Totalitarian regimes share the ambition to exert thoroughgoing, fanatical control over the hearts and minds of an entire population, regardless of their divergent ideological roots.

“what was new was not the alleged achievement of total control it was the ambition the articulation of the ambition that it might be possible to exercise such fundamental thoroughgoing control of entire populations”

The public in North Korea is forced to live under strict and oppressive rules, including severe punishments for consuming South Korean entertainment.

“anyone found watching or possessing South Korean entertainment will be sentenced to 15 years in labor camps”

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a barbaric and unstable totalitarian regime that represents a global threat beyond its own borders.

“as far as the Islamic Republic is in power the whole world cannot be safe place”

The requirement to force equality, whether based on class, race, or gender, is an inherently evil concept that inevitably leads to mass tyranny and death.

“the idea that you must force people to be equal is evil whether you're looking at it through the lens of class or race or sex or gender or whatever other [ __ ] people have come up with and the reason it's evil is not that it's not a good thing to redistribute wealth and income”

China is attempting to build a centralized technocratic dictatorship as an alternative to the liberal world system, but such systems historically fail.

“I think Kaiser Wilhelm II, I think uh Hitler, Tojo and Stalin all in their different ways had the same idea that the sort of technocratic dictatorship centralized power and planning could ch create an economy and a society that could challenge this Anglo-American hijgemony this call the liberal worl”

Centralizing power in the hands of one person leads to disastrous outcomes like famine.

“that's the problem with concentrating a lot of power in the hands of one person”

Rod Dreher contends that factors Hannah Arendt identified as pre-totalitarian are currently present in American society, making a right-wing or left-wing totalitarian future possible.

“the conditions that Hannah Aaron laid out for the emergence [music] of totalitarianism have not been dealt with. And we could easily see this rise [music] on the right too. And I don't want to live in a right-wing totalitarian society any more than than I want to live in a left-wing one.”

Totalitarian methods of pandemic response, like lockdowns, were imitated by Western countries, posing a greater long-term threat than the pathogen itself.

“we have a pathogen of of covid to contend with but we also have a pathogen of totalitarian totalitarianism to contend with and I would say the latter poses a much bigger threat than the former”

Modern Western societies are increasingly adopting methods characteristic of totalitarian Soviet systems, such as suppressing independent thought and using the label of conspiracy to intimidate oppone

“I can recognize especially now in our current time in the western world a growing increasing elements of a true dictatorship and not only dictatorship but totalitarian system and an intolerance by the name of Tolerance and freedom we are now living in the Western World to be oppressed”