By Steve Levy
The European Union threatening to punish Elon Musk, the owner of social media platform X (formerly Twitter), for posting an interview with Donald Trump may go down as the most underreported bombshell story of the decade.
Think about what just happened here. An elitist bureaucrat in Brussels, claiming to represent the power of a united Europe, declared that he will take it upon himself to impose penalties (which could possibly include bringing charges) against the owner of a social media platform if Musk posts an interview with the former United States president that the bureaucrat deems to include “disinformation.” https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/12/eu-warns-elon-musk-ahead-of-trump-interview-to-keep-hate-speech-off-of-x-.html
We would expect that from the Taliban, the Chinese Communist Party or Vladimir Putin. But this is Europe we are talking about, for goodness sake.
We have entered into a scary, dystopian, Orwellian phase where this crazy reactionary stuff is not automatically receiving huge pushback from the civilized world.
Frighteningly, this undemocratic suppression of free speech is now becoming normalized in Europe, which was one of the vanguards of liberal democracy.
This is the type of an event that was foretold by George Orwell in his 1949 novel 1984. He warned of a globalist, Big Brother society in which bureaucrats would control our thoughts and punish us with imprisonment or death if we dared to not only speak against the state, but to even think bad thoughts of the ruling party.
For many years, conservatives have been getting tarred by liberal elitists as conspiracy-theory-spouting, tin-hat-wearing yahoos for warning about the dangers of globalism. The liberal elite, who were getting rich off the flattening of the world economy, and the shipping of jobs to cheaper labor in Asia, did not mind this globalist trend, so long as they were lining their pockets in the process and they controlled the political levers. And of course, they didn’t feel the fallout from the exporting of jobs as the millions in the American rust belt had.
But conservatives were smart enough to understand that ceding nationalistic control to a faceless conglomerate of international commissions was going to amount to an enormous loss of freedoms.
It’s no wonder that the globalist elites decry the term “nationalism” and tried to make it synonymous with “white nationalism,” which stood for Nazi intolerance. In fact, nationalism has nothing to do with white nationalism. It is simply the belief that a country has the right to maintain its own borders and to control its own destiny through the election of its own representatives within those borders. That is what democracy and self-determination are all about.
The Brits saw how globalism, as developed in the EU, was stripping British citizens of controlling their own destinies. Immigration levels were no longer controlled by the Brits themselves, but rather by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. It led to the destruction of thousands of years of culture in many European nations. More alarmingly, it is now setting up a political structure whereby unelected, unaccountable political elites can tell people in nations far, far away what they can or cannot say, and what they can or cannot post.
Only the faraway bureaucrats have the seasoning, the intellectual capacity and the moral turpitude to make the discretionary decisions as to what is fact and what is misinformation, what is proper speech and what is so-called banned hate speech. It’s now so bad that hate speech is defined not only by what actually causes harm but what might cause harm. What a convenient way to control the speech of your political enemies.
Somewhere in Hell, Karl Marx is smiling.
Steve Levy is President of Common Sense Strategies, a political consulting firm. He served as Suffolk County Executive, as a NYS Assemblyman, and host of “The Steve Levy Radio Show.” He is the author of “Solutions to America’s Problems” and “Bias in the Media.” www.SteveLevy.info, Twitter @SteveLevyNY, steve@commonsensestrategies.com