FFFO Report: EU, Financed by U.S. Taxpayers is Trying to Shut Down Free Speech in the U.S

Excerpt from a new must-read report issued by the Foundation for Freedom Online: "23 US-Funded Organizations Drive The EU’s War on Tech Companies."

The American taxpayer is bankrolling online censorship in Europe. Multiple organizations involved in enforcing the EU’s draconian Digital Services Act (DSA), which imposes massive fines on American tech platforms found guilty of carrying “misinformation” or “hate speech,” are American entities backed by American government funding.

Supporters of these efforts, many of whom are deeply tied to the legacy US foreign policy establishment, admit that the goal of these efforts is to shut down free speech for Americans. The pressure is about to mount, as the previously-voluntary EU code of practice on disinformation becomes a mandatory regulation governing tech companies operating in the region.

The Foundation for Freedom Online has analyzed organizations that signed the EU’s code of practice, or are involved in enforcing it, finding eight organizations that receive funding from US government sources.

Additionally, two of the organizations on the list, NewsGuard and Bellingcat, are drectly involved in enforcing the EU’s censorship regime, as active participants in Europe’s network of EU-backed “digital observatories” aimed at detecting disfavored online narratives that can be analysed and targeted for censorship.

Who are these U.S. funded entities that are working overtime to deny Americans their right to free speech?  The above report names the names. And it is all looking incredibly ominous. The bottom line is that the U.S. right to free speech is being attacked by "foreign" entities that are financed by U.S. taxpayers. Americans are afflicted with the free speech version of an auto-immune dysfunction. Here is more from the report:

As the Foundation for Freedom Online highlighted in its 2024 Censorship Index, the U.S. government also pushed censorship in Europe through the State Department’s office of public diplomacy:

Gave the Atlantic Council a $300,000 grant to build a “transatlantic response to disinformation.” This grant was seemingly used to fund a conference involving conversations about cooperating on the EU Digital Services Ac (DSA)t. A grant transaction description mentions a June 2022 conference.

The Delegation of the EU to the United States and the Atlantic Council hosted a June 2022 EU-US Defense and Future Forum. During the conference, members of an audience, which included officials from the U.S. State Department, asked questions to and attended a talk by Gerard De Graaf on the EU-US Digital Policy Agenda, largely centered around the DSA.

Gerard De Graff was the Director of Digital Transformation at the European Commission. He is responsible largely for the creation of the DSA. De Graff was named Special Envoy for Digital to the US and head of the newly created EU San Francisco Office in September 2022, seemingly fitted near Silicon Valley to push American tech platforms into compliance with Orwellian European regulations.

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Nadine Strossen: Strongly Enforced Hate-Speech Laws Existed in Post-WWI Germany

Nadine Strossen discusses the "Weimar Fallacy." Strong hate speech laws prior to WWII in Germany shoved hate speech underground, out of sight, where it festered and grew. The better alternative would be to let the people say their hateful things out in the open market where their ignorance will be forced to engage with ideas that are better than hate. Strossen explains:

For more on this topic, see Greg Lukianoff's article, "Would censorship have stopped the rise of the Nazis."

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Mike Benz Offers a Sampling of USAID “Jobs”

As the USAID house of cards continues to collapse, Mike Benz responds to Alexander Vindman's whining:

On a light note, here are more (real) examples of USAID malfeasance:

More recent revelations:

These

- $1.5 million for DEI in Serbia

- $70,000 for a DEI musical in Ireland

- $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia

- $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru

This: "$15 million to George Soros's open foundation Over Obama's last four in office alone."

"Advertiser outreach" to censor news outlets.

Funding to thousands of journalists to shape the news.

Many people are assembling lists of USAID fraud. I can't vouch for all of this, but this is one of the many recent lists assembled by users on X:

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J.K. Rowling Summarizes the Damage Done by Gender Ideology

Here's one more J.K. Rowling post dedicated to those people who sat on your hands while thousands of confused teenaged girls were being butchered and/or injected with hormones that would lead to their permanent sterilization. Moreover, as Rowling notes, there is the problem with luxury beliefs like this, benefitting only the elites. There's also the problem with the men who take advantage of vulnerable women. Rowling, who has been subjected to non-stop death threats for years, has this to say:

"This 'why do you care about a tiny fraction of the population?' line is, and always was, utterly ridiculous.

Gender ideology has undermined freedom of speech, scientific truth, gay rights, and women's and girls' safety, privacy and dignity. It's also caused irreparable physical damage to vulnerable kids.

Nobody voted for it, the vast majority of people disagree with it, yet it has been imposed, top down, by politicians, healthcare bodies, academia, sections of the media, celebrities and even the police. Its activists have threatened and enacted violence on those who've dared oppose it. People have been defamed and discriminated against for questioning it. Jobs have been lost and lives have been ruined, all for the crime of knowing that sex is real and matters.

When the smoke clears, it will be only too evident that this was never about a so-called vulnerable minority, notwithstanding the fact that some very vulnerable people have been harmed. The power dynamics underpinning our society have been reinforced, not dismantled. The loudest voices throughout this entire fiasco have been people insulated from consequences by their wealth and/or status. They aren't likely to find themselves locked in a prison cell with a 6'4" rapist who's decided his name's now Dolores. They don't need state-funded rape crisis centres, nor do they ever frequent high street changing rooms. They simper from talk show sofas about those nasty far-right bigots who don't want penises swinging around the girls' showers, secure in the knowledge that their private pool remains the safe place it always was.

Those who've benefited most from gender identity ideology are men, both trans-identified and not. Some have been rewarded for having a cross-dressing kink by access to all spaces previously reserved for women. Others have parlayed their delicious new victim status into an excuse to threaten, assault and harass women. Non-trans-identified leftybros have found a magnificent platform from which to display their own impeccably progressive credentials, by jeering and sneering at the needs of women and girls, all while patting themselves on the back for giving away rights that aren't theirs.

The actual victims in this mess have been women and children, especially the most vulnerable, gay people who've resisted the movement and paid a horrible price, and regular people working in environments where one misplaced pronoun could see you vilified or constructively dismissed. Do not tell me this is about a tiny minority. This movement has impacted society in disastrous ways, and if you had any sense, you'd be quietly deleting every trace of activist mantras, ad hominem attacks, false equivalence and circular arguments from your X feeds, because the day is fast approaching when you'll want to pretend you always saw through the craziness and never believed it for a second."

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Reframing Anxiety as the Exciting Opportunity to Support the Eternally Radical Idea of Free Speech

Greg Lukianoff offers a history lesson starting with Henry VIII's battle with the effects of the printing press. He then turns his attention toward those who seek censorship as the remedy for feeling anxious at ever-new revelations that many of our institutions (including colleges) are dysfunctional, even corrupted to such an extent that they are betraying their stated missions:

What’s happening now is why the free and open exchange of ideas will always be radical. Yes, what the future is going to look like seems a lot less clear. Yes, we’re living through a crisis of authority. Yes, we’re questioning the legitimacy and necessity of our institutions. But those institutions and authorities don't deserve our blind loyalty. And they showed their cards when they went after the eternally radical idea — when they answered “the problem” of free speech with new speech codes, byzantine taboos, and cancellation campaigns.

The institutions and individuals that stand the test of this era will be those who show integrity and principle, those who tell the truth even when it’s inconvenient or unpopular. That’s what happened in the Enlightenment with figures like Voltaire and Diderot, Smith and Hume, Franklin and Madison. It’s also what we’re seeing now on platforms like Substack, where individuals and institutions with integrity and courage are finding new ways to lead.

I’m proud to say that FIRE is one of those institutions. We've had the courage to be non-partisan in a partisan world. Through all the tumult, we’ve defended free speech, free inquiry, and the free press for all — even at the cost of some uncomfortable Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

Democratic principles become even more essential during times of crisis, not less. History shows us that these principles are not luxuries. No, they are the foundations of a successful and dynamic society. The Enlightenment didn’t feel like the Enlightenment when it started. To most people, it probably felt like blasphemy, heresy, and chaos. And to Henry VIII, it probably felt like quite a bit of nasty gossiping.

But freedom always feels a little scary. Free speech is the eternally radical idea, after all.

Here’s a cognitive hack I like to teach my kids: you can reconceptualize fear as excitement. And remember, I have a well-documented history of dealing with anxiety. I know what I’m talking about here. So while I don’t blame anyone for feeling anxious right now, I also hope they feel exhilarated. What’s happening in this moment is thrilling: It is the chance to reexamine everything we thought we knew.

I invite you to read Lukianoff's full essay, "Institutional decay, Henry VIII’s big fat libido, and the eternally radical idea: When you add billions of eyes to the problems of the world, the result is not just noise but incredible breakthroughs."

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