All throughout 2020 and 2021, many Western governments behaved in an authoritarian fashion and/or made reforms to their legal systems against basic charters of rights and freedoms. Each time, the justifications were always because ‘we’re in an emergency’, or, if decided by the judiciary, ‘the pandemic justifies this’. Of course, one could easily argue that, ‘well, at least WE are not like China or Russia, those are true authoritarian regimes.’ This is true. However, if changes are done over periods of years, and, always in response for some ‘emergency’, slowly our Western nations’ democracies will trend towards authoritarianism. Currently, every change and measure is being done to quell a ‘danger’ for which the public is clamoring for a solution. ‘Deadly pandemic’, ‘terrorist racist trucker protesters’, etc. It is easy to enact laws and changes for such things that the majority have been scared into hating. It is not until the same laws are used against something one supports do people realize what’s changed. This is the classic explanation for free speech – silence everything you are against and one day they’ll silence something you support.