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Yesterday, Al Jazeera ran a very encouraging story headlined, “US bars five Europeans over alleged efforts to ‘censor American viewpoints.’” Not just any Europeans. The State Department banned entry to the US by five top architects of the censorship-industrial complex, including the European Union’s top minister for criminalizing speech, sorry, I meant for “digital safety.” Who is French, by the way.

In yesterday’s statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio correctly called the five individuals “radical activists” who had “advanced censorship crackdowns” against American speakers and American companies like Elon Musk and X. “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship,” he added.

“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose,” Rubio explained.

Ironically, the now-banned French minister, Thierry Breton, complained that he was being censored, and compared the travel ban to, wait for it, McCarthyism. (This is where I must defend “Tailgunner” Joe McCarthy, about whom everything you’ve been told is a liberal lie, and who was an American hero who liberals drove to an early grave and then salted the reputational earth. But I digress.) “To our American friends: Censorship isn’t where you think it is,” Mr. Thierry insisted.

Dainty French President Emmanuel Macron, whose handsome wife accompanies him everywhere, called it intimidation and coercion. “These measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty,” Macron whined. “The rules governing the European Union’s digital space are not meant to be determined outside Europe.”

Nobody’s trying to determine your stupid European rules. We just don’t want speech terrorists in this country. We don’t hate them; we just feel better when they aren’t around. And yes, this is what we voted for.

Earlier this month, the EU fined Twitter/X an eye-watering $140 million for a bunch of made-up nonsense, which everyone knows was actually meant to punish the social media platform for helping European citizens speak more freely, and for Musk’s recent advocacy against British rape gangs. The fine was levied under the so-called “Digital Services Act,” or DSA, which was passed in 2022 during the pandemic.

Not coincidentally, the now-banned Thierry has been called the “mastermind” behind the DSA.

The Trump Administration is once again “shattering norms and customs,” by punishing the individual officials behind anti-American activities, rather than treating them as if they were diplomatically immune from blowback. And it is driving the Europeans nuts.

@JoyceCarolOates
You're pretty smart. You have to be to be a writer.

If you try, you will understand that Trump was elected to spite you.

Why would anyone want to do that? Think. Feel.

Voters are not stupid or evil.

They're resisting the cruelty and contempt of the woke left.

Dec 25, 2025

You read last week’s essay by Jacob Savage in Compact. It was an aching lament, which allowed its readers to feel a pang of injustice, maybe for the first time. It wouldn’t have made a ripple as a polemic. But once you’ve realized that injustice took place, what to do about it? John Carter wants you to get good and angry, and sue every organization who participated into oblivion.

"Once again class action lawsuits and DOJ investigations are an obvious strategy. Proving discrimination in the case of any individual applicant is usually impossible, but demonstrating systemic discrimination should be very easy at the statistical level. Did a corporation have a DEI policy? Did white men comprise an obviously tiny fraction of new hires during the Cancelled Years? OK then, the organization is guilty of illegal discrimination, and we are now fining you one googolplex dollars; since you can’t pay that, your assets now belong to the plaintiffs, and everyone who works at your company is out of a job."

The low overhead and parasocial branding of podcasts makes them resistant to any conventional institutionalization. A TV or radio program might change hosts over the years, but podcasts are largely inseparable from the personalities of the podcasters. The People’s Policy Project isn’t a podcast, but it’s funded via a podcast platform. (Bruenig also has a successful podcast with his wife Liz1.) Current Affairs looks more like a conventional magazine, but as the 2021 blow-up showed, Robinson maintains outsized personal control over the organization, and as anyone who peruses the site knows, his lengthy blog-like screeds regularly grace its pages.

In one sense, the success of these enterprises supports Robinson’s assertion that “white men are doing fine.” People like him, Matt Bruenig, Will Menaker, Matt Christman, and Brace Belden are all evidently thriving—finding audiences and making money. But, in light of Savage’s argument, it does seem notable not only that they are all thriving outside of mainstream legacy institutions, but also that their projects have all avoided institutionalization—an imperative Robinson made explicit when he reasserted his personal ownership over Current Affairs. Because this seems to be how—as brash, assertive, opinionated white males—they avoided becoming casualties of the identitarian pressures that overtook elite professions in the 2010s.