America’s struggle with the deep state is a transnational conflict in which Britain and Europe have fought as willing proxies. This will no longer be tolerated.
The european elite is as certain that it holds a monopoly on truth as the church did when confronting Galileo for his advocacy of a heliocentric system. That's why, like the church, they imprison and sanction those that advocate for opinions that erode the facade of their dogma.
Yes, although I think Lyon's point is that this is transnational -- the American ruling class and bureaucracy feels the same way.
What an amazing time to be alive: we're either starting a counter-revolution to 1968 (or perhaps to Mill and the Enlightenment itself)... or we're the last gasp of freedom and our children are destined to be globalized serfs. "May you live in interesting times" indeed.
And yet, isn't the origin of the propaganda and censorship apparatus the elite universities of the United States? Much as the US Deep State machinations pushed the world to wage a proxy war in the Ukraine? I understand the frustration around the world as the elite regime in the US sets up these machiavellian schemes, and then turns on a dime and leaves its former proxies blowing in the wind. My thesis, after reading extensively about Napoleon's reign, is that potentates' desire for meaning in their existence drives them to ever more destructive and hubristic schemes. Add in nuclear weapons, and it's hard not to see the end of the world as we know it on the near horizon. Sorry to marr your mid-week euphoria 😔 .
The reality is that governments and authorities today are in the same predicament as medieval rulers during the rise of the printing press—they have lost control of the narrative because they have lost control of information. Those who control information shape the narrative. The result is the ongoing erosion of the nation-state, as the once-unified national narrative has fractured into multiple, often contradictory, versions. The most significant conflict is therefore not between countries, ethnic groups, religions, or over territories—it is within nations themselves.
Excellent analysis, underlining the tactic of outsourcing censorship from our First-Amendment shores to more meddlesome territories. And if it had continued unopposed, if Elon hadn’t bought Twitter and showed the Deep State receipts, our First Amendment itself would have become increasingly paper—in an era when paper is nearly obsolete, at least in terms of political speech.
I also appreciate your underlining the good news that Trump 2, especially in the figure of Vance, is on it. That the Administration sees it as not only a political threat, but a threat to our tech companies, and may well respond if the goons aren’t shut down.
That, however, will be a hard pill to swallow for Europe’s elites. They’re backed into a corner. If they drop their tendentious policing of Europe’s internet, their own citizens will be able to discourse openly online. The floodgates will open, with predictable results for the currently ruling parties.
Which is why I predict they’d rather brave Trump Administration ire than ease off on censorship vis a vis their own populations.
And really, this fear of their own populations may well be perversely feeding their current unrealistic posturing on Ukraine. They see there’s no way they’re going to get along with Trump and Vance, because they’re *not* going to accept actual democratic norms, so why not put a brave face on it while they watch their ship founder?
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation “
Marshal McLuhan, 1964
He was quite early in recognizing that technology reorders our world completely independent of how we use that technology (and more profoundly).
The media is the message.
This suggests that respect for free speech may not be sufficient. Free speech is an argument for how we use the technology. He warned repeatedly that how we use technology is powerless against the change wrought by the technology. More simply, we have invented the tools of fifth generation warfare and they will be deployed in a maximalist manner. The invention of electricity usurped time and space through instantaneity - light speed communication - and thereby collapsed our world into a village. All voices all are heard at once. Information is now a sickness. With AI, we have extended our own consciousness. I believe these tools will be Weaponized against us again in the future. I don’t think respect for free speech will be sufficient to stop what is coming. Electricity has only been around for 120 years. It’s new; It will take us to our destination. Trump and the gang are the last holdouts. They are shovelling shit against the tide. This is atemporary interregnum, 5GW is the future.
As always, a brilliant analysis. Connected a lot of dots for me. I thought Vance's Munich speech was mainly about Europe's political class denying free speech to their own people. Even though the U.S. tech giants caved too easily to the government pressure--either out of fear of losing access to markets or being ideologically aligned with the censorship goals--I am a bit less skeptical of their increasing influence in the Trump administration. A good next step for the tech giants would be to clean up the anti-populist, anti-conservative, anti-traditionalist bent in their LLM's.
~~Vance delivered multiple messages with his speech, the broadest and most historic of which was that the era of “post-national” global liberalism is over.~~
Perhaps. But we should be careful not to underestimate The Machine's ability to morph and adjust. Globalist neo-liberalism is nothing if not flexible.
The EU ruling class can't do it. They're too invested. They're to convinced of their own righteousness. But mostly, they're terrified of nationalism.
This data visualization explains why: https://youtu.be/UY9P0QSxlnI?t=409 That's queued to AD 1000. Look at how often the borders of Europe change. The last 160 years are weird: 50 years of stability in the late 19th century; 2 huge wars; then 70+ stable years until now. This stability (anchored by the US military) has been REALLY good for European material prosperity. The ruling class will do ANYTHING to prevent a return of nationalist Euro-wars. It's not altruistic; they remember 1848. What the EU ruling class fails to realize is that they are now the ancien régime.
The US may have to separate from most of Europe, treat them as enemies, impose tariffs, and perhaps sanction their leaders. So the question is, where are our allies? Australia is probably retainable, some of Eastern Europe, perhaps UK. Japan, S. Korea, India (loosely -- they play all sides). As weird as it sounds, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia. Taiwan is now far more important (our host has convinced me of that.) Since our historical-ethno-allies are turning against freedom; we're going to have to get creative. Our new allies may not be liberal-democracies (an oxymoron BTW) but must respect the Westphalian framework. That's why the EU can't be on that list any more than the old USSR: neither believe in Westphalia; both want(ed) their ruling ideology globalized.
Looked at in this vein, Trump's reset with Russia makes complete sense. It's not just "we want to separate Russia from China"; it's also that we need allies to replace Europe for the next 100 years. Because the latter is headed toward another 1848.
Absolutely. The reaction of Europe to Z-man's rout from the Oval Office tells me that they are going to ignore polite requests so more pointed actions will be necessary. First up, tell Macron and Starmer that their war plan doesn't interest the US and that they should go talk to Russia if they actually want peace. Second (or maybe first), exit Five Eyes. Tell the US IC that unauthorized contact with those agencies will be grounds for dismissal and trial. Target and remove all European intelligence operatives in embassies in the US. Pull all US military out of Europe. A public discussion of what Article 5 of the NATO treaty actually says would be useful. It doesn't require all out support so we could send a former DEI officer to help them.
If that still doesn't work, sanctions will be needed targeting government officials involved in suppression of free speech or other violations of the rights of American citizens. Next comes a LNG embargo. Perhaps we should join OPEC+.
In China, hundreds of millions of Chinese log on to the internet every week using a VPN. They log onto the real internet, the one that works. Not the fire-walled Potemkin Village Chinese version. China's Deepseek AI is powered by the real internet.
The white-paper (A4) revolution in mid-November of 2022 ended all Covid restrictions in China in one week. Millions and millions of 'voiceless' Chinese (the white copy paper was symbolic of voicelessness) held up pieces of A4 typing paper. All at the same time. All over China. Universities were all white paper for a couple of days. In December everyone got the Covid and it was over. It was a total and complete collapse of the regime's will to power.
Guess what? China has the real internet and their government needs to watch the movie, "how to train your dragon" Cartoon fantasy is their only hope
I guess my point is all the political change is driven by the changing technology of language. It's a global phenomenon. If the European governments look weak trying to censor their people. The Chinese have the same leaks on their ship of state. The Chinese regime is yielding freedom to their people. Great political changes in China will follow. Lyon's article is about Europe, and I don't need to expand it. But the Chinese are all learning English (the language of the internet) English is the language of freedom - the political changes will follow. The entire globe is being swept out on the River Flood to the Sea of Change.
When you say freedom, what does that mean? The right to privilege without obligation? Gay marriage, sexual promiscuity, divorce, addiction, etc., have all been the result of "freedom."
According to various sources, more than 30% of people in China make use of a VPN. Most, if not all, ex-pats in China make use of a VPN. Many companies who do business with other countries require a VPN to communicate with these countries and ensure successful business relations.
DeepSeek AI is designed to search and analyze data from a wide range of sources, not just the Chinese version of the internet. It leverages machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and deep learning algorithms to deliver highly accurate and context-aware search results. DeepSeek can access and process data from various platforms, including cloud storage services, CRMs, and enterprise software, ensuring that users can access and analyze data from multiple sources without switching between tools
I subscribe to your Substack because I am fascinated by the phenomenon of a good mind espousing mindlessness. Just about everything in this piece, like so much of your work, is an intellectual version of the game "opposite day."
It's impossible to refute the sheer amount of well-phrased wrongness here. Brandolini's Law, the bullshit asymmetry principle, is beautifully illustrated in your writing. Just a few examples:
-- Far from liberating Twitter from speech limitations, Elon's acquisition has created a hellscape of real restrictions--essentially, if you disagree with Elon, or diss him, your speech rights are gone.
-- It's not the Europeans who are meddling in US politics, it's Vance and Elon who are meddling in European politics. The Europeans are not publicly calling for Americans to vote the Proud Boys into Congress. It's us promoting the fortunes of AfD in Germany.
I could go on and on. In any case, I really want to engage with you on two fundamental questions.
1. Misinformation. Do you grant that there is such a thing, and that society has an interest, and a right, to restrict it? Let me reason by analogy: it's long-standing US law that you are not free to falsely yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Why? Because your putative free speech rights are trumped by the danger you might create a stampede which might hurt people and property for no reason. There are certain kinds of misinformation that is precisely analogous to that. For example, in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions, advising people to not take actions that will reduce the spread of disease, or advising people to take snake oil that does no good, is hurting the larger society in a way that must trump individual free speech rights for precisely the same reason.
2. High intelligence used to promote obviously stupid ideas. I have no illusions that you will actually engage on this one--we would have to know each other and be chatting over Scotch in private to really discuss the matter--but I'm typing, and I REALLY am curious, so here goes. I can't imagine that you believe your own bullshit. So, I can only imagine that it is one of the following:
-- It's hard to make a good living as an intellectual, so someone is paying you to advance this stuff in the public sphere. I know lots of people whose work disgusts their own moral sense, but they rationalize what they do by thinking, "If I don't do it, someone else will, so it might as well be me and benefit my family instead of another's."
-- You believe that democracy, individual liberty, traditional Lockean liberalism, the whole Enlightenment project, were all a mistake. Humans in general are too irrational, society is too complex, the stakes are too high to allow these mechanisms to continue. Attacking them frontally won't work with the masses--they are too conditioned to believe in them--so they must be manipulated instead. Bullshit for a higher purpose is moral, not immoral. (Of course, over that Scotch, I would then have to ask lots of questions about how you rationalize away all history, which essentially proves the old maxim that democracy is the worst possible system, except for all the others which have been tried from time to time.)
-- Teenage trauma, like early exposure to Ayn Rand.
Anyway, thanks for provoking all these thoughts. I remain a happy subscriber.
Let me take on 3 of your your points. (The 4th only our host can.)
Elon buying Twitter has significantly reduced the amount of censorship on Twitter. This is objectively true. It also resulted in a bunch of Leftists who fear contrary ideas fleeing the platform. But that's self-selection, not censorship. Can you get banned from Twitter? Sure. But it's a heck of a lot harder now than it was 3 years ago.
Meddling: Lyons specifically mentions the UK labour party sending over campaign workers for Joe Biden. If that's not meddling, I don't know what is. If you define you, me, or Elon Musk stating our views on the German election as "meddling", you have expanded the term beyond all utility. You really want to see US meddling, go lookup Samantha Powers behavior in Hungary in 2022.
Fire in a crowded theatre: This line is used incorrectly all the time. Oliver Wendel Holmes used this example in Schenck (1919) to illustrate a "clear and present danger" test, which resulted in Schenck being sent to prison for distributing anti-war pamphlets (effectively, he was imprisoned for hate-speech against the United States). 50 years later, this standard was definitively overturned by Brandenburg, and is recognized today as a miscarriage of justice. Your very example illustrates precisely why hate speech laws are so dangerous.
I agree that censorship of misinformation requires a clear and present danger. Public health misinformation during a pandemic is precisely that. I also agree that speech codes are awful, whether from the left or right. You shouldn’t cancel people for saying there are two biological sexes or for teaching the science of biological evolution.
We will agree to disagree on Elon and Twitter.
On Labour people canvassing for Biden, supposedly these were volunteers on their own time and dime. You and I are free to fly to Germany and campaign against neo-Nazis if we wish. Doesn’t mean our respective favorite politicians sent us.
You and I saying stuff about European politics is very different from the Vice President of the United States and the apparent co-President making very public remarks.
"I agree that censorship of misinformation requires a clear and present danger."
I most definitely do not agree with this, and neither does US law or SCOTUS. The Brandenburg standard is far tighter: "likely to produce imminent lawless action."
The "clear and present danger" std was revoked by SCOTUS precisely because it was too broad. Had it been in effect in 2020, both anti-masking COVID protests and BLM protests could easily have been charged as criminal by a US Atty on the basis of the content itself being dangerous.
"You shouldn’t cancel people for saying there are two biological sexes" -- Why not? It's a clear and present danger to trans-women by denying that they exist. (Note, I think this is absurd, but without free speech, having that debate is impossible.)
Banning "hate speech" just means banning speech that you happen to hate. If you demand the power to do that, others can too, and some of them may well want to ban you.
US law and SCOTUS determines the standard for censorship by the government. I'm sorry that I lazily echoed that word when it is actually inapposite. We can debate whether "imminent lawless action" is the right standard to trump the FIrst Amendment. But that's irrelevant to misinformation restrictions imposed by private companies on their systems.
My discussion of yelling-fire-in-a-crowded-theater is not about censorship. Private entities by definition are incapable of conducting censorship since they are not the state, and only the state can do censorship. Whether social media--or the letters to the editor page of the NY TImes, or the gardening column in the newsletter of the Elks Club--can restrict what does and doesn't go in is a different matter, and involves perhaps abstract notions of. fairness and morality, not censorship as a matter of law.
Well, I am not in favor of speech codes, for "hate" or anything else. I am a political liberal, as you can easily tell, which means I am against illiberality of all sorts. Speech in general cannot do harm. "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but..." and so on.
Back to misinformation. I am in favor of private companies restricting misinformation that presents a clear and present (as in substantial and imminent) danger to the public, which is what we were talking about, I think, with regard to restricting dangerous nonsense about COVID and COVID vaccines by social media companies on their systems.
So what's your take on the Biden administration enlisting every major social media company to shut down "COVID misinformation"? I ask because that skirts the line you're trying to draw: private companies banning speech at the behest of the US government.
Actually, two questions... what was your take on it at the time? And what is your take on it now that it's become clear that some of that
"misinformation" turned out to accurate (lab leak, vaccine side effects, etc...)
While I generally agree that "private companies can't engage in censorship", there are exceptions. Amazon absolutely can censor: ask Ryan Anderson. So can Citibank or BofA or Coutts: ask Nigel Farage or Melania Trump. Liberals were traditionally very wary of concentrated power (whether political, social or economic). I think there needs to be a line at which even a private entity becomes subject to 1st Amendment limitations.
A President can ask/cajole/embarrass publicly a private company--in JFK's day, this was called "jawboning." A President is not allowed to threaten to sic the power of the government, as in the IRS or the DOJ or Commerce, against private companies if they don't obey. AFAIK, Biden never did that (unlike Trump, who we know does cross those red lines).
Lab leak talk should never have been called misinformation. All the anti-COVID Vax talk is utter dangerous hogwash. That SHOULD HAVE and still SHOULD BE stopped. It's nonsense and kills people. Side effects are always possible in any medical intervention. The mRNA vaccines are hugely effective and tremendously safe. The propaganda against them needs to stop.
Agree on concentration of power in the economy. Disagree on extending the First Amendment to private entities. If the government can force private entities to say things, it can force them not to say things. There goes our freedoms.
Trump's actions really do signify a break with a narrative that's held continuity since the beginning of the Cold War--and more importantly, even after its end in the Gorbachev era, with the breakup of the USSR. To my reading, that's the root of the Ukro-Russian War and the resulting fracturing of the consensus between the US and Europe on international relations (especially the break with the UK, which is virtually unheard of.) The insistence--actually more like taking for granted--that the NATO alliance would extend eastward to the borders of the old Soviet Union showed that there was no serious thought to be given to allowing Russia (no longer Leninist, or even Marxist) a sphere of regional influence beyond its borders. And later moves during the second term of the Bush administration pressed even further, which is where the real trouble began--it became clear, at least to Putin and the Russians, that a zero-sum game was still being carried over from the Cold War, and that the NATO West was intent on carrying over policies to weaken the regional power of Russia and deny any legitimacy to influence outside the region. The result of this policy consigned Russia to a nation reliant exclusively on its extraction economy--albeit an extraction economy with an immense domestic resource trove. How could such a policy lead to any result other than the Russians becoming more nationalistic? And if the oligarchs overseeing those industries were crooks, at least they were Russian crooks. The US seemed to be applying a long-term strategy of weakening the corrupt plutocracy of Russia by weakening the country itself, with the end game apparently being that much-desired opening of Russia to increasing economic role for the West in supplying the investment and infrastructure to modernize those industries and incorporate Russia into the much wealthier sphere of the US-UK-EU trade bloc. But--including Russia as a subordinate, junior nation, under ground rules already established by the wealthier foreign interests.
This was no way to do it. And Ukraine was the last straw. The central geopolitical importance of Ukraine--not just regionally, but intercontinentally and globally--has been emphasized by geopolitical thinkers going back to the 19th century, to Mackinder and Haushofer. That's why the British Empire fought the Russians in Crimea in the mid-19th century, and attempted to pull Afghanistan (another resource trove) into its influence at the end of the 19th century. That strategy has never been significantly updated or adjusted in the direction of offering the opportunity for a multipolar regional balance with Russia. It's disingenuous to maintain that Russia is an inherently imperialistic nation when the power center of the international alliance making the accusation has an imperialistic character of its own. Stalinist Communism extended its influence over Eastern Europe, not Russia. Russia has a history of foreign domination of its neighbors, but so did the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth--in the direction of Russia and Ukraine.
I could go on. Openings and opportunities were squandered, in an era when the US (and its NATO proxy) really did possess the economic, military, geographic, and diplomatic means to innovate a way forward--by supporting some crucial elements of the social safety net, by not rushing into the new Russia with fistfulls of US dollars to naively attempt a "Western capitalist privatization" of the Russian economy in a country that was bound to be hostile toward such a future, American capitalist idealist boosterism notwithstanding. And now here we are. That ship has sailed. The legacy of peacetime went with it. Military aggression for the purpose of a power grab is always wrong, but >20 years of treating the nation of Russia as "a gas station with missiles" was wrong,
too. I'll say it again; even if the worst charges about Putin and his backers are granted as irrefutably true on all counts, even nations run as kleptocracies are sovereign states with valid national security interests. The history of US international relations shows that our national governments are fine with, by turns, either making favorable arrangements with kleptocracies or engaging in "regime change." Not as a matter of superior morality, just straight power concepts. And--particularly in the post-Cold War era--the US has gotten used to having its way. Apparently, the US foreign policy crafters of the neoliberal era assumed that their mergers and acquisitions were bound to achieve the same low-effort success in the case of Russia, albeit as a somewhat longer game. But that isn't
the way it worked. And now the Ukro-Russian war is a million casualties deep, and east of the Dnieper River, much of the countryside is a devastated battlefield, complete with the inevitable unexploded ordnance and landmines. Three years into the war, there's no end in sight--and the Ukrainian leaders evidently continue to battle under the US/UK/NATO-encouraged assumption that they'll be victorious! Because that's what a total Russian withdrawal--including ceding back Crimea and Sebastopol--would be, basically. Zelanskyy has actually been persuaded that as long as the Ukraine is backed by the US/UK/NATO, that logistical support will prove so powerful that Ukraine will be able to obtain an apology from Putin, with reparations!
That is not going to happen. It isn't in the cards, as the saying goes. Once Putin ordered an armed invasion and took territory, he was not going to simply hand it back. Russia has lost too many soldiers. The Russian economy has been revamped to counter the effects of boycotts, and it's militarized to support the war effort. I don't know how clear this reality was made to Zelensky in his meetings with Trump and his advisers; he seems to have absorbed none of those facts and implications. The problem is--and I realize that I'll be widely condemned for saying this--Biden and Blinken and Sullivan and the UK and NATO must have really laid the bullshit on with Zelensky. They encouraged Ukrainian hopes that are not supported either by the facts on the ground or the practical limits on the support that the US was ever willing to offer. And no, I don't think Biden releasing any amount of weapons to Ukraine earlier on would have swept the Russians back to the boundaries that existed before the invasion.
Once the Russians rolled their tanks, the best that could ever be hoped for is a demilitarized zone and a plebiscite of Ukrainians in the provinces east of the Dnieper, preferably under UN aegis, to determine the fate of those disputed territories.
(As for Russia handing back the Crimean peninsula as a concession--a territory that hasn't even been disputed as a battlefield--forget it. I find it bizarre that the US State Department ever endorsed such a goal. I mean, really, as if resolving that dispute was about litigating a civil case before some global Supreme Court. Even if such a possibility existed, the issues to be considered are hardly the unconditional slam-dunk implied by the fine print in the Ukrainian national charter, which is the sole support for the current Ukraine government's territorial claim over a territory with a population that's at least 70% Russian ethnicity and harboring a major Russian naval base with a history dating back to the Czarist era. Conquered for some years in the mid-19th century--by whom? A Western European alliance, dominated by imperial Great Britain.)
There are all sorts of reasons why a plebiscite in the eastern provinces would favor the Russians--both legitimate and illegitimate. Especially at this point. But even that prospect is now practically out of the question, given three years of full-scale war. Not unless Ukraine is successful in drawing other European nations in the (now practically defunct) NATO alliance to fight alongside Ukrainians--not just as "advisers", but escalating to a military alliance of regular army units and air forces. That would be a perilous escalation--particularly if that alliance were to achieve significant territorial gains in a counterattack! That's the real paradox--significant success in regaining territory in eastern Ukraine risks the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the front, and also possibly a multi-front campaign to capture the Baltic states. That's how escalation works: the more someone has to lose by failing to escalate, the more they'll be inclined to do it. That's how it worked in Korea: the US-dominated UN "police force" not only regained the territory south of the 38th parallel of latitude that had demarcated the division of the country into Communist-controlled vs. Western-allied portions, but MacArthur drove almost all the way to the border of the PRC. And then the Chinese army entered the war. Because even Communist totalitarian despotisms have vital national security interests.
I don't disagree that many of these laws have gone too far to "protect" people. Nor do I doubt that some of the intent behind the laws is malign.
But if these things are indeed so bad, why is there no reference in this post to what Trump does to shut down free speech (and the US court system's right to say what it thinks). Why is there no acknowledgement of Musk's recent, extensive and very public interference in UK and German politics ? Why is there no reference to Vance's attempts to shut down free speech domestically and abroad ? What Trump/Vance/Musk "say" they believe in, is not what they actually do.
By not mentioning any of the ways the Trump/Musk/Vance trio shut down free speech, it seems to suggest you believe the Americans are entitled do what they want... simply because they "say" they believe in free speech ?
You are so well read and so well informed, so your question surprises me. Has Trump passed laws like the one's you reference in Europe ? No. Perhaps law is your technical definition of "ways" to "shut down free speech". If so, we have no disagreement. ( And just to reiterate, I don't believe we have any substantive disagreement that some of these European laws have gone too far. )
But there are many ways to shut down free speech. I'd argue that fear is a far more powerful tool to crush free speech than law. I think Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Jimmy Lai would agree. Unfortunately we cannot ask Sergei Magnitsky. When very powerful people use their money, their political position and their propaganda machines to intimidate and crush dissent, then free speech withers and dies. True for China, true for Russia, true for Europe..... and currently in my view very true for America.
You will know Friedrich Hayek's work far better than me, so you will know what I mean by the use of centralized power to build propaganda machines (X, Facebook, maybe some of the broadsheets too) as forms of suppression of free speech, and the parroting of the party line. The pictures of the inauguration "line up" and the recent statements of support for Trump leave me with very little doubt about who actually controls the US propaganda machines.... or what those platforms will do to attack and intimidate any voice that dares criticize Trump, Vance or Musk.
I guess my point -- and I accept one could see this as semantics -- is that fear is as powerful as law to control freedom of expression. Examples of this ? I guess I could find all the exact wording from the litigation Trump launched against Michael Wolff to try to shut him up, ditto his litigation against Michael O'Brien, ditto the exact wording he used to threaten E Jean Carroll or all the judges whose legitimate rulings and comments he disagreed with. Or I could point you to Musk's X account and all the threats he has made via his own platform to people he disagrees with, or the litigation threats, or the threatening and disrespectful emails to Federal employees, or the paedophile labels... Musk should be acting as a servant of the government, for the people. His current position in Government massively amplifies his power, his voice and the consequences for those at the receiving end of his ire.
I won't spell all those things out, because I know you are very informed and I would only be detailing what you already know. So, maybe it boils down to this: I believe that using your power as an elected US official, especially when you do that in cahoots with the very wealthy owners of the US (global?) propaganda machines, to threaten, intimidate and bully people you disagree with, is as corrosive and toxic to free speech as any law that has been passed in Europe.
I don't see this as an issue of the right or the left by the way. To me this the misuse and abuse of political and financial power: either through law or through fear. In that sense they are all as bad as each other and we should say so, not cast Europe as bad for free speech and America as carrying the torch of free speech.
The european elite is as certain that it holds a monopoly on truth as the church did when confronting Galileo for his advocacy of a heliocentric system. That's why, like the church, they imprison and sanction those that advocate for opinions that erode the facade of their dogma.
Yes, although I think Lyon's point is that this is transnational -- the American ruling class and bureaucracy feels the same way.
What an amazing time to be alive: we're either starting a counter-revolution to 1968 (or perhaps to Mill and the Enlightenment itself)... or we're the last gasp of freedom and our children are destined to be globalized serfs. "May you live in interesting times" indeed.
And yet, isn't the origin of the propaganda and censorship apparatus the elite universities of the United States? Much as the US Deep State machinations pushed the world to wage a proxy war in the Ukraine? I understand the frustration around the world as the elite regime in the US sets up these machiavellian schemes, and then turns on a dime and leaves its former proxies blowing in the wind. My thesis, after reading extensively about Napoleon's reign, is that potentates' desire for meaning in their existence drives them to ever more destructive and hubristic schemes. Add in nuclear weapons, and it's hard not to see the end of the world as we know it on the near horizon. Sorry to marr your mid-week euphoria 😔 .
The reality is that governments and authorities today are in the same predicament as medieval rulers during the rise of the printing press—they have lost control of the narrative because they have lost control of information. Those who control information shape the narrative. The result is the ongoing erosion of the nation-state, as the once-unified national narrative has fractured into multiple, often contradictory, versions. The most significant conflict is therefore not between countries, ethnic groups, religions, or over territories—it is within nations themselves.
The rabbit hole is so much deeper than I had understood. Thank you for the illuminating background sir.
Excellent analysis, underlining the tactic of outsourcing censorship from our First-Amendment shores to more meddlesome territories. And if it had continued unopposed, if Elon hadn’t bought Twitter and showed the Deep State receipts, our First Amendment itself would have become increasingly paper—in an era when paper is nearly obsolete, at least in terms of political speech.
I also appreciate your underlining the good news that Trump 2, especially in the figure of Vance, is on it. That the Administration sees it as not only a political threat, but a threat to our tech companies, and may well respond if the goons aren’t shut down.
That, however, will be a hard pill to swallow for Europe’s elites. They’re backed into a corner. If they drop their tendentious policing of Europe’s internet, their own citizens will be able to discourse openly online. The floodgates will open, with predictable results for the currently ruling parties.
Which is why I predict they’d rather brave Trump Administration ire than ease off on censorship vis a vis their own populations.
And really, this fear of their own populations may well be perversely feeding their current unrealistic posturing on Ukraine. They see there’s no way they’re going to get along with Trump and Vance, because they’re *not* going to accept actual democratic norms, so why not put a brave face on it while they watch their ship founder?
“The successor to politics will be propaganda.”
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation “
Marshal McLuhan, 1964
He was quite early in recognizing that technology reorders our world completely independent of how we use that technology (and more profoundly).
The media is the message.
This suggests that respect for free speech may not be sufficient. Free speech is an argument for how we use the technology. He warned repeatedly that how we use technology is powerless against the change wrought by the technology. More simply, we have invented the tools of fifth generation warfare and they will be deployed in a maximalist manner. The invention of electricity usurped time and space through instantaneity - light speed communication - and thereby collapsed our world into a village. All voices all are heard at once. Information is now a sickness. With AI, we have extended our own consciousness. I believe these tools will be Weaponized against us again in the future. I don’t think respect for free speech will be sufficient to stop what is coming. Electricity has only been around for 120 years. It’s new; It will take us to our destination. Trump and the gang are the last holdouts. They are shovelling shit against the tide. This is atemporary interregnum, 5GW is the future.
Isn’t that terrible?
As always, a brilliant analysis. Connected a lot of dots for me. I thought Vance's Munich speech was mainly about Europe's political class denying free speech to their own people. Even though the U.S. tech giants caved too easily to the government pressure--either out of fear of losing access to markets or being ideologically aligned with the censorship goals--I am a bit less skeptical of their increasing influence in the Trump administration. A good next step for the tech giants would be to clean up the anti-populist, anti-conservative, anti-traditionalist bent in their LLM's.
~~Vance delivered multiple messages with his speech, the broadest and most historic of which was that the era of “post-national” global liberalism is over.~~
Perhaps. But we should be careful not to underestimate The Machine's ability to morph and adjust. Globalist neo-liberalism is nothing if not flexible.
The EU ruling class can't do it. They're too invested. They're to convinced of their own righteousness. But mostly, they're terrified of nationalism.
This data visualization explains why: https://youtu.be/UY9P0QSxlnI?t=409 That's queued to AD 1000. Look at how often the borders of Europe change. The last 160 years are weird: 50 years of stability in the late 19th century; 2 huge wars; then 70+ stable years until now. This stability (anchored by the US military) has been REALLY good for European material prosperity. The ruling class will do ANYTHING to prevent a return of nationalist Euro-wars. It's not altruistic; they remember 1848. What the EU ruling class fails to realize is that they are now the ancien régime.
The US may have to separate from most of Europe, treat them as enemies, impose tariffs, and perhaps sanction their leaders. So the question is, where are our allies? Australia is probably retainable, some of Eastern Europe, perhaps UK. Japan, S. Korea, India (loosely -- they play all sides). As weird as it sounds, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia. Taiwan is now far more important (our host has convinced me of that.) Since our historical-ethno-allies are turning against freedom; we're going to have to get creative. Our new allies may not be liberal-democracies (an oxymoron BTW) but must respect the Westphalian framework. That's why the EU can't be on that list any more than the old USSR: neither believe in Westphalia; both want(ed) their ruling ideology globalized.
Looked at in this vein, Trump's reset with Russia makes complete sense. It's not just "we want to separate Russia from China"; it's also that we need allies to replace Europe for the next 100 years. Because the latter is headed toward another 1848.
Absolutely. The reaction of Europe to Z-man's rout from the Oval Office tells me that they are going to ignore polite requests so more pointed actions will be necessary. First up, tell Macron and Starmer that their war plan doesn't interest the US and that they should go talk to Russia if they actually want peace. Second (or maybe first), exit Five Eyes. Tell the US IC that unauthorized contact with those agencies will be grounds for dismissal and trial. Target and remove all European intelligence operatives in embassies in the US. Pull all US military out of Europe. A public discussion of what Article 5 of the NATO treaty actually says would be useful. It doesn't require all out support so we could send a former DEI officer to help them.
If that still doesn't work, sanctions will be needed targeting government officials involved in suppression of free speech or other violations of the rights of American citizens. Next comes a LNG embargo. Perhaps we should join OPEC+.
In China, hundreds of millions of Chinese log on to the internet every week using a VPN. They log onto the real internet, the one that works. Not the fire-walled Potemkin Village Chinese version. China's Deepseek AI is powered by the real internet.
The white-paper (A4) revolution in mid-November of 2022 ended all Covid restrictions in China in one week. Millions and millions of 'voiceless' Chinese (the white copy paper was symbolic of voicelessness) held up pieces of A4 typing paper. All at the same time. All over China. Universities were all white paper for a couple of days. In December everyone got the Covid and it was over. It was a total and complete collapse of the regime's will to power.
Guess what? China has the real internet and their government needs to watch the movie, "how to train your dragon" Cartoon fantasy is their only hope
Source recommendations for diving deeper into the information you provide?
I guess my point is all the political change is driven by the changing technology of language. It's a global phenomenon. If the European governments look weak trying to censor their people. The Chinese have the same leaks on their ship of state. The Chinese regime is yielding freedom to their people. Great political changes in China will follow. Lyon's article is about Europe, and I don't need to expand it. But the Chinese are all learning English (the language of the internet) English is the language of freedom - the political changes will follow. The entire globe is being swept out on the River Flood to the Sea of Change.
When you say freedom, what does that mean? The right to privilege without obligation? Gay marriage, sexual promiscuity, divorce, addiction, etc., have all been the result of "freedom."
https://time.com/6238050/china-protests-censorship-urumqi-a4/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_COVID-19_protests_in_China
According to various sources, more than 30% of people in China make use of a VPN. Most, if not all, ex-pats in China make use of a VPN. Many companies who do business with other countries require a VPN to communicate with these countries and ensure successful business relations.
https://www.voanews.com/a/china-s-vpn-usage-nearly-doubles-amid-internet-censorship/7488465.html
https://www.tomsguide.com/features/are-vpns-banned-in-china-and-can-you-still-use-them
DeepSeek AI is designed to search and analyze data from a wide range of sources, not just the Chinese version of the internet. It leverages machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and deep learning algorithms to deliver highly accurate and context-aware search results. DeepSeek can access and process data from various platforms, including cloud storage services, CRMs, and enterprise software, ensuring that users can access and analyze data from multiple sources without switching between tools
I subscribe to your Substack because I am fascinated by the phenomenon of a good mind espousing mindlessness. Just about everything in this piece, like so much of your work, is an intellectual version of the game "opposite day."
It's impossible to refute the sheer amount of well-phrased wrongness here. Brandolini's Law, the bullshit asymmetry principle, is beautifully illustrated in your writing. Just a few examples:
-- Far from liberating Twitter from speech limitations, Elon's acquisition has created a hellscape of real restrictions--essentially, if you disagree with Elon, or diss him, your speech rights are gone.
-- It's not the Europeans who are meddling in US politics, it's Vance and Elon who are meddling in European politics. The Europeans are not publicly calling for Americans to vote the Proud Boys into Congress. It's us promoting the fortunes of AfD in Germany.
I could go on and on. In any case, I really want to engage with you on two fundamental questions.
1. Misinformation. Do you grant that there is such a thing, and that society has an interest, and a right, to restrict it? Let me reason by analogy: it's long-standing US law that you are not free to falsely yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Why? Because your putative free speech rights are trumped by the danger you might create a stampede which might hurt people and property for no reason. There are certain kinds of misinformation that is precisely analogous to that. For example, in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions, advising people to not take actions that will reduce the spread of disease, or advising people to take snake oil that does no good, is hurting the larger society in a way that must trump individual free speech rights for precisely the same reason.
2. High intelligence used to promote obviously stupid ideas. I have no illusions that you will actually engage on this one--we would have to know each other and be chatting over Scotch in private to really discuss the matter--but I'm typing, and I REALLY am curious, so here goes. I can't imagine that you believe your own bullshit. So, I can only imagine that it is one of the following:
-- It's hard to make a good living as an intellectual, so someone is paying you to advance this stuff in the public sphere. I know lots of people whose work disgusts their own moral sense, but they rationalize what they do by thinking, "If I don't do it, someone else will, so it might as well be me and benefit my family instead of another's."
-- You believe that democracy, individual liberty, traditional Lockean liberalism, the whole Enlightenment project, were all a mistake. Humans in general are too irrational, society is too complex, the stakes are too high to allow these mechanisms to continue. Attacking them frontally won't work with the masses--they are too conditioned to believe in them--so they must be manipulated instead. Bullshit for a higher purpose is moral, not immoral. (Of course, over that Scotch, I would then have to ask lots of questions about how you rationalize away all history, which essentially proves the old maxim that democracy is the worst possible system, except for all the others which have been tried from time to time.)
-- Teenage trauma, like early exposure to Ayn Rand.
Anyway, thanks for provoking all these thoughts. I remain a happy subscriber.
Thanks for subscribing! Hopefully if you keep reading we can over time perhaps break through your delusions and pretensions.
Let me take on 3 of your your points. (The 4th only our host can.)
Elon buying Twitter has significantly reduced the amount of censorship on Twitter. This is objectively true. It also resulted in a bunch of Leftists who fear contrary ideas fleeing the platform. But that's self-selection, not censorship. Can you get banned from Twitter? Sure. But it's a heck of a lot harder now than it was 3 years ago.
Meddling: Lyons specifically mentions the UK labour party sending over campaign workers for Joe Biden. If that's not meddling, I don't know what is. If you define you, me, or Elon Musk stating our views on the German election as "meddling", you have expanded the term beyond all utility. You really want to see US meddling, go lookup Samantha Powers behavior in Hungary in 2022.
Fire in a crowded theatre: This line is used incorrectly all the time. Oliver Wendel Holmes used this example in Schenck (1919) to illustrate a "clear and present danger" test, which resulted in Schenck being sent to prison for distributing anti-war pamphlets (effectively, he was imprisoned for hate-speech against the United States). 50 years later, this standard was definitively overturned by Brandenburg, and is recognized today as a miscarriage of justice. Your very example illustrates precisely why hate speech laws are so dangerous.
I agree that censorship of misinformation requires a clear and present danger. Public health misinformation during a pandemic is precisely that. I also agree that speech codes are awful, whether from the left or right. You shouldn’t cancel people for saying there are two biological sexes or for teaching the science of biological evolution.
We will agree to disagree on Elon and Twitter.
On Labour people canvassing for Biden, supposedly these were volunteers on their own time and dime. You and I are free to fly to Germany and campaign against neo-Nazis if we wish. Doesn’t mean our respective favorite politicians sent us.
You and I saying stuff about European politics is very different from the Vice President of the United States and the apparent co-President making very public remarks.
"I agree that censorship of misinformation requires a clear and present danger."
I most definitely do not agree with this, and neither does US law or SCOTUS. The Brandenburg standard is far tighter: "likely to produce imminent lawless action."
The "clear and present danger" std was revoked by SCOTUS precisely because it was too broad. Had it been in effect in 2020, both anti-masking COVID protests and BLM protests could easily have been charged as criminal by a US Atty on the basis of the content itself being dangerous.
"You shouldn’t cancel people for saying there are two biological sexes" -- Why not? It's a clear and present danger to trans-women by denying that they exist. (Note, I think this is absurd, but without free speech, having that debate is impossible.)
Banning "hate speech" just means banning speech that you happen to hate. If you demand the power to do that, others can too, and some of them may well want to ban you.
US law and SCOTUS determines the standard for censorship by the government. I'm sorry that I lazily echoed that word when it is actually inapposite. We can debate whether "imminent lawless action" is the right standard to trump the FIrst Amendment. But that's irrelevant to misinformation restrictions imposed by private companies on their systems.
My discussion of yelling-fire-in-a-crowded-theater is not about censorship. Private entities by definition are incapable of conducting censorship since they are not the state, and only the state can do censorship. Whether social media--or the letters to the editor page of the NY TImes, or the gardening column in the newsletter of the Elks Club--can restrict what does and doesn't go in is a different matter, and involves perhaps abstract notions of. fairness and morality, not censorship as a matter of law.
Well, I am not in favor of speech codes, for "hate" or anything else. I am a political liberal, as you can easily tell, which means I am against illiberality of all sorts. Speech in general cannot do harm. "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but..." and so on.
Back to misinformation. I am in favor of private companies restricting misinformation that presents a clear and present (as in substantial and imminent) danger to the public, which is what we were talking about, I think, with regard to restricting dangerous nonsense about COVID and COVID vaccines by social media companies on their systems.
So what's your take on the Biden administration enlisting every major social media company to shut down "COVID misinformation"? I ask because that skirts the line you're trying to draw: private companies banning speech at the behest of the US government.
Actually, two questions... what was your take on it at the time? And what is your take on it now that it's become clear that some of that
"misinformation" turned out to accurate (lab leak, vaccine side effects, etc...)
While I generally agree that "private companies can't engage in censorship", there are exceptions. Amazon absolutely can censor: ask Ryan Anderson. So can Citibank or BofA or Coutts: ask Nigel Farage or Melania Trump. Liberals were traditionally very wary of concentrated power (whether political, social or economic). I think there needs to be a line at which even a private entity becomes subject to 1st Amendment limitations.
A President can ask/cajole/embarrass publicly a private company--in JFK's day, this was called "jawboning." A President is not allowed to threaten to sic the power of the government, as in the IRS or the DOJ or Commerce, against private companies if they don't obey. AFAIK, Biden never did that (unlike Trump, who we know does cross those red lines).
Lab leak talk should never have been called misinformation. All the anti-COVID Vax talk is utter dangerous hogwash. That SHOULD HAVE and still SHOULD BE stopped. It's nonsense and kills people. Side effects are always possible in any medical intervention. The mRNA vaccines are hugely effective and tremendously safe. The propaganda against them needs to stop.
Agree on concentration of power in the economy. Disagree on extending the First Amendment to private entities. If the government can force private entities to say things, it can force them not to say things. There goes our freedoms.
Trump's actions really do signify a break with a narrative that's held continuity since the beginning of the Cold War--and more importantly, even after its end in the Gorbachev era, with the breakup of the USSR. To my reading, that's the root of the Ukro-Russian War and the resulting fracturing of the consensus between the US and Europe on international relations (especially the break with the UK, which is virtually unheard of.) The insistence--actually more like taking for granted--that the NATO alliance would extend eastward to the borders of the old Soviet Union showed that there was no serious thought to be given to allowing Russia (no longer Leninist, or even Marxist) a sphere of regional influence beyond its borders. And later moves during the second term of the Bush administration pressed even further, which is where the real trouble began--it became clear, at least to Putin and the Russians, that a zero-sum game was still being carried over from the Cold War, and that the NATO West was intent on carrying over policies to weaken the regional power of Russia and deny any legitimacy to influence outside the region. The result of this policy consigned Russia to a nation reliant exclusively on its extraction economy--albeit an extraction economy with an immense domestic resource trove. How could such a policy lead to any result other than the Russians becoming more nationalistic? And if the oligarchs overseeing those industries were crooks, at least they were Russian crooks. The US seemed to be applying a long-term strategy of weakening the corrupt plutocracy of Russia by weakening the country itself, with the end game apparently being that much-desired opening of Russia to increasing economic role for the West in supplying the investment and infrastructure to modernize those industries and incorporate Russia into the much wealthier sphere of the US-UK-EU trade bloc. But--including Russia as a subordinate, junior nation, under ground rules already established by the wealthier foreign interests.
This was no way to do it. And Ukraine was the last straw. The central geopolitical importance of Ukraine--not just regionally, but intercontinentally and globally--has been emphasized by geopolitical thinkers going back to the 19th century, to Mackinder and Haushofer. That's why the British Empire fought the Russians in Crimea in the mid-19th century, and attempted to pull Afghanistan (another resource trove) into its influence at the end of the 19th century. That strategy has never been significantly updated or adjusted in the direction of offering the opportunity for a multipolar regional balance with Russia. It's disingenuous to maintain that Russia is an inherently imperialistic nation when the power center of the international alliance making the accusation has an imperialistic character of its own. Stalinist Communism extended its influence over Eastern Europe, not Russia. Russia has a history of foreign domination of its neighbors, but so did the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth--in the direction of Russia and Ukraine.
I could go on. Openings and opportunities were squandered, in an era when the US (and its NATO proxy) really did possess the economic, military, geographic, and diplomatic means to innovate a way forward--by supporting some crucial elements of the social safety net, by not rushing into the new Russia with fistfulls of US dollars to naively attempt a "Western capitalist privatization" of the Russian economy in a country that was bound to be hostile toward such a future, American capitalist idealist boosterism notwithstanding. And now here we are. That ship has sailed. The legacy of peacetime went with it. Military aggression for the purpose of a power grab is always wrong, but >20 years of treating the nation of Russia as "a gas station with missiles" was wrong,
too. I'll say it again; even if the worst charges about Putin and his backers are granted as irrefutably true on all counts, even nations run as kleptocracies are sovereign states with valid national security interests. The history of US international relations shows that our national governments are fine with, by turns, either making favorable arrangements with kleptocracies or engaging in "regime change." Not as a matter of superior morality, just straight power concepts. And--particularly in the post-Cold War era--the US has gotten used to having its way. Apparently, the US foreign policy crafters of the neoliberal era assumed that their mergers and acquisitions were bound to achieve the same low-effort success in the case of Russia, albeit as a somewhat longer game. But that isn't
the way it worked. And now the Ukro-Russian war is a million casualties deep, and east of the Dnieper River, much of the countryside is a devastated battlefield, complete with the inevitable unexploded ordnance and landmines. Three years into the war, there's no end in sight--and the Ukrainian leaders evidently continue to battle under the US/UK/NATO-encouraged assumption that they'll be victorious! Because that's what a total Russian withdrawal--including ceding back Crimea and Sebastopol--would be, basically. Zelanskyy has actually been persuaded that as long as the Ukraine is backed by the US/UK/NATO, that logistical support will prove so powerful that Ukraine will be able to obtain an apology from Putin, with reparations!
That is not going to happen. It isn't in the cards, as the saying goes. Once Putin ordered an armed invasion and took territory, he was not going to simply hand it back. Russia has lost too many soldiers. The Russian economy has been revamped to counter the effects of boycotts, and it's militarized to support the war effort. I don't know how clear this reality was made to Zelensky in his meetings with Trump and his advisers; he seems to have absorbed none of those facts and implications. The problem is--and I realize that I'll be widely condemned for saying this--Biden and Blinken and Sullivan and the UK and NATO must have really laid the bullshit on with Zelensky. They encouraged Ukrainian hopes that are not supported either by the facts on the ground or the practical limits on the support that the US was ever willing to offer. And no, I don't think Biden releasing any amount of weapons to Ukraine earlier on would have swept the Russians back to the boundaries that existed before the invasion.
Once the Russians rolled their tanks, the best that could ever be hoped for is a demilitarized zone and a plebiscite of Ukrainians in the provinces east of the Dnieper, preferably under UN aegis, to determine the fate of those disputed territories.
(As for Russia handing back the Crimean peninsula as a concession--a territory that hasn't even been disputed as a battlefield--forget it. I find it bizarre that the US State Department ever endorsed such a goal. I mean, really, as if resolving that dispute was about litigating a civil case before some global Supreme Court. Even if such a possibility existed, the issues to be considered are hardly the unconditional slam-dunk implied by the fine print in the Ukrainian national charter, which is the sole support for the current Ukraine government's territorial claim over a territory with a population that's at least 70% Russian ethnicity and harboring a major Russian naval base with a history dating back to the Czarist era. Conquered for some years in the mid-19th century--by whom? A Western European alliance, dominated by imperial Great Britain.)
There are all sorts of reasons why a plebiscite in the eastern provinces would favor the Russians--both legitimate and illegitimate. Especially at this point. But even that prospect is now practically out of the question, given three years of full-scale war. Not unless Ukraine is successful in drawing other European nations in the (now practically defunct) NATO alliance to fight alongside Ukrainians--not just as "advisers", but escalating to a military alliance of regular army units and air forces. That would be a perilous escalation--particularly if that alliance were to achieve significant territorial gains in a counterattack! That's the real paradox--significant success in regaining territory in eastern Ukraine risks the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the front, and also possibly a multi-front campaign to capture the Baltic states. That's how escalation works: the more someone has to lose by failing to escalate, the more they'll be inclined to do it. That's how it worked in Korea: the US-dominated UN "police force" not only regained the territory south of the 38th parallel of latitude that had demarcated the division of the country into Communist-controlled vs. Western-allied portions, but MacArthur drove almost all the way to the border of the PRC. And then the Chinese army entered the war. Because even Communist totalitarian despotisms have vital national security interests.
A nice summation of the shit hole we find ourselves in.
Getting my popcorn and anxiously awaiting Clueless' answer to Lyons' question...
I'm really confused by this note.
I don't disagree that many of these laws have gone too far to "protect" people. Nor do I doubt that some of the intent behind the laws is malign.
But if these things are indeed so bad, why is there no reference in this post to what Trump does to shut down free speech (and the US court system's right to say what it thinks). Why is there no acknowledgement of Musk's recent, extensive and very public interference in UK and German politics ? Why is there no reference to Vance's attempts to shut down free speech domestically and abroad ? What Trump/Vance/Musk "say" they believe in, is not what they actually do.
By not mentioning any of the ways the Trump/Musk/Vance trio shut down free speech, it seems to suggest you believe the Americans are entitled do what they want... simply because they "say" they believe in free speech ?
As I said, I'm really confused by this note.
In what ways have Trump/Musk/Vance "shut down free speech"?
You are so well read and so well informed, so your question surprises me. Has Trump passed laws like the one's you reference in Europe ? No. Perhaps law is your technical definition of "ways" to "shut down free speech". If so, we have no disagreement. ( And just to reiterate, I don't believe we have any substantive disagreement that some of these European laws have gone too far. )
But there are many ways to shut down free speech. I'd argue that fear is a far more powerful tool to crush free speech than law. I think Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Jimmy Lai would agree. Unfortunately we cannot ask Sergei Magnitsky. When very powerful people use their money, their political position and their propaganda machines to intimidate and crush dissent, then free speech withers and dies. True for China, true for Russia, true for Europe..... and currently in my view very true for America.
You will know Friedrich Hayek's work far better than me, so you will know what I mean by the use of centralized power to build propaganda machines (X, Facebook, maybe some of the broadsheets too) as forms of suppression of free speech, and the parroting of the party line. The pictures of the inauguration "line up" and the recent statements of support for Trump leave me with very little doubt about who actually controls the US propaganda machines.... or what those platforms will do to attack and intimidate any voice that dares criticize Trump, Vance or Musk.
I guess my point -- and I accept one could see this as semantics -- is that fear is as powerful as law to control freedom of expression. Examples of this ? I guess I could find all the exact wording from the litigation Trump launched against Michael Wolff to try to shut him up, ditto his litigation against Michael O'Brien, ditto the exact wording he used to threaten E Jean Carroll or all the judges whose legitimate rulings and comments he disagreed with. Or I could point you to Musk's X account and all the threats he has made via his own platform to people he disagrees with, or the litigation threats, or the threatening and disrespectful emails to Federal employees, or the paedophile labels... Musk should be acting as a servant of the government, for the people. His current position in Government massively amplifies his power, his voice and the consequences for those at the receiving end of his ire.
I won't spell all those things out, because I know you are very informed and I would only be detailing what you already know. So, maybe it boils down to this: I believe that using your power as an elected US official, especially when you do that in cahoots with the very wealthy owners of the US (global?) propaganda machines, to threaten, intimidate and bully people you disagree with, is as corrosive and toxic to free speech as any law that has been passed in Europe.
I don't see this as an issue of the right or the left by the way. To me this the misuse and abuse of political and financial power: either through law or through fear. In that sense they are all as bad as each other and we should say so, not cast Europe as bad for free speech and America as carrying the torch of free speech.