River News: Our View

Earlier this year, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who was running for re-election, promised that if voters followed her off a cliff, she would dutifully reward them when they hit the rocky bottom, provided they survived.

Von der Leyen wasn’t going over the cliff herself — you know, do as I say, not as I do — and that’s not actually what she said, but it was what she meant. 

The authoritarian European leader actually promised that, if parliament’s voters placed their trust in her, she would return the favor by erecting a “European Democracy Shield,” in which the government would “link up and coordinate with existing national agencies” to detect, track, and delete deceitful online content.

In other words, bureaucrats will decide what speech is deceitful and what isn’t before Europeans can be poisoned by dangerous tin-foil ideas. Bureaucrats will decide what speech is allowed in Europe and what is forbidden. Bureaucrats will decide what ideas may be “freely” deliberated, all to shield democracy.

That thud at the bottom of the cliff will be the last unfiltered sound Europeans ever hear — the sound of the shield slamming into place, sealing them in a hammer-and-sickle darkness that would warm the hearts of the most hardened Bolsheviks. 

It’s all part of an ominous but not unprecedented movement against liberty in Europe, where Nazism is less than a century past. Now a new totalitarianism, a quasi-fascism or bureaucratic  collectivism, is taking hold and working its way fast through western societies.

The latest example occurred just this last week when French authorities arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, for basically taking a hands-off approach to “content moderation” on the platform. The French authorities say that has opened up Telegram to, as The Wall Street Journal puts it,  “terrorists as well as genuine political dissidents,” not to mention criminal activity, including child pornography and drug trafficking.

Free speech advocates, including Elon Musk, are standing up for Durov, saying the government is less interested in arresting drug traffickers and pedophiles and more interested in silencing those political dissidents. Musk knows of what he speaks: In the hours before he interviewed Donald Trump on X recently, the European Commission warned Musk to stay away from “harmful content” during the interview … or else.

That telegraphed exactly what the commission is all about, and it is not apprehending criminals. It’s about shutting down every platform that allows alternative speech to compete with government narratives. 

We do not condone the use of internet platforms for crimes of any kind, especially drug trafficking and child pornography, but — and this is a key point — governments need to arrest the perpetrators who commit those crimes and who illegally use internet platforms to do so, rather than arresting the platform providers and shutting down the platforms.

The vast majority of those platforms’ users are law-abiding citizens engaged in free expression, millions and millions of them; government should not punish the masses for the sins of a few.

In this case — and in the similar case of Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht, whose sentence Donald Trump has pledged to commute if elected — the true perpetrators go free, while free speech advocates and other political dissidents are arrested and imprisoned.  

Ulbricht’s case reminds us that the totalitarianism that is taking hold in Europe is fast washing up on the shores of the United States. The Biden administration has unabashedly supported the European crackdown on speech, exhorting all governments to target hateful speech or disinformation — as defined by the government, of course.

Ominously, as Kenin Spivak, the founder and chairman of SMI Group LLC, an international consulting firm and investment bank, wrote this past week, the U.S. Supreme Court had a chance this past year to end the U.S. government’s censorship but refused to do so in Murthy v. Missouri, for whatever reason unleashing the Biden administration’s censorship regime just in time for the 2024 presidential election.

One can always tell the mindset of speakers or writers by the language and lingo they use, and, Spivak wrote, that was perhaps the most troubling thing about the Murthy decision: “The court’s use [in the decision] of the Left’s preferred euphemism, ‘content moderation,’  rather than ‘censor’ or ‘suppress,’ is troubling. And, while the court is properly wary of states intruding in the editorial choices made by social media platforms, it expressed no similar concern about the federal government.”

Now unfettered, the Biden administration is free again to emulate Europe in suppressing political dissent, and, as Spivak points out, it is wasting no time doing so.

For example, referring to Elon Musk’s interview with Trump on X, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “you’ve heard us talk about this many times from here, about the responsibilities that social media platforms have when it comes to misinformation, disinformation. … we believe that they have the responsibility.”

Jean-Pierre has made a habit of calling free speech dangerous, reflecting the mindset of the administration. When asked about mean tweets leveled by Musk against Anthony Fauci, she said: “They are disgusting, and they are divorced from reality, and we will continue to call that out and be very clear about that. We are fortunate that he has devoted his career and his life and his exceptional talent to America’s public health, and that’s what should be discussed right now. That’s what we should be thankful to him about, and, again, these are incredibly dangerous and should be called out.”

Disagreeable perhaps, offensive perhaps, but dangerous? 

So what happens when speech is deemed dangerous by the government? Why, it’s censored, of course. Or, as Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz told MSNBC, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” 

Except there is. The First Amendment does not exempt so-called hate speech from its protections, just as it does not exempt flag-burning from its protections. That’s because one person’s hate speech is another person’s call to liberty, and the difference is in who makes the decision about what definition to use.

Following the Murthy decision, the Biden administration wasted no time in announcing that it would resume “collaborating” with social media platforms to make sure disfavored speech was suppressed one way or another, either by outright bans or through shadow-banning algorithms.

They may find the going tougher this time around, hopefully. As we report today, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to House judiciary chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), acknowledging that the Biden administration pressured Facebook and other Meta platforms to censor dissident Covid-19 vaccine narratives. The government was wrong to do so, Zuckerberg wrote, and Meta had been wrong to cave to the pressure.

The letter was carefully worded, making sure to stress that Meta made the content decisions, lest the company be deemed a state actor and become legally liable for the censorship, but it was telling nonetheless, not least because Zuckerberg specifically used the word “censor” to describe the administration’s actions, rather than that leftist euphemism.

It’s hard to figure out what Zuckerberg’s true motive in writing the letter was, just as it’s hard to figure out where all the major players in American politics will finally end up in the massive political realignment that is occurring in this country.

Clearly, lines between left and right are increasingly blurred; the new alignment seems to be more medievally between affluent and not; between privileged and not; between technocratic/bureaucratic and democratic. 

At the end of the day, there’s only two things we know for sure. 

One, we know that the party of censorship is the Democratic Party and the party of free speech and expression is the Republican Party. Just contrast Walz’s belief that free speech is not guaranteed with this year’s GOP platform:

“We will ban the federal government from colluding with anyone to censor lawful speech, defund institutions engaged in censorship, and hold accountable all bureaucrats involved with illegal censoring. We will protect free speech online.”

The second thing we know is, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg should not travel to France any time soon, lest they end up like Pavel Durov; and, similarly, Americans should halt their voting travels to, and visitations with, the Democratic Party, lest we all end up like Pavel Durov.

The bottom of the cliff is only 67 days away.