EU Bureaucrat at Davos Predicted Censorship is Coming to America
Věra Jourová is Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency.
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It may soon become a punishable offense to speak your mind here on Substack or, for that matter, anywhere else, on or off the internet.
Last month, at the billionaire confab in Davos, “a European Union official predicted to a U.S. congressman that the U.S. would ‘soon’ enact laws on ‘illegal hate speech’ similar to those in the EU,” according to American Military News.
Věra Jourová, the vice president of values and transparency for the European Commission, tapped Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton on the arm and laughed as she made the prediction. It came as she discussed whether AI is capable of moderating online hate speech.
Jourová is a Czech politician and lawyer. She is the Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency. Her personal “values” have been called into question.
Some MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) believe she is too close to the oligarch billionaire and former Czech PM Andrej Babiš. He was implicated in the Pandora Papers.
In 2021, The Guardian ran an article revealing Babiš’ “offshore arrangements,” including “secretive” loans, amounting to €15 million from three different companies via “the British Virgin Islands-based Blakey Finance Limited through a business called Boyne Holding LLC in Washington DC to its subsidiary SCP Bigaud in Monaco.”
Babiš, the second richest man in the Czech Republic, was also involved in subsidy fraud. He used EU funding to finance the construction of a resort and conference center in Bohemia. It was discovered “that the company was originally under Agrofert, the industrial holding that Mr Babiš founded, until it was renamed and transferred to an unknown owner via anonymous shares,” Radio Prague International reported last June.
Thus, if the connection is indeed as close as the MEPs argue, it is nothing less than a sick joke that a woman cozy with a criminal oligarch is permitted to oversee the “core values” of the EU. In 2006, she was brought up on corruption charges of her own (the Budišov Affair), however, thanks to savvy lawyers, she was acquitted and awarded a settlement of 3.6 million Czech korunas as compensation.
Jourová is no stranger to censorship. In 2018, she accused Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the “far-right” League party, of hate speech against Roma and immigrants. She argued that Salvini should have his speech curtailed. Jourová made the remark after Salvini went on Twitter and accused North Africans of kidnapping a 13-year-old girl.
In 2021, Salvini was put on trial in Palermo, accused of “allegedly illegally blocking over 100 migrants in dire sanitary conditions from disembarking from a rescue ship,“ Al Jazeera reported.
Salvini was a target of opportunity for Jourová and her desire to eradicate all speech she finds objectionable or politically incorrect. “Contrary to what Věra Jourová has said,” the Visegrad Post reported,
she is not only demanding more transparency but is actively seeking to control online content. Her exchange with Matteo Salvini, coupled with her close ties with Soros networks, only further highlight how hypocritical she is and, when the opportunity arises, how she eagerly attacks countries that show the slightest insubordination towards Brussels… she is in reality an agent of George Soros’ Open Society.
For Jourová, censoring critics of the EU and punishing people for not accepting Brussels’ narratives is a form of democracy. “Media are a pillar of democracy,” she argued last January during an open public consultation on the upcoming European Media Freedom Act, a pet project of Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission.
“But today this pillar is cracking, with attempts by governments and private groups to put pressure on the media. This is why the Commission will propose common rules and safeguards to protect the independence and the pluralism of the media. Journalists should be able to do their work, inform citizens and hold power to account without fear or favor. We are now consulting broadly to come with the best proposal.”
Jourová, of course, is not addressing the “independence” of a Substack newsletter like this, or its European counterpart, but rather corporate media, connected to the government, which has come under criticism as people begin to understand they are lied to on a number of important issues. As noted in the following tweet, the proposed law is basically a “media privilege” act.
“The system of proposed ex-ante notification to self-declared media establishes de facto fast-track, non-transparent procedures to certain privileged actors that will have a major negative impact on the right to freedom of expression and information,” Article 19 argued last month.
Article 19 is an international human rights organization that defends and promotes freedom of expression and freedom of information. It takes its name from the United Nations Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The group notes that the Media Freedom Act’s primary focus is on content moderation. In order to achieve the gargantuan task of scouring the internet in search of content malefactors, a 2019 paper issued by Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, proposes the use of artificial intelligence.
“A key element of this debate” to censor content harmful to the state “has centred [sic] on the role and capabilities of automated approaches (driven by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques) to enhance the effectiveness of online content moderation and offer users greater protection from potentially harmful material,” states a Cambridge Consultants PDF, “Use of AI in Online Content Moderation.”
According to Ofcom, in addition to “actively moderating harmful content, AI technologies can be used to encourage positive engagement and discourage users from posting potentially harmful content in the first place.” Ofcom believes the problem is “anonymity,” described as “a potential explanation for why some internet users act maliciously online.”
In other words, anonymous debate, as practiced in 1787-88 by “Publius” (Madison, Jay, Hamilton) in the Federalist Papers, would be illegal if this EU bureaucrat has her way. In 1995, the Supreme Court ruled in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission that
Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority… It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation… at the hand of an intolerant society.
That “intolerant hand” is busy at work in the European Union—an imposed government with unelected bureaucrats who are not answerable to the people—and that intolerance, according to the corrupt sub-czar of European censorship, has informed the Americans that similar tyranny will be coming their way.
I’m not certain that will be the case. However, over the last few years, Congress has worked with social media giants to “moderate” (censor) content the state finds objectionable.
We shouldn’t expect arbitrators in black robes to save us from political censorship. Last year, the Supreme Court blocked a law in Texas that would have prevented social media giants from censoring political content unacceptable to the state.
“The court’s decision to temporarily block the Texas law comes as politicians in Congress and in statehouses across the country look to regulate social media giants like Facebook and Twitter,” CNET reported.
Věra Jourová warned a member of Congress at the elite confab in the Swiss Alps that the EU, and soon the USG, will use the hyped-up phantom of “disinformation and extremism in the media” (that is, media critical of government narratives) to shut down any and all opposition to the state, its financial crimes, and its addiction to forever war.
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are no longer the law of the land in America.
