Donald Trump was the canary in the coal mine.
He showed just how far global elites would go to stop one man.
And Donald Trump received one scary message from Tucker Carlson about this spine-chilling arrest.
Rise of the censorship industrial complex
In 2015, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel got caught on a hot mic imploring Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to do something about online speech that was critical of mass migration into Europe.
Zuckerberg assured her that Facebook was working on it.
The next year, two massive events shook global elites to their core.
Great Britain voted in favor of Brexit, and Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Those two episodes showed that there was a populist movement brewing in the West because the establishment had bungled things so badly.
The response to Brexit and Trump was to crack down on free speech.
So-called hate speech and disinformation were used as a pretext to silence online voices outside of the control of legacy institutions.
The new online censorship regime reached a crescendo when Trump himself was banned from social media after January 6.
Even Trump’s biggest critics—like Merkel—said that banning Trump from speaking was a step too far.
In light of the rampant censorship, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion with the intent of re-centering free speech on the platform.
After buying the social media giant, Musk coordinated with independent journalists to release the Twitter Files, which exposed how Twitter—and likely other platforms—were colluded with world governments to censor speech.
Telegram refuses to bend the knee
One social media platform that has been unwilling to cooperate with governments is Telegram, which was created by Russian national Pavel Durov.
Telegram is one of the most popular apps in the world, and Durov refused to give the U.S. government a backdoor into his company in order to spy on users.
What happened next was terrifying.
Durov was recently arrested in France—where he is a citizen—on dubious charges.
The Washington Post reported that “Durov was being temporarily detained in connection with distributing child sex abuse material and drugs, money laundering and working with organized crime, according to a statement released by French prosecutor Laure Beccuau.”
It seems quite suspicious that Durov was detained based on these salacious allegations after he would not allow intelligence agencies access to Telegram.
The Post added that the “accusations also included improper use of cryptography and failure to allow authorized law enforcement interception, flash points in the efforts by some governments to force companies to reveal private messages between users. The prosecutor’s statement said the probe is of an unnamed person, allowing for the possibility that Durov is not the ultimate target.”
So Durov might not even be the target of the investigation.
Tucker Carlson, who has become one of the most vocal and prominent critics of U.S. intelligence agencies—the NSA spied on him and read his private communications—interviewed Durov earlier this year.
In light of the arrest, Carlson wrote on social media, “Pavel Durov left Russia when the government tried to control his social media company, Telegram. But in the end, it wasn’t Putin who arrested him for allowing the public to exercise free speech. It was a western country, a Biden administration ally and enthusiastic NATO member, that locked him away. Pavel Durov sits in a French jail tonight, a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies. Darkness is descending fast on the formerly free world.”
Pavel Durov left Russia when the government tried to control his social media company, Telegram. But in the end, it wasn’t Putin who arrested him for allowing the public to exercise free speech. It was a western country, a Biden administration ally and enthusiastic NATO member,… https://t.co/F83E9GbNHC
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 24, 2024
The arrest of Durov should serve as a wakeup call to the people who think Trump is the real threat to freedom.
Stay tuned to Unmuzzled News for any updates to this ongoing story.
