A few weeks ago, between July 30th and July 31st, an estimated 60,000–72,000 people entered or attempted to enter the Spanish city of Ceuta from neighbouring Morocco by land and sea, many swimming around the coastal barrier. Ceuta, located on the north coast of Africa, has approximately 80,000 inhabitants, separated from mainland Spain by the Strait of Gibraltar. It is viewed as a potential stepping stone to Europe for poor migrants in search of a better life, in spite of the fact that it is not part of the free-movement Schengen area. The sheer scale and speed of the movement, together with the apparent failure of Moroccan security forces to prevent it at the outset, have led to widespread suspicions that the episode was coordinated by criminal smugglers and deliberately facilitated by the Moroccan government.

Whatever the exact reasons behind the extraordinary influx of migrants into Ceuta, the episode is a vivid illustration of the untenability of cosmopolitan ideals of an open-border world. John Lennon once imagined, in a memorable lyric, a world “with no countries” and “nothing to kill or die for.” As a metaphor for a healed humanity, these lyrics are emotionally touching, but their vision of a borderless society does not play out beautifully in real-world conditions.

There are many reasons why open-border ideals are neither feasible nor just. Here are four:

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If there was an international poster boy for official Covid “Science,” surely it was Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the Covid years. He was one of the most sought-out and influential voices of “Science” on national and international media, a go-to authority on everything from the efficacy of masking to the safety of vaccines. Those who questioned his authority and good faith were dismissed as delusional, paranoid, or irresponsible. However, the cumulative evidence, including email records and more recently, revelations from Fauci’s own diary, do not paint Fauci in a flattering light.

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For example, according to diary entries released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Fauci privately wrote (on January 26, 2020) that "now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” weeks before he began reassuring the public that a natural spillover at a Wuhan wet market was the likely origin.

A little over a week later, following a February 1, 2020 conference call with a dozen leading virologists and evolutionary biologists convened to discuss whether the virus looked engineered, his own notes record that “there was not total agreement” among the group — of the eleven scientists on the call, only two were convinced the virus had emerged naturally.

While the lines reported from Fauci’s diary do not state categorically that he personally accepted the lab-leak theory, they do show he was aware that opinion was divided on the matter within the scientific community, and that the natural origins thesis was not something “the science” supported in any definitive way.

Indeed, even one of the authors of a paper highly critical of the lab origins theory (“The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,”), Kristian Andersen, wrote in an email to Fauci dated 31 January 2020, “Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

Yet a few days after receiving this email, Fauci told the public in a podcast that lab-leak talk was in “the realm of conspiracy theories without any scientific basis.” It would take him until 2024, under oath, to concede that the lab-leak hypothesis was not “inherently” a conspiracy theory after all.

The latest evidence of Fauci’s wilful misrepresentation of the “settled” science on a matter of grave public interest, the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, may scandalise those who looked up to Fauci as a valiant defender of “Science” but it will not be particularly shocking to those who have already observed Fauci’s bizarre and scientifically arbitrary flip-flopping on pandemic measures like masking and lockdowns.

You judge a man’s character by his actions, not just by his credentials or reputation. An individual might be the most adulated “voice of science” on the planet, but that means nothing if his actions betray the trust of the public.

Fauci, while he was prolific in his public health tips, from masking to vaccination, was himself heading up an agency - the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases - that sponsored bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, research some believe contributed to the eventual outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

For the purposes of proving Fauci acted in bad faith during the pandemic, it doesn’t actually matter whether or not a leak from Wuhan caused the Covid outbreak, or whether NIAID-funded research played a contributory role in such an outbreak. All that matters is that Fauci went out of his way to discredit the lab-leak hypothesis, knowing full well that it could not be ruled out from a scientific perspective, and knowing that his connections with Wuhan could potentially inflict substantial reputational damage on him personally and institutionally, if the lab origins thesis gained traction.

Last Wednesday, the incriminating evidence of his diary entries and emails was presented to him at a Senate hearing before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, evidence suggesting he used his very substantial authority to mislead the public and shield himself from scrutiny for his involvement with the Wuhan lab. Instead of defending his actions, he invoked the Fifth Amendment (the “right to remain silent”) ad nauseam. He painted himself as the victim of a hit job, describing the release of his diary as an attempt to embarrass and intimidate him.

But he is not the victim here. The victims are ordinary citizens, who were compelled, on his recommendation, to accept an experimental vaccination as a precondition for remaining employed; who believed, on his authority, that cheap masks would protect them from an airborne virus; who believed, on his authority, that shuttering schools and businesses across the country would protect people’s health and well-being; and who accepted, on his authority, that those advocating the lab origins of Covid on reasonable scientific grounds had gone off the deep end.

God knows, if I were in his position, and was being pushed to come clean, for once and for all, about my self-serving, reckless and deceitful behaviour, I might well run scared and plead the Fifth too.

The Freedom Blog offers a thoughtful voice in defence of freedom at a time when the pillars of a free society are coming under attack across the West from our very own institutions and governments.

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My academic profile and publications are listed at my website, davidthunder.com.

A new law, popularly referred to as “Chat Control 1.0,” has been passed by the European Parliament authorising Big Tech companies to scan citizens’ private chats. The law passed on a second reading despite the fact that it had been voted down by MEPs in the first vote and was oppposed by a majority of MEPs present for the second vote.

The Commission invoked a procedural loophole to get the law through immediately before summer recess, taking advantage of the fact that it was a difficult time for opponents to rally an absolute majority (a majority of all sitting MEPs).

It is not surprising that a law like this failed to secure majority support in the European Parliament. Though the pretext for the law, child protection, seems noble, the measure proposed - allowing private companies to scan citizens’ online chats - is a very troubling precedent from the perspective of citizens’ right to privacy.

Perhaps some good may come from such a law. Maybe some child predators will be put behind bars because of measures like this. Who knows? But the ability to achieve some good is not an appropriate test for a sound law; rather, we must assess the principles it instantiates and its overall effect on the social and legal order.

There is a reason why there is a robust legal barrier against surveillance of citizens’ communications. If one cannot speak in public and share one’s opinions and arguments without incurring the risk of being snooped on or having one’s voice silenced by more powerful citizens, democracy is a dead letter. Once the barrier against indiscriminate surveillance is broken down a little bit, it will be easier to find new pretexts to expand the scope for digital surveillance in the future.

Sadly, Chat Control is by no means an anomaly. On the contrary, there is an overwhelming tendency spearheaded by governments in the U.K, Australia, and Europe, to expand the scope of government surveillance - whether direct or by “proxy” - over citizens’ digital communications.

We see this tendency manifest in the EU’s Digital Services Act, which seeks to make Big Tech companies censor social media on behalf of the European Commission. We see it in new requirements to self-identify before going online, in the name of excluding children from social media useage. And we see it in the investigation of “non-crime hate incidents” in the U.K, that diverts valuable police resources to investigating politically incorrect speech.

The paradox is that people are using democratic procedures like parliamentary legislation to build a powerful infrastructure that can be easily leveraged for spying on citizens and putting a stranglehold around the public sphere.

Is this “democracy”? If democracy is vote-counting, then perhaps it is. But if democracy is a system of governance in which citizens can speak to each other on an equal footing, without fear of being arrested or intimidated for offending the powers that be, then these assaults on privacy and freedom of speech are assaults on democracy itself.

The Freedom Blog offers a thoughtful voice in defence of freedom at a time when the pillars of a free society are coming under attack across the West from our very own institutions and governments.

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My academic profile and publications are listed at my website, davidthunder.com.

This morning, Sir Keir Starmer announced his resignation as UK Prime Minister. Though his government is not the first to restrict citizens’ speech in Britain, one of his darker legacies is the intensification of Britain’s censorship regime. Indeed, his parting gift, just a week prior to his resignation, was the announcement of a plan to ban under-16s from accessing social media in Britain. Unless his successor does a U-turn in the coming months, Britain is on course to introduce one of the most far-reaching social media surveillance systems in the world.

Starmer announced his plan to exclude under-16s from social media at a press conference on June 15th. He planned to introduce a comprehensive social media ban for under under-16s, a step he argued was necessary in order to “give kids their childhood back.” “Tech giants had their chance and failed,” he said, “but we’re stepping in to protect children, back parents and set a new normal for future generations.”

Starmer’s fighting words were dripping with benevolence and nobility. But as Ronald Reagan once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.’” Government officials have a compelling interest in protecting their own power and enhancing their control over society. So when they advocate a major intervention in the public sphere and wax lyrical about “saving our chlidren,” it is not wise to just take their word for it.

Any massive intervention in social life, in particular one backed by coercive force or financial sanctions, is likely to have at least some significant downsides. And this is indeed the case for the proposed social media ban.

Unfortunately, many well-intentioned citizens do not see this. They focus on the “emergency” of social media harms and on the promised benefits of government action, and turn a blind eye to the potential risks of an age-based social media ban. One hears the argument, “what is your solution?” as if the absence of a quick-fix solution justified any alternative, no matter how destructive.

There are many problems with social media bans, not least the fact that they have limited efficacy for a generation that is quite tech-savvy and will easily find workarounds like VPN apps to get around regulations; and that they may potentially drive some teens into a “dark web” of platforms that operate “under the wire.” But it could be argued that partial efficacy is better than zero efficacy, and that the unfortunate fact that some teens are driven into the “dark web” is an acceptable if regrettable cost of improving the lives of many young people.

Even if we accept these sorts of arguments, they do not remove the major risks a social media ban poses for freedom of speech on the internet. The main problem with age-based social media bans enforced or overseen by government is that they alter the government’s relationship with all social media users, of all ages, in disturbing ways. Specifically, they give government a new gatekeeping power over social media useage, by requiring all social media users, of all ages, to present some form of identification as a precondition for accessing social media platforms.

Initially, this new surveillance system might be used exclusively to control under-age use of the internet. But it also creates an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure that could later be leveraged by governmental actors to monitor and control the behaviour and speech of adult citizens on the internet.

If that seems far-fetched, consider the fact that people, including journalists, have been investigated by the police in the UK for political commentary on social media that might cause “offence” to some people. Or consider the fact that the Joe Biden administration secretly pressured social media companies like Twitter and Facebook into restricting content that contradicted official government propaganda on masks and vaccines during the pandemic.

With these precedents in place, it would be naive to think that a social media gatekeeping infrastructure would be restricted to its original purpose. It is only a matter of time before such an infrastructure would be exploited to shut down political dissenters.

Those who are willing to endorse the creation of a massive, government-controlled surveillance infrastructure, had better contemplate its risks head-on, and honestly weigh them against its likely benefits. The outcome of that balancing act will depend on how much you trust government to oversee an ambitious surveillance system without exploiting it to shore up its propaganda machine and silence its critics.

The Freedom Blog offers a thoughtful voice in defence of freedom at a time when the pillars of a free society are coming under attack across the West from our very own institutions and governments.

If you appreciate my blog posts and the careful work that goes into them, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription, by clicking here.

My academic profile and publications are listed at my website, davidthunder.com.

What follows is a summary of a talk I will be presenting this Tuesday, 8th June at the “Open Reason” conference at Francisco de Vitoria university in Madrid.

In an age of deep political polarisation, cultural fragmentation, and profound disagreement about fundamental values, the idea of a “common good” can seem hard to defend, perhaps a relic of simpler, more morally cohesive societies. What could genuinely unite the citizens of a large, diverse modern society — people who disagree not just about policies, but about the very meaning and purpose of human life? Those of us - including myself - who want to hang on to the language of the “common good” in a modern context need to rise to the challenge of showing how such a concept is both relevant and attractive under conditions of advanced social complexity, moral fragmentation, and specialisation.

Roots in an Ancient Tradition

The concept of the “common good” has deep roots in the classical, and later Christian tradition whose leading lights include Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Unlike liberal political thought, which places overwhelming emphasis on individual rights and private goods — bodily integrity, personal enjoyment, material welfare — this tradition conceives of political community as oriented toward shared goods that citizens pursue and enjoy together: most notably, justice, civic friendship, and peace.

On this view, a political community is not merely an impartial framework of rules and institutions designed to protect individuals from predation. Rather, it is a morally “thick” enterprise, one in which citizens are bound together by the shared pursuit of a humanly enriching way of life, something more than a pact of mutual non-aggression. The question is, can this ambitious vision of political community survive in a big society divided into countless diverse communities and projects pursued by a citizenry with deep-rooted philosophical differences about the best way to live?

Why Modern Societies Represent a Challenge for Common Good Thinking

At first glance, there are reasons to be skeptical. While the idea of substantive common goods - e.g. civic friendship, justice, public art and beauty - may have real purchase in a small, relatively cohesive community — the ancient Greek polis being the classic example — in a large modern society, this is not so clear. In a nation of millions, marked by deep cultural diversity, functional complexity, and highly specialised and dispersed knowledge, the common good starts to feel abstract to the point of uselessness.

Two possible fixes suggest themselves, but it seems to me that both fall short. One is to reconceptualised the common good less as a shared life than as a set of instrumental conditions for collective survival and prosperity. On this view, it is “good” for everyone to live in peace, and therefore a good thing that most citizens obey the law and pay their taxes. But this dissolves the common good into a condition of legal compliance and non-aggression, taking away precisely what is distinctive about common good thinking - its willingness to go beyond contracts of mutual survival, to consider the positive goods that unite citizens within a shared project.

Another approach is say that while the common good of a large political society like a nation-state may be unduly vague and abstract to the average citizen, a few select citizens - perhaps judges, legislators, or policymakers - may see it more clearly, and may serve as a beacon for the less enlightened. But there are two problems with this idea: first, it is very far from clear that politics and the civil service tend to attract morally upright citizens or that high-level political institutions are well equipped to incentivise public-interested attitudes. Second, given the tremendous complexity of modern social life, the majority of social affairs and interests are probably inscrutable to politicians and civil servants.

A Pluralist Reconstruction

What is required, in the face of these challenges, is to reconstruct the common good along pluralist lines — to see it not as a single, unified shared life that all citizens participate in together, but as an emergent order - a set of shared norms and understandings, shared institutions, habits of tolerance, etc., arising from a broad array of diverse communities and activities, even in the absence of a strong sense of a shared life comparable to that of a small vilalge or an ancient Greek city State.

This pluralism operates along two dimensions. The first is territorial: modern societies are composed of nested levels of social organisation — neighbourhoods, municipalities, regions, nations — each with its own distinctive common goods. The most concrete and accessible shared goods are typically found at the lower levels, where social interactions are direct, mutual understanding is more readily achieved, and the effects of collective action are more visible to the average citizen.

The second dimension is associational: modern societies are also internally differentiated into a vast array of non-territorial institutions and communities — universities, churches, professional associations, voluntary organisations, sports clubs — each oriented toward its own distinctive ends. These associations generate their own forms of common good: the shared pursuit of knowledge, artistic collaboration, spiritual fellowship, professional solidarity. These goods are often more immediate and meaningful to participants than anything at the level of a national political community.

From Local Goods to the Health of the Whole

This might sound like a retreat from the idea of a genuinely political common good — as if I am simply saying “tend your own garden.” But that would be to misunderstand my argument. For while each association has its own distinctive purposes and shared goods, there is also the possibility of achieving a broader, more encompassing good of the whole. We just have to understand what this sort of high-level good can and cannot be, and how it relates to the goods of the diverse associations of the polity.

The good of the whole polity is not merely the sum of the goods of its parts. There is a meaningful sense in which citizens of a nation can share a bond of friendship and trust, for example. But this bond is less demanding and less consequential in their everyday life than the bonds of friendship and trust associated with local communities and associations like schools, universities, and cooperatives.

The goods of local associations and communities are extremely consequential for the thriving of the larger polity. For this reason, participation in local and associational goods, though it may not seem like an obvious expression of civic excellence, can contribute substantially to polity-wide goods, provided it is accompanied by the right disposition.

Consider a university. Its internal common good — shared learning, the shared pursuit of truth, the cultivation of knowledge — is not the same as the common good of the wider society. But when universities function well, they contribute in substantial ways to broader social goods: a more informed citizenry, more civil public debate, greater civic trust. The same logic applies to professional associations, religious communities, and artistic associations. Each pursues its own ends, but in doing so, it can help to consolidate the conditions of the success of the larger political community.

Nonetheless, vibrant participation in local communities is not in itself sufficient for the promotion of polity-wide common goods. For example, if one is a “good citizen” in one’s local town but couldn’t care less about the economic and environmental impact of one’s town’s activities on the broader political community, one is hardly an exemplary citizen, and one is definitely not displaying a personal commitment to the common good of the whole.

Participants in local communities and associations must remain, to some degree, outward-facing — disposed toward justice and cooperative goodwill beyond their immediate circle. In ordinary times, this may mean something relatively modest: complying with fair legal and professional regulations, paying taxes, adjusting one’s conduct in light of others’ needs. In more demanding times — economic crises, external threats — it may require more substantial solidarity and sacrifice. The point is that genuine contribution to the common good requires more than excellence within one’s own community; it requires a principled openness to the claims of the wider society.

A Social Mosaic, Not a Military Platoon

One image we might make use of to capture the unity of a large modern society is that of a social mosaic — coherent not through an impressive level of moral and religious uniformity, but through a shared spirit of justice, mutual respect, and openness expressed across a genuine plurality of ways of life. Of course, not every belief system or religion can form a part of this mosaic. For example, a religion that is completely opposed to tolerance of diverse religions or who sees every non-believer as an enemy will not fit well into a free and open society. Nor will a way of life that is entirely indifferent to the flourishing of others fit comfortably into this sort of social mosaic.

The health of a society depends not only on the quality of its political institutions and leaders — though these matter enormously — but on the vitality of its families, schools, churches, professional associations, and civic organisations. Political institutions provide the legal and cultural framework within which local goods can flourish; but the common good itself is, to a large degree, built from the ground up.

This is a vision that should resonate across political divides. It neither reduces politics to individual rights nor demands the kind of thick cultural unity that pluralist societies cannot and should not try to achieve. It asks citizens to be excellent in the communities closest to them — and to remain, always, neighbours to those beyond them. It is not a vision that is easy to achieve, but it is certainly one that is worth striving for.

The Freedom Blog offers a thoughtful voice in defence of freedom at a time when the pillars of a free society are coming under attack across the West from our very own institutions and governments.

My academic profile and publications are listed at my website, davidthunder.com.

My grandfather grew up in a world without phones. My father, when he came of age, proposed to install a landline in the house. My grandfather’s instinctive response was, “Why? Who would want to be at the mercy of a perfect stranger’s whims?” He could not imagine himself opening his home to the intrusive rings of strangers. He eventually agreed reluctantly to have the device installed in his home, on condition that he would never have to answer the phone himself.

Since hearing this story, I have often reflected on how shocking our digitised world would be to someone like my grandfather - God rest his soul. If the ringing of a phone appeared intrusive and distracting to this gentleman, I assume the idea of an entire population living at the beck and call of a mobile device full of images and voices and stories and advertisements would strike him as a permanent intrusion into the “inner chamber” of people’s minds and hearts.

Yet a large chunk of the population is effectively “plugged in” to their mobile devices, either literally via earplugs, or figuratively, via an attitude of expectant attention, awaiting the next piece of news or the next streaming content or the next item in their inbox. The existence of “smart” phones mean that unless we go up the Himalayas or go down into a remote basement, our waking hours may, potentially, be filled with incessant communication - very often, passive rather than active - with a world of messages and entertainment that never sleeps.

While it is true that the birth of digital media and online communication changes the character of our distractions, the ceaseless quest for diversion and distraction is nothing new. For example, Blaise Pascal, 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher, offered a reflection in his treatise, Pensées, that demonstrates that restlessness and perpetual distraction are by no means the preserve of a digital era:

When I have sometimes set myself to consider the various agitations of men, and the dangers and hardships to which they expose themselves at Court, in war, from which arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often wicked enterprises, etc., I have often said that all the unhappiness of men comes from one single thing: not knowing how to remain quietly at rest in a room.

Restlessness and distraction can become a way of life, even for people who are immersed in a faith tradition. When TV series, email-checking, social media browsing, financial investment, or frenetic work schedules take over our lives, we can grow so accustomed to the endless noise that prolonged silence and simple companionship become boring or even intolerable to us.

When Spain was enveloped in a massive nation-wide data outage on 28th April 2025, millions of citizens were completely cut off from any form of digital communication for several hours. I drove around my city, Pamplona, in search of a phone signal, to get some news about what was actually going on, to no avail.

When I got home from my fruitless quest, my wife was quietly reading a book. We had no access to internet, social media, or Netflix movies. A strange quiet had engulfed our lives. But it wasn’t actually a bad thing to have our phones knocked out for a few hours. It was a stark reminder that we had forgotten how to live entirely offline, sitting with the quiet of our own thoughts or lost in a book.

Perhaps Pascal was exaggerating a little when he said that “all the world’s problems” derive from our inability to “remain quietly at rest in a room.” But it is surely the case that there is a form of inner peace, happiness, and serenity that is only possible for people who frequently take time out from the frenzy of economic consumption, social media scrolling, and TV entertainment, to be still with their own thoughts, or to spend time in quiet conversation with the people they care about.

The Freedom Blog offers a thoughtful voice in defence of freedom at a time when the pillars of a free society are coming under attack across the West from our very own institutions and governments.

My academic profile and publications are listed at my website, davidthunder.com.

On 23 April 2026, I participated in a hearing at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg to address the question, “Is the democratic crisis primarily a social crisis?” The session, organised by the Special Committee on the New Democratic Pact and co-sponsored by the Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development, brought together policymakers, parliamentarians and researchers to reflect on declining trust in democratic institutions across Europe, and what to do about it. Below are the questions I was asked at the hearing, and a slightly more elaborated version of the answers I gave.

Q1. What moves you to study the crisis of democracy and its social roots?

I care about the quality of our shared institutions and practices, and the way they shape our well-being, both at a personal level and at a communal level. Across Europe, we are witnessing clear signs that the traditional democratic order is in a state of crisis: we are seeing rising anti-establishment sentiment, declining trust in public institutions, a growing sense of disempowerment and disillusionment among citizens, and of course, a declining quality of life for many. We need to think through the root causes of these symptoms of disease, and not just settle for superficial diagnoses, such as the notion that citizens are “ignorant” or have been taken in by “disinformation.” Only with a mature and honest diagnosis can we hope to develop realistic solutions to the social and economic crisis we face in Europe.

Q2. Which factors trigger a shift towards protest voting or abstention?

The first thing to note is that protest voting and abstention are not equivalent phenomena. Protest voting reflects a form of engagement - which often involves the hope of change, whereas abstention signals disengagement, and often either indifference or despair.

Both, however, can be driven by a combination of factors:

• Political factors: Many citizens feel that political elites are not listening to their concerns—especially on issues like housing, public services, and immigration. At the same time, dissenting views are often dismissed in ways that alienate segments of the population.

• Economic factors: For many, especially younger people, living standards appear to be stagnating or declining. They feel cheated by the social contract. They put in their dues, but are now stuck in rent traps and hit by rising costs of living and prohibitively high taxes.

• Institutional factors: Highly centralised political systems can leave citizens feeling disempowered. This can be compounded by regulatory approaches—such as efforts to aggressively police online speech—that limit or artificially suppress the open discussion of difficult problems. In addition, high taxes and highly complicated economic regulations impose excessive costs on economic activity.

• Cultural factors: Increasing “individualisation,” which refers to a worldview more focused on personal growth and fulfilment than community bonds, means that many young people, in particular, are less embedded in strong communities and more focused on personal lifelplans and career optimisation, which can make the idea of a political community and its responsibilities look irrelevant or even invisible.

Q3. How can social protection and individual responsibility be balanced?

A sustainable approach to our welfare systems requires rethinking how social protection systems are organised to ensure they both deliver on their promises and offer incentives for citizens to use them responsibly. Large-scale, top-down and nationalised welfare systems are increasingly poorly managed and are not doing a good job at weathering the demographic crisis or promoting a strong sense of personal responsibility. So what is a better way to reconcile social protection with individual responsibility?

First, we should bring protective institutions closer to local and regional actors, who are in a better position to understand people’s needs and tailor the system to them, as well as trying out innovative solutions such as different models of public-private partnership. This is already being implemented, to a certain degree, in places like Britain, and some autonomous regiones of Spain, such as Navarra, already have a substantial degree of healthcare autonomy, which could be further enhanced.

Second, we should place greater emphasis on reciprocity, ensuring that welfare and social security systems encourage personalised contributions and a sense of personal ownership. One way of doing this is by linking benefits more clearly to individual contributions where appropriate. For example, the use of private pension schemes alongside public provision can help reinforce the connection between what individuals contribute over time and what they receive in return.

The broader goal is not to weaken social protection, but to structure it in a way that is both sustainable and perceived as fair by those who support it.

Q4. What levers can reduce social frustration?

Several practical steps can help reduce social frustration:

• Exercise restraint in the use of censorship, particularly in areas like online speech, where overreach can erode trust.

• Encourage policy experimentation, allowing different regions or sectors to test out solutions adapted to their circumstances. In this way, polarisation of national populations around controversial policy questions can be significantly mitigated.

• Reduce red tape and punitive taxation, making it easier for citizens to start businesses, build homes, or establish institutions such as schools or community centres. Europe is notoriously afflicted by the plague of over-regulation.

• Adopt immigration policies that are transparent, fair and proportionate to the capacities of the host societies.

Together, these sorts of measures can help citizens experience institutions as enabling them to achieve their life goals rather than obstructing them or channelling the fruits of their labours to politicians’ pet projects.

Q5. How can the effectiveness of a social contract be assessed?

A social contract must be evaluated not just by its intentions, but by how it functions in practice. Two criteria are especially important:

• Structural fitness: Does the social system meaningfully incorporate economic actors, civil society, and local institutions, including local political institutions? Can it adapt to changing and diverse needs? Does the contract allow for different variations, within a principled constitutional scheme, adapted to the needs and sensibilities of different communities?

• Mechanisms of persuastion and consent: Are there effective channels of communication between citizens and decision-makers? Are decision-making processes sufficiently inclusive and distributed, avoiding a predominantly top-down arrangement?

Without these features, any political system, especially one claiming “democratic” credentials, is very likely to shed legitimacy over time.

Q6. How can public policies strengthen trust in institutions?

We should broaden the question: it is not only about public policies, but about correctly structuring our institutions. If we want to rebuild trust, we need to create more opportunities for citizens to shape their own life paths, build associations to advance their projects, start businesses, and participate meaningfully in public life.

This suggests a strategy centred on empowerment and experimentation, including:

• pilot programmes in tax voucher schemes to give citizens greater control over how their taxes are spent in areas like education and healthcare

• greater political devolution and enhanced municipal authority, not just symbolic gestures but the transfer of real financial and regulatory clout to lower-level institutions

• cutting back excessive regulatory and administrative burdens, so that citizens face less State-imposed obstacles to their projects, whether to start a school or business, or organise a cultural association

Concluding thought

The democratic crisis in Europe cannot be reduced to a single cause. But one recurring theme is the growing distance between citizens and the institutions that govern them. Rebuilding trust will require more than policy adjustments. It will require a shift toward a model of democracy in which citizens rather than politicians are the primary actors responsible for solving social problems.

An effective response to our political and constitutional crisis requires reducing the scope of political authority, enhancing the role of local governments, and creating a system that welcomes rather than systematically frustrates citizens’ initiatives and entrepreneurship. This will require far-reaching institutional reforms that politicians have, up to now, been reluctant to undertake. But if we continue to put our faith in centralised bureacracy, its one-size-fits-all solutions will become ever more ineffective and irrelevant and we risk delegitimating the whole democratic system.

The Freedom Blog offers a thoughtful voice in defence of freedom at a time when the pillars of a free society are coming under attack across the West from our very own institutions and governments.

If you appreciate my blog posts and the careful work that goes into them, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription, by clicking here.

My academic profile and publications are listed at my website, davidthunder.com. Below, my immediate thoughts after leaving the Council of Europe hearing:

I just participated in a hearing of the Special Committee on the New Democratic Pact at the Council of Europe, and one of the issues that I underlined in my contribution was that politicians are not there to solve all of our problems. In fact, we have unrealistic expectations of our politicians and our political system. We think that they are going to solve all these immensely complex problems - the pension system, the welfare system, immigration, public finances, etc., from a central pivot point.

I made the point that if we are going to actually develop sustainable solutions to these problems, we have to promote structured experimentation. That means allowing local actors to try out different solutions, to be empowered with real decision-making power and real financial power, so that they can try out different solutions to our ageing problem, our healthcare problem, our housing problem, etc.

And we also need to reduce the regulatory burden, the red tape that is imposed on civil society initiatives and on economic initiatives. We need to reduce the paperwork that people need to plough through in order to get any kind of project off the ground. In Europe, we have a major problem of overregulation. And by the way, that is a problem that really affects the housing sector as well.

That is one of the often invisible causes, for a lot of people, of the housing crisis: overregulation, not underregulation, because it is very difficult to actually construct housing and to get housing projects off the ground within a reasonable time period in many major cities.

The problem of overregulation and excessive bureacracy is widely recognised as a plague on European societies. Until we tackle these problems head-on, we will not be able to win back citizens who are losing their confidence and trust in the public institutions of Europe.

The Freedom Blog offers a thoughtful voice in defence of freedom at a time when the pillars of a free society are coming under attack across the West from our very own institutions and governments.

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Australia was the first government to introduce a ban on under-age use of social media platforms. Though the ban, introduced last December for under-16s, likely had some positive effects, overall teenagers had little difficulty outwitting the systems designed to lock them out.

The whole saga should serve as a warning to other governments across the world of the folly of attempting to micro-manage childrens’ access to a widely accessible communications technology. Governments need to take a step back and ask themselves how they can support, rather than supplant, the supervisory role of parents.

But this will not be easy. For one of the hallmarks of modern national governments is their deluded conception of their own power over the social fabric. Their delusions of grandeur are not accidental: our modern governments are built on an ideology that displaces the divine authority of absolutist kings with the secular authority of democratic parliaments. Absolutist monarchs dismantled the authority of civil society, making the king “sovereign” over the social order; democratic parliaments filled that vacuum of authority with the power of “the people” and its delegates to shape the social order at will.

The delusions of grandeur of democratic parliaments are manifested in three recurrent features: first, their tendency to arbitrarily usurp the functions proper to non-State actors, such as churches, local communities, and families; second, their failure to acknowledge the unintended harms of their benign interventions; and third, their tendency to vastly underestimate the power of citizens to evade their regulations.

Each of these features is on display, rather dramatically,in the attempt to use legislative authority to stop teenagers from using social media.

First, advocates of State-imposed age limits on social media use tend to assume that parents are not competent to educate their own children in the responsible use of social media; or if they are competent, that State coercion is a necessary complement to their efforts and is likely to be more effective than leaving it up to parents. For example, instead of focusing attention on information campaigns and technological innovations to help parents do their job better, the discussion is heavily centred on the need to legally “ban” social media use.

Second, those enthusiastically demanding a ban on under-age use of social media typically display minimal awareness of the multiple downsides of these sorts of coercive interventions in the digital sphere. If you impose age restrictions on social media use, you risk destroying digital anonymity, an important tool for resistance to unjust regimes; you also open the door to enhanced government and private surveillance of citizens’ communications, by compelling citizens to feed a central database with bio-markers and other personal information.

The easier it is for government to track citizens’ social media accounts and identities, the easier it is for them to criminalise and prosecute speech they don’t like. And let’s not forget that teens seeking to evade the bans may migrate to darker corners of the web, completely defeating the purpose of social media regulation. Indeed, in a recent YouGov poll, 27% of parents reported that their children moved over to alternative, less regulated platform after the social media ban was introduced in Australia.

Third, regulators appear to underestimate the capacity of teenagers to outwit government-imposed controls. According to a recent compliance report by the Australian eSafety Commission, the organization responsible for enforcing the ban on underage use of social media in Australia, many children are able to game the system by adapting the information they input, changing their appearance to look older, or using false IDs or VPNs. Seven in ten parents reported in a survey quoted in the report said their children retained access to their social media accounts after the ban came into effect.

This was all amply predicted by critics of the ban, including myself, yet State officials and many supporters of social media bans have just stuck their heads in the sand. Some people are simply unprepared to accept that there are some social problems the State cannot solve.

Advocates of government-imposed bans on under-age use of social media will undoubtedly react to the predictable failure of their regulatory efforts by attempting to tighten up regulations, banning VPN use, or imposing yet further restrictions. And a generation growing up in the age of AI will just keep getting smarter at gaming the system.

It is time for regulators to grow up and admit that their best course of action is not to compete with parents or attempt to outsmart tech-savvy kids, but to offer parents meaningful support by providing the knowledge and the tools they need to make informed choices and help their children derive the benefits rather than the harms of a more digitally connected world.

The Freedom Blog offers a thoughtful voice in defence of freedom at a time when the pillars of a free society are coming under attack across the West from our very own institutions and governments.

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A few weeks ago, the president of Spain used the occasion of a “forum against hate” in Madrid to launch “HODIO,” a “hatred and polarisation footprint” created by the Spanish Observatory for Racisim and Xenophobia and the Ministry for Inclusion, Social Security and Migration.

The goal of the new “hatred and polarisation footprint” is to create a public measure of the amount of hateful and polarising discourse occurring on social media platforms available in Spain and to use this measure, to quote Sánchez, to “demand responsibility” from the platforms for restricting the polarising “amplification” of hate speech.

In spite of the appearance of “science” and “objectivity” that the word “measurement” might suggest, there could be nothing more partisan and politically charged than the “HODIO” initiative, which effectively assigns to the national government of Spain the function of combatting “hatred” and “polarisation” on the internet – two terms that do not lend themselves to any clear and non-partisan interpretation.

One of the hallmarks of totalitarian regimes is the conversion of political rulers into unquestionable authorities on truth and falsehood and virtue and vice. Instead of concerning themselves with external actions that palpably disrupt public order or attack basic rights like property and bodily integrity, totalitarian rulers use all the means at their disposal to school citizens on the right and wrong sorts of attitudes, beliefs and speech to adopt in their everyday life. In short, government becomes the policeman not only of public order, but of social and personal morality.

And because governments are immensely powerful actors with vested interests in shielding their power from criticism, their attempts to tutor citizens on the finer points of morality almost always reflect a distorted and highly self-interested vision of justice and morality.

For example, the right to punish “un-patriotic” behaviour has been used, historically, to coercively suppress uncomfortable criticisms of controversial wars. The right to shut down “toxic,” “discriminatory” or “hateful” speech has typically been used as an excuse to censor citizens who dissent from the ideology favoured by government ministers, and rarely to censor friends of the government.

So when the President of Spain waxes lyrical about the need to spend more time talking about “love” and less talking about “hate,” and in the same breath launches a government-sponsored “hatred and polarisation footprint” to monitor social media, those familiar with the totalitarian playbook will recognise that the mix of moralism, technocracy, and political power is itself the “footprint” of a totalitarian movement in the making.

President Sánchez mixes truth and falsehood, which gives an air of plausibility to his attack on hate speech. There is indeed a problem with the way social media platforms tend to amplify emotionally charged speech, in particular angry and hostile speech, while they tend to mute more moderate and emotionally cool interventions. And there are simplistic and stereotypical messages that carry more easily on social media than complex and nuanced analysis.

But employing technocrats to create a hate and polarisation “footprint” as a basis for restricting speech is not going to create a more healthy public sphere. On the contrary, as we have already seen in the operation of other hate speech regimes, it will simply serve as a tool for suppressing political content that is disfavoured by the technocrat and his master.

That is because you cannot objectively or mathematically measure “hate and polarisation.” For hate and polarisation are highly subjective and morally loaded concepts. Precisely which sorts of combative speech or behaviour are unacceptably “hateful” or disrespectful and which are legitimate exercises of free speech? Until this thorny question is settled, “measurement” is completely arbitrary.

Similarly, the concept of “polarisation” is meaningless in a moral vacuum. All combative, high-stakes political speech is potentially “polarising.” Therefore, the question is not, which speech is polarising, but which speech is polarising in a dangerous or “toxic” way? That is where morality and ideology come into play. From the point of view of a government, almost any hard-hitting criticism of its policies may be viewed as unacceptably “polarising.” The concept is so open-ended that it invites a self-serving interpretation, one that inevitably suits the political ends of the incumbent government.

So let us hope that citizens will not be deceived by the language of science and measurement. Sanchez’s new hate and polarisation footprint is not a valiant defence of the integrity of the public sphere, or a noble harnessing of science for the common good, but a shameless pretext for suppressing voices that do not share the government’s vision of “love” and “social cohesion.”

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Your speech is being censored behind closed doors by the European Commission. Now, when I say “your,” I don’t just mean citizens of the European Union; I mean citizens across the world. Anyone who is using a social media platform such as YouTube, Facebook, or X is subject to censorship by the European Commission.

Now, what does this mean exactly? We’re not talking about the old, traditional type of censorship, where the censor lays out certain rules and says that if you criticize the Catholic Church, you’ll be censored, or if you criticize my regime, you will be censored. No, this is a much more subtle kind of censorship that is opaque to the majority of citizens. Most citizens will probably never be aware that they’re being censored using this method.

How it works is that, under the Digital Services Act, the European Commission can have private meetings with the heads of Big Tech platforms, with their managers and their content moderation managers, and they can indicate to them what sorts of “systemic risks” need to be managed or “mitigated.” They can also give them guidelines about how this should be done.

Let’s take some examples: A “systemic risk” could be “disinformation” or “misinformation.” It could be “public health misinformation.” It could be “hate speech” or “discriminatory” speech. It could be a potential harm to “civic discourse,” or something that might undermine public trust or trust in our public institutions.

Now, if you take any of these risks, they’re clearly very vaguely defined. They are readily susceptible to a political interpretation or a self-serving interpretation. They’re not well-defined legal categories. And it’s not the Commission itself that is going to be doing the censoring directly. The European Commission will be “guiding” the Big Tech platforms as they do the dirty work for the Commission.

And how will they be “guiding” them? They’ll be convening meetings with them, often in private, to review some of these risks and to indicate some of their “concerns.”

Fortunately, we have a U.S. House Judiciary report coming out of the U.S. House of Congress this February which reviews a lot of evidence showing quite conclusively that there is very close communication between Big Tech platforms and the European Commission in regard to censorship. Much of this is going on behind closed doors.

Some of that communication between Big Tech and the European Commission has now come to light through the work of the Republican House Judiciary Committee. We now know from the House Judiciary reports that TikTok censored or removed a substantial amount of content on its platform that supposedly constituted “misinformation” on issues such as climate change, migration, LGBTQ rights, and security.

Clearly, this is political content. This is lawful political speech that is being censored under the auspices of the Digital Services Act and under the supervision of the European Commission.

It’s not done through public and transparent rules. It’s done through discretionary judgments made by the Commission and by Big Tech officials that are completely opaque to the average citizen.

But if there’s one thing we can be pretty certain of, it’s that those judgments will track the politics of the European Commission—the ideological proclivities of the European Commission.

Compliance with the European Commission’s wishes is certainly not optional, because there is a very hefty fine associated with non-compliance: a fine of up to 6% of global annual turnover for these companies. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of euros or dollars that these companies will have to pay if they’re found to be non-compliant with the Digital Services Act, which in practice means non-compliant with the wishes of the Commission—its guidelines and its suggestions for how to mitigate these risks.

Why does this apply to the whole world and not just to the European Union? Basically, it’s because it would be a logistical nightmare for social media companies to have to implement different censorship rules for every region, or to have a special European Union regime.

So, in practice, we’re seeing that this censorship is occurring not only in the European Union but in the United States as well, because the platforms have uniform community guidelines, and it would be extremely costly for them to tailor those guidelines to every region separately.

So everyone should be concerned. Anyone who cares about free speech should be deeply concerned about this opaque way in which the European Commission is now censoring our speech. Much of this has only come to light because of information that was subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee.

We should not depend on a U.S. House Judiciary Committee to discover whether or not the European Commission is censoring our speech. That should be on record. It should be transparent. It should be public information.

But instead, it’s all done behind closed doors. This is the direction we’re going with the Digital Services Act.

If you’re a European citizen and you care about freedom of expression, then my advice to you is to vote accordingly. Vote for candidates, both at the national and the European level, who are going to fight for your right to speak in public without being censored. Vote for candidates who are going to expose the censorious conduct of the European Commission and the ugly underbelly of the Digital Services Act.

The Digital Services Act is now in place. It’s been voted on. It’s in operation. All we can do is draw attention to how nefarious this act is and how much discretion it gives to the European Commission to censor public speech behind closed doors.

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These days, we are seeing a strong push for enhanced government surveillance over digital communication, from Australia and the United Kingdom to Ireland, Germany and Spain, whether by imposing a universal digital identification requirement for accessing social media, or spying on citizens’ private chats.

The leading reason being offered for enhanced surveillance and data collection is the protection of children from online harms, such as pornography and social media addiction. But given recent experiences of shameless government overreach rationalised by “solidarity” and protection from disease, any move by government to claim enhanced powers of surveillance over our personal data and communications should be viewed with suspicion.

Sometimes governments leverage citizens’ deepest fears and most noble aspirations to convince them to expand State prerogatives at the expense of personal liberties. This is not a hypothesis, but a historical reality, evidenced in a vivid way by the UK’s psych-op operation to guilt citizens into taking the shot, and the UK’s Health Secretary boasting in private correspondence that announcing a new, more virulent variant of Covid would “frighten the pants off everyone.”

If I wanted to convince a large population of the need for a far-reaching surveillance state — and I had no principles — I would try to tap into their deepest human instincts. I would appeal to the kinds of instincts that override rational deliberation and calm thought. One of those instincts is the natural desire to protect our young from harm. We are wired head to toe to protect our children, and governments know it.

As it happens, the campaign to institute a more far-reaching surveillance state is employing precisely this argument. We are being told that we cannot protect children from online harm unless we introduce sweeping surveillance mechanisms. We see this logic at work in the Online Safety Act in the United Kingdom, and in the Digital Services Act in the European Union.

I am not suggesting that everyone who argues for a ban on under-16s having access to social media are intentionally manipulating people’s parental instincts to rationalise a surveillance State. Well-known commentators like Jonathan Haidt have done good work in uncovering the harms of online interactions for children and adolescents, and I believe his reasons for supporting a ban on social media for under-16s are sincere and noble.

However, there is a dark agenda lurking behind this push for universal digital ID that Jonathan Haidt and other defenders of the ban have underestimated. The overwhelming tendency of governments over the past several years has been to establish public support for wide-ranging surveillance powers over citizens’ private communications.

Governments have an interest, as power-holders, in gaining leverage over citizens’ data. If they can do this by appealing to “child safety,” they will. To think otherwise would be the height of naivete. Any honest debate about the regulation of social media by government actors must engage with this broader problem.

We are told that to keep children safe, we must empower state actors to monitor private conversations, weaken or eliminate encrypted privacy in our online chats, and require users of social media to identify themselves and register their biometric data each time they go online.

This is deeply problematic.

If online anonymity disappears, it becomes far easier for state actors to trace the identity and location of citizens who speak out against those in power. Some might dismiss this concern as paranoid. But it is not paranoid — it is prudent.

Recent history gives us reasons for caution. During the COVID period, governments shut down protests, froze bank accounts, and censored speech. In the United States, for example, government officials pressured social media companies to suppress criticism of COVID policies. We have ample reason to believe that governments will use the tools at their disposal to protect their narrative and bolster their power.

Now we are told that children are suffering from the addictive effects of social media, and that platforms should be made illegal or inaccessible to minors under 16. But to enforce such a rule, everyone — children and adults alike — would need to verify their identity as a condition for accessing social media. That effectively eliminates anonymity, removing a crucial safeguard against authoritarian overreach and making it much easier to track dissenters and critics.

There are further problems with universal digital ID requirements. Teenagers are remarkably adept at circumventing restrictions. They will use VPNs, new software tools, or whatever technological workaround emerges next. Heavy-handed rules may prove ineffective while still imposing broad costs on civil liberties.

There is also a troubling presumption behind these proposals: that protecting children online is primarily the state’s responsibility rather than the parents’. Parents need to wake up to the reality that social media can be addictive and psychologically harmful. Raising children in an age of social media and AI is undeniably difficult — but that responsibility cannot simply be handed over to the government.

When governments take on that role, they tend to use blunt instruments and we are likely to produce significant collateral damage for free speech and privacy.

It is time to be honest about what this debate is really about. It is not just about child safety. It is about whether the limited protection offered by proposed restrictions is worth securing in return for the infrastructure of a powerful surveillance state.

The Republican majority of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee has just published a voluminous “interim staff report” (February 3rd), presenting documentary evidence of far-reaching digital censorship conducted by online platforms under the supervision of the European Commission. The report, entitled “The Foreign Censorship Threat, Part II: Europe’s Decade-Long Campaign to Censor the Global Internet…”, makes for sobering reading, corroborating the worst fears of critics of the Digital Services Act (DSA). It is worth underlining that the censorship regime enabled by DSA should be of concern not only to Europeans, but also to non-Europeans, since their practical effect, given the technical challenges and economic costs of instituting region-specific moderation regimes, is to restrict speech across the globe and not only in Europe.

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The DSA Paved the Way for Arbitrary Censorship

In this blog, I warned on September 5th 2023, shortly after the Digital Services Act (DSA) was applied to “very large online platforms” (VLOPs), that “the net effect of the act would be to apply an almost irresistible pressure on social media platforms to play the “counter-disinformation” game in a way that would pass muster with the Commission’s auditors, and thus avoid getting hit with hefty fines.” And so, according to this report, it has come to pass.

We do not need to read the House Judiciary Committee’s interim report to understand that the wording of the Digital Services Act creates enormous discretionary power on the part of the European Commission in overseeing platforms’ content moderation policies. For the Act places online platforms under onerous “due diligence obligations” to “mitigate” vaguely defined “systemic risks,” including risks related to “disinformation” and impacts on “civic discourse” and electoral processes.

The Act in itself leaves considerable room for interpretation regarding how the European Commission and its auditors will assess “systemic risks” like disinformation, threats to “civic discourse,” and hate speech, and how they will evaluate the adequacy of service providers’ mitigation efforts. This ambiguity gives enforcers of the Act broad discretion to interpret it as they see fit. The Commission has investigative and enforcement powers under the DSA, including the ability to impose fines of up to 6% of a platform’s global annual turnover for non-compliance.

The 160-page report makes a compelling case that the Digital Services Act is effectively the culmination of a decade-long campaign to give the European Commission ever-greater power over the content moderation policies of online platforms. The many twists and turns of this campaign, which includes earlier “voluntary” Codes of Conduct coordinated by EU institutions, are outlined in the report.

Here, I propose to focus exclusively on what the report presents as some of the bitter fruits of the Digital Services Act, namely the censorship actions conducted under its oversight mechanisms. The report focuses overwhelmingly on interactions between the EU Commission and TikTok, and assuming the supporting documents can be authenticated, it gives us a disturbing glimpse of a deeply entrenched censorship regime that is completely opaque to the average citizen. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is no telling what else might be uncovered if an investigator got access to similar evidence on other platforms such as Meta, Youtube, and LinkedIn.

How DSA Oversight Works in Practice

The mechanisms of control by EU officials over platform moderation policies, as outlined in the report, share a common pattern: the European Commission itself, or national regulators designated under the DSA (known as “Digital Services Coordinators” in each Member State), query platforms about their “risk mitigation” measures concerning a particular issue (e.g. vaccines, electoral disinformation, hate speech, or the war in Ukraine), either in written communications or in person, and request documentation detailing steps taken or about to be taken. Platforms then submit reports describing their compliance efforts and plans to enhance their risk mitigation strategies, after which the Commission may provide feedback or request additional measures. The House Judiciary Committee report plausibly characterizes many of these exchanges as exerting pressure on platforms to expand moderation efforts in order to avoid potential sanctions.

2024 Election Guidelines

But it is not just a generic expansion of the volume of moderation that is at stake in this report: it is also one-sided influence over the political and ideological tenor of the moderation rules. After all, the Commission is keeping a “score card” on Big Tech’s moderation policies, relying in part on its own army of “trusted flaggers,” often drawn from leftist NGOs, and is not ideologically or political neutral itself. So it should come as no surprise that the outcome of such a process is the restriction of content that is highly critical of the EU Commission’s progressive-leftist/technocratic politics and ideological commitments.

A case in point is the Election Guidelines issued by the European Commission in April 2024, prior to the European Parliament Elections, urging platforms to "update their risk mitigation measures, reduce the prominence of disinformation (including “gendered disinformation”), cooperate with fact-checkers, and develop measures intended to build resilience against “disinformation” narratives. The Commission invited Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Meta, Microsoft, Pinterest, Snapchat, Wikimedia, X, and Youtube to an “election readiness roundtable” and reminded them that “it is actively monitoring compliance” with election obligations under DSA, and would “take enforcement actions related to the elections.”

The Election Guidelines were not part of the Digital Services Act, nor were they binding law. Indeed, they were publicly framed as guidance and recommendations rather than legally binding obligations. However, the House Judiciary interim report alleges that “behind closed doors,” at a Meta roundtable on DSA Election Guidelines held on March 1st, 2024, Prabhat Agarwal, identified in the report as a senior official involved in DSA enforcement, described the Guidelines as a “floor” for DSA compliance, stating that if platforms deviated from them, they would need to “have alternative measures that are equal or better.” Strange as such a statement might seem, it is consistent with the DSA’s notion of a “due diligence obligation” on the part of large digital platforms to take reasonable measures to mitigate platform risks. If the enforcer of a vague obligation offers a fool-proof way to satisfy it - even if it is presented as a “guideline” - the “guideline” becomes an attractive way to avoid being sanctioned.

Evidence of Platform Compliance: The Case of TikTok

Did the platforms comply with the Commission’s 2024 election guidelines? Based on internal platform communications and exchanges between platforms and EU officials reproduced or summarized in the report, it appears that at least some platforms adjusted their policies in response. In particular, the committee report states that TikTok informed the European Commission that it had removed or restricted over 45,000 pieces of content identified as “misinformation,” including political speech on topics such as migration, climate change, security and defence, and LGBTQ rights, ahead of the 2024 EU elections.

A March 20, 2024 TikTok Community Guidelines update executive summary cited in the report mentions “updates” to TikTok’s community guidelines, “mainly related to compliance with the Digital Services Act,” included policies addressing “marginalizing speech and behavior,” “misinformation that undermines trust in the integrity of the democratic process,” and “misrepresenting authoritative information, such as scientific data.” The main point of these changes, on TikTok’s own admission, was to comply with DSA. They are not policy changes determined by independent criteria.

Now, it is pretty obvious if you think through the new TikTok policies launched in 2024 to ensure DSA compliance that they can mean essentially whatever you want them to mean. For example, political discourse is inherently conflict-ridden, so almost any hostile remark could be perceived as “marginalizing speech and behavior.” Similarly, if someone makes a good faith critique of the “integrity of the democratic process,” are they “undermining trust” in it? And what of the “misrepresentation” of “authoritative information”? Science can only function if so-called “authoritative” scientific claims are not artificially shielded from hard-hitting criticism.

Subtle but Real Regulatory Pressure

It is true that the specific contours of TikTok’s censorship regime were not directly imposed by the European Commission. The Commission is not generally in the business of ordering specific posts to be removed. However, they were clearly drafted under pressure from the DSA regulatory regime and its enforcers. TikTok, in developing measures to “mitigate risk” with a view to DSA compliance, had to somehow anticipate the views of regulators regarding vaguely defined risks like “hate speech,” “disinformation” and damage to “civic discourse.”

Now, you might wonder, if these risk categories are so vaguely defined, then how could TikTok manage to tailor its policies to pass muster with EU regulators? The answer is not complicated. When there are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake (sanctions of up to 6% of a platform’s annual global turnover), a smart and well resourced company would make it its business to “read between the lines” and figure out the politics and ideological proclivities of EU regulators. They could make an educated guess as to what sorts of censorship is music to the ears of the Commission.

For example, the Commission has consistently sided with the vaccine industry and with official health bodies like the WHO. The Commission represents a broadly leftist-progressive perspective on gender, hate speech, and environmental issues. Similarly, it is obvious that the Commission is interested in suppressing pro-Russian war propaganda. So even if the DSA does not include an exhaustive list of arguments to be targeted by censors, the history of the Commission’s legislative initiatives and past statements make very clear what sorts of things they consider to be “systemic risks.” These intuitions are undoubtedly fine-tuned in the public and private meetings with EU officials to which platform executives are routinely summoned.

Flagging of “Problematic” Slovakian TikTok Accounts

If the House report is accurate, then it would appear that EU officials are not shy about wading in directly and telling a platform to look into a specific account or set of accounts considered “problematic.” The report states that in September 2023, four days ahead of the Slovak parliamentary election, the Commission sent TikTok a spreadsheet with lists of “problematic accounts of Slovak TikTok,” to be looked into. The spreadsheet is reported to have contained at least 63 accounts, with follower counts ranging from 1,000 to 120,000. According to the House judiciary report,

TikTok’s post-election summary report noted that it banned 19 of these accounts in direct response to the Commission’s request—five of them for “spreading hate.” Sixteen accounts flagged by the European Commission had “none [sic] or very low violations,” including “satirical accounts focused on politics.” Other accounts were placed on TikTok’s “watchlist.”

Standoff Between EU Commission and X

There is one social media giant that has conspicuously defied the EU Commission’s regulatory ambitions. In May 2023, X withdrew from the “voluntary” code of disinformation that was the precursor of DSA, and is apparently not instituting the sorts of moderation policies that the Commission has requested under the DSA regime. Consequently, the Commission has X in its cross-hairs. It has imposed a hefty fine of €120 million upon X for non-compliance with the Act - though curiously, based on what appear to be somewhat rarefied offences such as failing to honour Twitter’s old Blue Check system, or storing information of public interest in the wrong format. This is the first fine imposed under the DSA.

Report Appears to Corroborate the Harms of DSA for Free Speech

I have only begun to scratch the surface of this report. But hopefully, the pattern is already clear enough: If this report is accurate — and if the communications it cites were properly authenticated — then it suggests that the DSA is empowering a privileged cadre of public officials to decide, through elaborate oversight mechanisms whose logic is impenetrable to the average citizen, what sorts of information and argumentation are fit for public consumption, and what sort must never reach the ears of citizens.

We did not actually need this report to realise that the “progressive” political elites of the European Union are erecting a complex and multi-layered censorship machine in plain sight. That much is already clear enough from the text of the Digital Services Act itself. However, up to now our knowledge of this regime was quite legalistic, based more on the logical ramifications of the wording of the DSA and the control mechanisms it creates, than on hard evidence of its application.

This report provides what may turn out to be quite damning documentary evidence of a range of mechanisms through which EU officials appear to have leveraged DSA to pressure Big Tech companies to restrict Europeans’ political speech in far-reaching ways, on pain of suffering major economic sanctions. Furthermore, due to the technical and financial challenges of fragmenting platform rules, these restrictions have, in practice, been frequently applied outside Europe as well.

Now that these allegations and accompanying evidence are out in the open, the EU Commission owes it to all of us to explain itself. So far, EU digital affairs spokesman Thomas Reigner has just said, “On the latest censorship allegations. Pure nonsense. Completely unfounded.” Is Reigner suggesting that a U.S. House Judiciary Committee fabricated emails and notes of meetings between EU officials and digital platform managers out of whole cloth?

I await with great interest a more serious response from the European Commission.

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Mainstream media, such as BBC, New York Times, CNN, Irish Times, and national television channels across much of Europe, will call out the slightest whiff of “incitment to hatred” on the right - even when it is just an argument that some find “offensive” - and turn a blind eye to the use of insulting and dehumanising rhetoric on the left. It is for this reason that it is worth reproducing the exact words of a sitting leftist MEP and former Spanish Minister for Equality, Irene Montero, at a political rally in Zaragoza the other day. Fortunately, she was caught on video, so she cannot wriggle out of it:

I want to ask migrant and racialized people (ethnic and racial minorities) not to leave us alone surrounded by so many fascists. And yes, of course we want them to vote — absolutely. We’ve secured residency papers; now we need full regularisation. And next we’re going for citizenship, or for changing the law so they can vote, obviously. I wish — so much for the so-called “replacement theory” — that we could sweep the fascists and racists out of this country with migrant communities and working people. Of course I want replacement: replacement of fascists, replacement of racists, replacement of freeloaders…. (translated from Spanish, italics added)

Montero, though no longer part of the Spanish government, is a sitting member of the European Parliament and thus has a privileged position to influence public opinion on the left. The best defence that could be made of her ostensibly dehumanising rhetoric is that she was being ironic and attempting to employ the sort of “replacement theory” of right-wing anti-immigrant movements in an unexpected and provocative way.

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The problem is, it doesn’t particularly matter whether or not she is being ironic, because she is part of a political party - Podemos - that has consistently villified the Spanish right as “fascists” or as lovers of Franco. It is obvious that “fascists,” from the perspective of a Spanish leftist, are not reasonable people and are not the sort of people you can just work a problem out with. So when Montero says we need to “sweep” Spain of its “fascists,” she is basically saying, we need to render these unreasonable “right-win nuts” completely irrelevant to Spanish society.

Now, if Montero was referring to people who want to abolish democratic processes, strip women of the right to vote, and introduce internment for a section of the population, then the idea of isolating them and neutralising their political voice might actually make sense, or at least be somewhat defensible.

But in Spain’s current political climate, the term “fascist” is essentially a codeword for anyone on the right that a leftist wants to attack or dismiss. In Spain, if you question abortion rights, “gender-affirming” treatment, or existing welfare or immigration policies, you can easily be dubbed a “fascist” by people on the left.

So it is concerning, to say the least, to hear a sitting MEP and former government minister suggest that a large part of Spanish society - essentially, those who hold right-wing opinions - should be “swept” away or “replaced” by immigrants.

Whether spoken with irony or not, the public use of such language as “sweeping” - which connotes removing unwanted debris or trash - and population “replacement” - which is disturbingly close to the idea of ethnic cleansing - cannot be considered as just a bit “insensitive.” We are dealing her with a worrying coursening of the tone of political rhetoric, in this case rhetoric on the left - that could open a path to even more dangerous and extreme forms of political polarisation than those we are seeing already.

A wise philosopher once observed that we are the only animals armed with the use of language, and that with this gift, we can either reach the heights of our humanity or sink to the very depths of bestiality.

Irene Montero, who has somehow made herself a name as a “respectable” politician, appears to have foresaken any sense of responsibility for her own words. She is prepared to push out the limits of acceptable political rhetoric, in a way that endangers the future of a nation that depends on the peaceful coexistence and mutual toleration of groups of people with dramatically different visions of their collective identity and values.

When you suggest that your political adversaries should be “swept” aside or “replaced,” you are playing a very dangerous game indeed. For once the fire of tribal hatred and violence has been ignited, anyone can get caught up in it. It is in few people’s interest to live in a society torn apart by factions that consider each other as enemies unworthy of citizenship.

The Freedom Blog offers a thoughtful voice in defence of freedom at a time when the pillars of a free society are coming under attack across the West from our very own institutions and governments.

If you appreciate my blog posts and the careful work that goes into them, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription, by clicking here.

My academic profile and publications are listed at my website, davidthunder.com.

Click here to download the preface and introduction to my book, The Polycentric Republic, for free. Click here to purchase the book.

The UK Online Safety Act was approved by the British parliament with broad cross-party support and came into law on 26th October 2023. It was intended to “(make) the use of internet services…safer for individuals in the United Kingdom.” The Act purported to achieve this by “(imposing) duties…(requiring) providers of services regulated by this Act to identify, mitigate and manage the risks of harm” from “(i) illegal content and activity, and (ii) content and activity that is harmful to children.” The main enforcer of these duties is OFCOM (“Office of Communications”) which regulates communications services in the UK.

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A strong case can be made for articulating more clearly the obligations of internet service providers to make their algorithms more transparent, provide certain content controls to their customers, and take reasonable measures to protect users from degrading and illegal content, particularly content that may be viewed or accessed by children. Who, after all, would oppose such a noble goal as the protection of children from harmful and exploitative content and communications?

On the other hand, laws should not be judged on the lofty intentions of their authors alone, but on the way they are liable to be interpreted and applied by human beings acting under realistic constraints and incentives. The 300-page Online Safety Act, intended to make the internet a safer place for children, is certainly not as innocent and “safe” as it sounds. UK civil liberties group Big Brother Watch believes the Act as it stands “will set free expression and privacy back decades in this country.” Reform UK has promised to do all in its power to scrap the Act completely.

A careful reading of the Online Safety Act reveals that, in spite of significant improvements secured before its passage, it is anything but neutral in its impact on freedom of speech. Most notably, it radically alters the constraints and incentives under which social media companies operate, in particular regarding their content moderation policies, by shifting the onus away from users themselves, onto the communications service provider, for ensuring content produced and disseminated on their service is legally compliant. These changes may well bring some modest benefits for child protection. But these benefits are limited, and are secured at an unacceptably high cost for freedom of speech.

One of the main mechanisms for shielding children from child-inappropriate content, age verification, adds another layer of intrusive bureaucracy to the internet but will have limited efficacy, given that many people under the age of 18 are fully capable of by-passing age verification requirements: they can just use a VPN service to trick regulators into thinking they are accessing the internet outside the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. Indeed, when the age verification requirements kicked in in July 2025, VPN signups in the UK reportedly surged by 1000-1400%.

While the intention of protecting children from harm is obviously laudable, the British government chose to pursue this aspiration at the cost of creating a regulatory environment distinctly unfriendly to freedom of expression. Unlike the traditional machinery of censorship, in which the government acted directly upon citizens, the UK’s Online Safety Act saves the government the trouble of censoring citizens directly, by imposes somewhat vague obligations upon service providers to “mitigate risk” by flagging and removing illegal content and content deemed harmful to minors.

Now, on its face, it might seem perfectly reasonable to require a social media company to mitigate risks of illegal content and content that is potentially harmful for under-age users. But there are several features of this Act and the monitoring mechanisms contained within it that will make people in the UK who post lawful content in good faith more vulnerable than ever to arbitrary censorship.

To begin with, the idea of “sufficient” compliance with the Act, most notably the obligation to mitigate risks of exposure to illegal content through appropriate moderation policies, is hard to define with any precision, and its operational meaning will ultimately be at the discretion of OFCOM. This opens up the prospects of a worrying level of discretionary power on the part of government agency officials over the limits of speech across the entire UK digital public sphere - exactly the same problem we see in the EU’s Digital Services Act, which imposes similarly vague “due diligence” duties on “very large online digital platforms.”

This broad discretionary power is even more worrying given that the penalties for non-compliance with the Act are extremely steep - up to 10% of a company’s global turnover. In the absence of a clear idea of what “sufficient” compliance might entail in practice, or how OFCOM might interpret it, the logical thing for a social media company that wants to protect its “bottom line” is to err on the side of taking down content in case there is the slightest doubt about its legality.

The net effect of the incentive to err on the side of suppression of potentially illegal content is that a lot of perfectly legitimate and lawful content will be swallowed up by the censorship machine. Certain categories of illegal content, such as “terrorism” content, child sexual exploitation, certain types of violent content, and criminal “incitement to hatred” offences, are deemed to constitute “priority” illegal content and therefore service providers are required to take steps to pro-actively reduce exposure to them pre-emptively (say, by suppressing its visibility for its intended audience) rather than reactively (say, in response to a complaint or allegation by a customer).

Because this must be done at scale, and a finding of non-compliance would be extremely costly to the company, it is inevitable that AI-driven censorship algorithms will be used to shadow-ban or suppress content deemed suspect or “risky.” The problem is, AI-based models analyzing massive amounts of data, particularly if trained to err on the side of intervention to avoid the risk of non-compliance and its associated penalties, will cast the net wide, and suppress content that is lawful and reasonable just because it contains certain “red flag” language patterns or keywords.

Lest all of this sound like the speculative musings of a philosopher, it is worth quoting from an article by Chris Best, the CEO and co-founder of blogging platform Substack, one of the few platforms that truly championed free speech during the pandemic, on how the UK Online Safety Act makes it harder than ever for a business like his to live up to its commitment to create an environment supportive of free speech:

In a climate of genuine anxiety about children’s exposure to harmful content, the Online Safety Act can sound like a careful, commonsense response. But what I’ve learned is that in practice, it pushes toward something much darker: a system of mass political censorship unlike anywhere else in the western world. What does it actually mean to “comply” with the Online Safety Act? It does not mean hiring a few extra moderators or adding a warning label. It means platforms must build systems that continuously classify and censor speech at scale, deciding—often in advance of any complaint—what a regulator might deem unsuitable for children. Armies of human moderators or AI must be employed to scan essays, journalism, satires, photography, and every type of comment and discussion thread for potential triggers. Notably, these systems are not only seeking out illegal materials; they are trying to predict regulatory risk of lawful, mainstream comment in the face of stiff penalties.

To make this a little more concrete, let’s consider at-scale censorship from the Covid era. A large volume of legitimate debate and commentary, including my own, was shut down by “public health” moderation algorithms. For example, when I attempted to upload a blog post to Medium about my experience of being censored for critically discussing controversial issues like vaccination and masking, my post was immediately taken down based on the allegation that it constituted “Covid misinformation.” So apparently, even discussing a past episode of censorship on a different platform was identified by the content moderation algorithms as a “misinformation” offence.

Similarly, when I documented spectacular cases of Big Pharma fraud settlements on LinkedIn, I had my LinkedIn account suspended based on “public health misinformation,” even though what I stated was indisputably true and on public record.

Now, imagine if someone writes a hard-hitting social media post on the problem of child grooming gangs, or a bit of harmless satire with some sexual innuendo attached to it, or a critical discussion of the mindset of this or that terrorist movement, or a candid report of the sentiments of a small town overwhelmed by immigration: what sort of automated content moderation policy designed to minimize exposure to illegal child sexual exploitation content, terrorism, or criminal incitement to hatred toward racial minorities, could pick apart legitimate commentary from illegal content?

Surely there is a high likelihood that a significant number of lawful posts on these topics would be taken down or shadow-banned by an AI-driven content censorship machine, much as the slightest criticism of vaccination or mask policy triggered censorship during the Covid era? Why should we believe that the oversensitivity of the Covid censorship machine, which was even highlighted as problematic by one of its own architects, the CEO of Meta/Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, will not be replicated by companies attempting to comply with the UK Online Safety Act?

The Freedom Blog offers a thoughtful voice in defence of freedom at a time when the pillars of a free society are coming under attack across the West from our very own institutions and governments.

If you appreciate my blog posts and the careful work that goes into them, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription, by clicking here.

My academic profile and publications are listed at my website, davidthunder.com.

Click here to download the preface and introduction to my book, The Polycentric Republic, for free. Click here to purchase the book.

U.S. forces carried out a dramatic military intervention in Caracas, Venezuela on January 3rd, capturing acting President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and flying them to the United States to face federal charges including narco-terrorism, cocaine trafficking and weapons offenses.

We’re hearing a lot of people saying there is no basis in international law for a foreign nation to detain the head of state of another country. It is argued that each nation is “sovereign” or enjoys legal immunity from coercive interference by foreign nations. This is used to argue against the American detention of illegally elected dictator Nicolás Maduro.

Of course, there are legitimate concerns surrounding Trump’s dramatic intervention and his roadmap for the future of Venezuela. For example, notwithstanding the cumulative evidence attesting to Maduro’s criminal actions, it is not self-evident that one superpower should be the sole judge of the legitimacy of a head of state. In addition, there is a reasonable question as to whether a foreign power like the U.S., given its none too impressive track record at “nation-building,” will be able to successfully “run” Venezuela by proxy, as they claim they will, during a “transitional” period.

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But it is quite another thing to suggest that the Venezuelan government is shielded from outside interference by national “sovereignty.” For example, the current Chair of International Law and International Constitutional Studies in Cambridge University, Prof. Marc Weller, has characterised the capture of Maduro as “a significant violation of Venezuelan sovereignty.” If we accept this, then it would follow that a regime headed by a brutal and illegally elected dictator enjoys some sort of legal immunity from foreign intervention.

This implication is hard to swallow, not least for the Venezuelans celebrating in the streets after they heard about Maduro’s capture. Nonetheless, there is a reasonable case to be made for allowing a strong presumption in favour of the legal and political immunity of nations from foreign military incursions. Under many circumstances, the invasion of another country, even on grounds of righting a grave injustice, should be condemned as a threat to the international order.

But is the principle of national sovereignty absolutely inviolable in all circumstances? Are there circumstances in which the principle of national sovereignty might be forfeited by a State or its leaders? And if so, did these circumstances obtain in Venezuela, whose leader had almost entirely forfeited his credibility as a legitimate ruler, both at home and abroad?

It is one thing to argue on grounds of U.S interests or the potential repercussions in the international order that Trump’s intervention in Venezuela was ill-advised or wrongly executed, and quite another to suggest that Nicolás Maduro and his allies were shielded by “sovereignty,” or legal immunity from foreign interference.

It is hard to see how someone like Maduro who, at the time of his arrest, had put himself at enmity with his own people and effectively converted the Venezuelan state into a gang of thugs, could plausibly claim immunity from foreign intervention, or claim that the “national sovereignty” of Venezuela trumps the right of Venezuelan citizens to be protected from brutality, expropriation, and murder.

Nicolás Maduro was not a legitimate head of State when he was arrested, even though he held the formal trappings of State power. He refused to accept his defeat in the 2024 presidential elections, clinging to power without producing a shred of credible evidence that he had been legitimately elected, while his opponents produced credible documentary evidence of their victory.

Maduro engaged in widespread human rights violations including torture, imprisonment and murder of his political opponents, as documented by organizations like Amnesty International, UN Human Rights Council, and Human Rights Watch. He effectively created an “alternative” political assembly to do his bidding when the parliament was not on his side. He illegally expropriated his own citizens, and reduced them to poverty through his extractive and clientelist economic policies.

The case of Venezuela raises at least two pressing questions: First, who exactly is being protected by the principle of national sovereignty? A tyrant and his lackeys? An international order that is theoretically on the side of human rights but practically helpless in the face of a dictatorship? Or the people of Venezuela?

Second, is there any limit at all to the principle of national sovereignty? For example, take the case of a genocidal regime wiping out part of its population on ethnic grounds, or Nazi Germany during the extermination of its Jewish population. It is hard to sustain that such regimes deserve legal immunity from military intervention by external powers.

Indeed, one is more inclined to think that such regimes and their agents have become so de-humanised and brutalised that they have put themselves outside the protection of international law, and forfeited any plausible claim to act as “sovereign nations” - even if other nations happen to decide for independent reasons to refrain from intervening.

What is the point of defending the sovereignty of nations in the international order? On one interpretation, it means that we should respect the “self-determination” of the people of each nation. But that hardly applies in the case of a brutal tyrant like Maduro, who has cheated his way into high office. Maduro, far from representing the popular will of Venezuelans, has usurped the democratic process through electoral fraud, which explains why most Western nations refused to recognise his electoral victory.

Even if you reject the idea that a people has the right to determine its own destiny, or think it is a thin veil for elite power, one would think that governments who enjoy the protection of sovereignty must have some credible measure of political legitimacy, or must credibly act as the political representatives of a given population. There must be some constitutional basis to their authority and that of their regime. For otherwise, we might as well extend the protections of sovereignty to whatever mafia or cartel happens to get their hands on the apparatus of a State.

In short, there must be some minimal threshold of political legitimacy and recognition for a government to enjoy the special protections of sovereignty or immunity from interventions by neighbouring governments. Otherwise, the international system might as well be constituted by a checkerboard of brutal drug cartels or tyrants who torture and kill their own citizens with impunity.

If some minimal threshold of political legitimacy is a precondition for sovereignty, then the Venezuelan government has fallen short of that condition spectacularly, engaging in widespread illegal expropriation of its citizens, torturing, imprisoning and killing its political opponents, and forcing a large part of its population into exile through its violent repression of dissent and its catastrophic and extractive economic policies.

The Freedom Blog offers a thoughtful voice in defence of freedom at a time when the pillars of a free society are coming under attack across the West from our very own institutions and governments.

It was born in the shadow of Covid-era censorship and civil liberty violations. It aims to go beyond cheap political slogans, to grasp what it means to live in freedom, and how we can defend a free and flourising way of life in an increasingly hostile environment.

If you appreciate my blog posts and the careful work that goes into them, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription, by clicking here.

My academic profile and publications are listed at my website, davidthunder.com.

Click here to download the preface and introduction to my book, The Polycentric Republic, for free. Click here to purchase the book.

“I wanted something very badly, and I thought if I took my eye off of it, I couldn’t have it.” This is what the protagonist of the 2025 movie Jay Kelly says to his daughter when she brings him to task for his failure to be the father she needed. Jay Kelly, acted by the real-world movie star George Clooney, is the quintessential Hollywood “success” story. Yet a lifetime achievement tribute event serves as the perfect backdrop for uncovering the cracks in Jay’s apparently picture-perfect life.

Jay Kelly is depicted as a brilliant actor who can put on a “hell of a show,” both for himself and for his audience. And it is this very skill that both projects him to Hollywood fame and helps him hide from uncomfortable truths about his own fragility and brokenness. His invitation to accept a lifetime achievement award in Tuscany, Italy, becomes the occasion for some painful discoveries about aspects of his life that remained in the shadows of a stellar acting career.

The main discoveries Jay makes in the days and weeks prior to receiving his lifetime achievement tribute are: first, that his career was launched based on lines he stole straight from the mouth of one his best friends - who resents him for it bitterly; second, that among the admirers, managers, and fans who surround him, very few actually know him and even less consider him a genuine friend; third, that even though he could act the part of the family man, his broken family life is a living proof that he failed abjectly to be an approachable and affectionate father to his children, a supportive husband to his wife, or a caring son to his father.

The outward success of Jay Kelly’s life is tinged with a sense of inner hollowness and failure, as a large part of his own entourage abandons him, and his own family rebuffs his invitation to attend his special tribute event in Italy.

There is a universal human truth unveiled by this film, namely, that the most important things in life are often obscured from view by the “glitter” of public recognition and prestige. The Jay Kelly character at the centre of the movie is ultimately a symbol of the ambitious and driven individual, who aims so single-mindedly at a certain idea of “success” that he is willing to sacrifice his friendships and deprive his children of a father-figure along the way.

The cold, hard truth is that there are plenty of Jay Kelly’s in our world, and the sky-rocketing divorce rates and broken families are a testament not only to the internal dysfunctions of modern marriages, but also to the fact that values independent from family and marriage, such as professional and artistic excellence and prestige, often become so dominant that everything else takes second place.

Jay Kelly could be read as a sort of “ghost of Christmas future”: if we want to reach our “mature” years without becoming a Jay Kelly who cannot even celebrate his life achievements with his own family and friends, we had better make sure to balance our life ambitions with the most enduring ethical and spiritual values that confer meaning and purpose on our life. Perhaps the quality and resilience of our most meaningful and true friendships should be the ultimate barometer of our life’s “success,” rather than the accolades of people who barely know us.

Thanks for reading! And thanks for supporting The Freedom Blog, which aims to enrich the public sphere with a spirited and reflective defence of freedom. I wish all of my readers a happy new year!

In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1:4-5

Merry Christmas to all of my readers and subscribers!

Our world needs look-outs to spot the dangers on the horizon. We need people who do not go down without a fight, nor allow themselves to be dragged along by the currents of political correctness and the edicts of petty despots. The example of a few brave souls can inspire the resistance of millions to tyranny and gaslighting.

Yet sometimes the fight can be exhausting, and the dark clouds on the horizon can be disheartening. Sometimes the undertow of authoritarianism can feel irresistible, and true political leaders, few as they are, simply do not appear to attract enough of a following to divert the ship of state away from the rocks of a cold authoritarian future.

However, let us not forget that the future is not written, but made. There is no fore-ordained outcome to history. And the forces of evil and unfreedom, even if they gather ominously on the horizon, and even if they infiltrate the heart of our societies, have not yet overcome the forces of goodness. Christmas holds out the promise that though we may endure trials, good will ultimately win out.

We may imagine the victory of good over evil as a powerful emperor subduing his enemies. But the image of the God-man wrapped in swaddling clothes, greeting the world in the most humble of circumstances, is a compelling reminder that the power of goodness and love is what Czech dissident Vaclac Havel called the “power of the powerless”: the quiet power of a life lived in the service of Truth and Love rather than falsehood and hatred.

As John the evangelist reminds us, “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” At Christmas, we can pause the fighting for a moment, and fix our eyes on a little baby, born in the most humble of circumstances, destined to be the Saviour of all of mankind.

The Labour-led British government is currently attempting to hollow out an ancient pillar of English constitutionalism, trial by jury. Under their planned reforms, trial by jury would survive in England and Wales for certain types of crimes, but its use would be significantly curtailed. For example, according to a government press release issued earlier this month, new “Swift Courts” will assign cases “with a likely sentence of three years or less” to be heard by “a Judge alone.”

The campaign against jury trials, one of the most free-spirited and universally lauded institutions bequeathed to us by the common law tradition, would be baffling in a healthy constitutional regime. But sadly, it is predictable enough in a regime whose political leaders have developed the habit of tinkering with civil liberties as though they were trimming their lawn.

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Being an ancient institution that evolved gradually over a millennium, a significant restriction of jury trials would have unpredictable effects on the justice system. We simply do not know with any confidence how, in the long run, such a move would alter the incentives of prosecutors, change the pattern of convictions for different crimes, or alter public perceptions of the justice system.

What we do know is that it would constitute a dangerous and completely unnecessary constitutional experiment, eroding one of the most time-honoured bulwarks of civil liberty. Furthermore, it is worth noting that according to an analysis published by the Free Speech Union, drawing on Ministry of Justice data, overall acquittal rates are much higher with juries than with magistrates’ courts (21.6% vs. 11.4%), and this difference also holds specifically for speech-related offences (27.6% vs. 15.9%). Assuming these figures are accurate, citizens will likely be much more vulnerable to prosecution and conviction if the use of jury trials is thrown out or significantly eroded.

Trial by jury has been lauded by generations of learned and respected scholars of law and democracy as a cornerstone of a free society. Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1835-40 volume Democracy in America offers one of the most incisive of reflections on the pros and cons of modern democracy, opined that “the jury... is the most energetic means of making the people rule, [and] is also the most effective means of teaching it how to rule well.”

An eminent 17^th-century English jurist, Sir Edward Coke, insisted that no Englishman could be lawfully condemned “but by the lawful judgment of his peers.” The esteemed 18^th-century legal commentator, Sir William Blackstone, likewise described trial by jury as “the glory of the English law” and “the most transcendent privilege which any subject can enjoy,” emphasising its role as a shield between the individual and arbitrary power.

Budding constitutional reformers would do well to pay heed to Lord Patrick Devlin’s warning that “the first object of any tyrant... would be to make Parliament utterly subservient to his will; and the next to overthrow or diminish trial by jury, for it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.”

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If marginal gains in the duration of trials are deemed an adequate justification for tinkering with this bastion of the legal order, then we might as well just go ahead and subject the whole constitutional order to an “efficiency” test: if we can shave a few days or weeks off this or that legal procedure, then why not engage in a bit of constitutional engineering?

But this is a cheap and shallow argument. To begin with, we should not be so sure of our own understanding of the mechanics of such a complex and evolved order, nor should we be so confident that we can predict the short- and long-term impact of our well-intentioned meddling.

Equally importantly, those who bring a revolutionary pick-axe to the constitutional edifice destabilise public expectations about the basic “rules of the game.” In doing so, they open the door to political opportunists who would happily overturn the rules and conventions that keep citizens free in order to advance their own careers or curry favour with party bosses or the fickle tides of public opinion.

These constitution-wreckers have bought into a reckless form of positivism that views the legal system as the handiwork of each new generation of human lawgivers rather than as a hallowed constitutional inheritance, and conceives the legislator as an ambitious constitutional reformer, ever poised to introduce “enlightened” reforms in the longstanding customs of liberty, whether in the name of “efficiency” “progress,” “social justice,” or some other ostensibly noble end. While the seeds of positivism and its contempt for the common law have been in place for centuries, its bitter fruits are now on full display.

The outcome of happy-go-lucky constitutional engineering is that citizens are perpetually vulnerable to political fanaticism. And not just any old fanaticism, but the sort that dismantles or radically alters fundamental constitutional rights such as privacy, freedom of speech, or the right to be tried before one’s peers.

Sadly, the move against jury trials is not an anomaly. Rather, it reflects a growing trend among modern governments and legislators – not only in the United Kingdom, but in many other places – to assert their own authority over the constitutional order in exaggerated and destructive ways.

Instead of recognising that they are standing on the shoulders of giants and acting as humble stewards of an ancient tradition of ordered liberty, whose inner workings have evolved gradually over countless generations, legislators and government ministers have gotten it into their heads that they are can stand majestically above the constitutional order and remake it at will, as one might re-arrange one’s bedroom.

Unfortunately, the citizenry of Western societies, or at least a large portion of it, is in a state of moral stupor and has become complacent about the risks of governmental tyranny. Many are no longer well equipped to distinguish between the arbitrary utterances of a legislator and the longstanding rules of humanity and decency.

The idolisation of positive law and the downgrading of the customary liberties of Western societies came to a head during the pandemic: people were happy to go along with laws that made life hell for their unvaccinated neighbours, just because they were unvaccinated; large segments of the public acquiesced in, or actively supported, these measures, looking on approvingly while police suppressed public protests in the name of “public health”; and people reported their neighbours for the “offense” of having social gatherings in their homes.

Legal systems are meant to set us free, by providing a framework of public order and reaonable expectations within which we can get on with our lives. But they can only do this if they are beholden to a higher law, of the sort that is discovered rather than made by human fiat. This is the sort of law that binds the King and cannot be unmade by the King, as the Magna Carta famously recognises.

Only if citizens believe passionately in a moral code superior to the say-so of legislators and politicians can they find a firm foothold for resisting egregiously unjust and tyrannical laws. But belief in a morality that transcends the will of the legislator is not easy in a culture saturated with moral relativism. We need to recover our confidence in a higher moral law, if we are to reverse the current drift toward legal and political authoritarianism.

The Freedom Blog offers a thoughtful voice in defence of freedom at a time when the pillars of a free society are coming under attack across the West from our very own institutions and governments.

It was born in the shadow of Covid-era censorship and civil liberty violations. It aims to go beyond cheap political slogans, to grasp what it means to live in freedom, and how we can defend a free and flourising way of life in an increasingly ignorant and hostile environment.

If you appreciate my blog posts and the careful work that goes into them, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription, by clicking here.

My academic profile and publications are listed at my website, davidthunder.com.

Click here to download the preface and introduction to my book, The Polycentric Republic, for free. Click here to purchase the book.

The following review of my book The Polycentric Republic: A Theory of Civil Order for Free and Diverse Societies (Routledge, 2025), by Flavio Felice, was originally published in City Journal on November 20th 2025. Click here to purchase the book.

“The modern sovereign state, though it may not exercise perfectly supreme or comprehensive control over the civil order, is animated by a deeply problematic ideology of order that drives officials to exert disproportionate influence over the citizens and associations within their orbit.” With these words, David Thunder concludes his elegant book The Polycentric Republic: A Theory of Civil Order for Free and Diverse Societies, which won the Joseph Ratzinger Vatican Foundation’s 2025 Open Reason Prize this September at the Holy See. The book sketches Thunder’s vision of a republic that values pluralism and categorically rejects monism—the idea that the state can resolve irreducible civil pluralism in the name of sovereignty.

Polycentrism is basically another term for the idea of “plurarchy,” developed by the Italian thinker Luigi Sturzo in 1935 during his exile in London. Sturzo described polycentrism-plurarchy as “the formation of different centers of social coexistence, with their own autonomy and mutual contact, sometimes tolerant, sometimes combative.” Civil society is essential to the polycentric republic, serving as a bulwark against absolutist claims and cultivating a critical mindset that disposes citizens to resist any faction’s hegemonic ambitions.

Civil society consists of various territorial and non-territorial communities, social formations, and economic, social, and religious entities. If we treat these groups as radically and intractably differentiated, we see the need for both “horizontal” and “vertical” forms of subsidiarity.

“Horizontal subsidiarity”—the principle under which the state and other governing bodies encourage the autonomous initiative of citizens to carry out activities of general interest—ensures a balanced distribution of tasks and responsibilities between state and private entities. “Vertical subsidiarity”—the principle that administrative functions should be conducted at the level of government (municipal) closest to citizens—properly allocates powers and functions among the different territorial levels of state administration. Together, these forms of subsidiarity offer a path for harmonizing interests and integrating government with governance, grounded in a bottom-up dynamic.

Thunder criticizes the modern idea of the state—or, at least, its most ideological expression, the totalitarian state. At the heart of this modern conception of political authority is a presumed right of rulers to administer a comprehensive civil power. Such a totalitarian or “monistic” state acknowledges no reality that cannot be traced back to itself, subsumes all of civil society, and proclaims its own “sovereignty” in the name of the “people.”

To counter this ideology, Thunder maintains, one must fundamentally challenge the narrative that produced it: social contract theory, the notion that social order arises from a contract among perfectly free and equal individuals. This idea underestimates people’s rootedness in associations and nonstate bodies and wrongly treats civil society as irrelevant to the formation of political order and the distribution of power.

Rooting the state’s authority exclusively in the will of the “people”—understood as a shapeless mass of isolated and uncommunicative individuals—eliminates the power of intermediate bodies, what Edmund Burke called “little platoons.” These bodies constitute civil society, where human personality is formed. Denying their existence strengthens the state’s ambition to operate without constraint in the name of the “sovereign people.”

When intermediate bodies are excluded from the narrative of how authority is formed in democratic societies, Thunder says, they cannot effectively claim freedom and autonomy for the people within them. Their claims inevitably collide with those of the state—an entity as artificial as it is powerful that ostensibly operates in the name of the “sovereign people” but in practice serves the interests of the elite in power.

Thunder contends that the most troubling aspect of the state paradigm, rooted in social contract theory, is not merely that the state accumulates excessive power over its citizens, but that it is inherently unable to recognize the sources of autonomy and the legitimate claims arising from the many intermediate groups under its authority.

Thunder’s book aims to achieve three objectives. First, it seeks to highlight the damage caused by the notion of sovereignty as outlined above; second, it seeks to develop a theory of civil order that favors the lives of individuals, the sole holders of status publicus (public condition), in their spontaneous communities: family, business, school, university, municipality; finally, from this theoretical perspective, it tries to enrich the body of federalist theories, implementing them through the use of nonterritorial associations. In demonstrating the weakness of a paradigm based on centralized power management—a weakness increasingly evident when we consider the degree of complexity of civil society—Thunder achieves these objectives.

Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre, F. A. Hayek, and Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, Thunder sets his polycentric republic against every form of centralism. Subsidiarity governance—entrusting tasks and decisions to the most appropriate level of government or organization—gives citizens a real share in authority by letting them take part in decisions that shape their lives. The principle of subsidiarity offers a way to order and manage the many institutional centers that no modern society can reduce to one. Above all, it stands against monism—the belief that a single faction, convinced of its own truth, can claim the power to bend competing interests into a uniform whole.

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Click here to download the preface and introduction to my book, The Polycentric Republic, for free. Click here to purchase the book.