The collapse of freedom in the Western world proceeds apace.

Misinformation boards. Government backdoors into social media companies. Bogus “fact checks” that promote outright falsehoods.

And now an arrest for being mean to Emmanuel Macron on Facebook. An actual arrest for calling him “filth.”

You are likely aware of the raging protests in France over pension reforms. As much as I hate to admit it, I am with Macron on this issue. Raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 is hardly draconian given the increase in lifespans and the fiscal crises all pension programs face.

The protests have been “fiery but mostly peaceful,” as they say. Not a single person has died by guillotine yet, although it is early in the process. That took a while to get going during the French Revolution. The French love their escalating violence in protests.

Yet the arrest of which I am writing has nothing to do with being fiery or mostly peaceful. Or even encouraging anybody else to be mostly peaceful.

Rather, a woman was arrested for insulting President Macron on Facebook:

The complaint focused on a post on her Facebook page made on March 21, the day before Macron gave a lunchtime interview to TF1 television to defend his controversial pension reforms that have sparked nationwide protests.

“This piece of filth is going to address you at 1:00 pm… it’s always on television that we see this filth,” she wrote.

The woman, in her 50s, had been a supporter of the 2018-2019 “Yellow Vest” protests that shook Macron during his first mandate.

She stands accused of “insulting the president of the republic” and will stand trial on June 20 in Saint Omer, the prosecutor said.

We can’t have anybody insulting a politician, can we?

Similar arrests have taken place in Great Britain, including a man who shouted “who elected him?” about King Charles.

A man arrested in England after shouting “who elected him?” about King Charles III said he was left “shaken” and concerned about freedom of speech.

At least three other people have been arrested or cautioned for acts of peaceful anti-monarchy protests across the UK during the days of mourning for Queen Elizabeth II, as legal experts and activists raise concerns about their treatment.

Symon Hill, 45, told Insider that he commented while watching an event proclaiming the new monarch in Oxford, UK, on Sunday, following the death of Queen Elizabeth last week.

The first part of the proclamation was about the death of the Queen, which Hill said he remained silent during out of respect for those grieving.

“But when it got to proclaiming that Charles was now ‘our only rightful liege lord and king’ and that we owed him allegiance, that isn’t something I felt we should all listen to and passively accept as if we were still in the Middle Ages,” he said.

At that point, Hill said he called out: “Who elected him?” and “A head of state is being imposed without our consent.”

He said security guards tried to remove him from the crowd, and police officers grabbed hold of him and dragged him away despite protestations from people around him.

“They handcuffed my hands behind my back, told me I was being arrested, and forced me into the back of a police van,” he said.

Twitter users in the United States have been getting notices that people in Germany are complaining about their posts and that they have been investigated for hateful conduct.

It’s all part of the growing censorship industrial complex, which is growing by leaps and bounds.

The Left has been admiring China government tactics for quite a while now. Remember Tom Friedman’s lament that we couldn’t be “China for a day,” decrying the West’s inability to just do things without consent?

Well, the Left has given up on giving up. They ARE just going to do stuff whether it is legal or not. Consent of the governed only matters if you let it.

So here we are, a couple hundred years into the Western experiment in liberal democracy.

And the powers-that-be have decided: that was a bad idea.

If you don’t agree with them on the desireability of liberty, they have an answer: shut up, peasant.