American tech-platform owners are unlikely to tell the speech-fascists at the European Union to suck a fat one and swallow the resulting spew. Will Americans care?
The E.U. has implemented laws that will make it almost impossible for Meta and X to operate domestically even without formal dissolution of the First Amendment. What now?
For years, leaders of Western countries have been working fervently to limit the ability of ordinary citizens to express certain ideas online. The overwhelming percentage of this targeted speech is either objectively true (e.g., the covid “vaccines” have a high incidence of serious side effects) or supports narratives contradictory to the interests of a perpetual war-and-inflation state (e.g., the United States has no genuine business mucking around in the affairs of the two most corrupt countries on Earth).
This surveillance-and-repression state formally got underway in the immediate wake of 9/11, with the formation of the Department of Homeland Security followed closely by the passage of the Patriot Act and a set of very long, extraordinary fruitless and expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can pause here and ask yourself if you think that DHS, which began controlling the Transportation Safety Authority (TSA) in 2003 and is allegedly in charge of securing the nation’s borders, has added value to the country in the twenty-plus years of its existence.
When Donald Trump won the 2016 election, the already fervent efforts of the federal government to control the Internet and monitor the lives of its contributors exploded. A wealth of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by some of the worst people on Earth—Bill Gates, George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, the Clinton family, and British and American intelligence and defense interests—tasked themselves with infiltrating and coercing the management of social-media platforms in a way intended to suppress inconvenient postings about covid, January 6, elections, Ukraine, and anything else that threatened to stall the efforts of the American War-and-Inflation Uniparty and its higher-level international puppeteers.
In the case Gates and other actors, this merely represented an intensification of narrative-steering they’d been at the forefront of for years.
The extent of the government’s involvement with tech platforms first became widely known—as widely known as it could, anyway—owing to reporting widely termed the Twitter Files. If you listened to anyone try to derogate this reporting, you were listening to a liar who deserves to drop to the ground from Clot Shot-induced neuronal destruction while dissembling live in front of the U.S. Capitol.
More recently, Missouri v. Biden—which, if you’re a dedicated consumer of the mainstream propaganda stream who rarely ventures into reality, you probably haven’t heard a word about—has been making its way toward the U.S. Supreme Court. But even as the government has been ordered to leave platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter alone, those companies are continuing to censor away anyway. Why wouldn’t they? They want to stay in business, and the government is aware of having very successfully snookered huge numbers of people about important things thanks to its ultimate control of the mainstream media and social-media platforms.
Meanwhile, Canada and its Nazi-handjobbing priss of a Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, recently made a move toward reining in podcasters and others operating outside that company’s flamboyantly corrupt state media.
The status of free speech has reached a crisis level now. It is imperative that people recognize that the kind of speech targeted spans the ideological spectrum. You’re not safe just because you’ve been careful to only criticize MAGA, antivaxxers, Putinites, and the right segment of U.S. election deniers on whatever social-media accounts you maintain. It’s not just people like me who habitually say unpopular things and have been fed up with the nonsense for years who should be primed to fight back.
The European Commission, and arm of the European Union, has just passed a statute called the Digital Services Act that stands as the most openly authoritarian non-violent gambit in the modern history of “democratic” countries. As Matt Taibbi explains in an article posted today, this legislation not only serves these fagged-up EU autocrats directly by suppressing information and opinions that stand in the way of their inhumane machinations, but will also effectively force social-media platforms to adopt the same standards in the U.S. if they continue operating elsewhere.
Hence, this new set of sweeping regulations can be used by American actors as a catapult to launch themselves clean over the First Amendment. And the U.S. government is rabidly and categorically behind these crackdown-laws.
What will X CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and their peers will do is fairly predictable, especially in the case of Zuckerberg. But how will everyday Americans react to a continued undoing of the one thing that really does set America apart from every other country on the planet, and has for over two hundred years? I guess that depends on how strongly individual members of this society perceive having been lied to, over and over, in ways that directly damage them or people they know.
Sadly—and this is a major source of my driving angst, apart from any formal positions I hold on any issues—I’m not sure we’re even close to a consensus here. I don’t think many people really understand how undemocratic the air around them has become and how much worse it might quickly become. But personally, I am not prepared to spend the rest of my life being lied to by people who should be in prison like Tony Fauci, Albert Bourla, and Rochelle Walensky while others either nod soporifically along or actively rally behind the toxic jizz these sociopathic greedheads ejaculate.
