Thierry Breton’s Smug Authoritarianism

Is Thierry Breton the most loathsome figure in European politics? He is certainly one of the most authoritarian. His chief contribution to his role as Commissioner for the Internal Market—aside from overseeing an unprecedented decline in European competitiveness—has been a barrage of laws and regulations, like the Digital Services Act, aimed at controlling what can and cannot be said online.

Yet, with his latest sanctimonious proclamation issued to Elon Musk, he has plumbed new depths of smug absolutism. The letter—ironically posted on X but, unlike most of Breton’s other posts, thankfully missing the accompanying photo of Breton’s face—attempted to pre-empt a planned livestream between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. 

Quite what an interview with an American presidential candidate has to do with the EU is not immediately obvious. But the real context for Breton’s missive is made quite clear by an oblique reference to “the context of recent events in the United Kingdom.”

The “recent events” are of course the outbreak of anti-immigrant rioting and protests in the wake of the shocking butchery of young girls attending a Taylor Swift dance party. But Breton is not writing to suggest Musk asks Trump about the breakdown of law and order in the UK or the long-ignored grievances of much of the UK population. Instead, he is looking to follow the lead of Keir Starmer and the UK’s commentariat, who have delighted in pinning the blame for the rioting on “misinformation” and “harmful speech”. 

Such a discourse has been music to Breton’s ears, providing him with another opportunity to rail against the supposed role of “disinformation” in turning voters away from the Eurocrat class’s favoured policies of endless migration and endless EU integration. Breton’s latest letter refers to “the amplification of harmful content” and the role of “content that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation.” Here, the EU’s bulldozer approach to free speech is quite evident: Breton mixes together the charge of “incitement to violence”—in most jurisdictions a long-standing and tightly-defined offence—with the utterly nebulous concepts of “promoting hatred” and spreading “disinformation.” But with Breton, the ambiguity is quite intentional: what he and the EU want is carte blanche to remove any content that questions the EU narrative. 

Of course, Breton has additional motives for further attacks on Elon Musk. He is still smarting from Musk revealing that the EU offered X “an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us.” The accusation from Musk followed a frankly bizarre and technologically illiterate intervention from Breton, where he announced that enforcement action against X would focus on the use of X’s blue “Verified” checkmarks. 

But if Breton’s desperate bandwagon-jumping is dangerous, the response by regime bootlickers to his letter is embarrassing. A ragtag band of sycophantic gravy-train riders leapt to Breton’s defence. Sporting titles such as “Jean Monnet Professor” or citing plumb jobs in state or EU-funded media, academia, and NGOs, they have lined up to congratulate Breton for forcing Musk to, as EU speak has it, “play by the rules” and obey “rule of law”. Some of these accounts appear so perfectly the caricature of midwit media intellectuals that I had to check they were not parodies. Alas, it seems the EU elite class is beyond parody.

The tone of self-congratulatory smugness is truly something to behold. Rather than representing the economic, intellectual, and political stagnation of Europe’s elites, the EU’s status as “regulatory superpower” is recast as the protection of civilisation against American-style barbarism. Quite what is civilised about unaccountable, supranational bodies determining what can and cannot be said is left unsaid. European anti-Americanism is so instinctive that even the achievement of the First Amendment is viewed with automatic suspicion. 

But the chief virtue of Musk’s X is that such childish displays are actually the minority. The letter has attracted widespread condemnation and outright disbelief from commentators all over the world. It appears to have gone particularly viral in the United States, where an opportunity for a patriotic display in defence of the Constitution is of course never missed. 

But to our free-speech-loving friends in the U.S., I am sorry to break it to you but this kind of outrageous attack on speech is nothing new at all for the EU. In fact, you are highly likely to already be feeling the effects of the EU’s vast censorship regime. As our report from Dr Norman Lewis at MCC Brussels notes, the EU has been secretly compiling an enormous army of tools for outright censorship. And this system is only set to expand and even become automated in the years to come. Breton and Musk’s sparring might be new, but the EU’s empire of censorship is not. It is already influencing what even users in the U.S. see. 

The Breton-Musk spat is set to continue. Huge fines or even a total ban on X in the EU is not off the table. Thankfully, Musk, for all his faults, seems to have the instincts to stand up to the EU’s miserable attempt at anti-democratic bullying. This will, one hopes, force Breton’s censorship regime further out into the open. Perhaps then, Europeans will be forced to reckon with the restrictions on free speech that have thus far been passed with barely a whimper.

And what of Musk’s interview with Trump? Despite Breton’s dire warnings, as of time of publication, we see nowhere in Europe did the discussion spark riots. Breton will presumably suggest his letter ensured such calm. The inflated pretensions of the Eurocrats know no bounds.