“The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States, and yet lands only in Europe.”
That was author Tom Wolfe way back in the 1970s. He was talking about this curious dynamic in which we hear repeatedly from left-wing commentators and media that America is on the precipice of fascism—but tyranny ends up coming to Europe instead.
Tyranny appears to be again descending on Europe. Unfortunately, in the globalized, interconnected world of the 21st century, I wouldn’t be quite as sure that it won’t land here, too.
Social media have become a “third wave of journalism” as Titus Techera, the executive director of the American Cinema Foundation, wrote Friday in Law & Liberty. The technology has allowed the average citizen and nontraditional journalists to step around institutions and cover stories that might be buried because they didn’t fit a favored narrative.
But our various, interconnected institutions are fighting back and increasingly using government power in coordination with private sector and nonprofit organizations to crack down on unapproved news and opinions.
That appeared to be the case over the weekend when French authorities arrested Pavel Durov, CEO of the messaging app Telegram, outside a Paris airport on Saturday.
According to NBC News, French prosecutors cited “complicity” in facilitating a whole host of illegal activities. The charges included soliciting fraud and illicit drug sales plus 11 other charges that seem like they could be aimed at most other social media platforms, as well.
French President Emmanuel Macron insisted that there had been a lot of false information spread about Durov’s arrest and that France was still “deeply committed” to freedom of expression, despite the appearance of a political motivation.
“The arrest of the president of Telegram on French soil took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation,” Macron said in a statement posted on X—ironically, another social media platform. “It is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on the matter.”
Frankly, when any European leader hollers that they are for free speech it’s about as believable as when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who prosecuted former President Donald Trump for obviously political reasons (while letting all kinds of criminals walk free), claims nobody is “above the law.”
Maybe there is something to the charges against Telegram. Certainly, there have been serious issues with child pornography and other horrible things being facilitated by social media. But it’s hard not to see this as simply an escalation of what we’ve seen from European governments in recent months, in which free speech has been relentlessly attacked in one nation after another.
Earlier this month, the U.K. government began arresting citizens for posting memes on social media.
That was in response to protests and riots that erupted in Southport, Merseyside, after an 17-year-old son of Rwanda immigrants allegedly stabbed and killed three girls and wounded 10 others at a Taylor Swift-themed yoga and dance workshop on July 29.
It wasn’t enough for the U.K. to repress its own citizens, it tried to reach out “across the pond” and silence Americans, too.
London’s Metropolitan Police chief issued a threat to those posting memes abroad.
“We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you,” Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said in an interview with Sky News.
Thank God for George Washington and the Continental Army, and for the framers of the Constitution, who included the First Amendment to explicitly protect our free speech rights.
While we should be thankful for the patriots of 1776, the European Union and European censorship regimes are nevertheless trying to reach into our country and chill speech anyway.
During the U.K. protests, a former Twitter executive argued in the Guardian that X CEO Elon Musk should be threatened with arrest if he doesn’t control speech on his platform.
EU authorities seemed eager to oblige.
French politician and EU official Thierry Breton—from that land so “deeply committed” to free expression—threatened Musk with siccing the EU Commission on him using the Digital Services Act.
Musk essentially told Breton to get bent. Various free speech groups rebuked Breton, and even other EU officials said that he never received approval to send the letter. Even Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who represents parts of Silicon Valley in California, came out in support of Musk and free speech. Good for him.
But that doesn’t mean the threat wasn’t real.
European countries don’t have the First Amendment, and clearly don’t have much interest in defending free speech. The shallow rhetoric of their politicians means little in the face of authoritarian actions by their governments that increasingly resemble the purer tyrannies of Russia and China.
Unfortunately, many people who hold power in our increasingly ideologically captured American institutions clearly find these European methods of threatening speech in the name of “tolerance” quite appealing.
Retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was a witness at the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, also seemed gleeful at the thought of Musk being persecuted.
After Durov was arrested, he warned Musk that he could be next.
“While Durov holds French citizenship, is arrested for violating French law, this has broader implications for other social media, including Twitter,” Vindman wrote on X. “There’s a growing intolerance for platforming disinfo & malign influence & a growing appetite for accountability. Musk should be nervous.”
Ah, yes, “accountability.”
When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was thrown into a gulag for questioning the Soviet regime, that was just appeasing the appetite for accountability, right?
Keep in mind that the bureaucratic agencies that represent the real power in Washington are filled with people like Vindman. You don’t think that if they could use the government to stomp on speech they dislike that they would restrain themselves?
If you think it’s improbable that our federal government wouldn’t arrest and imprison someone for posting memes, well, it’s already happened.
Would a Biden-Harris administration use diplomatic pressure to prevent their domestic political opponents from being threatened by censorship from abroad? They seem to be quite happy to use it here.
Western Europe is fast headed toward tyranny and that certainly serves as a dire warning. As thankful as I am for the First Amendment, it remains what founder James Madison called a “parchment barrier” to repression only as strong as the people and institutions willing to defend and maintain it.
The Constitution may buy us time, but the ultimate marriage of American-style wokeness with European-style censorship would mean the end of liberty in the West if it isn’t derailed.