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I thought JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, warning Europe that its greatest threats comes “from within”—specifically mass immigration and censorship—was mostly on target. A few years back, I wrote a book titled, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent, in which I took a deep dive into these issues.
The thing is, on speech, I’m unsure Europe can save something they never really cared much about in the first place. Speech protections on the continent have always been malleable and arbitrary. Germany has had bans on "poisonous" political speech/ depictions for decades. In Britain, The Malicious Communications Act makes it illegal to send messages that cause “distress” or “anxiety.” Article 10 of the EU’s “Convention of Human Rights” is a useless two paragraphs, featuring a bunch of exemptions for attacks on “national security,” “territorial integrity,” “public safety,” “disorder or crime,” “health or morals, and “reputations of other people.”
Vance used a familiar populist framing to accuse European elites of undercutting the rights of the citizenry. Maybe. But “democracy” is just as guilty of corroding individual freedom. From my experience and research, it’s clear that many -- if not most -- Europeans are fine with a bit of censorship, and don’t really value or even comprehend neutral principles. And no one should be under the impression that nationalist parties, should they come to power, are going to be more inclined to safeguard open discourse.
For us, though, the really concerning thing is that the EU's illiberal outlook has been adopted by a significant segment of the American left. They also seem under the impression that free expression is a privilege bestowed on the individual by the state rather than a right protected by it. Which brings me Margaret Brennan’s preposterous assertion in an interview with Marco Rubio that free speech had been “weaponized” to cause the Holocaust. Now, obviously, the subtext here is fear mongering over Elon Musk and unregulated speech on X. But history shows us that free speech doesn’t lead to tyranny, and censorship can’t save us.
From my Examiner piece:
First, in an interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, host Margaret Brennan argued that Vance “was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide, and he met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups. The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you know that, that the censorship was specifically about the Right.”
Rubio quickly pointed out that “free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. … There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany.”
All of that is true, of course. But even the democratic Weimar Republic that preceded the Third Reich had hate speech laws on the books. The infamous newspaper Der Stürmer was shut down by the government scores of times between 1922 and 1932, with its copies destroyed and files confiscated. The paper’s psychopathic editor, Julius Streicher, was frequently brought up on charges and hauled down to police stations. The Nazi propagandists Joseph Goebbels and Theodor Fritsch, among many others, were both charged with spreading antisemitic rhetoric. All these prosecutions did was shower the upstart Nazis with attention and transformed fascists into martyrs. None of it stopped the Nazis.
It shouldn’t go unnoticed, either, that Brennan rationalized modern German censorship by noting that it was “specifically about the Right,” as if fascism was the only toxic ideology to exist in the world. Czarist censorship didn’t stop the communists from rising to power, and, fortunately, Soviet censorship did not stop communism from falling, either.
RFK Jr.
In my continuing — and fruitless — effort to convince Republicans that RFK Jr is a dangerous authoritarian quack, I wrote to give context to his misleading claim that the United States has seen a spike from 1 in 10,000 cases of autism in 1980 to 1 in 34 today, which Trump repeated on Truth Social:
The idea that anyone had any useful handle on the number of autistic children in the past, much less used the same criterion as we do today, is preposterous. Autism wasn’t even a separate diagnosis from schizophrenia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980, the year Kennedy said the affliction began rising.
Before 1991, the federal government lumped children with autism in with other “intellectual disabilities.” In 1994, the definition of autism included Asperger syndrome and children on the milder end of the spectrum.
Researchers didn’t start trying to track autism until 2000. It wasn’t until 2006 that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended screening all children for autism during routine pediatrician visits in the first two years, and many still did not. It wasn’t until 2013 that present guidelines were instituted.
Even now, there’s no objective test for autism — no blood test — for diagnosis. So, for instance, the prevalence of autism has varied greatly between states, which points to different levels of awareness and testing. In 2010, 1-767 children in Iowa were diagnosed with autism, while in Maine, the number was 1-67. Even now, there are significant disparities in states such as Rhode Island, Maryland, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
Dr. Allen Frances, who spearheaded the effort to expand the definition of autism in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the 1990s, believes we’ve created a “false epidemic.” And it sure feels like we’re overdiagnosing autism.
I also write on RFK’s contention that no one has been “asking questions” about the purported links between autism and vaccines. There have been scores of reliable major studies, none have found any link. There is, however, some evidence that autism begins in the womb, before any shots. And there is also evidence that some of the uptick in autism might have something to do with women having children later. But, of course, neither of those work in RFK’s war on Pharma. There will never be enough studies for RFK because he’s a nut.
Read the rest here.
(Writing on scientific issues always makes me a bit queasy, but then I remind myself that I have the same medical degree as RFK Jr, and he gets to run federal health care policy.)
Media.
On this week’s “You’re Wrong,” Mollie and I talk about Vance's speech in Munich, the integrity of the judicial branch, and debate the Trump administration's handling of New York City Mayor Eric Adams' indictment. My cultural recommendations were "Alone: Australia" and “The Stranger” — the Harlan Coben British miniseries on Netflix, not the movie.
I also highly recommend Woody Allen: A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham (the title lifted from Bananas.) My love of Allen’s work is no secret. I’ve read basically every major book written on him, and I think this might be the best—even better than Eric Lax’s bio. Considering Allen’s diminished place in popular culture today, I’m somewhat surprised the book was even published. I also ran across a cool link of Pauline Kael speaking to Woody Allen about Scorsese’s Mean Streets, The Exorcist, and Robert Altman.
I also recently appeared on Buck Sexton’s podcast.
You can find my books here. My latest is The Rise of BlueAnon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists.
Good reads.
Their Time Is Up — Liel Leibovitz, Tablet
Ponder How the Bibas Boys Died — Bernard-Henri Lévy, WSJ
How Greg Gutfeld Became the Bill Maher of Fox News — And Toppled Fallon and Colbert in the Ratings - Variety
A Bridge Too Far? — Lee Smith, Tablet
The U.S. Does Not Need a Sovereign Wealth Fund — Dominic Pino, NR
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