Triggering the Great Reset

posted by Robert A. Taft at American Thinker

Both the East, led by China and Russia, and the West, led by U.S. and EU globalists, want to fundamentally change the world order. They call this change the Great Reset, first termed by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive director of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The WEF consists of the world’s wealthiest people, including over 1,000 global corporations and most of the G-20 leaders. Schwab & Co. naively view China as a partner, with dictator Xi Jinping a regular forum keynote speaker. Although China and Russia are diehard nationalists, their mission dovetails with that of Western globalists, so, for now, Xi and Vladimir Putin play along. 

Nationalist Donald Trump gave them a common enemy and COVID-19 set the East-West alliance.

During the Obama administration, China achieved enormous gains in overtaking the United States. China's rise was a boon for corporations. They ignored the $600-billion-a-year thievery of American technology in hopes of accessing the largest market on earth, stocked with some of the cheapest labor and raw materials available. 

From 2016 to 2020, globalists and the Chinese watched helplessly as Donald Trump returned manufacturing to this country and increased wages for workers at an unprecedented rate. China experienced its worst economic years since their 2001 World Trade Organization entry. Corporate lobbyists paid Uniparty politicians handsomely to overthrow the president. Wall Street teamed with China  to try to halt Trump's tariff imposition on the communist nation and China paid nearly $14 billion to politicians and 600 U.S. groups, all to work against Trump.

High-tech capitalist companies like Google refused to work with the Defense Department but rolled over for China, our Number 1 foe.  To slow the Trump engine, billionaires like Mike Bloomberg, George Soros, and Bill Gates poured in millions into the effort to increase the wealth gap between the elite and the worker bees, while China’s slave labor provided the perfect model.

So China and Western globalists formed their unofficial alliance to destroy Trump. On one side were the global corporations and the United Nations with their World Bank and International Monetary Fund and the Bank of International Settlements. On the other side, China, wanting its power to grow, welcomed help from naïve Western globalists. Wall Street began to funnel American investment funds into China companies to prop up the Chinese economy. 

Together China and the Western globalists set the stage for COVID-19.  A year after Trump assumed office, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced a major pandemic would shortly strike the world. In October 2019, globalists Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg organized Event 201.Its purpose: to simulate a pandemic. One hundred and thirty guests, including representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO) and global corporations, attended. The stated key to success to the Great Reset: world leaders must lockdown economies to stop the pandemic.

So COVID-19 helped the East and the West. While China measured its effectiveness militarily during the pandemic, the West gauged its ability to control and reduce the population. China launched a bioweapon without much global pushback and the West, through fear and misinformation, began to convert democracy into totalitarianism. And so the stage was set for Schwab’s Great Reset as China became a reliable partner. 

The G-20 brings together the world's major economies that account for over 80% of the world GDP and 75% of global trade. G-20 included Western and Eastern leaders from developed and developing countries and became the perfect vehicle to advance the Great Reset. 

This year's G-20 summit included two meetings. John Kerry, Biden's environmental czar, headed the first meeting in Egypt where he proposed that EU countries and the United States pay reparations to developing countries, including the world’s worst polluter China, for environmental damage caused by the West. The outrageous price tag for this initiative and requisite environmental infrastructure: over $7 trillion annually. 

The second meeting held in Bali, featured Klaus Schwab, who pitched his Great Reset, the systematic restructuring of the world where technology will change how people and government function.

Subsequent to the Bali meeting, East and West now agreed to: 

• Implement communist-style totalitarian rule globally to maximize the wealth gap between the rich and the worker bees. Western globalists, led by Schwab, praise the Chinese system. They encourage Western financing, namely Wall Street, to bolster China's industry. China’s model of slave labor utilization not only minimizes labor costs but also shows how low worker wages must fall to maximize profits and feed global oligarchs. 
• Reduce global population. Since the launch of mRNA gene therapies passed off as legitimate vaccines, the death rate globally has increased by 40%.  Schwab, nonetheless, is pushing the G-20 to globally implement regular mRNA vaccines and to mandate vaxports to monitor compliance. Travel and other restrictions would befall anyone not well jabbed. 
• Control healthcare globally. Mandatory vaccines would both reduce population and result in windfall profits for the elites, while increasing their power over the masses and controlling the global death rate. China, by producing most of the ingredients in pharmaceuticals, not only would regulate the flow of these pharmaceuticals but also their content. 
• Use technology to control global population and replace individuality with collectivism, i.e., everyone must think the same and commit to global governance. People would be monitored by China's Social Credit Scores and facial recognition IDs, not just vaxports. 
• Advance transhumanism. People would be merged with technology to improve and better control them. Globalists are preparing for cyborg development by brainwashing children electronically with apps like China-backed Tik Tok whose purpose is to condition/program kids how to think about what they observe.
• Digitalize food processing and develop biotechnology to create what they call a sustainable food supply. Both Schwab and Biden, in his biotechnology executive order, call for building more equitable food systems. 

But while the western and eastern participants share a vision for the Great Reset, there are significant differences that will eventually tear them apart.

X22, And we Know, and more- December 2nd

 

Cough is 98% cleared up! Here's tonight's news:

Stop Adopting the Left’s Pseudomorality

If we do not reject the false morality of political correctness and guilt by association, we will no longer have a country that is recognizably free.

by Christopher Roach for American Greatness

The latest brouhaha about Trump’s meeting with Kanye West and lesser-known “alt right” figures—the mostly irrelevant Milo Yiannopoulos and the America First organization’s youthful leader, Nick Fuentes—shows that Republicans have learned absolutely nothing from Trump. Instead, they have piled onto the regime’s latest “two minutes hate” bandwagon, climbing and clawing over one another to prove that they’re loyal, voluntary enforcers of regime morality by condemning Trump. 

Just as we have heard so many times before, “He really did it this time! He can’t recover!”

Even stipulating for a moment that Kanye et alia have said things that are offensive, racist, and even antisemitic, so what? What a dubious moral principle which says Trump cannot meet with such people, or, if one chooses to meet with them, one thereby endorses everything they ever wrote and said. Bad thoughts are not (yet) crimes, unlike Barack Obama’s cocaine use or Bill Clinton’s rape of Juanita Broderick. Yet no one has been condemned for meeting with those losers. 

Moreover, Kanye and his new friends might be wrong, mistaken, confused, and hostile in having such views, but there is no such thing as a thought crime. Honorable people can be liberal or atheists, for example, and be wrong, mistaken, confused, and sometimes hostile in having such views. This does not make them criminals, and this does not mean that Trump or anyone has done something wrong in meeting with members of either camp.

In other words, in a free society we should reject the concept of “thought crimes,” just as our law has since time immemorial. We should affirm that free people can speak and meet with whomever they want. They can meet with their opponents and their enemies. They can meet with those whose minds they want to change. They can meet with people they agree with on some matters and disagree on others. In contrast, “guilt by association” is a totalitarian notion, which demands that every meeting, every friendship, every relationship, and ultimately every thought be policed by an ever-changing kaleidoscope of prohibitions and restrictions.

One thing Trump did well, which most other Republicans still have not learned, was never to concede that the Left and their organs in the media and the professional political class can set the standards of morality. When they punched, he punched back, on instinct. 

Trump’s critics on the Left are disgraceful and immoral people, who have accepted money from criminals like Sam Bankman-Fried and Jeffrey Epstein, and who themselves have frequently acted disgracefully. They have stood with violent terrorists in the Weather Underground, Antifa, and the Black Lives Matter movement and minimized the damage these violent groups have done. 

They have no standing to judge anyone. Rather, their alleged scale of values is false and full of hypocrisy. It’s a tool designed to instill fear and uncertainty and a lack of confidence in the majority. Their accusations are a pose, a psyop, a means of exercising social and political control by erecting a false, au courant, and malleable scale of new moral values. It is unsettling, because it is designed to unsettle. 

Prior to Trump’s appearance, and even now, Republicans are always jumping to the tune set by others, trying to show that they’re not racist, sexist, homophobic, or whatever, as if these principles made up the entirety of morality. They seem to forget that the Left’s dishonesty, cowardice, destructiveness, licentiousness, and hatred for Christian civilization and white Americans deprives the Left of moral and political standing. When condemning the Left, Republicans unfortunately use the same moral compass, calling them the “real racists,” as if this were the only conceivable way to be wrong or evil. 

Even before Trump, was it not obvious that labeling racist everything from self-defense to proper grammar made such accusations meaningless? 

Trump, of course, had his issues, not least of which is that his vaunted instincts got him to hire actual enemies hostile to him and his agenda. Simultaneously, he set adrift his early allies, such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

That all said, Trump always knew that the “guilt by association” brigade and their calls to recant, disavow, and separate himself from people was a losing strategy. He resisted this many times, including in his condemnation of the violent Antifa crews present at the Charlottesville rally. Trump took heat for this, but he was right to say what he said. There was nothing wrong with protesting the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee; there were good people on both sides; and, even the extremists in the crowd had a right of free speech and free assembly that should have been protected from violent attack.

America used to have a culture of free speech, free association, and free thinking. Not merely the legal rights to these things, but a culture such as this is an essential requirement for popular government and self-rule. In its absence, the regime becomes an oligarchy, where thought and policy are all emanations from those at the top, and where deviations are punished by a full spectrum of coordinated economic and reputational penalties.

Modern morality, sometimes called “political correctness,” is hostile to these older principles of free thinking and free speech. This is the root of the online “safety” monitors and “hate speech” restrictions on campus. There is an irreconcilable tension between the older political morality of the Constitution—the morality of liberty—and the modern one, which is concerned chiefly with enforcing equality of outcomes rather than merely recognizing our equality in political rights. 

As Christopher Caldwell has argued, “changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible—and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out.”

There is no reason that I or anyone needs to defend Kanye or Milo or Nick Fuentes in order to defend Trump. He can meet with whoever he wants, accepting what they say that is true, while rejecting that which is false. Nothing they have done or said is imputable to Trump simply for meeting with them. 

This issue is not going away. If we do not reject the false morality of political correctness and guilt by association, we will no longer have a country that is recognizably free. 

'Feed 'Em, Don't Breed 'Em': Extinction Activist Wants People to Stop Having Kids—to 'Save the Biosphere'

Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

Twilight Zone stuff, right? Of course, it is—and it gets worse. We’re talking about the “existential threat to mankind” (climate change) crowd. Except, in this case, an extinction activist wants humans to voluntarily stop having children–so humanity will eventually die out, thus giving the biosphere a “chance to recover.”

Sounds legit. Show of hands—who’s in?

Tuesday’s episode of “Dr. Phil” focused on the “ethics of procreation” and the debate about overpopulation, with Voluntary Human Extinction Movement founder Les Knight predictably spewing a variety of ridiculous statements. For the sake of the planet, Knight says, “May we live long and die out.”

Dr. Phil asked Knight, as reported by Fox News, to confirm his views:

You’re involved with an extinction movement who basically says we just need to live long and die out, we just need to ‘feed, not breed,’ is that what you say?

Knight was on it: 

“Feed ‘em don’t breed ‘em,” yes, that’s right, we’re not taking care of the people who are already here.

My plan is for everyone to think before they procreate, and if people really think about it, think it all the way through, and have the wherewithal not to procreate — which is a really big problem all over the planet — and if people think about it  … 44 percent of young people are saying “No I don’t think I wanna do that,” just because they’ve thought about it.

And if we all stopped procreating we’ll go extinct, slowly, we’ll clean up our messes as we go, and the biosphere – what’s left of it, will have a chance to recover.

Hang on a sec. If humankind goes “instinct,” as this guy said, then who’s going to be left as “the rest of it”? Radical left “intellectuals” like Knight and their silly visions of utopian bliss never seem to come to fruition. On the contrary, history has taught us countless times that their mad lab experiments don’t “quite” turn out as well as the masses were programmed to believe. 

So, you know where this is headed: Knight plugged on-demand abortion as a cornerstone of his vision.

Reproductive freedom is the most important thing we need today. … Hundreds of millions of couples are denied their right to not procreate. [Many people] don’t have contraceptive services – reproductive health services that they need. Those are not provided, and maybe people should supply their own, but they can’t afford it because they’re having more offspring that they can’t feed.

OK, so this guy obviously believes taxpayers should provide “free” contraceptive services and “reproductive health services” to everyone, particularly to those who can’t afford them because they’re having more kids than they can feed.

I might not be as “smart” as you are, Mr. Knight, but how about untold numbers of financially-challenged women and their partners, if any, not getting pregnant in the first place? Just a thought. Then this insanity:

Try to get a sterilization here in America when you haven’t had kids and you’re only 22. We’re not allowing people to not breed.

Sorry, pal, but that’s just messed up.

Another guest, content creator Anton Daniels, told Dr. Phil that “these irresponsible people” end up having to be taken care of, “whether it be the prisons that we built for them or the social services that we have to create for them, and they do not become more educated and do things differently,” dispassionately adding: “They breed more, that’s what happens.”

I’m not one to throw “Hitler” around (see: “Ye“) lightly, but building prisons for women who are either too stupid or too defiant to stop having children — “breeding,” as these left-wing elitists say — because some Orwellian “Department of Breeding” orders society’s “violators” not to?

And all for a “recovered biosphere” on top of it?

This makes my head hurt; I’m outta here.

Meanwhile, the “climate change” fanatics (“environmentalist whackos,” as the late Rush Limbaugh called them) continue to up their faux utopian game. It’s time to “just say no.” Maybe we can get Elon on it.

Soldiers Take an Oath to Defend America, Not a Rainbow Flag

posted by D.W. Wilbur at Townhall

When an American raises their right hand to take the oath as they enter the military service, they promise to “protect and defend the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic”. They also pledge their allegiance to our national banner, the Stars and Stripes, thirteen alternating red and white stripes, and fifty white stars on a field of blue. They do not pledge their allegiance to a rainbow colored flag. Protecting and defending the United States has nothing to do with promoting who one chooses to engage in sexual relations with.

America’s armed forces has lost its’ way. The leadership at the Pentagon is seemingly more concerned with promoting an alternative lifestyle choice than with insuring that America and Americans remain free and protected from our increasingly threatening adversaries, in a very dangerous world.

While members of the Chinese military are training hard in the art of war and focusing their energies on learning more effective ways to win on the battlefield, America’s Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen are learning about using proper pronouns. And ensuring that they use the correct one when interacting with other service members, or possibly face non-judicial punishment if they don’t.

What once were considered deviant sexual behaviors that resulted in dismissal from the armed forces if made public are now being celebrated on U.S. military bases around the world. Rainbow flags fly alongside our national banner, the Pentagon is lit up with rainbow colors at night, and more emphasis is placed on finding ways to assimilate men who like to dress up in women’s clothes into the military branches, than in learning how to kill our enemies.

Now before the LGBTQ community hyperventilates and accuses me of ten kinds of phobias, as with most other military veterans I could care less what someone does in the privacy of their bedroom, as long as innocent children and other innocent people are not victimized. It’s your business, but keep it your business.

What matters to most veterans is how one performs their military duties. As the old adage goes, when slinging lead with the enemy a soldier cares only whether your aim is true, and you have their ‘six’. Not whether you’re sexually attracted to your own gender, or that you like to dress up as a woman.

The U.S. Armed Forces survived racial integration and was obviously made far better as a result. The contributions of black Americans have been extensive, and countless have served heroically and made the ultimate sacrifice in service to America.  As far back as our revolution and the country’s very founding. Women have also served honorably, and continue to serve with distinction in our armed forces to this very day.

Racial integration of the military, while not without challenges and a backlash on the part of a few racist holdovers who were reluctant to accept it, eventually proved to be a transition that was accomplished with far less difficulty than racial integration of the American population in general. Which unfortunately to this day still has racist holdovers struggling to accept it.

While racial integration of the military was implemented and fully embraced, acceptance of this new ‘woke’ bill of fare being peddled by the senior military leadership, with the emphasis on the LGBTQ agenda has been less than a resounding success.

Partly the reason why is that a person’s sexuality is much more of an intimate and personal thing than simply the color of one’s skin. Add to that the traditional religious beliefs of many service members, which the majority are far more conservative and traditional than much of the general public. In fact, military tradition is drummed into their heads from the time they step foot off the bus at their basic training base.

Talk to most of the warfighters and they will tell you they really could care less about who someone sleeps with, they’re just tired of hearing about it. They’re tired of it being pushed down their throats. There is a whole month - Pride Month - dedicated to the LGBTQ community, and only one day to Veterans, one day for remembering our war dead, one day to celebrate our nation’s independence.

Maybe it’s time for the senior leadership to quit listening to special interest groups and liberal politicians both inside and outside of the armed forces who are pushing a social agenda, and start listening to the warfighters who just want to be given the tools and training they need to make them more lethal to our enemies.

And maybe it’s also time to leave the rainbow flags to the civilian world, and the only flag our military recognizes, flies proudly on our bases, on our ships at sea, and that is defended to their last breath, is the Stars and Stripes.

A GOP With Backbone Would Support Elon Musk, Punish Apple, And Fight For Free Speech On Twitter

Instead of speaking out against Apple, Republicans have been disturbingly silent, which means they still have no idea what time it is.

posted by John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist

Apple’s threat to remove Twitter from its App store for the crime of being a slightly more open forum for free speech under Elon Musk has been met with a chorus of outrage and substantive threats of congressional action by Republican leaders.

Just kidding. Republicans have barely said anything about it, and establishment Republicans have said nothing at all. With the exception of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who offered his opinion on a matter outside his purview as a governor, Apple’s threat to crush Twitter has been met more or less with silence, even from members of the GOP who consider themselves conservative. (Sen. Mike Lee, to his credit, tossed out a tweet saying Apple’s threat makes the case for the Open Apps Markets Act. But he’s the exception to the rule.) And though Apple leaders apparently smoothed over the “misunderstanding” with Musk on Wednesday afternoon, we have all seen this pattern: Big Tech’s anti-speech aggression always turns out to be a “mistake” or “misunderstanding” as soon as enough people notice.

This is why I’ve argued that actual conservatives, those who want to save the country and restore republic self-government, should stop calling themselves conservatives. At this point, the label amounts to an admission of failure and defeat, and might as well be the official title of those who desire above all to be the controlled opposition for a permanent leftist regime. 

The Apple situation perfectly illustrates why conservatives need to swap out their old labels for new ones even as they swap out old ways of thinking about government power for a candid recognition of new realities and new imperatives.

In this case, Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook, are squarely on the side of authoritarianism, here and abroad. They are certainly on the side of communist China, which right now is trying hard to suppress mass protests over the CCP’s draconian “zero Covid” policy. Chinese President Xi Jinping sent tanks into the eastern city of Xuzhou this week — not that you’ll read much coverage about it in the corporate press.

As it happens, China is working to quash protests and suppress free speech with Apple’s help. Earlier this month, news broke that the company eliminated the AirDrop wireless file-sharing on iPhones in China after the feature was used by protesters to coordinate and share information. For their part, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., wrote a letter to Cook, branding Apple’s operations in China “unconscionable” and calling on the CEO to work toward halting them; Florida’s Marco Rubio, who is a co-sponsor on the Open Apps Markets Act with Hawley, chimed in with an anodyne tweet; and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, echoed what’s been abundantly clear: “Apple is fully in bed with Communist China.”

Since Apple is an active collaborator with China’s police state, it’s no surprise that Apple is also on the side of an increasingly authoritarian Democrat Party and a Biden administration that seems eager to use Big Tech to suppress online speech. Consider White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s recent comment that the administration is “keeping a close eye” on Twitter and Musk, “monitoring” the social media giant to ensure it suppresses “misinformation” and “hate.” And you know what that means. 

Given all this, it should be easy for Republican leaders like Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to come out swinging against Apple and in defense of Twitter and Musk, to propose legislation that breaks up tech giants such as Apple and Google, treats them as common carriers, or at the very least requires Apple and Google to make it easier for app developers to connect with customers directly, as the Open Apps Markets bill would do.

But the old conservatism remains so in thrall to free market libertarianism and big business that it cannot even contemplate any of that, which means that it has effectively outlived its usefulness and we should be done with it. The only kind of Republicans we need now are those who recognize not just that the left has captured our institutions but that for at least the last half-century it has been building a tyranny machine in the form of an aggressive administrative state, which is now colluding with the most powerful tech companies in the world to suppress speech, rig elections, and support authoritarianism abroad.

This fusion of the administrative state with Big Tech threatens to replace republican self-government with an unaccountable federal bureaucracy. Indeed, that process is already well underway. Those on the right who repose some hope in the Supreme Court stopping it are being naïve. The court has proven itself unwilling to smash this tyranny machine — and even if it tried, the left has signaled its willingness to pack the court if it feels its revolutionary project is truly under threat.

The task at hand, then, is nothing less than the restoration of republican self-government and the revival of first principles in American civic life. To do that, we need a plan to revive the other two badly atrophied branches of government so they can dismantle the federal bureaucracy or, where necessary and possible, use it as an instrument of renewal.

McCarthy, or whoever ends up as the next Republican speaker of the House, will have such a slender GOP majority that it will be limited to investigating the administrative state and blocking the Biden administration’s legislative agenda. It would be a monumental mistake to pursue any kind of bipartisan cooperation with the Democratic Party on any issue. It would likewise be a mistake to ignore calls to investigate and impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. 

Asked about these things recently, McCarthy betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem, saying, “I think the country wants to heal and … start to see the system that actually works.”

But the system cannot work as long as Garland can use the Justice Department as a political weapon, branding parents who speak out at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists” and sending the FBI to raid the homes of anti-abortion activists. The system cannot work when the DOJ is allowed to deploy a geofence dragnet warrant to intercept the communications and location data for thousands of peaceful protesters on Jan. 6, making a mockery of the Fourth Amendment. It cannot work as long as Mayorkas is free to ignore federal immigration law and maintain a de facto open border. And it cannot work if Apple and the White House are allowed to attack Twitter because Elon Musk decided to make it marginally more open to free speech.

There is a war underway for America’s future, and right now only one political party is fighting it. The political and cultural project of the left constitutes a cancer that’s killing our republic and must be cut out. It’s time for Republicans to start talking and acting like they understand that, or step aside and take their place in the ranks of a failed conservative movement. 

If You Wonder What’s Wrong With Georgia – The Republican Lt Governor Appears on CNN to Tell Georgia Republicans Not to Vote for Hershel Walker

Sundance reporting for Conservative Treehouse

People around the country are looking at the Georgia Senate runoff between Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Hershel Walker.  Lots of people wondering what is going on.  Well, last night the Republican party of Georgia gave an excellent example of what it means to be Republican in Georgia.

Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan appeared on CNN to share his opinion of Republican candidate Hershel Walker.   As Republican Duncan outlined during the interview he stood in line for an hour, took a ballot at the polling location, and then decided he could just not vote for a Republican in Georgia, so he turned around and walked back out without voting.

Republican Geoff Duncan had no issue pushing this on CNN much to the smiles of the CNN producers, Democrats and the Warnock campaign.  This is what it means to be a Republican in Georgia.  WATCH (01:08 prompted 30 seconds)

The 2022 goal of the Republican party of Georgia is in alignment with the 2022 Republican National Committee.   The goal of Mr Duncan and others is to remove the populsit movement within the RNC by destroying the Make America Great Again grassroots movement.

Was Duncan censured? No.  Was Duncan criticized by fellow Republicans? Again, no.   Was Duncan ostracized for promoting an election position against the interests of the Republican party? Yet again, no.  Did RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel rebuke the effort to undermine Walker as carried out by Republican Geoff Duncan?  Rhetorical at this point, I know.

In the bigger or big pictures, Republican Lt Governor Geoff Duncan is doing what professional Republicans do.  He also knows there’s nothing to fear from it because he is operating on behalf of the majority Club interests who support his agenda.  However, somehow this will be President Trump’s fault.

Europe Tries Desperately To Rein In Elon Musk Because Free Speech Threatens The Regime’s Grip On Groupthink

If Musk emboldens dissident voices, then entrenched interests 

could be at risk of losing their power.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett reporting for The Federalist

The European Union (EU) reportedly threatened to ban Twitter from the continent on Wednesday if the company’s new owner, Elon Musk, doesn’t adhere to strict content moderation guidelines. 

This warning shot was fired by EU industry chief Thierry Breton, who indicated that the guidelines Musk’s Twitter must follow were detailed in the European Commission’s Digital Services Act (DSA). These guidelines include surrendering the platform to “independent audits” conducted by “independent” third parties and the implementation of “mechanisms to adapt swiftly and efficiently in reaction to crises affecting public security or public health,” among other things. 

Breton indicated that in order to prevent Twitter from being banned in Europe, the tech entrepreneur will have to part ways with his “arbitrary” approach to reinstating the accounts of people previously banned from the platform. Musk must also surrender the platform to an “extensive independent audit” by 2023. Reportedly, Breton told Musk that the platform must “reinforce content moderation” and “aggressively” root out disinformation. 

On one hand, the EU’s stipulations sound somewhat reasonable; after all, the DSA requires Twitter to report if criminals are using the platform to conduct illegal activities. On the other, this move is utterly deranged and should not be tolerated. Who is the EU to strong-arm an American company? 

Previously, Musk indicated that under him, Twitter would constrain itself to the laws of the lands in which its users operate. And, to be fair, this is a reasonable approach to doing business; after all, companies like Kellogg’s adhere to the standards laid about by the European Food Safety Authority. 

But Twitter isn’t in the business of producing breakfast cereals, and the regulation of a tech company is undoubtedly more complex than determining the appropriate ratio of high-fructose corn syrup or yellow dye allowed in products for mass consumption. The EU’s gripe with Twitter, as indicated by Breton’s statements, is the potential proliferation of information and speech that threaten the entrenched interests of the ruling regime on the European continent. 

The fact that freedom of speech is largely a political phenomenon unique to the United States and that Big Tech found its roots in the same country isn’t a coincidence. Neither is the fact that in its earliest days, Big Tech’s pioneers insisted that their inventions would be used for the proliferation of free speech around the globe. The naivety of this nouveau neoliberalism was short-lived, however, as the cynical realities of running massive transnational corporations became all too real. 

Previously, Twitter was one of the international managerial elite’s favorite inventions because it allowed them to set and control the narratives that gave direction to the world’s governments, markets, and more. Now that these people have lost control of the machine that put them at the center of the universe, they want to see it stripped of all utility. 

Musk’s re-platforming of dissident voices on a massively popular social media platform that is taking steps, however imperfectly and incompletely, to no longer unfairly, algorithmically suppress counternarrative speech threatens the legitimacy of the EU. If there are enough anti-regime people in Europe who can successfully use the platform to mobilize the masses, what’s to stop another country from successfully organizing a populist, Brexit-style referendum and further delegitimizing the EU? What’s to stop faltering regional secessionist movements, like those in Catalan, from regaining momentum?

European leaders may claim their tech interests are grounded in humanitarian concerns, but this is simply a farce. If these people actually cared about human rights or any of the other buzzwords they throw around, they would institute large-scale outright bans on tech companies operated under the purview of oppressive governments such as China’s Huawei instead of playing footsie with tyrants. 

Surely, these are matters of concern, but what does catering to the EU’s demands mean for free speech here? Why should the preferences of unelected European bureaucrats determine which American citizens are able to speak and what information we are able to consume?

At the end of the day, Musk has to do what is best for business. He has to keep the lights on so he can recoup the $44 billion spent to purchase Twitter in the first place. And Europe is a big place with a lot of people whose use of Twitter can make Elon a lot of money. Musk has made clear that under his leadership, Twitter will adhere to all relevant laws to which it may be subject while neutrally enforcing content moderation guidelines. Simultaneously, he is fending off a hostile regime at home that seeks nothing less than his complete ruination for deregulating digital speech.

At the time of writing, Musk hasn’t issued a public statement on the EU’s threat, but more alarmingly, no major American politicians have spoken out about a foreign entity attempting to force an American company to censor itself.