Brownstone Institute
The EU is the Real Culprit of Censorship

From the Brownstone Institute
BY
The Supreme Court recently hearing arguments in the case of Murthy v. Missouri has refocused attention on the US government’s efforts to get social media platforms to suppress alleged Covid-19 “misinformation” and the issue of whether these efforts crossed the “line between persuasion and coercion” and thus constituted government censorship.
But how could the government’s efforts have not constituted government censorship when it had a full-fledged “Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation Monitoring Program” in which all the major online platforms were enrolled and which required them to submit periodic reports outlining, even indeed quantifying, their suppression of what was deemed “false and/or misleading information likely to cause physical harm or impair public health policies?”
The program covered almost the entire official course of the declared Covid-19 pandemic. It was rolled out in early June 2020, just three months after the WHO’s pandemic declaration, and it was only wound up in summer 2022, after most of the measures adopted in response to the pandemic declaration, including various forms of vaccine passports, had already been withdrawn. The participants in the program included Twitter, Facebook/Meta, Google/YouTube, and Microsoft (as owner of Bing and LinkedIn). An archive of the no less than 17 reports which each of them submitted to the government can be seen below.

A presentation of the data submitted specifically by Twitter in its final report can be seen below. Note that the figures given on accounts suspended and pieces of content removed are global figures, i.e. the government censorship program was affecting Twitter users all around the world.

Moreover, the government had already hit several of the participants in the program (Google, Facebook, and Microsoft) with massive fines in antitrust cases in recent years, and the program was being rolled out in conjunction with draft legislation which was practically guaranteed to become law and which gave the government the following powers, among others:
- The power to fine platforms up to 6% of their global turnover if they fail to comply with the government’s censorship demands: i.e. to suppress what the government deems misinformation or disinformation.
- The power to conduct “dawn raids” in case of suspected non-compliance: i.e. to have government agents break into and seal off company premises, inspect books or records in whatever form, and take away copies of or extracts from whatever books or records they deem relevant to their investigation.
- The all-important power, in the context of digital means of communication, to require platforms to provide the government access to their algorithms. This gives the government the opportunity not only to demand open and direct censorship in the form of content removal and account suspension, but also to demand and to influence the more subtle and insidious censorship that takes the form of algorithmic suppression.
In July 2022, the legislation was passed, as expected, and it is now law.
You do not remember this happening? Well, that is not because it did not happen. It did happen. It is because the government in question is not the United States government, but rather the European Commission.
The archive of the Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation Monitoring Program is here, the cited Twitter report is here, the legislation and now law is the EU’s Digital Services Act, which can be consulted here.
It was thus the European Commission which was the driving force behind the wave of censorship which struck Covid-19 dissent from 2020 to 2022, certainly not the Biden administration, whose role was limited to making informal, essentially toothless requests. There was indeed coercion, there was indeed a threat. But it was coming from a different source: it was the looming threat of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
It should be recalled that in Murthy v. Missouri, the US government has argued that it was merely asking platforms to apply their own content moderation policies. So, the question is: Where did those policies come from? “Content moderation” is, after all, just a kinder, gentler euphemism for censorship. Why should the platforms even have “content moderation” policies? Why do they have them?
The answer is that they have them because the European Union has demanded that they have them: first in the context of suppressing “hate speech” and more recently in that of suppressing alleged “disinformation.” The European Commission launched its so-called Code of Practice on Disinformation in 2018, “voluntarily” enrolling all of the major online social media platforms and search engines into it. Was Google, for instance, which the European Commission had just hit with a record-breaking €4.3 billion fine – plus a €2.4 billion fine just the year before! – going to refuse to play ball? Of course not.
The Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation Monitoring Programme was a sub-program of the Code of Practice. The Code of Practice would in turn lose its ostensibly “voluntary” character with the passage of the Digital Services Act, as the below European Commission tweet makes perfectly clear.

What is at issue in Murthy v. Missouri is an injunction preventing the US government from communicating with online platforms about “content moderation.” In the meanwhile, however, all the online platforms which signed up to the Code of Practice – and even many which did not but were simply unilaterally designated by the European Commission – have necessarily to be in contact with the latter on their “content moderation” in order to ensure compliance with the Digital Services Act.
The platforms are indeed required to submit periodic reports to the Commission. The Commission is even given the power to demand that the platforms undertake special “content moderation” measures in times of crisis, with a “crisis” being defined as “extraordinary circumstances…that can lead to a serious threat to public security or public health” (preamble, para. 91). Sound familiar?
The 2022 “strengthened” Code of Practice even set up a “Permanent Task Force on Disinformation,” in which representatives of the platforms meet with EU officials at least every six months, as well as in sub-groups in between the plenary sessions. The Task Force is chaired by the European Commission and also, for some reason, includes a representative of the EU foreign service.
So, even supposing the Supreme Court finds in favour of the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri and upholds the injunction, what will have been gained? The US government will be prevented from talking to the platforms on “content moderation,” but the European Commission, the executive organ of a foreign power, will still be able to do so.
How is that a victory? The European Commission is in fact doing so, systematically and in a formalized manner, because the EU’s Digital Services Act makes it nothing less than the arbiter of what counts as “misinformation” or “disinformation” – the very arbiter of truth and falsity – and the platforms have to satisfy the Commission that they are respecting its judgment in this regard or face the ruinous DSA fines.
The fact of the matter is that Americans’ 1st Amendment rights are already well and truly dead and they are dead because of the actions of a foreign power. Lawsuits targeting the US government will do nothing to change this.
Here is what would: for the US Congress to pass its own law making it a crime for US companies to collaborate with a foreign government in restricting Americans’ speech.
The law could give federal authorities the same draconian powers that the DSA gives the European Commission, but now in the cause of protecting speech rather than suppressing it: (a) the power to apply crippling fines for non-compliance; (b) search-and-seizure powers, so that we can know exactly what communications the companies are having with the European Commission or other foreign powers or governments, rather than having to wait, say, for Elon Musk to kindly divulge them at his discretion; (c) the power to demand access to platform algorithms, so that we can know exactly what and whose speech platforms are surreptitiously, algorithmically suppressing and what and whose speech they are surreptitiously, algorithmically amplifying (which is just the flip side of the same coin).
If the platforms want to stay on both markets, then it would be up to them to find a modus vivendi which allows them to do so: for instance, by geo-blocking content in the EU. Censoring Americans’ speech to meet EU demands would no longer be an option.
Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Adam Kheriarty (all three plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri): Are you going to call for such a law?
Senator Ron Johnson, Senator Rand Paul, Representative Thomas Massie: Are you prepared to propose it?
If you truly want to defend Americans’ freedom of speech, then the EU has to be confronted. Attacking the Biden administration for informal contacts with online platforms while staying silent about the EU’s systematic infringement and undermining of Americans’ 1st Amendment rights – and instrumentalizing of American companies to this end! – is not defending freedom of speech. It is grandstanding.
Brownstone Institute
If the President in the White House can’t make changes, who’s in charge?

From the Brownstone Institute
By
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Brownstone Institute
The New Enthusiasm for Slaughter

From the Brownstone Institute
By
What War Means
My mother once told me how my father still woke up screaming in the night years after I was born, decades after the Second World War (WWII) ended. I had not known – probably like most children of those who fought. For him, it was visions of his friends going down in burning aircraft – other bombers of his squadron off north Australia – and to be helpless, watching, as they burnt and fell. Few born after that war could really appreciate what their fathers, and mothers, went through.
Early in the movie Saving Private Ryan, there is an extended D-Day scene of the front doors of the landing craft opening on the Normandy beaches, and all those inside being torn apart by bullets. It happens to one landing craft after another. Bankers, teachers, students, and farmers being ripped in pieces and their guts spilling out whilst they, still alive, call for help that cannot come. That is what happens when a machine gun opens up through the open door of a landing craft, or an armored personnel carrier, of a group sent to secure a tree line.
It is what a lot of politicians are calling for now.
People with shares in the arms industry become a little richer every time one of those shells is fired and has to be replaced. They gain financially, and often politically, from bodies being ripped open. This is what we call war. It is increasingly popular as a political strategy, though generally for others and the children of others.
Of course, the effects of war go beyond the dismembering and lonely death of many of those fighting. Massacres of civilians and rape of women can become common, as brutality enables humans to be seen as unwanted objects. If all this sounds abstract, apply it to your loved ones and think what that would mean.
I believe there can be just wars, and this is not a discussion about the evil of war, or who is right or wrong in current wars. Just a recognition that war is something worth avoiding, despite its apparent popularity amongst many leaders and our media.
The EU Reverses Its Focus
When the Brexit vote determined that Britain would leave the European Union (EU), I, like many, despaired. We should learn from history, and the EU’s existence had coincided with the longest period of peace between Western European States in well over 2,000 years.
Leaving the EU seemed to be risking this success. Surely, it is better to work together, to talk and cooperate with old enemies, in a constructive way? The media, and the political left, center, and much of the right seemed at that time, all of nine years ago, to agree. Or so the story went.
We now face a new reality as the EU leadership scrambles to justify continuing a war. Not only continuing, but they had been staunchly refusing to even countenance discussion on ending the killing. It has taken a new regime from across the ocean, a subject of European mockery, to do that.
In Europe, and in parts of American politics, something is going on that is very different from the question of whether current wars are just or unjust. It is an apparent belief that advocacy for continued war is virtuous. Talking to leaders of an opposing country in a war that is killing Europeans by the tens of thousands has been seen as traitorous. Those proposing to view the issues from both sides are somehow “far right.”
The EU, once intended as an instrument to end war, now has a European rearmament strategy. The irony seems lost on both its leaders and its media. Arguments such as “peace through strength” are pathetic when accompanied by censorship, propaganda, and a refusal to talk.
As US Vice-President JD Vance recently asked European leaders, what values are they actually defending?
Europe’s Need for Outside Help
A lack of experience of war does not seem sufficient to explain the current enthusiasm to continue them. Architects of WWII in Europe had certainly experienced the carnage of the First World War. Apart from the financial incentives that human slaughter can bring, there are also political ideologies that enable the mass death of others to be turned into an abstract and even positive idea.
Those dying must be seen to be from a different class, of different intelligence, or otherwise justifiable fodder to feed the cause of the Rules-Based Order or whatever other slogan can distinguish an ‘us’ from a ‘them’…While the current incarnation seems more of a class thing than a geographical or nationalistic one, European history is ripe with variations of both.
Europe appears to be back where it used to be, the aristocracy burning the serfs when not visiting each other’s clubs. Shallow thinking has the day, and the media have adapted themselves accordingly. Democracy means ensuring that only the right people get into power.
Dismembered European corpses and terrorized children are just part of maintaining this ideological purity. War is acceptable once more. Let’s hope such leaders and ideologies can be sidelined by those beyond Europe who are willing to give peace a chance.
There is no virtue in the promotion of mass death. Europe, with its leadership, will benefit from outside help and basic education. It would benefit even further from leadership that values the lives of its people.
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