ArcaMax

PARIS — Quick, someone please take the official stationery away from the Republican House Judiciary Committee staffers. In an attempt to fight what they describe as Europe’s effort to distort reality, they’ve just done exactly that themselves.

It turns out that a bunch of folks immediately mistook this partisan screed for an official bipartisan congressional report because it looked so formal. The title? “The Foreign Censorship Threat: Europe’s Decade-Long Campaign to Censor the Global Internet and How It Harms American Speech in the United States.”

Surely, it’s just a coincidence that this committee’s chairman, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, has been batting for GOP mega-donor and multi-billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, against the European Union since at least 2024. And that the report is dated the exact same day that Musk’s local X offices in Paris were raided by French authorities over complaints about the murky X algorithm— the one that seems to constantly shove Musk’s own posts in your face on his platform, when you aren’t being mugged by everything from porn to scams and AI-generated slop.

“In light of your recent threats of reprisal toward X Corp., an American company, for facilitating political discourse in the US, we write to demand that you stop any attempt to intimidate individuals or entities engaged in political speech in the United States and you take no action to otherwise interfere in the American democratic process,” Jordan wrote to the EU back in 2024.

Poor little richest man on the planet, being “intimidated” by bureaucrats.

But does this new partisan report by Jordan's staffers have a point? Look, I’m hardly a fan of the EU bureaucracy. It absolutely overreaches when it comes to policing speech — online or otherwise. And the report rightly criticizes that. Not that all EU regulation is bad. Its strict control of food sold within the bloc is a welcome example. Who has the time, or ability, to determine the impact of every ingredient in products on grocery store shelves? Some of us would rather have good food ingredient regulation than wonder if the sudden and rapid proliferation of our backside is the result of that new salad that we’ve been buying. But they've become far too iron-fisted about narrative control.

Here’s where the report starts manipulating information itself, though. In arguing that the EU has interfered in European elections, it specifically cites the Romanian presidential election, where a dark horse candidate’s first-round win was annulled by the country’s constitutional court under longstanding law after local intelligence alleged state-backed interference by Russia.

A TikTok campaign was the visible part of the iceberg, but not the only part. A Romanian mercenary, Horatiu Potra, who once served in the French Foreign Legion and later worked as security chief for the ousted candidate, Câlin Georgescu, was charged with “actions against the constitutional order, dissemination of false information and false statements regarding his campaign financing and asset declarations,” according to Romanian press.

No mention of that part in the GOP report.

Instead, it asserts that it was all about social media, and that TikTok not only didn’t have proof of the alleged 25,000 accounts that acted in a swarm, but also that it couldn’t be attributed to Georgescu’s campaign — undercutting the Russian interference narrative. In reality, TikTok said last month that these accounts did exist, but that it can’t make a definitive attribution — nor clear any actors of wrongdoing.

The selective telling of facts, packaged as truth, is exactly what makes propaganda effective.

From all this, the GOP report concludes that it’s actually “the European Commission” that “regularly interferes in EU Member State national elections” by controlling and censoring political speech online. As though there can only be one culprit.

Look, everyone’s interfering in some way or another, trying to push their own pawns across the global chessboard. The best we can hope for are good referees for this game, able and willing to call out the moves on all sides. Because power rarely self-regulates.

The same Team Trump whose members authored this torqued report whining about internet freedom is now searching five years’ worth of visitors’ social media history and data at the U.S. border.

And while accusing the EU of interference, it recently emerged that Trump officials have met with separatists from the Canadian province of Alberta seeking to break up America’s northern neighbor under the delusion that they can take the federally-owned pipelines with them.

The U.S. State Department also just expressed an interest in funding pro-MAGA think-tanks in Europe.

And for all Musk’s whining about the EU interfering with his freedom to fill the internet with porn, bots, AI and other junk, the UK has apparently felt compelled to introduce a law to ban wealthy foreigners like him from setting up British front companies to launder cash to political parties in support of their favored puppets.

Musk has specifically been mentioned in reporting as seeking to back the UK Reform party, to the point of getting vocal about wanting a new leader.

These folks waving the banner of liberty and shouting about freedom are barely audible over their own meddling and censoring agendas. They could all really use a good mirror, a reality check and someone to hide the stationery from their self-serving propaganda efforts.