A Big Announcement Is Coming This Week. Americans Should Be Nervous.

A respected annual report on freedom around the world could deliver a shocking rating to the United States.

Something is happening this Thursday that, during normal times, Americans wouldn’t need to pay a lick of attention to. Freedom House, the esteemed, D.C.-based research institute that has existed since 1941, is scheduled to release its annual report on the state of freedom in the world. You may have seen one of these at some point or another. There’s the written report—last year’s ran to 30 pages—that describes broad trends. And then there’s the ever-popular clickable map, which gives every country in the world a global freedom score based on a number of assessments pertaining to political rights and civil liberties. The nations of the world are divided into three categories: free (a score between 70 and 100); partly free (a score between 40 and 69), and not free (0 to 39).

Freedom House has been issuing this report since 1972, and the United States of America has, of course, always been rated free. In the report released in 2025, which actually covered the calendar year 2024, America scored an 84. Not up there with Sweden (99) or Canada (97) or the U.K. (92), but not bad. We finished fifty-fourth. (It’s worth noting that a lot of the countries that had better scores are very tiny—Palau, Tuvalu, San Marino.) The U.S. score has been declining in recent years; in 2006, the first year Freedom House used the current 100-point scale, we got a 93.

Well. I think you know where I’m headed. This week’s report covers events from the year 2025. You may have noticed that a few things changed in this country from 2024 to 2025. A masked federal police force started rounding up law-abiding people and shipping them off to hellish prisons in countries to which they had no connection. The Justice Department became a transparent arm of the chief executive. Said chief executive has enriched himself on a scale the tinpot dictators of the 1950s and 1960s could never have imagined, making him arguably........

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