Free Speech’s O.K. Corral

They are the thieves of righteousness and justice.

Freedom of speech and thought is the defining characteristic that gives life to every other human right. It has been the driving essential ingredient for intellectual, scientific, and societal progress and prosperity in the Western World since arguably the Reformation and in the American colonies since the 1600s.     

While freedom of speech and thought has always been under unrelenting attack, perhaps the most dangerous and climactic attempt this century was the coordinated maneuver by Western governments, including the United States, when Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of a popular social free speech application with nearly a billion users, Telegram, was arrested this past week as he landed in Paris on an international flight.

The arrest of Mr. Durov seems to be the ultimate warning shot that free speech is now under the exclusive control of the various governments. Judge your words with care.  

Supposedly, the arrest is for Telegram’s “complicity” in illegal activities that are suspected to be ongoing on the platform, such as money laundering, drug running, and child pornography – all of which are itemized publicly and meant to suggest that Mr. Durov is personally involved in these crimes and poison public opinion.

But the “tell” is that the trailing accusation is at the heart of the arrest. Mr. Durov has failed to provide content “moderation.” That means he has steadfastly refused the demands of intelligence agencies and unelected bureaucrats in his former home in Russia – the reason he left – and in Europe and the US to create a “back door” allowing them to access all the traffic on the app. Perhaps more importantly, it denies them the ability to use the app for their dark activities like silencing opposition, feeding “color revolutions” in other countries, and hosting otherwise illegal activities. (Mr. Durov has publicly said the CIA tried to bribe a Telegram engineer to install convert fixes on the app, creating backdoor access.)

[The tactic of prosecuting the leadership of a media corporation for possible “illegal” activities through the lack of sufficient “moderation” of content by its users, viewers, or listeners seems as illogical as holding the mailman or the phone company responsible for the possible illegal activities of its clients.And it leads one to wonder, is Elon Musk next?]

Thanks to Mike Benz, the founder and Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, and a former State Department official, we have a glimpse into how this works in real time. On the Lou Dobbs Podcast, he explained:

“[The app] Telegram played a major role in the State Department’s fomenting of the Color Revolution in Belarus in the summer of 2020. The National Endowment for Democracy, the US State Department, and USAID were all funding the major organizers of the street riots in Belarus and using Telegram as the main channel to organize those street riots because Telegram has such ubiquitous use in Eastern Europe, also in Russia, also in Ukraine. So they loved Telegram as a way to organize, rent riots, to destabilize [Prime Ministers] Lukashenko’s government.”

The brazen use of Facebook, Twitter, and many other online and hard copy news sources to censor speech in 2016 with the bogus CIA Steele dossier, and in 2020, during COVID, and the ongoing discourse over hot-button issues like immigration, race relations, and so-called “extremist” activities is now a matter of public record. Mark Zuckerburg, CEO of Meta (Facebook’s parent) admitted in a letter to Congress this week that he had indeed caved to intense government pressure to censor his platforms. He wrote Congress that his company was pressured by the Biden Administration to “censor” free speech on Facebook about COVID and the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

Neither the US nor European governments are any longer hiding their intent to censor speech or misinformation, which is the current favored euphemism. Even academics are joining the movement to censor speech, saying they are “reconsidering free speech.” Of course, many colleges and universities already have strict speech controls in place.

At the same time, American and European intelligence agencies and law enforcement are already operating extensive censorship programs. These agencies are heavily invested in curtailing unbridled speech while at the same time funding and participating in clearly illegal manipulation of political parties and the overthrow of elected governments using the various techniques of suborning the truth, lying, and misinformation – the very things they accuse their citizens of using as justification for their war on speech.

Before Elon Musk interviewed former President Trump on X recently, a bizarre man named Thierry Breton, supposedly the European Union’s head of digital information, publicly threatened Mr. Musk via a letter that he paraded for the press, in which he told the owner of X to “proceed with caution” or there would be “legal consequences,” for the promotion of hatred, disorder [or] disinformation.”

Mr. Breton closed by stating he would “make use of our toolbox” to keep the world safe from disinformation, which he obviously thought Mr. Musk and President Trump might feed to the unwitting public.  

The censorship brigades are filled with evil men and women who fear the truth, just as Dracula does Sunshine. The individuals, corporations, organizations, and governments that would advocate, legislate, and regulate free thought – speech – are the mortal enemy of free people anywhere on the planet. They are the monsters among us who live in humanity’s dark shadows–until they have such power as to be unstoppable. Their primary aim is to enrich themselves, and they yearn for control and “will to power” over everything they see or touch.   

To be clear, if a government – any government – curtails, limits, or legally defines the boundaries of free political speech, then that government is inherently illegitimate. If corporations or academics in league with the government and its intelligence apparatus – which is now “a given” in the US and Europe – set up algorithms and programs, committees, or juries to ascertain what the “truth” is, diagnose “misinformation,” or “content moderation” and “disinformation,” or set standards of what constitutes “scientific” reality, then those same entities become the criminals stealing the most sacred possessions of a culture, or a nation.

They are the thieves of righteousness and justice.