(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Sánchez y Jamenei, Elon y la verdad)
It is laughable to hear Sánchez say that his attempts to end freedom of expression are a fight against tech magnates.
It is entirely logical that Pedro Sánchez seeks pretexts to control and censor social media. Just as it is logical that the government of socialists and communists in Spain has launched a hysterical campaign against all the media that allow citizens to express their opinions freely. As logical as it is that Ayatollah Khamenei blocked all the networks on the Internet when he decided to begin massacring the population to set a bloody example that would guarantee his survival, at least until he could weigh other options.
It is laughable to hear Sánchez say that his attempts to end freedom of expression are a fight against tech magnates. When he is an obedient pet in the general seven-ring circus of beasts and dwarves run by the Soroses, Bill Gateses and so many other members of the club of social and human engineering — as regular at Davos as they are friends of China.
Sánchez is not Khamenei, if only because we are in another corner of the world where today, at least for now, there are things that no longer happen and have not happened again. But both Sánchez and Khamenei share, as rulers who fear their people, a will to persecute, blind and crush the truth without any scruple. The truth is their greatest enemy because it is what mobilizes, inspires and arms their respective peoples against their governments of lies and misery.
Social media — and especially X, the former Twitter, the only one that since Elon Musk became its owner has not allowed itself to be intimidated, bought or blackmailed by governments — are today the greatest enemy of every authoritarian, lying, abusive, criminal or openly criminal ruler. Governments that know their legitimacy is questioned or threatened know that the networks are their enemy because on them the truth flows in a way impossible to control unless they have bought or kidnapped the owners.
However much some media such as El Debate are an honorable and extremely rare example of professional dignity in journalism today, the networks combine information with the experiences, feelings and concerns of their consumers in such a fluid and fast way that it is lethal for those who try to defend a uniform lie.
In this sense — and leaving Khamenei now in his Eastern corner, watching how he negotiates his survival with Donald Trump — in Europe Pedro Sánchez is none other than the most radical and extreme of the rulers of an increasingly radicalized social democracy as a whole. It has radicalized out of the very anguish generated by its fear of losing the hegemony it has managed to maintain, in its various disguises, for more than half a century in Europe.
In Brussels, the dwindling majority that still maintains that hegemony — made up of the People’s Party, socialists, greens and communists — is bent on generating instruments of censorship and pretexts to use them. They already know they have lost the political argument, as is shown in every electoral campaign in Europe over the last two years and above all in their results. It is seen in Austria and Germany, as it will be seen today in Aragon, was seen in Extremadura, and will be seen in all the Spanish regions, as it is seen in all European countries.
Panic is spreading in what we might call the two-party system, or the single social-democratic party. And while we take it for granted that they will not use Khamenei’s methods in the streets, we can also be certain that they will go very far in administrative and legal methods while they can — judicial and police, as well as propagandistic — to try to maintain that hegemony.
To try not to be swept away by the national and anti-socialist forces that feed on the frustration and indignation over the continuous failures, the stubborn persistence in error and the permanent lies of the political power of the social-democratic consensus of Brussels and the thousand tentacles of its bureaucratic monster.
The attempts to crush freedom of expression — also on the part of those who claim to be its defenders — are part of the anguished self-defense of political forces and an ideology that are definitively failed. Freedom of the press will be the force that largely determines the speed of the changes, which would already have been much greater had Western societies had an honest journalism rather than a sectarian and militant one, with few exceptions.
The purchase of X by Elon Musk, which freed this network from the clutches of the left, was fundamental to Donald Trump’s victory. That victory has been decisive for the offensive to conquer freedoms and rights in Ibero-American countries subjugated by narco-socialism. And it has also been a deterrent to the European Union’s temptations to act with its particular Brezhnev Doctrine against conservative and national forces. Had Kamala Harris won, many in Europe would have believed the moment had come to ban parties that tend to be in the majority. That was not the case, and that is why the change of era is going to be much faster than many believe and some hope.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.