THE political elite of Europe and the Anglosphere appeared shocked by J D Vance’s wonderfully blunt speech in Munich last month. The US Vice President declared Washington’s top security concern to be ‘the threat from within’ the Nato alliance and castigated assembled leaders for their increasingly brazen assaults on ‘democratic values’ including censoring speech, suppressing popular opposition parties, and cancelling elections. But if this shock isn’t feigned, it is rather remarkable, given that these elites were in their own way already effectively at war with the United States. All Vance did was point out the nature of this hidden conflict.
Vance delivered multiple messages in his speech, the broadest and most historic of which was that the era of ‘post-national’ globalist liberalism is over. The United States, he indicated, now has a core interest in seeing a Western world that is collectively strong because its sovereign nations are strong, with the self-confidence to independently defend themselves physically, culturally and spiritually. His emphasis on promoting free speech and democratic legitimacy tied into this message, but was about far more than the importance of ‘shared values’ or even Washington’s new friendliness to nationalist parties. Practically, it was an implied warning that the role Europe has been playing as a proxy actor in the political and ideological conflicts raging in the United States will no longer be tolerated. More specifically, it was a declaration that transatlantic institutional, technological and legal support for America’s embattled left-wing deep state must end – or else.
After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, America’s panicked establishment elites reacted by attempting to construct a system for managing public opinion through strict control of information, especially online information. The idea was that growing public support for populism was fuelled by ‘low-information voters’ and their consumption of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ including from foreign actors, and that if their ‘information diet’ could just be controlled they would stop voting wrong. The underlying assumption here was of course that the elite’s own increasingly radical policy preferences were the only rational path, opposable only by the stupid and easily manipulated. As Trump’s defeated opponent Hillary Clinton would later put it, social media platforms had fundamentally changed the information environment and ‘if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control’.
This intended system of thought-control would later grow into the censorship industrial complex that was partially revealed following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. But a big obstacle initially stood in the way: the US Constitution and its protection of free speech. The public might be receiving the ‘wrong’ information on the internet, but ‘our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence’, as John Kerry lamented in a speech to the World Economic Forum.
Under the Biden administration, this legal problem was partially solved by simply ignoring it, the federal government directly colluding with technology companies and a network of ‘independent’ (state-funded) ‘fact-checking’ organisations to impose mass censorship on American citizens. The result was, as one federal judge later described it, effectively ‘the most massive attack against free speech in United States history’.
A more subtle and sustainable work-around was discovered, however. This was to circumvent the US Constitution by outsourcing the policing of the internet and populist movements to other countries around the world. This could be done because the internet is global and so the whole network is affected by government regulations on any local market of sufficient size. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic immediately grasped that legal and regulatory structures imposed by the European Union, with the leverage of its huge unified market, could for example force internet companies the world over – including US companies – to change their behaviour in order to comply and avoid losing access (this imperialistic regulatory strong-arming was dubbed the ‘Brussels Effect’, becoming Europe’s only significant innovation this century).
American ‘partners’ quickly began setting up a network of structures to force global internet content ‘moderation’ as part of a de facto counter-populist alliance. This began in 2016 when Brussels pressured Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube into signing the ‘Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online’ which required the ‘removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours’ and ordered them to ‘remove or disable access to such content’. Decisions on what counted as illegal speech would henceforth be determined by a new category of ‘trusted reporters’, i.e. a network of ideologically aligned media organisations, often funded by the state. Others quickly joined in creating their own similar regulatory frameworks, such as Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which criminalised a vast array of ‘misinformation’, or the UK’s ‘Online Safety Act’ which made illegal such vaguely hateful behaviour as causing ‘needless anxiety’ and ‘non-trivial psychological or physical harm’.
This process of regulatory political containment reached its ultimate form in the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which began to come into legal force in 2023 and is now fully operational. The DSA’s ‘main goal is to prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation’, and it does so by threatening to fine any internet platform anywhere in the world (from social media, to app stores, to travel and accommodation sites) up to 6 per cent of their annual global revenue if they fail to take down ‘false’ or ‘harmful’ content within a matter of hours. Information fit to be censored is determined by small committees of ‘experts’ chosen by the European Commission. Overall the DSA is, as investigative journalist Matt Taibbi has rightly put it, ‘the most comprehensive censorship law ever passed in a Western democracy’.
For a long time, these regulatory methods worked. As revealed by the ‘Twitter Files’ uncovered by reporters including Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and others, Twitter employees were for example regularly producing enthusiastic reports on the company’s global compliance with Germany’s NetzDG. Overall, Twitter’s legal policy office reported internally that it was ‘spending 50 per cent or more’ of its time ‘on global regulation’ and compliance with foreign censorship demands by 2022.
The construction of this counter-populist system was formalised as a distinctly international project in 2019 with the ‘Christchurch Call to Action‘ summit, pioneered by New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern. This secured commitments from dozens of governments, online service providers, advertisers and ‘civil society and partner organisations’ to ‘eliminate terrorist and violent extremism content online’. These commitments were self-described as ‘wide ranging, covering everything from applying appropriate laws and regulation to specific technical measures, to efforts to address the underlying drivers of terrorism’. (‘Underlying drivers’ in practice here largely meaning right-populist and anti-establishment political views, quickly expanding to include any dissenting views on Covid-19 and misgovernance during the pandemic.)
Following this, the world saw hundreds of ‘non-governmental’ organisations, think tanks, ‘fact checkers’ and academic misinformation ‘researchers’ sprouting up to help co-ordinate censorship without borders. These organisations provided ready-made ‘expertise’ on which governments and technology platforms could draw when deciding who to target for silencing or worse. Additionally, they could provide cover by giving the whole scheme a sheen of independence and scientific objectivity. They quickly became integral to the counter-populist project. In particular, these outfits became adept at co-ordinating campaigns to cut off financing for political opponents and ideological adversaries by pressuring advertisers into boycotting dissenting websites, platforms and media outlets by smearing them as dangerous extremists.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British Labour Party cutout, proved especially effective at this ploy, successfully cutting off ad revenue flowing to perceived right-wing sites. It also drove away many advertisers from Twitter after its acquisition by Elon Musk, with leaked CCDH documents later revealing the outfit had explicitly listed ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’ as a top strategic priority. CCDH did far more than this, however: it worked hand-in-glove with governments to provide enemies lists and custom-made excuses for censoring political opponents. When CCDH published a report labelling 12 influential covid lockdown sceptics as the dangerous ‘Disinformation Dozen’, 12 Democratic Party attorney generals in the United States inexplicably sent a letter on the same day to the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook citing the CCDH report and demanding the Disinformation Dozen be deplatformed. It was later revealed that the NGO and the Democratic Party had regularly shared drafts and co-ordinated their attacks in advance, which was of course precisely the point.
Moreover, CCDH appears to have acted as a dedicated foreign lobbyist, meeting constantly with US legislative staff and reporting internally on making ‘progress towards change in USA and support for STAR’ – STAR being a proposed ‘Global Standard for Regulating Social Media’ that CCDH seemed convinced America could be cajoled into adopting if Democratic Party rule continued. Perhaps this is part of what Vice President of the European Commission Věra Jourová was referring to at Davos two years ago when she confidently asserted that European-style hate speech laws were something ‘which you will have soon also in the US’.
The US Department of Justice now appears to be considering whether CCDH therefore engaged in a co-ordinated foreign influence campaign while failing to register as the agent of a foreign power (the UK). Given that the Labour Party was found to have sent as many as 100 staff to the United States to help campaign for Kamala Harris, something the Trump campaign blasted at the time as ‘blatant foreign interference’, the Trump DOJ seems unlikely to be sympathetic to arguments for the organisation’s innocence and independence.
Actions, meet consequences.
CCDH is just one of many such organisations performing a similar role, however, including groups like Newsguard and the Global Disinformation Index. Collectively, these organisations have, as an UnHerd investigation found, successfully established a cartel of ‘invisible gatekeepers within the vast machinery of online advertising’ and media ‘fact-checking’. Their purpose has been to distort and control the factual information and narratives reaching the public. In other words, they were established as political weapons.
It is striking that a significant proportion of these organisations and similar outfits, such as the Atlantic Council and the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), are commonly both partially state-funded (often by multiple countries on both sides of the Atlantic) and maintain deep connections to the various agencies of the security state. ASD’s founding board, for example, notably included such figures as John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Richard Ledgett, deputy director of the National Security Agency during the Obama administration, and Michael McFaul, Special Assistant to President Obama on the National Security Council.
This overlap is no coincidence. As the reporter Jacob Siegel has expertly detailed, after 2016 the American security establishment began to turn the tools and tactics of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency warfare and regime change that it had developed abroad back on to its own people. Particularly after the Christchurch Call, other Western intelligence and security services, especially among the ‘Five Eyes’ Anglosphere intelligence-sharing alliance, followed suit. They began to dramatically ramp up their direct co-operation to counter ‘disinformation’ and leverage their own propaganda machines to ‘win hearts and minds’. In the UK, for instance, the Army’s 77th Brigade, a military intelligence unit tasked with ‘non-lethal psychological warfare’, began to surveil and report on British citizens (despite claiming its operations were directed only overseas), as well as to work with other British government agencies and cooperating with other Five Eyes intelligence services on influence operations.
These security services had folded the perceived domestic threat of populist movements into their emerging theories and doctrines of ‘fifth-generation warfare’, in which the digital revolution is believed to have transformed the world of geopolitical competition into a global ‘omnipresent battlefield’ characterised by persistent cyberwarfare and a constant struggle over ‘information and perception’. In this view, the minds of citizens (or ‘cognitive infrastructure’ as governments began to unironically refer to them) are terrain that has to be constantly fought over with rivals such as Russia. This made populists the equivalent of foreign adversaries, rather than merely normal domestic political opponents.
Such a pressing threat seemed to necessitate what was described as a ‘whole of society‘ approach, meaning the totalising integration of government, military, private sector and non-profit spheres, as well as international organisations, in service of defending ‘democracy’. This united front of public and private organisational power is the real ‘deep state’. And it is why we quickly began to see intelligence services working so closely with activist NGOs like CCDH, or with putatively private firms like Graphika, a for-profit ‘social network analysis’ company that was initially funded by the US Defense Department to fight terrorist propaganda, then redeployed to identify and censor public discourse about covid and other concerns.
In short, the transatlantic alliance has for years been waging a hybrid information war on the American public (among other nations). Above all, the objective of this politics by other means was to stop the rise of Donald Trump and the populism he represents. But that war failed; now Trump is back and, as Vance warned the political and military leaders assembled in Munich, ‘there is a new sheriff in town’ in Washington. Much as they risk being abandoned and left standing alone holding the bag in Ukraine, the allies of former president Joe Biden on this side of the Atlantic have been left stranded in the digital trenches of America’s cold civil war, still combatants on what’s now distinctly the losing side. Vance was politely informing them that their cyber-soldiers had better pack up and leave the conflict zone immediately.
Vance reiterated this message directly to UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in the White House last week, saying: ‘Look, I said what I said, which is that we do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the UK and also with some of our European allies, but we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British but also affect American technology companies and by extension American citizens.’ He was not talking just about American discomfort with British and European disregard for the abstract value of free speech; he was pointing to their active information warfare against the United States, its new government, its companies and its citizens. So when Starmer stammered in reply that ‘certainly we wouldn’t want to reach across US citizens, and we don’t . . .’ that excuse was both transparently false and unlikely to cut it with the new sheriff.
If the countries of Europe and the Anglosphere don’t want to be treated as enemies of the United States instead of allies, they are going to need to retreat from the war they’ve been waging on behalf of Washington’s old regime and disarm their censorship machines. That means reigning in their intelligence services, cutting off support for their non-state armies of transnational censorship organisations like CCDH, and backing off of legal frameworks like the DSA and the Online Safety Act that are designed to control information and political discourse across borders. Vance has been hammering this point ever since he threatened during the campaign to withdraw US support from Nato if Europe continues trying to regulate American politics through the DSA, noting that it would be ‘insane that we would support a military alliance [Nato] if that military alliance isn’t going to be pro-free speech’.
Washington’s message to its putative allies is straightforward: end the information war and get the hell out. If they instead ignore these warnings and continue to meddle in America’s domestic political affairs they may soon find that its new sheriff is willing to impose real diplomatic and economic consequences for their continued aggression.
This article appeared on The Upheaval on March 4, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
