Freedom and Liberty used to be principles understood and valued by Western Civilization. Not anymore; freedom is just a buzzword of racist right-wingers — so say Canadian media and their American fellow travelers. Political analyst Daniel Greenfield writes:

“Freedom,” warned the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is funded by the Trudeau government, is a word that has “become common among far-right groups.”

To prove its point, the CBC quoted Elisabeth Anker, a George Washington University prof, who claimed that freedom is a “slippery concept” and that those on the right want “violent” freedoms that reject being “bound by norms of equality” or “norms to remedy inequality.”

Or, in other words, freedom from state coercion to create the ideal society of the state.

This new doctrine has become fashionable on the Left.

In George Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Truth is decorated with party slogans that include, “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength.” The organization was based on the actual British Ministry of Information which Orwell had a great deal of experience with while working for the wartime BBC even while his wife worked for the Ministry’s censorship division.

Orwell would not have been in the least surprised by state media trotting out an academic who regularly appears on state media (including that of totalitarian nations such as Qatar) to explain that freedom is really a very naughty thing even as the state crushes a “Freedom Convoy” using emergency powers that were meant to deal with wartime emergencies, not peaceful protests.

It’s all in service to a seemingly power-hungry leader in Canada — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says his “emergency powers” are simply “necessary to reinforce the principles, values, and institutions that keep all Canadians free.”

Long before the Freedom Convoy, media in this country had begun vocally insisting that Gov. Ron DeSantis was an “authoritarian” for refusing to impose onerous regulations on Floridians.

“Ron DeSantis is creating a paradise of authoritarianism,” a Washington Post column argued.

An authoritarian paradise, like a place where tyranny is the right not to be told what to do, is a contradiction in terms, but in a backward world where freedom is a threat, elected officials who don’t force people to do things are authoritarians, while politicians who take away rights are liberators. The greatest tyranny is making your own choices and the ultimate freedom comes from government regulation. Only by giving up freedom to the government can we be free.

Civil rights, likewise, mean taking away rights. Anyone who doesn’t is an authoritarian.

“The real threat to civil liberties comes from states banning vaccine and mask mandates,” the ACLU claimed in a New York Times op-ed.

“Far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties,” the organization’s official statement argued, and the “justifiable intrusion on autonomy and bodily integrity” would actually empower our “civil liberties” because “rights are not absolute.”

The ACLU, like Trudeau, could have saved a lot of time by writing, “Freedom is Slavery.”

It would be funny if it weren’t so serious, and such a slippery slope to much worse things than mask mandates.

The underlying argument behind the spin is that collectivism trumps individual freedom.

Greenfield concludes:

If Freedom is Slavery, then Ignorance must be Strength. An increasingly totalitarian radical movement is evading the realities of its abuses by inverting language and ideas. Revolution is the leftist brand, but its revolution doesn’t liberate; rather, they consistently enslave. Its activists want to pretend that they’re the underdogs, when they are actually the ones with all the power. …

As the tyranny intensifies, so does the intensity with which basic truths are reversed. Freedom, the tyrants insist, is slavery. And their slavery is liberation. The more regulations they impose on us, the freer we are. And the more we want to be free, the more authoritarian we must be.

Read the whole thing here.