There are few things members of the legacy media hate more than free and “unfettered” conversations, which means there are few things they love more than the censorial European technocrat.
Thus, to absolutely no one’s surprise, certain members of the American press have come to the defense of the five Europeans hit last week with visa restrictions by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“Trump administration sanctions five foreigners it considers at odds with American values: Russians? Chinese? Iranians? No, Europeans who fight disinformation and online abuse but stand accused by Trump officials of censorship,” writes New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced last week that the Trump administration has banned five Europeans from entering the country due to their participation in the “global censorship-industrial complex.” REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt/File Photo
It might interest Baker to learn that the Trump administration is enforcing travel restrictions on Russian businessmen and government officials, Chinese students and CCP members and Iranian citizens.
NBC News published a report none too subtly headlined, “Europe pushes back at Trump’s ‘authoritarian’ sanctions on anti-disinformation figures,” which described the sanctioned Europeans simply as “online safety campaigners” who are “accused” of censoring “American viewpoints.”
The Atlantic’s David Frum, meanwhile, made sure to shoehorn a reference to Jeffrey Epstein into his criticism — “Trump position on free speech: treason trials for Americans who report on Trump’s Epstein connections; punitive sanctions on Europeans who report on Russian disinformation.”
And so on.
But if you actually read up on these Eurogoons — former European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate Imran Ahmed, Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index and HateAid’s Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg — you’ll find they have actively worked to suppress free speech in the United States.
That’s a violation of our Constitution, their defenders might recall.
Breton is a key figure behind the Digital Services Act, the tool by which EU countries impose massive fines on US companies for violating Europe’s concept of “acceptable” speech.
In December, the EU fined X (formerly Twitter) $141 million for failing to comply with its speech regulations.
Ahmed leads pressure campaigns to strongarm social media platforms into censoring users or removing them entirely, including an effort to get Google to ban the Federalist from its advertising platform.
Before Elon Musk acquired Twitter, Ahmed held secret meetings with his company’s London staffers to discuss deplatforming specific individuals.
Afterward, according to internal documents, Ahmed listed “kill Musk’s Twitter” as a top goal.
Melford specializes in turning US websites that don’t fully comply with EU speech regulations into pariahs for advertisers.
Her GDI created a “dynamic exclusion list” that it shared with ad companies, labeling news sites as “high-risk” for “disinformation.”
Melford has bragged that the GDI’s defunding list has had a “significant impact” on ad revenue for its targeted sites.
Tellingly, the GDI’s top 10 “riskiest” outlets are almost all right-leaning, including The New York Post, the Daily Wire and the Federalist.
Reason magazine and RealClearPolitics are also in the organization’s top 10 “riskiest” news sites, even though they’re clearly nothing of the sort.
Laughably, among the sites the GDI approvingly cites as carrying “the lowest level of disinformation risk” are NPR, ProPublica and HuffPost. Oh, come on!
Then there’s Ballon and von Hodenberg, the leaders of HateAid, a group based in Germany that acts as a “trusted flagger” for the DSA, responsible for reporting and monitoring undesirable online speech.
President Trump is right to ban these people.
Contrary to the sacraments of the new left, just as the United States is not morally obligated to host everyone who crosses its borders, we have no duty to welcome anyone who wants to travel here — especially not those who openly disdain the liberties explicitly outlined in our founding documents.
We don’t, in fact, have to host a Eurocrat who sees freedom of speech as a disease to be cured.
We can tell him to stay home in his nation-sized museum.
But because this is the Trump era, members of the American press have naturally shown sympathy for these Euro goblins, making them the latest martyrs of the church of the resistance — whose catechism views the US State Department, rightly exercising its discretion, as an affront to Western civilization and the international order.
What nonsense.
There are a great many things for which Trump and his cabinet deserve criticism.
But telling a handful of Eurotrash censorship fanatics to find somewhere else to peddle their Big Brother baloney is not one of them.
T. Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington, DC.