In which the Trump administration imposes visa sanctions on five very precious hate speech complainers and the EU has a big impotent retarded sad

Three weeks ago, the European Commission fined Elon Musk’s X €120 million for alleged violations of their Digital Services Act. The Americans vowed to retaliate against this effort to squeeze one of their leading tech enterprises, and now they have begun to do that:

The Trump administration says it is barring former European Commissioner Thierry Breton and four other European nationals involved in curbing hate speech from U.S. soil as part of a sanctions package targeting what it describes as digital censorship.

The sanctions, announced Tuesday, also revoke the U.S. visas of British citizens Imran Ahmed and Clare Melford, who respectively head the Centre for Countering Digital Hate and the Global Disinformation Index …

Germany’s Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon, leaders of Hate Aid, a non-profit that tracks digital disinformation spread by far-right groups, are also subject to the visa bans.

U.S. Under Secretary of State Sarah Rogers called the list of sanctioned individuals “illustrative not exhaustive,” and she also detailed their symbolic importance. Enduring Euromoron Thierry Breton, for example, got the hammer for “mastermind[ing]” the DSA and for writing that wacky letter to Musk in advance of last year’s elections, while the State Department singled out cringe girlboss Josephine Ballon at HateAid partly for appearing in a notorious 60 Minutes segment on German political repression and telling her interviewers that “free speech needs boundaries.” ¹

Regular readers of the plague chronicle will recognise HateAid. They are one of only two “trusted flaggers,” or official internet censors, that our Federal Network Agency has designated under the DSA. As such they are charged with crying to teacher about online content they don’t like, and social media platforms are required to give their censorship demands special expedited consideration in the vast open-air pantywaist boarding school known as the European Union. Both sanctioned CEOs of HateAid – Ballon and von Hodenberg – are well-networked within the German political establishment, and their entry ban has provoked cries of fury from the lunatics who presently rule us:

The Green Party is calling on the German government to respond decisively to the entry bans. Omid Nouripour, Vice-President of the Bundestag, said that the government should “immediately summon the chargé d’affaires of the U.S. Embassy. This is a matter of protecting German citizens.” Party leader Franziska Brandner echoed this demand: “The entry bans are an authoritarian attempt at intimidation and a direct attack on the rule of law in Europe,” she said. Anyone who defames the fight against hatred, threats and digital violence as “radical activism” is deliberately turning freedom of expression on its head.

Yes indeed: Unless the United States grants entry visas to precisely the people whom leading Green politicians think the United States should grants entry visas, the United States is guilty of an authoritarianism and of an attack on “the rule of law in Europe.”

The reds are also very performatively pissed off:

Harsh words also came from the ranks of the SPD. The deputy chair of the Bundestag parliamentary group, Sonja Eichwede, emphasised that the US was trying “under the guise of supposed freedom of expression” to take action against people and organisations “who are committed to having social platforms without hatred and incitement.” And the SPD parliamentary group’s spokesperson on legal policy, Carmen Wegge, accused the US government of simply presenting a false argument. “Criminal behaviour such as incitement to hatred and insults are not protected by freedom of expression,” she warned.

The censors just constantly engage in these tiresome motte-and-bailey arguments. Left to speak freely, they talk of the need to combat “hate speech” and “disinformation,” which are fuzzy propaganda concepts with no basis in German law. Under pressure, they fall back to familiar German statutes against things like incitement and insult, which were illegal long before the Digital Services Act, and the conceptual boundaries of which they are forever expanding, because the goal is to force the existing legal framework to accommodate the new anti-hate speech and -disinformation regime while pretending that hate speech and disinformation were always illegal.

Human wet noodle incarnation and German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul has called the visa sanctions “unacceptable,” although he has no choice but to accept them …

… and the EU has done the same, hinting darkly to the press that they are weighing whether to retaliate against the United States for withdrawing entry privileges that it is totally within the discretion of the United States to grant. In particular, European Council President António Costa has joined Wadephul in calling the visa sanctions “unacceptable,” in one of the more hypocritical statements in recent memory. This selfsame European Council recently hit the Swiss intelligence analyst Jacques Baud with vastly wider-ranging sanctions, and is at this moment weighing similar measures against friend-of-the-blog and Weltwoche editor-in-chief Roger Köppel, for the crime of producing journalistic content that is insufficiently critical of Russia. Sanctions for thee, but not for me.

Now I am going to say things that will probably irritate some people:

1) Visa sanctions like these allow censorship goons like Breton, Ballon and the rest of them to claim a lot of clout for being persecuted by the Trump administration, while in truth facing nothing more than mild inconvenience. Thus our gaggle of discourse schoolmarms released strident statements within hours of Rubio’s announcement, professing their brave defiance of the Trump administration and their determination to continue censoring the internet in the name of human rights and free speech “now more than ever.” There is the danger that this whole thing devolves into a scenario of symbiotic opposition.²

2) What the U.S. would need to do, to really hurt these people and put a kink in their retarded game, is hit them with real sanctions – the kind that the EU has imposed on Baud and may impose on Köppel, the kind that make it impossible to buy and sell anything. That would have a serious chilling effect on the internet hall monitors. Alternatively, the Americans might work behind the scenes with the EU or specific European governments, like Merz’s coalition, enticing these governments to starve key nodes of the censorship industrial complex of funding in return for favours on things like tariffs (or whatever).

3) All of this naturally depends on what it is the Americans want to achieve. The official line, as stated by Under Secretary Rogers, is that British or EU laws restricting online speech that end up impacting the rights of Americans to free expression cross a “red line” and will invite retaliation from the United States. With only a little extrapolation, this argument also works to defend the European operations of American social media companies from DSA-related harassment more generally. And then there are the visa sanctions themselves, which suggest to me at least an interest in attacking the European censorship regime independently of its specific effects on Americans in America.

4) Either way, one should have realistic expectations here: It would be great to get rid of organisations like HateAid, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate and the Global Disinformation Index, but even total success on this front would not inaugurate a new era of liberalism and freedom of expression in Europe. These particular political tumours were all founded in 2018, after Brexit, Donald Trump’s first election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal convinced political elites of the totally insane conspiracy theory that adversarial states like Russia had weaponised “disinformation” and “social media algorithms” to hijack their political systems. These NGOs and many others sprouted like mushrooms in the space of just a few months, capitalising on establishment insecurity by promising vague, buzzword-laden solutions to the illusory Russian social media menace. In practice, they swallowed and continue to swallow millions of Euros while doing a lot of huffing and puffing for middle-aged digitally naive German politicians about all the evil monsters that lurk in the scary internet world. Along the way, they have indeed managed to censor some people and prosecute some others, but their operations are remarkably inefficient and a lot of the censorship we see in Germany would continue undaunted were all these low-level grifters to disappear tomorrow.

1. One person in Rogers’s list is not like the others. Imran Ahmed, who heads the CCDH, lives in the United States with his American wife and children, and he is now facing imminent deportation – which he is fighting in court. Ahmed’s surprisingly amateurish and hamfisted enterprise has earned the enmity of the Trump administration, among other things for including U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a cringe “Disinformation Dozen” list of anti-vaxxers and setting “killing Musk’s Twitter” as a top priority for 2024. The Americans have not revoked Ahmed’s visa just to send a message; the Americans have revoked his visa because he is a fucking creep and an enemy and they want him out.

2. Symbiotic opposition happens when two opposed parties choose to maintain a conflict rather than resolve it, because the conflict itself proves mutually beneficial and/or the resources required for resolution are judged too extravagant an expense. So, for example, if I am really angry with you but doing something about it is not worth the risk, I might punch you but not very hard. Because you don’t want to invite harder punches, you sell my punch as the worst thing ever. This allows me to claim to my supporters (who also hate you) that I’m kicking your ass, and it allows you to claim to your supporters (who think I am the worst person ever) that you’re being brutally victimised. In truth, both of us are engaging in a low-risk and ultimately meaningless professional wrestling-style ritual. Kayfabe situations like these can arise spontaneously without either party explicitly arranging or planning them in advance. They are often unstable and can easily devolve into real, existential hostilities.