New York Post, January 4, 2026

Soulless censors

by James Bovard

Vice President J.D. Vance denounced European politicians for blighting democracy with brazen censorship in a February speech in Munich. Vance warned: “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”

European politicians were outraged because their citizens are still free to say anything their governments approve. Unfortunately, the censorship stampede accelerated after Vance’s address. A slew of zombie-like politicians and zealots remain hellbent on destroying free speech in Europe and America.

Germany was the scene of some of the 20th century’s worst tyranny, but today’s German leaders claim only noble intentions for oppression. Berlin’s best and brightest “improved” democracy by putting politicians on a legal pedestal far above the common herd. After a conservative editor mocked a top German law-enforcement official by posting a meme showing her holding an “I hate freedom of opinion” sign, he was convicted and sentenced to seven months in jail for “abuse, slander or defamation against persons in political life.” The editor is on probation while the sentence is suspended, but many other Germans have been locked up for similar offenses. German police “routinely raided homes, confiscated electronic devices, interrogated suspects and prosecuted individuals for the exercise of freedom of speech, including online,” according to the US State Department human-rights report. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz personally filed almost 5,000 complaints against his online critics, sometimes resulting in police raids against people he targeted.

Britain’s Online Safety Act, passed in 2018, is now a battering ram to force social-media companies to endlessly muzzle their users. Forbes reported British “police are making more than 30 arrests a day over what they deem to be offensive online posts, retweets or cartoons. That’s 12,000 arrests a year.” The government even punishes individuals guilty of “cultural nationalism” — defined as “a belief that ‘Western Culture’ is under threat from mass migration into Europe.” Professor Yascha Mounk says it’s common “for Britons to be jailed for up to six months for tweeting a stupid joke.”

Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president, is championing a new “European Democracy Shield” to provide endless pretexts to suppress ideas, people and political parties they disapprove. The Trump administration has rightly condemned the European Union’s Digital Service Act as an authoritarian tool to give Euro bureaucrats veto power over the entire internet. The EU last month hit Elon Musk’s X with a $140 million fine for alleged violations of that act.

On the home front, America’s champions of censorship have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Former senator Hillary Clinton still favors letting the feds prosecute Americans who share what Washington labels “disinformation.” But how can anyone trust a failed politician who claimed the “lesson” of George Orwell’s 1984 is that citizens should blindly trust their rulers?

President Joe Biden’s flash-in-the-pan disinformation czar, Nina Jankowicz, continues scoffing at criticisms of censorship as “modern-day McCarthyism” and a “right-wing fever dream.” In testimony to the British parliament, Jankowicz, who registered as a foreign agent after losing her Team Biden gig, derided freedom of expression as the equivalent of “fairy dust.” Jankowicz, who touted herself as the “Mary Poppins of Disinformation,” complained in April that the controversy resulted in her “inclusion in deepfake pornography.” Did the bogus video include muzzles or blindfolds?

Americans must never forget how not long ago federal agencies secretly sabotaged the First Amendment. Federal Judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden censorship regime in 2023 as potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” Federal censorship tainted the 2020 and 2022 elections, suppressing tens of millions of tweets, YouTube videos and Facebook posts from conservatives and Republicans. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) declared, “Twitter was basically an FBI subsidiary before Elon Musk took it over.”

Across the Western world, politicians claim they must lead a holy war against disinformation to save democracy. “Disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods. The biggest disinformation of the pandemic was President Biden’s July 2021 promise that anyone who got vaccinated would never get COVID — plus or minus 100 million cases of COVID.

The crusade against disinformation is predicated on a quasi-theological view of government as the ultimate source of truth. As German journalist Jasmin Kosubek observed, “Germany’s censorship machine creates digital ‘priests’ who claim the truth — and silence those who challenge them.” In America, federal ID badges are “close enough for government work” to the Oracle of Delphi. Federal agencies “found” the absolute truths used to censor Americans in the Biden era simply by asking bureaucrats and “apparently always assumed the government official was a reliable source,” as a 2023 federal court decision noted.

Censorship defines down self-government to “one person, one vote, one time.” Whoever wins a national election will exploit the censorship regime to perpetuate their own power. German politicians are conniving to outlaw the second-largest political party, the Alternative für Deutschland, because officialdom despises its beliefs. But it wasn’t AfD that caused Germans’ trust in politicians and government to plummet in recent years.

Censorship is turning democracy into a parody: Voters choose politicians who then dictate what citizens are permitted to read, think and say. As censorship multiplies, vote counts merely gauge prevailing delusions among the populace and turns self-government into a charade.

In his Munich speech, Vice President Vance promised that “the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite” of Bidenesque and Euro-style censorship. Fulfilling that lofty standard would be a great way to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

James Bovard is the author of 11 books, including “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty.”