House Report on EU Censorship Has Some Fascist Feathers Flying

AP Photo/Tim Ireland

The holier-than-thou elite of the European Union (EU), none of the hierarchy directly elected by a single, solitary soul in the European populace, have been on a censorship tear for the better part of a decade. Subtle at first, it has morphed into a ravening beast of continental proportions with a global appetite that cannot be satiated or restricted.

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The United States during the Obama and Biden terms, helmed by presidents who were both crippled by their shame at American colonialism and ever obsequious to supposed European superiors, were loath to assert our independence in any respect, let alone one that required a firm and exceptional 'piss off' message to the authoritarians in Brussels.

Besides, Obama and POTATUS were altogether too fond of the direction the EU was taking as far as state surveillance, suppression of free speech, and the thought control of their citizens. They would prove to be all too willing co-conspirators in the movement to control 'misinformation' and 'populist' rhetoric.

You can't move a herd where you want if steers keep breaking out of the main group.

Only November 5th saved this country from a tightening of those seen and unseen freedom-strangling nooses.

We elected a president and his vice, who are unafraid to call the Brussels Brahmins on the floormats for their hypocrisy over freedom of movement, the press, and, most importantly, free speech.

J.D. Vance hadn't been in office a month yet when he marched into the heart of Euro darkness and read them the riot act on their own soil.

...Brussels was warning citizens they plan to shut down social media during times of "civil unrest," if they see "hateful content" [...] Or in Sweden, where the government convicted a Christian activist, where a judge said freedom of expression doesn't cover "offending" another group [...] And I look to the U.K., where the government charged a 51-year-old physiotherapist and army veteran of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for 3 minutes [...] Across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.

Particularly galling to the Europeans was the purchase of the formerly complacent and obedient Twitter by freedom renegade Elon Musk. Their first brush with him came during the 2025 presidential election. Wire-haired anti-freedom Euro fascist Thierry Breton threatened to sanction X and possibly imprison Musk if he held a scheduled live online event with an EU-unapproved US presidential candidate...gasp...Donald Trump.

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...The statement followed EU Commissioner Thierry Breton’s open letter to Musk, 53, reminding the X owner that his social media platform is subject to the EU’s Digital Services Act –  a sweeping provision that took effect last August and requires the largest tech companies to moderate content, protect user privacy and address risks to the public.

Musk is hosting a live “conversation” with Trump, 78, on X Spaces Monday night. 

“With great audience comes greater responsibility,” Breton wrote on X, arguing that “there is a risk of amplification of potentially harmful content in [the EU] in connection with events with major audience around the world.” 

Breton’s letter suggested that Musk’s livestream with Trump “might increase the risk profile of X and generate detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security.” 

“My services and I will be extremely vigilant to any evidence that points to breaches of the DSA and will not hesitate to make full use of our toolbox, including by adopting interim measures, should it be warranted to protect EU citizens from serious harm,” the EU official warned.

Trump, naturally, exploded, and staffers at the Biden White House gave POTATUS a new cup of pudding to distract him from the unseemly upset.

Still, the EU kept pushing, even as their own member states, Germany especially (along with the Brits outside looking in) all began campaigns of suppression of free speech on any platform and in any public venue.

In Germany, it's banging on the door at 6 am for social media posts and 'hate speech' convictions. In Keir Starmer's United Kingdom, it's being dragged away from a baggage counter by five righteous officers at Heathrow upon landing for a Xweet sent from Arizona.

...NONE OF YOU MATTER AGAINST THE POWER OF LABOUR

Graham Linehan was arrested by armed police officers at Heathrow airport for writing gender-critical posts on social media.

The Irish comedy writer – who came up with TV sitcoms Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Books – has become a vocal critic of the trans rights movement in recent years.

In a lengthy post on his Substack blog, the 57-year-old claimed he was detained at the airport by five officers after returning from Arizona over three tweets posted in April.

It's also an American battle against the evil of a dystopian British entity known as OfCom, or the Office of Communications, which is charged with hunting down all the miscreants who step over new lines laid down in the benignly named but malignantly intended Digital Safety Act (DSA).

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FOR THE CHILDREN

The British are under the impression that American citizens or companies are also subject to British edicts. It took a hamster farting in their general direction - when OfCom sent a threatening letter to the weaponized autistics at 4chan to square it away to DSA standards or else - to rudely inform them we play by no one's rules but our own.

...“Preston's pet hamster, Mr. Whiskers, disapproved of the last batch of Ofcom correspondence that was provided to him as it was bitter and salty and smelled of failure. This notwithstanding, the fact that it had been created with a white-hot mix of English rage at the sight of Americans exercising their freedom will doubtlessly keep him nice and warm all winter long. He will keep this hamster bedding in reserve in case of emergencies but it is unlikely to be his first choice for the Christmas season.”

OfCom's magnificent legal defender, barrister Preston Byrne, filed a federal lawsuit against OfCom and has been instrumental in advancing what's dubbed 'The Granite Act' to the point where it has a good chance of becoming law.

In a report released two days ago, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee have revealed just how insidious the European Union and its devious state counterpart, the UK, have been.

The .pdf for the entire report is here, and I urge you with all my freedom-loving heart to go through it as you have time. 

I'm going to highlight some of what they've discovered, and you'll see why people like Musk, Byrne, and the administration are so vital to maintaining the beacon of free speech, and why these anti-freedom fascists must be called out, shamed, and foiled at every possible turn.

Minister Breton's threat to Musk was the public salvo, and he was forced to resign over it. But behind the scenes and for months beforehand, the EU had been working on all the American tech platforms to conform. The EUROPEANS were so deep in the weeds concerning censoring Americans' social media access that the European Commission vice president traveled to California to meet with TikTok executives, and when asked specifically if she wanted to discuss 'BOTH EU and US election preparations'?

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BOTH

...The European Commission sought to minimize Breton’s letter to Musk as an unapproved freelance from a rogue Commissioner acting alone.40 But months before Commissioner Breton’s letter, other senior European Commission officials were similarly pressing Big Tech executives for more information on how they planned to moderate election-related speech ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.  In May 2024, European Commission Vice President Jourova traveled to California to meet with major tech platforms. During this trip, Jourova met with TikTok CEO Shou Chew and TikTok’s Head of Trust and Safety to discuss topics including “election preparations.”41 TikTok sought confirmation on whether the European Commission Vice President was traveling all the way to California to have a meeting that “stay[ed] mostly EU focused,” or whether she wanted to discuss “both EU and US election preparations.”42 The European Commission confirmed that Vice President Jourova wanted to discuss “both.”43 

Their Digital Services Act grants them wide latitude for censorship, particularly during elections, and they are the arbiters of what is 'misinformation.'

Check out what they are allowed to keep from the people who are going to the polls in any given EU country. The last paragraph is damning.

The European Commission regularly interferes in EU Member State national elections. 

The European Commission works to influence EU Member States by controlling political speech during election periods. Most strikingly, the European Commission issued DSA Election Guidelines in 2024 requiring platforms to take additional censorship steps ahead of major European elections, such as: 

  • • “Updating and refining policies, practices, and algorithms” to comply with EU censorship demands; 
  • • Complying with “best practices” outlined in the Disinformation Code, the Hate Speech Code, and EUIF documents;
  • • “Establishing measures to reduce the prominence of disinformation”;
  • • “Adapt[ing] their terms and conditions . . . to significantly decrease the reach and impact of generative AI content that depicts disinformation or misinformation”;
  • • “Label[ing]” posts deemed to be “disinformation” by government-approved, leftwing fact-checkers;
  • • “Developing and applying inoculation measures that pre-emptively build resilience against possible and expected disinformation narratives”;44 and 
  • • Taking additional steps to stop “gendered disinformation.”45

These DSA Election Guidelines were branded as voluntary best practices.46 But behind closed doors, the European Commission made clear that the Election Guidelines were obligatory. Prabhat Agarwal, the head of the Commission’s DSA enforcement unit, described the Guidelines as a floor for DSA compliance, telling platforms that if they deviated from the best practices, they would need to “have alternative measures that are equal or better.”47  

Moreover, the European Commission’s election censorship mandates likely had extraterritorial effects. For example, companies disclose in mandatory reports to the European Commission the company’s standard election-related “policies, tools, and processes.”48 The European Commission regularly engages with large social media platforms on what electionrelated changes should be made, and hosts DSA-related discussions in non-EU countries.49 

Since the DSA came into force in 2023, the European Commission has pressured platforms to censor content ahead of national elections in Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Moldova, Romania, and Ireland, in addition to the EU elections in June 2024.50 Nonpublic documents produced to the Committee pursuant to subpoena demonstrate how the European Commission regularly pressured platforms ahead of EU Member State national elections in order to disadvantage conservative or populist political parties.  

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'Premptive innoculation measures' against 'possible and expected disinformation'?

Left-wing factcheckers.

And eight directly compromised elections.

The Romanian election is memorable as I covered the twists and unbelievable turns of that one.

These were EU-suppressed 'hate speech' terms not allowed on social media during the Slovak election.

The 2023 Slovak election is one key example. TikTok’s internal content moderation guides show that TikTok censored the following “hate speech” while facing European censorship pressure: 

  •  â€˘ “There are only two genders”; • “Children cannot be trans”; 
  • • “We need to stop the sexualization of young people/children”;
  •  â€˘ “I think that LGBTI ideology, gender ideology, transgender ideology are a big threat to Slovakia, just like corruption”; and
  • • “Targeted misgendering.”54 

Romania would have a President Georgescu but for EC interference and Romanian government collusion.

The European Commission took its most aggressive censorship steps during the 2024 Romanian presidential election. In December 2024, Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the results of the first round of the previous month’s presidential election, won by little-known independent populist candidate Calin Georgescu, after Romanian intelligence services alleged that Russia had covertly supported Georgescu through a coordinated TikTok campaign.56 Internal TikTok documents produced to the Committee seem to undercut this narrative.57 In submissions to the European Commission, which used the unproven allegation of Russian interference to investigate TikTok’s content moderation practices, TikTok stated that it “ha[d] not found, nor been presented with, any evidence of a coordinated network of 25,000 accounts associated with Mr. Georgescu’s campaign”—the key allegation by the intelligence authorities.58 

POOF

Shades of the Steele dossier and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

...By late December 2024, media reports citing evidence from Romania’s tax authority found that the alleged Russian interference campaign had, in fact, been funded by another Romanian political party.59 But the election results were never reinstated, and in May 2025, the establishment-preferred candidate won Romania’s presidency in the rescheduled election.60 

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And the EU is still plotting.

Two recent EU initiatives also threaten to worsen the European free speech crisis. Under President von der Leyen’s “Democracy Shield,” the European Commission will create at least two new censorship hubs for regulators and left-wing NGOs to pressure platforms to censor conservative content—the European Center for Democratic Resilience and the European Network of Fact-Checkers.66 Under the same proposal, the European Commission is seeking to expand the Disinformation Code to include requirements related to “user verification tools,” which could effectively end anonymity on the internet by requiring users to show identification in order to create an account.67 The Commission is also seeking to circumvent normal democratic processes to create a single, expansive definition of illegal “hate speech” across Europe.68 This would require every EU member state to adopt the Commission’s definition, which includes conventional political discourse and “memes.”69 The European censorship threat shows no signs of abating.

As I said above, please read the entire thing as you have time.

There the European Commission sits, exposed.

The United States isn't taking any of this lying down.

Thank God we have some fierce warriors on our side, like Sarah Rogers, the unfiltered Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy.

She's a frickin' pistol. (The entire interview is here)

It is a them-or-us fight to the death for our way of life, but our team is so much quicker on the draw.

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We'll be their huckleberries.

They won't know what hit them.

At least Johnny Ringo had the sense to be worried.

Editor's note: If we thought our job in pushing back against the Academia/media/Democrat censorship complex was over with the election, think again. This is going to be a long fight. If you want to join the conversation in the comments -- and support independent platforms -- why not join our VIP Membership program? Choose VIP to support Hot Air and access our premium content, VIP Gold to extend your access to all Townhall Media platforms and participate in this show, or VIP Platinum to get access to even more content and discounts on merchandise. Use the promo code FIGHT to join or to upgrade your existing membership level today, and get 60% off!

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