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.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I don’t buy the arguments about its utility it is worse then useless it id downright pernicious on many levels. That world and his platform is part of it, they partake of a low energy which seeks to fill the void like an illness waiting to attack a weak person, essentially the spirit of a mindless carrion bird waiting for death or near death before approaching the remains..
Good thing we still have a free market at least on that sort of service
The saddest thing is that these people are viewed now as the greatest dissidents and greatest minds. Listen to any of them. They sound like grasping neophytes. Look at how risk averse they are. Truly they are of the gutter and it isn’t difficult to see.
Forget these people and get to know your local fishmonger. Honestly these prats will lead you up the garden path especially if you are an insecure person. This movement looks big and boistrous but it counts for nothing.The real movement is more subtle.
Come on man. Can’t you just come home and listen to some music or read a book. This universe that the say you should belong to, it brings you nothing but misery.
There is no recognition of the cruciate form of our reality. That we are pulled on the horizontal and vertical plane to an ethical conclusion. These scumbags are unwitting dupes . If they quieten down then I will leave them alone. If they start to open their mouths then I will deal with that.
Don’t get the hots for the antichrist. These are the worst scumbags imaginable.
.
The left, and orhers, constantly describe the nazis as Far Right. The nazis were National Socialists. Hitler was a brand of leftism, not a free enterprise, unrestricted economic freedom, guy. He took control of vast segments of the state. He took control of companies (by implanting commisars in every one, that the owners had ro get permission from to do almost anything), he took over German trades unions, he controlled the banks, he controlled industrial and commercial orders and demand. He socialised Germany. He only hated the communists because they were international socialists, and were in competition with his brand of socialism.
The left hate this truth, so they constantly use Stalin’s description of rhe nazis which he applied to them in 1928, by saying that national socialism was ‘right wing’.
The left are fellow travellers of the nazis. Think: does our left use some violence , does it try to destroy competitors by damaging their reputation and cancelling them? Do they have control of the establishment? Yes, they do all this. They would attack their enemies if they could get away with it.
Constant repetition doesn’t cause this nonsense to become anymore true. Neoliberalism is a fairly recent ideology which didn’t step into the limelight before the late 1970s. In the 1920s and 1930s, “the [German] right” were principally the monarchists and the people favouring a strong and patriotic German nation state and they counted Hitler as someone sitting on the fringes of their own ideology. The left ranged from people who favoured the republic despite its shameful birth, presumably mainly, because the envisioned themselves as its permanent rulers, to people who wanted a much more thorough people’s revolution and ultimatively, a Russian-style soviet republic closely aligned with the USSR and collectively working towards world revolution. The left still had some ideological baggage calling for the neoliberal end goal “abolishment of the state in favour of anarchic networks of self-sufficient communities” but they had long since ceased to mean that, coinciding with Stalin’s goal to “build socialism in one country”, as opposed to all over the world at the same time.
Hitler was a dedicated anti-communist because he believe communism to be nothing but a global Jewish conspiracy against the German people. He also used to term socialism, just as everyone else did at that time, because it was the big fashionable thing everybody talked about: Do something to improve the lot of the large class of impoverished factory workers living in very unstable conditions. He wanted to do that because he needed the support of “the masses” for his nationalist cause, having come the conclusion that prior (German) nationalist movements had mainly failed because they had been too elitist while the Marxists had successfully harnessed the power of the masses for their agenda. I could go into more detail here, eg, the internal fight against the revolutionary radicals in the SA culminating in the so-called “knight of the long knives”, but it’s going to be wasted, anyway, as the nonsense I’m replying to is going to repeated by some other fan of the sex-obssessed Russian housewife with the poor writing skills in the not to distant future, anyway.
Collectivism is a figment of Ayn Rand’s stupidity and not some kind of great, intellectual discovery.
“There is little chance that Elon Musk’s relaxed moderation regime will lead to fascism”
Dear Mr Eugyppius, I do not believe for one second that people like Thierry Breton are worried about “fascism” and think that X will lead to “fascism”. What worries them is that it will lead to the end of their fascism. The political left worry about “populism” because it might lead to them getting chucked out of their lucrative positions of power and influence.
Spot on.
Why is it only the “extreme right” that gets the euro commies in a tizzy? There must also be far left opinion everywhere on social media, or is it not simply the case that they are infact the “far left” and they cannot stand any world view that differs from theirs?—
—-The truth is actually quite simple. Governments used to be able to control all narratives via their political speeches and the consolidated media that they control. We were all little children told to eat up our vegetables and not speak to strangers. But now we are able to see points of view from everywhere, from private individuals and sources not controlled by the establishment. We no longer have to accept climate orthodoxy and we can say so. We no longer have to agree to take untested vaccines, and we can say why. What we used to only be able to say in our own house or at the pub with our mates we can now say for the whole world to see, and if some of that is nonsense or inaccurate then so be it and people can just that for themselves. It is called Freedom. When people cannot speak they are not free.
As per my comment above, I don’t think the puppet masters really think there is any threat from an “extreme right” – it’s just a stick to beat people with and fool useful idiots.
Labelling is key to being a Liberal Progressive. Nazi’s are universally detested and so attaching the Nazi label often has the desired effect. Just as the Eco Fundamentalists use the infantile term “climate denier”.
Covid denier, granny killer, anti vaxxer, conspiracy theorist
Has Breton and his acolytes heard of VPNs? Will they ban their use too and how?
Have they asked their own people if they want X to be banned in the first place? Who voted for that?
Exactly….They proclaim to be a democracy Lol.
Who voted for them?
No one. It is all part of democracy in modern Europe.
Even the EU Parliament had only the one candidate to crown.
The EU comprises 27 DINOs.
The UK is a DINO with a government alleged ‘elected’ but only 1 in 5 voted for them.
If I was Musk, I’d be very tempted to pull the plug on X in Europe ….. and let the technologically incompetent WEF/EU-and-its-puppets-in-government howl in frustration.
But then, I’m not a businessman.
Unlikely, but it would be fascinating to see the result… no doubt something ‘official’ could come online to do similar
He does not have to.
If most people are not using VPNs right now they will be very soon.
Anything other than shutting down the internet in the EU will not prevent them using X.
You know it. I know it. And Elon Musk knows it.
The short period of freedoms of the few Western DINOs [democracy in name only] is under attack from within possibly with the direction of external enemies and almost no one seems to have noticed.
Worse still of course is that the enemy is invisible and we the future downtrodden [and current of course although we don’t acknowledge it] have no means of fighting back even if we knew who the enemy is.
Elon’s X is nice but this time words won’t save us from the internal enemies and may never have saved anyone before either.
It is back to headings and meanings again. Why should Liberals remain liberal when Conservatives are not conservative and Labour have nothing to do with the working man ?
It is an illusion that language maintains meaning. It was never intended to. Meaning is an immediate property of sentience, which has nò time for process