How the US Should Respond to the ‘Orwellian Nightmare’ of the EU, According to Heritage Expert
A Heritage Foundation expert is calling for the United States to respond to the European Union’s fine on the social media platform X and on owner Elon Musk, with sanctions on EU officials and restrictions of travel, including preventing them from attending next year’s World Cup festivities in the U.S.
“We should sanction EU, European Commission officials who are responsible for fining Elon Musk and X,” Nile Gardiner, director of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, told The Daily Signal in an interview Monday. “They should not be welcome in the United States. They should be banned from attending the World Cup next summer.”
The EU announced a $140 million fine on X Friday. The European Commission defended the fine as a response to X allegedly misleading users by allowing users to purchase a blue check mark, an identifier that previously symbolized verification. European Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier told The Daily Signal that the decision “has nothing to do with content moderation.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the fine as an attack on Americans.
“The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on [X,] it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments,” he posted on the platform. “The days of censoring Americans online are over.”
Musk called for the abolition of the EU in response.
“The people of Europe should withdraw from the EU to regain their sovereignty,” he posted on X.
Attack on Free Speech
Gardiner framed the fine as an attack on free speech.
“This is about power and control,” he said. “EU bureaucrats couldn’t care less about blue ticks and who buys them. What they care about is controlling content and the messaging.”
“The European Union is an Orwellian nightmare and the European Commission thrives on controlling what people can and cannot say within the EU, which is why X is a huge threat to their whole modus operandi,” Gardiner added.
“X is a very powerful force that undermines the Orwellian power of Brussels,” he argued. “They want to make it as expensive as possible for X to operate in Europe, in order to suppress freedom of speech.”
The Twitter Files revealed European involvement in the massive pressure campaigns to force social media companies like Twitter to censor speech governments like the EU deemed to be “misinformation.”
“We have seen a real revolution on thinking on U.S. policy towards Europe in the last year and Elon Musk is rightly advancing this revolution by standing up to the European Commission,” Gardiner noted. “Three cheers for Elon Musk for standing up for freedom, democracy, sovereignty, and self-determination!”
Gardiner noted that X has allowed the British public to highlight many scandals, including the horrifying trend of men of Pakistani heritage forming “grooming gangs” to sexually abuse young women.
“If we didn’t have X, we wouldn’t have seen this big spotlight on the grooming gangs scandal, we would not have seen the massive focus we have today on thousands of British citizens being arrested for their views and thoughts and free speech,” Gardiner noted. “If we didn’t have X in Europe, I would fear for the future of Europe—which is why the EU elites fear it so greatly.”
The EU’s Response
Regnier, the European Commission spokesman, told The Daily Signal that the Digital Services Act, the legislation under which the EU fined Musk, has “nothing to do with censorship.”
Between January and December of this year, Instagram made more than 118 million content moderation decisions, Facebook made more than 413 million, and X made more than 616,000. “So, these were taken by the platform in the EU, not by us,” Regnier said.
“There are facts. We want platforms to enforce their terms and conditions and to make sure that our citizens can fight back against unjustified content moderation decisions,” Regnier said. “We are not targeting any company or jurisdiction. We base our decisions on due process.”
Why Oppose the EU?
Gardiner described the EU as a force against self-determination and sovereignty for European nations.
“The European Union is not remotely democratic. It’s about power, it’s about the centralization of power in Brussels,” he said. “It is about trampling upon the sovereignty, the independence, the self-determination of European nation states.”
“The EU behaves like a dictatorship,” he added. “It is a modern-day form of tyranny in Europe. Elon Musk is right, it’s time for the people of Europe to throw off the shackles of the EU and declare their freedom.”
He compared the EU’s grand project to those of French Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
“The EU follows in the ambitions of Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin,” Gardiner said. “They all tried to create a centralized Europe and they all failed. The European Union also is failing and it will collapse.”
He said the United States should adopt a formal policy of calling “for every European Union member state to hold a referendum” like the 2016 Brexit referendum in which British citizens voted to leave the EU.
“The United States must always stand for freedom, democracy, and self-determination,” Gardiner declared. He praised President Donald Trump for fighting back against the EU and predicted that the union would collapse “in the next 2-3 decades.”
Gardiner said his proposal to sanction EU officials and to ban their travel to the U.S. “will have a real impact in Europe” due to the popularity of soccer across the Atlantic.
This article originally appeared at The Daily Signal.