America’s Progressive Left Flirts with Obsolescence
International relationships are taking a new shape because two high-impact forces have changed the order of things: international, economic interdependence, and the fact that the internet is borderless. Purely domestic national policy is no longer possible.
Societies that believe in using state force against their citizens’ rights to thought, belief, and speech are the European Union, which uses, managerial state tyranny; Chinese Marxism; and politicized Islamist tyrannies.
Because the internet eliminated national boundaries, some regimes’ efforts to censor their citizens by blocking their speech and religious freedom bleed across national and regional boundaries and attack foreign nations and companies. Efforts to prohibit their citizens from participating in public discourse and exercising their God-given human rights run aground because their domestic laws can’t silence other people from around the world. A few months ago, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance warned European leaders against this form of international aggression.
Because of this, new axes are replacing the geographically driven alliances of the twentieth century, which are now losing relevance. The basis for positive international relations now comes from whether governments allow their citizens to think and speak freely or not. Now, the international divide is between free and statist nations.
International Censorship Policies Threaten Digital Freedom
Statist nations prohibit the open exchange of ideas. This worldview abounds in Western Europe. The Digital Services Act (DSA) birthed in the faceless cauldron of the EU compels online platforms to “swiftly” remove content deemed “misleading.” This screams 1984. It is soft-speak for nothing other than totalitarian state oppression.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes strict privacy rules that limit data flow and platform operations, which automatically affect American tech companies in their commitment to human rights and freedom of speech. The problem is not economic warfare against American companies, but more importantly, the attempt to deny God-given, unalienable, First Amendment rights to citizens in countries the EU oligarchs don’t rule.
The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Bill requires platforms to remove “harmful” content under the threat of heavy fines. But what does this actually mean? Is it as innocuous as saying, “Your mother wears army boots”? No one really knows — until they get arrested. The vagueness of what constitutes “harmful,” again, is nothing more than elitist, state-enforced authoritarianism.
Germany’s Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) is even more draconian, mandating the removal of “hate speech” within 24 hours. Brazil has what is called the Fake News Law to “protect” its poor citizens from “misinformation.”
American social media platforms cannot play this game, not only as a matter of free enterprise, but as a matter of human rights. Millions of Americans fought and died for people’s right to think, or say a prayer and not end up disappeared in prison. Collectively, these international policies represent a coordinated assault on the open internet, on international companies, and on the human rights to believe, think, and express an opinion.
America: A Radical Affirmation of Individual Liberty
America is the most radical and courageous country in history so far concerning the freedoms and rights of its citizens. In America, government power is both derived from and limited by the people. The United States was founded on the inviolable truth that individuals are free and sovereign, equal under the law, and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights.
The four main groups that oppose this concept of government are woke European, secular globalists; Chinese Marxists; political Islamist despots; and captured Democrats and radicals in the U.S. These four groups act to control citizens by force, concentrating power in the hands of a totalitarian elite who wield the machinery of the state to enforce ideological conformity. The Islamo-Fascist and Chinese Marxist states do so openly. The European globalists and US Democrats try to do it stealthily, often through fraud and manipulation of the judicial branch and public narrative.
The Progressive Left Becomes Obsolete
Because Americans fought for eight years to recover American ideals of freedom and equality (starting with the first Trump administration through the Biden administration), the American Left now finds itself exposed and without a persuasive voice. Eight years of clandestine power-seeking to enforce woke compliance now suffers under the kleig lights of “the best disinfectant.” Democrats now find themselves outside the American conversation. Their efforts, through corruption and clandestine taxpayer abuse, to secretly create a culture forbidding speech puts them in alliance with other anti-freedom regimes both at home and abroad.
With their money drying up and the institutions they captured now being pried from their hands, the American Left has been reduced to openly supporting (and even actively participating in) violence and civil destabilization, and trying to suffocate President Donald Trump’s constructive reform efforts by abusing the federal judiciary. These are the last, desperate maneuvers of a movement that has lost touch with America’s founding values.
New Relationships
Under Trump’s renewed leadership, other key nations are now championing the cause of human freedom and individual sovereignty — Italy, Poland, Hungary, India, Argentina, and others.
Until Democrats can cast off their addiction to statist, autocratic power and reaffirm their commitment to freedom, equality under the law, and the unalienable rights given by God, they will continue to live in exile, outside the American conversation.
The world is like this now.
Frank Kaufmann is founder and president of the American renewal effort The Settlement Project and author of Woke Ideology: Critique and Counter Proposal (independently published, November 2024).