The Brussels Eurocrats around Emmanuel Macron are having a big sad about Twitter right now. They fear the platform fuels “the amplification of hateful content” and “disinformation”, which are multisyllabic ways of saying that there is too much unapproved and uncurated discourse on the site. You cannot just have people taking to their keyboards to type, like and retweet whatever they want. You especially cannot have that in Europe, where we suffer under the immensely liberal and democratic Digital Services Act, which mandates all manner of social media censorship to protect traditional European freedoms, like freedom of expression.
Twitter is a useful website; I use it to try out ideas and also for news-gathering purposes. As much as I’ve benefitted from the platform, however, I find the establishment derangement surrounding it to be extremely bizarre. There is little chance that Elon Musk’s relaxed moderation regime will lead to fascism, and still less chance that heavy censorship there will do anything about tHe ExtREmE RiGhT. The real reason that Twitter bothers establishment pundits and politicians, is its inherently confrontational nature. Our smug and self-satisfied oligarchs don’t like getting dragged and dunked on by the rabble. They want to tweet their lunacies without anonymous anime-themed accounts showing them up for the fools that they are, and they are very, extremely, fulminously enraged that Musk won’t do anything to improve their user experience.
One of these dissatisfied users is Thierry Breton, the Macron-appointed Commissioner for the Internal Market of the European Union. As everybody knows, on August 12th, Breton posted a letter to Musk ahead of Musk’s Twitter discussion with Donald Trump, to remind the American entrepreneur of his obligations to censor content. Breton has long been a thorn in the side of his EU colleagues, who regard him as a shallow self-promoter, and his game rapidly backfired. The next day, the EU Commission clarified that “The timing and the wording of the letter were neither co-ordinated nor agreed with the President nor with the [commissioners].” The American House Judiciary Committee then added to Breton’s humiliation by condemning his “threats” and his “attempt to intimidate individuals or entities engaged in political speech in the United States”. Musk also had some choice words for the EU Commissioner:
The Macronistes don’t care that they are wildly unpopular and that everybody hates them. They just don’t want to hear about it. They could simply delete their Twitter accounts, but people would still be saying mean things about them on the internet somewhere. They’d have to lie awake in bed at night, staring at the ceiling and stewing about it. Better by far would be to delete Twitter itself, or at least to block access to the platform across all 27 EU member states. This Monday, Sandro Gozi, who represents Macron’s Ensemble coalition in the European Parliament, gave an interview to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, in which he renewed Breton’s threats and hinted that it might even come to that:
… Gozi said on August 19th that X “must respect the [Digital Services Act] directive on disinformation and incitement to hatred” or face prohibition.
“If Elon Musk does not comply with European rules on digital services, the EU Commission will ask continental operators to block X or, in the most extreme case, will impose the total dismantling of the platform in the territory of the Union,” the senior Renew Europe MEP stated.
He went on to justify speech controls as being necessary to curtail political violence as well as the rise of the so-called “extreme Right.”
“Online violence often leads to offline violence,” he wrote. “The extreme Right hides its violence behind freedom of expression. Platforms must moderate hateful content.”
Perhaps the EU will soon have its own version of the Great Chinese Firewall, all to protect the delicate feelings of our political minders Europeans from the scourge of being able to say and read things on the internet.
The most notable thing about these attacks, is that they’re emanating precisely from the self-described centrist, liberal quarters of the Eurocracy. For my American readers, that’s “liberal” in the traditional sense of the term, denoting those who claim to value such things as equality before the law and individual rights. Something very strange has happened to European liberals over the past several decades. Liberal parties across Europe embraced the Covid lockdowns, many of them were totally on board with mass vaccination insanity, and in Germany the liberal FDP have hardly lifted a finger to oppose the strange and unhinged campaign of the Federal Interior Ministry to persecute “the Right”.
What has happened to all these erstwhile lovers of individual rights and freedoms? How did they lose their minds so completely, and what do they even think they are doing?
In response to Monday’s post on the “secret Hitlers,” valued reader SCA offered this insightful comment:
In those days [of the Covid insanity]… I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, the virulence of people who should have known better because of history that their own families must have been one way or another touched by, wanting anyone refusing to submit to vax insanity excluded from society; maybe even denied the ability to buy food; denied the ability to keep their households afloat because they did what the papers of record in America had always advised …
If you found yourself to be that monster and you are therefore a fundamentally weak and dishonest person are you ever gonna acknowledge that? Better to find Undead Hitler everywhere than look into the chambers of your own bad heart.
I want to broaden the thesis. I think European liberalism has been hollowed out – driven to abandon its core principles not only by its idiotic embrace of the Covid response, but also by much recent history. In thrall to their universal ideology of human rights, liberal politicians have welcomed hordes from the Global South to our countries. The foreseeable consequences of their idiocy here have forced them to take a hard line, occasionally against the more unruly of our guests and more frequently against nativist opponents of mass migration. Liberalism, in short, just became too inconvenient for this brave new liberal political project. Then there is the fact that liberalism is above all an ideology of prosperity, and our wealth is slowly slipping away from us. As establishment parties lose support, they find still further reasons to abandon their ideological principles. Now, as never before, they must muzzle their opponents and keep their parties out of power, all to protect the European liberalism they claim to represent, as well as their own deeply liberal feelings.
In the meantime, they’ve compensated by shifting their remaining liberal energies to the past. Now, they signal their virtuous liberalism above all by denouncing distant political villains like Adolf Hitler and by sticking the Nazi label especially on those elements of the populist opposition that insist on traditional, negative-rights liberal principles – the very ideals that our establishment liberals claim to espouse and that they’ve long since betrayed.
Establishment liberalism is devolving into a monstrous and deformed anti-ideology, one that loathes above all whatever contemporary incarnations of fascism it claims to detect and whatever it imagines Hitler would’ve done.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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