Today the State Department launches a two-day Summit For Democracy, featuring the participation of 110 invited countries from around the world (but not Hungary, because even though Hungary is a democratic country, and a member of NATO, Hungary is Very, Very Bad™). The idea is to united world democracies to stand firm against “authoritarianism.” Golly. Here’s a fantastic essay by N.S. Lyons, from his can’t-miss newsletter The Upheaval, on how this is a phony exercise, given what the West has become in the pursuit of soft totalitarianism. Excerpts:

What we absolutely won’t see are any of the Western “liberal democracies” dare to stand up and commit to defend actual liberal principles themselves. Because liberalism in the West is dead.

Don’t believe me? Let’s go on a little holiday tour to examine which Western democracies are still upholding the core values of classical liberalism that their nations gave birth to during the great philosophical flowering of the Enlightenment.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s take as our measure a handful of the most important principles of this grand idea that was liberalism:

• that individuals possess universal and inalienable natural rights;
• that “liberty of conscience is every man’s natural right” (as John Locke put it), and that freedom of religion is fundamental to a just and peaceable society;
• that freedom of expression is paramount, as free debate is inseparable from the process of government by reason, and to all human individual and social progress;
• that self-rule is the pinnacle of just and enlightened government, and that freedom of association and assembly is integral to political liberty;
• that the rights of the individual supersede the will of the collective, and all citizens are equal before the law;
• that there exists a necessary separation of the public and private spheres of life.

So how closely does the West follow these liberal principles today?

Thus follows a quite shocking tour of actual conditions in Western countries. For example:

Britain now launches manhunts for 12-year-olds who allegedly send racist messages on social media, convicts teenagers of hate crimes for quoting rap lyrics in general circulation (fitting them with ankle monitoring bracelets for extra public safety), and jails people for offensive jokes. But the real innovation of the nation of George Orwell has been the invention of the “Non-Crime Hate Incident” – a brilliant category encompassing anything the police deem to potentially be offensive to someone, somewhere. That was the lesson learned by the unfortunate Harry Miller, whose 2019 tweets about gender were reported anonymously to police, who then quickly stormed into his workplace to “check his thinking.” Some 25,000 such incidents are now investigated by UK police each year, with each case filed in a permanent record that shows up in employment background checks even if no crime is ever prosecuted.

All of this is apparently still insufficient, however, as in October Prime Minister Boris Johnson threw his support behind new legislation, the Online Safety Bill, pledging to crack down even further on “hate speech” and “extremism” by imposing “criminal sanctions with tough sentences for those who are responsible for allowing this foul content to permeate the internet.” The bill may represent “state-backed censorship and monitoring on a scale never seen before in a liberal democracy,” as one free speech watch-group put it, but how can one argue with safety?

I assure you this is not the worst on the list. Many Americans have no idea how punitive other liberal democracies have become in policing “hate speech” against Sacred Victims. Read Lyons’s survey; it will shock you. As I write in Live Not By Lies, this soft totalitarianism is coming about for therapeutic reasons: to guarantee safety, comfort, and well being. This is not something that is going to happen someday; as Lyons details, this is something that is well underway right now. If we did not have the First Amendment in this country, people like Joe Biden would be eager to lead America towards the example set by the UK (especially Scotland), Germany, and other countries in the (checks notes) Free World. They would be very happy for America to replicate from sea to shining sea the left-wing illiberalism of many college campuses.

Here’s how Lyons ends his essay:

That old era of liberty, the Age of Liberalism, is over. The real reason Biden’s summit for liberal democracies will fail, why it will not accomplish anything in turning back the likes of authoritarian China, is because there no longer is any liberal West. Everywhere upon the face of the earth, Actually Existing Liberalism is now just oligarch technocratic progressivism wearing liberal principles as a skin suit and flirting with authoritarianism.

And if you can prove me wrong, if you can find me even one country still truly committed to liberal principles, please let me know – because I would like a visa.

Please read the whole thing. You need to know this. Take a look again at the list of fundamental liberal principles Lyons lays out, and ask yourself how well those principles are thriving in our “diverse, equitable, and inclusive” country. Subscribe to Lyons’s great newsletter. And don’t forget to #LiveNotByLies.