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An appeal to the dissident right from the Russian opposition about the arrest of Pavel Durov
The founder of Telegram was arrested in France and faces 20 years in prison. The charges ostensibly surround the use of Telegram for criminal activity, but the Guardian notes:
At the height of Twitter censorship, probably 95% of the Dissident Right was banned from Twitter and all went to Telegram. The only contingent of the DR left on Twitter were the Bronze Age Pervert-types who extoled "The West" and race realism but otherwise promoted a philosemitic undercurrent among the right-wing. This all changed with Musk's acquisition of Twitter/X and now nearly all of the banned are back on that platform.
Yesterday Elon Musk also gave exposure to the Telegram founder's claim that the FBI tried to recruit one of his engineers to introduce vulnerabilities into the application through open-source dependencies.
It's hard to overstate the fragility of "freedom of speech", although admittedly I mostly care about expression and information-sharing related to the topics that I consider true and important. And those are the political topics which are only actually threatened at this point. The political persecution of Durov not only threatens Telegram, basically what became the last "internet Ghetto" of the Dissident Right, but it puts pressure on all platforms to conform to EU censorship standards, which are becoming more stringent year after year. TikTok is likewise being banned for not sufficiently curtailing speech according to the interests of the Jewish lobby.
You have the EU censorship regime, the international NGO apparatus like ADL and Hope not Hate which put enormous political and financial pressure on platforms and governments to censor this speech. The current state of Internet discourse is also proof positive of Elite Theory. Only someone like Elon Musk could do what he did with X and (for now) get away with it. Musk himself has related growing scrutiny and lawsuits by the federal bureaucracy against his businesses as retaliation for his "free speech" policy in governing X, and I think he's almost certainly correct.
It really is, at this point, one man standing against the impending total-internet censorship of the Dissident Right. People were making fun of Musk for overpaying for X, but it's an important lesson, a lesson already known by many, that you can't put a price on memetic control over the collective consciousness.
It truly is amazing how quickly freedom of speech has been utterly abandoned by most of the West.
I'm genuinely curious how this happened. Does anyone have a good model for it? Are we just lazy now, and unprincipled? Do people actually believe that 'hate speech' shouldn't be protected.
I don't know, it's just absurd to me on a very basic level that people think free speech isn't under massive attack.
My intuition is that free speech, like many things, is something that works well in a culturally homogeneous society, and begins to break apart otherwise*. When the majority are basically on the same page about most things of real importance, you can tolerate a small group of weirdos ranting about blacks/gays/Jews/or whatever. When you have multiple cultures, some with very strong group-consciousness, free speech easily becomes abusable as a tool to direct aggression towards other communities in a zero-state competition for state benefits and favours. The UK is the obvious example of this: Muslims routinely use freedom of speech to organise thousands of young aggressive men to march around cities intimidating anyone they don't like into hiding away. OTOH, counter-protestors having the freedom of speech to express their dislike of this situation will cause outbreaks of violence with the aforementioned groups that will quickly escalate beyond what the state can handle, hence why they just simply deny this right to the less-favoured group.
*The obvious counter-example is the US, which is certainly more diverse than almost anywhere else by most metrics. I think they get away with it as the sheer scale of the country means that even if two groups of people want to kill each other, while they're living thousands of miles apart there's little chance of large-scale violence occurring.
Oh, really? So having minority cultures with very strong group-consciousness causes directed aggression towards other groups in a competition for resources and power? Very interesting. It sounds like you would call me a "weirdo ranting about Jews" while you acknowledge a dynamic recognized by the DR which is denied by everyone else.
The US is not an exception to this by any means. It's just that Jews were the minority group with the very strong group-consciousness that has used free speech to direct strong cultural aggression towards White culture and identity while simultaneously demanding fealty to their own group identity.
The "weirdos ranting about Jews" are just saying what you are accusing Muslims of doing, but Muslims don't even have such prominent control over academia, Hollywood, and other institutions of cultural influence. If they did, and used their influence to elevate their own group identity and criticize the identity of their outgroup so prominently, you would certainly accuse Muslims of doing what anti-Semites accuse Jews of doing.
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