A man stands up at the UN and says that the free world is no longer free.
The video is two years old, the man is Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, and I know that half of you have, quite certainly, already called him a dictator and the other half a hero, so let me deal with that part first.
Ten years ago El Salvador was the country in the world where the most people were killed, and gangs like MS-13 decided who was allowed to walk down which street.
Today it is one of the safest countries on the entire continent.
He did that, and he did it by a road we cannot take - a state of emergency since 2022 and more than eighty thousand people behind bars without anything we would call a trial.
The great majority, however, are gang members with lives on their conscience, men none of us would miss on the street, or among us, but when you fish with a net that wide you catch innocent people too, and several thousand he has had to let out again.
He had himself re-elected even though the country's own constitution expressly forbade it, and many of the journalists who wrote about it live somewhere else today.
That is the price, and it belongs in the calculation.
I do not want that model at home, or anywhere in Europe - and I will not think differently in a week, a month, a year, or as far ahead as I can see.
And now listen, all the same, to what he says.
About us.
The Western world.
He talks about chocolate bars and razors that now - today - sit behind locked glass in the shops of some of the richest cities on earth, in what we still call the free world. He could have included the rest - beef in a net with an alarm on it, a block of cheddar in a plastic box, and Danish butter with a security tag.
He talks about streets that no longer belong to the people who live on them - and he names no countries, but we can fill in Sweden and France ourselves. He talks about citizens who have been arrested for sharing a post on social media - where England clearly takes the prize in a disturbingly totalitarian development - about platforms that censored at the request of governments, and about ruling parties that have tried, and are still trying, to ban their own opposition.
And we could go on ourselves. About a supranational body that blocks the media of hostile nations, so that we cannot read for ourselves what they write.
About growing surveillance and control of everything perfectly ordinary people do, and a suspicion that reaches deep into private life.
I sat there waiting for the sentence I could dismiss - and it just never came.
And notice what it is he measures us by. Freedom of speech, equality before the law, property rights, a people who can walk home at night without looking over their shoulder - these are our own words, our own inheritance, which he stands and reads aloud to us from a podium in New York, while we are busy looking up his name to find out whether we need to listen.
That is the movement I cannot let go of. We judge the man so that we do not have to look at the measurement.
Because there is something underneath his speech that is worse than the criticism. His people chose him, and they chose him again, and they did it with open eyes, because a human being who cannot send his children to school without fearing for them does not ask for very long about the separation of powers. This is what it looks like when freedom can no longer hold the street. Then it is traded away, willingly and with relief, to the first one who can.
We cannot applaud the place where he stands. But we can stop telling ourselves that we stand somewhere else by nature, and that what happened there has no road leading here.
A measuring stick is not made wrong by being held in a hand you would not shake.
❤️🔥🪽
