No you did not. The XX substitution is a clever rhetorical move, but it misses what’s actually being debated. This isn’t about whether a logical predicate can be made to fit many countries; it’s about whether certain state practices are becoming acceptable.
What’s concerning here isn’t “wrong opinions being criticized,” it’s administrative punishment without criminal process: loss of banking access, travel bans, and professional exclusion imposed by executive designation, justified after the fact as “they must be criminals anyway.” That logic works for any XX, and that’s exactly the problem.
This doesn’t make the EU “totalitarian,” but it does point to an illiberal drift where due process is treated as optional if the target is politically unsympathetic. The precedent matters more than the headcount. Once viewpoint + security assessment is enough to trigger real penalties, the boundary between law enforcement and political enforcement starts to blur, regardless of which XX you plug in.
What’s concerning here isn’t “wrong opinions being criticized,” it’s administrative punishment without criminal process: loss of banking access, travel bans, and professional exclusion imposed by executive designation, justified after the fact as “they must be criminals anyway.” That logic works for any XX, and that’s exactly the problem.
This doesn’t make the EU “totalitarian,” but it does point to an illiberal drift where due process is treated as optional if the target is politically unsympathetic. The precedent matters more than the headcount. Once viewpoint + security assessment is enough to trigger real penalties, the boundary between law enforcement and political enforcement starts to blur, regardless of which XX you plug in.