Internet
The Soft Totalitarianism of the Political Class

From Reason
Officials pursue an anti-liberty agenda through unofficial pressure and foreign regulators.
It’s no secret that governments around the world are chiseling away at people’s liberties. Rights advocates document a nearly two decade decline in freedom. Civil liberties activists warn of a worldwide free speech recession. And while American restrictions on government power hold the line better than pale equivalents elsewhere, the political class seems determined to end-run those protections and impose creeping totalitarianism by leveraging the authority of allies in other countries.
“Obrigado Brasil!” Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, wrote this week to thank that country’s authoritarian Supreme Court for its recent ban on the X social media platform.
The court demanded X censor political views it called “disinformation” and appoint a new legal representative to receive court orders—after threatening the previous one with arrest. Importantly, the ban threatens ordinary Brazilians with hefty fines if they evade the prohibition on the social media network. Nevertheless, demand for blockade-piercing VPNs surged in Brazil after the court decision.
Ellison serves alongside Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Walz, who is the Democratic candidate for vice president and has falsely claimed “there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” He’s also not the only prominent politician to have a real hate-on for X and its CEO, Elon Musk.
“Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” Robert Reich, Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration and one-time adviser to President Barack Obama, huffed in The Guardian. He cited the recent arrest in France of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov as a precedent. “Like Musk, Durov has styled himself as a free speech absolutist,” Reich sniffed.
But the animus doesn’t stop with X, Telegram, and their bosses.
“For too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability,” former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claimed in 2022. “The EU is poised to do something about it. I urge our transatlantic allies to push the Digital Services Act across the finish line and bolster global democracy before it’s too late.”
Leveraging Foreign Authoritarianism for Domestic Purposes
Why would a former U.S. presidential candidate cheerlead for European speech regulations?
“The Digital Services Act will essentially oblige Big Tech to act as a privatized censor on behalf of governments,” Jacob Mchangama, founder of the Danish think tank Justitia and executive director of The Future of Free Speech, warned in 2022. “The European policies do not apply in the U.S., but given the size of the European market and the risk of legal liability, it will be tempting and financially wise for U.S.-based tech companies to skew their global content moderation policies even more toward a European approach to protect their bottom lines and streamline their global standards.”
Now in effect, the law is used to squeeze online speech, including as an end-run around U.S. protections for expression. It’s not the only overseas bypass of U.S. law, either.
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina “Khan can’t get Congress to pass her antitrust agenda and is losing in U.S. courts, so now she’s leaning on foreign governments to do the anti-business work for her,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board noted last year about Khan’s reliance on European regulators.
Behind-the-Scenes Pressure for Censorship
But attempts to impose control and stifle dissent in the absence of legal authorization or in defiance of constitutional protections also occur here at home. Days after Telegram CEO Durov’s arrest in Paris, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed what had already been revealed by the Twitter and Facebook
“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,” Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee. He also admitted to suppressing reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop and its incriminating contents under pressure from the FBI.
That implicates not only incumbent President Joe Biden, but also Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president. Harris has complained in the past that social media companies are “speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation.”
Oversight, it seems, is now applied through back-channel pressure, and regulation by governments in countries that lack serious protections for free speech. The result is to endanger the role of the United States as a haven for free speech and other liberties in a world growing ever-more authoritarian.
The Political Class Embraces an Increasingly Authoritarian World
“Global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023. The breadth and depth of the deterioration were extensive,” Freedom House cautioned in its 2024 annual report. “Political rights and civil liberties were diminished in 52 countries, while only 21 countries made improvements.”
“Today, we are witnessing the dawn of a free-speech recession,” Justitia’s Mchangama mourned two years ago. “Liberal democracies, rather than constituting a counterweight to the authoritarian onslaught, are themselves contributing to the free-speech recession.”
This erosion of protections for free speech and other rights occurs with the encouragement of American officials who want more control over our lives but have been (partly) stymied by American protections for liberty. In a world of global platforms and international travel, these officials are applying extra-legal pressure and relying on overseas friends to punish people for activities that are legal in the U.S.
Readers will notice that most if not all these officials are Democrats. Much ink has been spilled in recent years—rightly—about the authoritarian drift of the Republican Party. GOP vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance wants to punish ideological opponents and advocates that his allies “seize the administrative state for our own purposes” and that they “seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets, and give it to the people who’ve had their lives destroyed by the radical open borders agenda.”
But as illiberalism rises across the political spectrum, Democrats are leapfrogging authoritarianism to embrace a soft totalitarianism enforced by unofficial pressure and foreign allies subject to minimal restraints on their power. They ignore legal constraints and display contempt for this country’s protections for liberty in their quest to leave no refuge for dissent.
If liberty has a future in this country, it will be despite the best efforts of the political class.
|
|
|
Censorship Industrial Complex
Jordan Peterson reveals DEI ‘expert’ serving as his ‘re-education coach’ for opposing LGBT agenda

From LifeSiteNews
The Ontario College of Psychologists has selected Jordan Peterson’s “re-education coach” for having publicly opposed the LGBT agenda.
In a June 16 op-ed published by the National Post, Canadian psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson revealed that U.K. citizen Harry Cayton will guide him through the mandatory training.
“In the last week … the College has re-established contact, after months of unnecessary delay, which occurred in violation of their own order and guidelines. They have made me an entirely new offer, all the while insisting that this was their intent all along, which it most clearly was not,” Peterson said.
“All they really want, it turns out, is one two-hour session, which will not involve any ‘social media’ training,” he further explained. “This will be conducted by a man — one Harry Cayton — a citizen of the U.K., who is neither social media expert, according to the College and is definitely not a psychologist.”
Harry Cayton, a supposed expert on “professional regulation and governance,” is known professionally for promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
In 2021, he was appointed to conduct an independent review of the British Columbia Law Society’s governance structure, specifically examining how it supports DEI goals.
Additionally, in 2022, while appearing on Ascend Radio’s podcast, Cayton argued there should be more DEI regulations in professional associations.
Peterson has promised to make the details of his “re-education” public, questioning why the College wishes to hide what Cayton plans to discuss with him.
“If I am the intransigent fool, and he is the wizard to set things right, why not bless everyone interested with his wisdom, and allow them to participate in the restructuring of my psyche and eventual enlightening? Why the concern with confidentiality?” he asked.
Peterson also explained that he will publicize the training “so that people who are interested can decide for themselves what is going on.”
In January 2024, Peterson lost his appeal of the board’s decision to compel him to undergo mandatory re-education, meaning that he must attend the training or risk losing his license to practice psychology in Ontario.
Peterson also revealed that his “legal options have” now “been exhausted” after Ontario’s highest court rejected his appeal of the College’s 2022 ruling that his public political statements ran afoul of the administrative board’s rules and that he must therefore submit to, and personally pay for, a “coaching program” on professionalism.
Peterson is a widely-known critic of Canada’s increasingly totalitarian government. He has also spoken frequently on the need for young men to accept and take on personal responsibility. While he has seemingly inspired others to explore Christianity, he has not yet espoused a personal belief in any religion, though he affirmed his wife Tammy in her decision to convert to Catholicism in 2024.
Business
The CBC is a government-funded giant no one watches

This article supplied by Troy Media.
By Kris Sims
The CBC is draining taxpayer money while Canadians tune out. It’s time to stop funding a media giant that’s become a political pawn
The CBC is a taxpayer-funded failure, and it’s time to pull the plug. Yet during the election campaign, Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged to pump another $150 million into the broadcaster, even as the CBC was covering his campaign. That’s a blatant conflict of interest, and it underlines why government-funded journalism must end.
The CBC even reported on that announcement, running a headline calling itself “underfunded.” Think about that. Imagine being a CBC employee asking Carney questions at a campaign news conference, while knowing that if he wins, your employer gets a bigger cheque. Meanwhile, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has pledged to defund the CBC. The broadcaster is literally covering a story that determines its future funding—and pretending there’s no conflict.
This kind of entanglement isn’t journalism. It’s political theatre. When reporters’ paycheques depend on who wins the election, public trust is shattered.
And the rot goes even deeper. In the Throne Speech, the Carney government vowed to “protect the institutions that bring these cultures and this identity to the world, like CBC/RadioCanada.” Before the election, a federal report recommended nearly doubling the CBC’s annual funding. Former heritage minister Pascale St-Onge said Canada should match the G7 average of $62 per person per year—a move that would balloon the CBC’s budget to $2.5 billion annually. That would nearly double the CBC’s current public funding, which already exceeds $1.2 billion per year.
To put that in perspective, $2.5 billion could cover the annual grocery bill for more than 150,000 Canadian families. But Ottawa wants to shovel more cash at an organization most Canadians don’t even watch.
St-Onge also proposed expanding the CBC’s mandate to “fight disinformation,” suggesting it should play a formal role in “helping the Canadian population understand fact-based information.” The federal government says this is about countering false or misleading information online—so-called “disinformation.” But the Carney platform took it further, pledging to “fully equip” the CBC to combat disinformation so Canadians “have a news source
they know they can trust.”
That raises troubling questions. Will the CBC become an official state fact-checker? Who decides what qualifies as “disinformation”? This isn’t about journalism anymore—it’s about control.
Meanwhile, accountability is nonexistent. Despite years of public backlash over lavish executive compensation, the CBC hasn’t cleaned up its act. Former CEO Catherine Tait earned nearly half a million dollars annually. Her successor, Marie Philippe Bouchard, will rake in up to $562,700. Bonuses were scrapped after criticism—but base salaries were quietly hiked instead. Canadians struggling with inflation and rising costs are footing the bill for bloated executive pay at a broadcaster few of them even watch.
The CBC’s flagship English-language prime-time news show draws just 1.8 per cent of available viewers. That means more than 98 per cent of TV-viewing Canadians are tuning out. The public isn’t buying what the CBC is selling—but they’re being forced to pay for it anyway.
Government-funded journalism is a conflict of interest by design. The CBC is expensive, unpopular, and unaccountable. It doesn’t need more money. It needs to stand on its own—or not at all.
Kris Sims is the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country.
-
Health2 days ago
RFK Jr. Unloads Disturbing Vaccine Secrets on Tucker—And Surprises Everyone on Trump
-
Crime2 days ago
National Health Care Fraud Takedown Results in 324 Defendants Charged in Connection with Over $14.6 Billion in Alleged Fraud
-
Business1 day ago
Elon Musk slams Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ calls for new political party
-
Censorship Industrial Complex1 day ago
Global media alliance colluded with foreign nations to crush free speech in America: House report
-
Business12 hours ago
Latest shakedown attempt by Canada Post underscores need for privatization
-
Business12 hours ago
Why it’s time to repeal the oil tanker ban on B.C.’s north coast
-
Alberta12 hours ago
Pierre Poilievre – Per Capita, Hardisty, Alberta Is the Most Important Little Town In Canada
-
MxM News12 hours ago
UPenn strips Lia Thomas of women’s swimming titles after Title IX investigation