9700 arrests this year for online speech. This is not safety. This is a government deciding what you are allowed to think.
The Online Safety Act took censorship out of Silicon Valley’s hands and placed it into government hands. The state now decides what is harmful. Your intent does not matter. Your rights do not matter. Your speech becomes a permission slip.
The EU took it even further. The Digital Services Act gives Brussels sweeping power over what is said, shared and allowed online. Platforms face crushing fines if they do not censor fast enough. The EU says it is fighting “harmful content” but has expanded the definition to include anything that politicians say threatens stability. They are building a digital state where unelected officials dictate what counts as truth. They are now advancing rules that allow scanning of private messages under the banner of protecting children. Once the door opens, it never closes. No private conversation stays private. No message stays yours. The state sits in the room with you every time you type.
Canada has followed the same script. Punish speech. Regulate content. License expression. Expand power over media and online platforms. Draw lines about what opinions fall outside government approved limits. Call dissent misinformation. Threaten criminal penalties for wrong ideas.
Australia has gone the same way. More censorship. More fines. More pressure to police speech. Now expanded powers against media and even gun ownership for citizens they view as threats to order. Governments want a society that never questions authority. They are building it through enforcement, not persuasion.
Digital ID accelerates all of this. Digital ID ties your identity to everything you do online. Every post. Every message. Every transaction. Every social interaction. Once you tie your identity to a centralized system, you lose anonymity. You lose privacy. You lose choice. Digital ID plus censorship plus surveillance equals total control. It gives governments the power to track you, judge you and restrict you. The tools for a social credit system already exist. Facial recognition vans on UK streets scan citizens by default. If you match a watchlist, police grab you on the spot. If you do not, they promise your data is deleted. You are expected to trust a government that arrests people for jokes.
Privacy and free speech no longer exist in these countries. People are punished for expression. Religion faces selective enforcement. Opinions face criminalization. And the public sits silent because they are told it is for safety. Europeans lived through the 1930s under the exact same logic. Yet today they walk into the same trap. A powerful unelected body in Brussels dictates laws and expands power at a speed normal citizens cannot match. The EU is now closer to a centralized superstate than at any time in its history. Only the armbands are missing. The authoritarian spirit is the same. The ambition is the same. A unified continent under one authority. Now the UK signals interest in returning. If that happens, the project that tyrants of the last century dreamed of will be complete.
In the United States, Democrats want their own version of control. They want the repeal of Section 230. Not for safety. Not for fairness. They want it because Elon Musk broke their monopoly on narrative power. Twitter was the Left’s greatest propaganda asset. It shaped what the media wrote. It shaped what voters believed. It shaped what stories trended. The day Elon bought it, they lost that machine. Now they want to cripple him, destroy X and pressure the government to dismantle the platform entirely. Free speech threatens their political power. Free access to information threatens their influence. Privacy threatens their ability to monitor and punish dissent.
They say they protect democracy. They move like regimes that fear it.
The shift over the past few months shows a new willingness to escalate. They regulate harder. They censor faster. They demand greater compliance. They present every freedom as a threat. These governments now resemble the forces Western history once fought against. Europe once vowed never again. Today it repeats the same mistakes with new tools.
So the question becomes urgent. How do we stop this? How do you halt governments that rewrite laws to control speech, restrict faith, monitor private messages and weaponize technology against their own people? Is it too late to reverse the direction? The arrests in the UK show the scale of the problem. The policies in Australia show where they want to take it. The EU’s surveillance agenda shows what the endgame looks like.
The response starts with refusing to accept censorship as safety. It starts with defending privacy as a right. It starts with building platforms, systems and technologies that governments cannot switch off or seize. It starts by rejecting the idea that authorities should decide what you are allowed to say or believe.
Freedom survives only when the public stops waiting for permission to have it.
About the Author
