Officials pursue an anti-liberty agenda through unofficial pressure and foreign regulators.
It’s no secret that governments around the world are chiseling away at people’s liberties. Rights advocates document a nearly two decade decline in freedom. Civil liberties activists warn of a worldwide free speech recession. And while American restrictions on government power hold the line better than pale equivalents elsewhere, the political class seems determined to end-run those protections and impose creeping totalitarianism by leveraging the authority of allies in other countries.
“Obrigado Brasil!” Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, wrote this week to thank that country’s authoritarian Supreme Court for its recent ban on the X social media platform.
Ellison serves alongside Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Walz, who is the Democratic candidate for vice president and has falsely claimed “there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” He’s also not the only prominent politician to have a real hate-on for X and its CEO, Elon Musk.
“Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” Robert Reich, Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration and one-time adviser to President Barack Obama, huffed in The Guardian. He cited the recent arrest in France of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov as a precedent. “Like Musk, Durov has styled himself as a free speech absolutist,” Reich sniffed.
But the animus doesn’t stop with X, Telegram, and their bosses.
“For too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability,” former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claimed in 2022. “The EU is poised to do something about it. I urge our transatlantic allies to push the Digital Services Act across the finish line and bolster global democracy before it’s too late.”
Leveraging Foreign Authoritarianism for Domestic Purposes
Why would a former U.S. presidential candidate cheerlead for European speech regulations?
“The Digital Services Act will essentially oblige Big Tech to act as a privatized censor on behalf of governments,” Jacob Mchangama, founder of the Danish think tank Justitia and executive director of The Future of Free Speech, warned in 2022. “The European policies do not apply in the U.S., but given the size of the European market and the risk of legal liability, it will be tempting and financially wise for U.S.-based tech companies to skew their global content moderation policies even more toward a European approach to protect their bottom lines and streamline their global standards.”
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina “Khan can’t get Congress to pass her antitrust agenda and is losing in U.S. courts, so now she’s leaning on foreign governments to do the anti-business work for her,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board noted last year about Khan’s reliance on European regulators.
Behind-the-Scenes Pressure for Censorship
But attempts to impose control and stifle dissent in the absence of legal authorization or in defiance of constitutional protections also occur here at home. Days after Telegram CEO Durov’s arrest in Paris, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed what had already been revealed by the Twitter and Facebookfiles—that the government leaned on private companies to suppress dissent and criticism of officialdom.
“Senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee. He also admitted to suppressing reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop and its incriminating contents under pressure from the FBI.
That implicates not only incumbent President Joe Biden, but also Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president. Harris has complained in the past that social media companies are “speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation.”
Oversight, it seems, is now applied through back-channel pressure, and regulation by governments in countries that lack serious protections for free speech. The result is to endanger the role of the United States as a haven for free speech and other liberties in a world growing ever-more authoritarian.
The Political Class Embraces an Increasingly Authoritarian World
“Global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023. The breadth and depth of the deterioration were extensive,” Freedom House cautioned in its 2024 annual report. “Political rights and civil liberties were diminished in 52 countries, while only 21 countries made improvements.”
“Today, we are witnessing the dawn of a free-speech recession,” Justitia’s Mchangama mourned two years ago. “Liberal democracies, rather than constituting a counterweight to the authoritarian onslaught, are themselves contributing to the free-speech recession.”
This erosion of protections for free speech and other rights occurs with the encouragement of American officials who want more control over our lives but have been (partly) stymied by American protections for liberty. In a world of global platforms and international travel, these officials are applying extra-legal pressure and relying on overseas friends to punish people for activities that are legal in the U.S.
Readers will notice that most if not all these officials are Democrats. Much ink has been spilled in recent years—rightly—about the authoritarian drift of the Republican Party. GOP vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance wants to punish ideological opponents and advocates that his allies “seize the administrative state for our own purposes” and that they “seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets, and give it to the people who’ve had their lives destroyed by the radical open borders agenda.”
But as illiberalism rises across the political spectrum, Democrats are leapfrogging authoritarianism to embrace a soft totalitarianism enforced by unofficial pressure and foreign allies subject to minimal restraints on their power. They ignore legal constraints and display contempt for this country’s protections for liberty in their quest to leave no refuge for dissent.
If liberty has a future in this country, it will be despite the best efforts of the political class.
Thank you for reading.
– J.D.
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TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew responded to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Friday allowing a ban of the social media app to go into effect, saying he hopes to work with President-elect Donald Trump on a solution.
Trump posted on Truth Social that the Supreme Court’s Friday decision was expected. He noted that his own decision over the platform would be made soon and said, “Stay tuned!”
The CEO posted to the app on Friday following the ruling, thanking Trump for supporting the platform’s efforts to be accessible in the United States.
“I want to thank President Trump for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States,” he said. “This is a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship.”
Chew continued: “We are grateful and pleased to have the support of a president who truly understands our platform, one who has used TikTok to express his own thoughts and perspectives, connecting with the world and generating more than 60 billion views of his content in the process.”
Before the ruling, Trump had said he had a productive conversation with Chairman Xi Jinping of China. The two discussed topics such as trade, fentanyl, TikTok, and other issues. Trump expressed optimism about resolving issues between China and the U.S. and emphasized working together to promote global peace and safety.
The outgoing Biden administration stated they would be leaving the ban up to the incoming administration.
“Given the sheer fact of timing, this Administration recognizes that actions to implement the law simply must fall to the next Administration, which takes office on Monday,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
Suchir Balaji was trying to warn the world of the dangers of Open A.I. when he was found dead in his apartment. His story suggests that San Francisco has become an open sewer of corruption.
According to Wikipedia:
Suchir Balaji (1998 – November 26, 2024) was an artificial intelligence researcher and former employee of OpenAI, where he worked from 2020 until 2024. He gained attention for his whistleblowing activities related to artificial intelligence ethics and the inner workings of OpenAI.
Balaji was found dead in his home on November 26, 2024. San Francisco authorities determined the death was a suicide, though Balaji’s parents have disputed the verdict.
Balaji’s mother just gave an extraordinary interview with Tucker Carlson that is well worth watching.
If her narrative is indeed accurate, it indicates that someone has induced key decision makers within the San Francisco Police and Medical Examiner’s Office to turn a blind eye to the obvious indications that Balaji was murdered. Based on the story that his mother told Tucker Carlson, the key corrupt figure in the medical examiner’s office is David Serrano Sewell—Executive Director of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
The disappearance of a human skull has spurred a lawsuit against the top administrator of San Francisco’s medical examiner’s office from an employee who alleges she faced retaliation for reporting the missing body part.
Sonia Kominek-Adachi alleges in a lawsuit filed Monday that she was terminated from her job as a death investigator after finding that the executive director of the office, David Serrano Sewell, may have “inexplicably” tossed the skull while rushing to clean up the office ahead of an inspection.
Kominek-Adachi made the discovery in January 2023 while doing an inventory of body parts held by the office, her lawsuit says. Her efforts to raise an alarm around the missing skull allegedly led up to her firing last October.
If the allegations of this lawsuit are true, they suggest that Mr. Serrano is an unscrupulous and vindictive man. According to the SF Gov website:
Serrano Sewell joined the OCME with over 16 years of experience developing management structures, building consensus, and achieving policy improvements in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors. He previously served as a Mayor’s aide, Deputy City Attorney, and a policy advocate for public and nonprofit hospitals.
In other words, he is an old denizen of the San Francisco city machine. If a mafia-like organization has penetrated the city administration, it would be well-served by having a key player run the medical examiner’s office.
According to Balaji’s mother, Poornima Ramarao, his death was an obvious murder that was crudely staged to look like a suicide. The responding police officers only spent forty minutes examining the scene, and then left the body in the apartment to be retrieved by medical examiner field agents the next day. If true, this was an act of breathtaking negligence.
I have written a book about two murders that were staged to look like suicides, and to me, Mrs. Ramarao’s story sounds highly credible. Balaji kept a pistol in his apartment for self defense because he felt that his life was possibly in danger. He was found shot in the head with this pistol, which was purportedly found in his hand. If his death was indeed a murder staged to look like a suicide, it raises the suspicion that the assailant knew that Balaji possessed this pistol and where he kept it in his apartment.
Balaji was found with a gunshot wound to his head—fired from above, the bullet apparently traversing downward through his face and missing his brain. However, he had also sustained what—based on his mother’s testimony—sounds like a blunt force injury on the left side of the head, suggesting a right-handed assailant initially struck him with a blunt instrument that may have knocked him unconscious or stunned him. The gunshot was apparently inflicted after the attack with the blunt instrument.
A fragment of a bloodstained whig found in the apartment suggests the assailant wore a whig in order to disguise himself in the event he was caught in a surveillance camera placed in the building’s main entrance. No surveillance camera was positioned over the entrance to Balaji’s apartment.
How did the assailant enter Balaji’s apartment? Did Balaji know the assailant and let him in? Alternatively, did the assailant somehow—perhaps through a contact in the building’s management—obtain a key to the apartment?
All of these questions could probably be easily answered with a proper investigation, but it sounds like the responding officers hastily concluded it was a suicide, and the medical examiner’s office hastily confirmed their initial perception. If good crime scene photographs could be obtained, a decent bloodstain pattern analyst could probably reconstruct what happened to Balaji.
Vernon J. Geberth, a retired Lieutenant-Commander of the New York City Police Department, has written extensively about how homicides are often erroneously perceived to be suicides by responding officers. The initial perception of suicide at a death scene often results in a lack of proper analysis. His essay The Seven Major Mistakes in Suicide Investigation should be required reading of every police officer whose job includes examining the scenes of unattended deaths.
However, judging by his mother’s testimony, Suchir Balaji’s death was obviously a murder staged to look like a suicide. Someone in a position of power decided it was best to perform only the most cursory investigation and to rule the manner of death suicide based on the mere fact that the pistol was purportedly found in the victim’s hand.
Readers who are interested in learning more about this kind of crime will find it interesting to watch my documentary film in which I examine two murders that were staged to look like suicides. Incidentally, the film is now showing in the Hollywood North International Film Festival. Please click on the image below to watch the film.
If you don’t have a full forty minutes to spare to watch the entire picture, please consider devoting just one second of your time to click on the vote button. Many thanks!
