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Notes -
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 is telling, though, that Musk is regularly in Europe and yet has never been arrested, while Durov has avoided it for some time and was arrested upon landing in France for the first time in a while.
In reality, everything that the EU wants Durov to remove from Telegram is stuff Musk’s X already does remove and is happy to remove if a takedown notice is filed.
They've already threatened Musk several times and are taking action against X; there's no arrest warrant for him for two reasons
He's not as far along in the process and
He's an American citizen. The Biden and Harris administrations may not like him, but it would still be a problem if France arrested him for this sort of thing.
No, this blue-pill stuff wore through a long time ago. It's about not tolerating right-wing speech, not about whatever fig-leaf they put on it.
I think in Telegram’s case it’s about more than just right-wing speech, to put it mildly.
It would be no problem at all. American citizens are arrested abroad for crimes that are not crimes in America all the time, and beyond some vague consular action that occasionally partially (but not wholly) limits a sentence the US is often fine with it.
The EU would certainly have a problem if it tried to extradite Musk, but arresting him? That would not affect the status quo.
Sometimes. But sometimes it causes minor diplomatic incidents: the Executive Branch pulled at least a few strings to get Brittney Griner and Evan Gershkovich home. Or five US citizens imprisoned in Iran. The State Department presumably has some judgement in terms of what they consider "wrongful detention," though.
Do we think the Biden / Harris administrations are as favorable to Griner as they are to Musk?
Given the news recently about NASA turning to SpaceX to help bring the two stranded astronauts back to Earth, and pointedly rejecting Boeing's pleas that their Starliner capsule was fit for the task, I'd say they'd probably be more favorable to Musk if he were detained on foreign soil. They clearly don't like the guy, but it would require pigheaded dogmatism to overlook his benefit to the US government and leave him to languish in a foreign prison.
Then again, pigheaded dogmatism would not shock me from these people.
NASA is definitely likely to be his biggest ally for sure, but who listens our cares about what NASA has to say? They are politically irrelevant except as a pork delivery system, which SpaceX a actually threatens. DOD might actually be the most influential voice urging his indispensibility, though their influence over State is likely weak and not enough to overcome the political hatred of Musk combined with the lobbying of the traditional defense contractors. The voting public are largely convinced that Musk is a grifter and a loud mouth, and that the companies he heads would be much better off without him.
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