A perfect storm of crises has been building. It comes from still bubbling rage with governments for their single-minded obsession with Covid and the lasting damage caused by lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates, with the media for amplifying government fear porn and social media platforms for collusion with innovative techniques of censorship, to the cost of living pressures, Ukraine war, and the crimes, housing crisis, cultural decay, and social dislocations of mass immigration. A survey earlier this year in France, Germany, Italy, and Poland found that 60 percent of voters lack trust in political institutions.

People have come to hold politicians to be dishonest, incompetent, and lacking courage and integrity. Being unheard and vilified has broken public trust in the underpinning institutions of democracy. In the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, less than half the people in high-income developed countries trust their government, media, business, and NGOs. 

In Australia, governments earned scores of -21 for competence and -5 for ethics. Pew Research Center polls show trust in the US government falling from 77 percent in 1964 to 22 percent in 2024.

Headlines capture a growing crisis of free speech and civil liberties that are a threat to Western liberal democracy with a transfer of power and rights from citizens to the state as the latter attempts to impose its dogmas on people, sometimes in defiance of biological reality.