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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.
Colonial wars in the middle east.
It was the first time enemies couldn't be seen as having any legitimacy. There were no rules of war, just terrorists that have no more rights than vegetables. They can't be negotiated with, they are barely treated as prisoners of war, have no arguments that can be accepted and anything that happens to them is justified. There is no judicial process for terrorists and anyone suspected of being sympathetic can have all their rights striped. Total surveillance is acceptable against terrorists.
Much of the legal framework for the deplattforming comes from the war on terror.
The west built up a huge apparatus of professional regime change counter terrorists who worked in the middle east from 2001-2015. Then they came home and brought their tactics with them. Secondly, the big challenge to the regime is no longer Al Qaeda it is the own population.
Right wingers who supported the wars in the middle east effectively scored the most epic own goal in history and shot them selves in the face. The repression of the last couple of years is the military industrial complex being used against the own population.
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