Trump Administration Imposes Visa Sanctions on Five Very Precious Hate Speech Complainers

Three weeks ago, the European Commission fined Elon Musk’s X €120 million for alleged violations of their Digital Services Act. The Americans vowed to retaliate against this effort to squeeze one of their leading tech enterprises, and now they have begun to do that:

The Trump administration says it is barring former European Commissioner Thierry Breton and four other European nationals involved in curbing hate speech from U.S. soil as part of a sanctions package targeting what it describes as digital censorship.

The sanctions, announced Tuesday, also revoke the U.S. visas of British citizens Imran Ahmed and Clare Melford, who respectively head the Centre for Countering Digital Hate and the Global Disinformation Index …

Germany’s Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon, leaders of Hate Aid, a non-profit that tracks digital disinformation spread by far-right groups, are also subject to the visa bans.

U.S. Under Secretary of State Sarah Rogers called the list of sanctioned individuals “illustrative not exhaustive,” and she also detailed their symbolic importance. Enduring Euromoron Thierry Breton, for example, got the hammer for “mastermind[ing]” the DSA and for writing that wacky letter to Musk in advance of last year’s elections, while the State Department singled out cringe girlboss Josephine Ballon at HateAid partly for appearing in a notorious 60 Minutes segment on German political repression and telling her interviewers that “free speech needs boundaries.” 1

Regular readers of the plague chronicle will recognise HateAid. They are one of only two “trusted flaggers,” or official internet censors, that our Federal Network Agency has designated under the DSA. As such they are charged with crying to teacher about online content they don’t like, and social media platforms are required to give their censorship demands special expedited consideration in the vast open-air pantywaist boarding school known as the European Union. Both sanctioned CEOs of HateAid – Ballon and von Hodenberg – are well-networked within the German political establishment, and their entry ban has provoked cries of fury from the lunatics who presently rule us:

The Green Party is calling on the German government to respond decisively to the entry bans. Omid Nouripour, Vice-President of the Bundestag, said that the government should “immediately summon the chargé d’affaires of the U.S. Embassy. This is a matter of protecting German citizens.” Party leader Franziska Brandner echoed this demand: “The entry bans are an authoritarian attempt at intimidation and a direct attack on the rule of law in Europe,” she said. Anyone who defames the fight against hatred, threats and digital violence as “radical activism” is deliberately turning freedom of expression on its head.

Yes indeed: Unless the United States grants entry visas to precisely the people whom leading Green politicians think the United States should grants entry visas, the United States is guilty of an authoritarianism and of an attack on “the rule of law in Europe.”