Rep. Keith Self: In the Digital Age, Is the West Where Liberty Goes to Die?

Guest post by Rep. Keith Self – proudly serving Texas’s Third District.

The former great empires of Europe are no longer so great for those who embrace freedom.

In the digital age, the reality is, parts of the West are becoming places where liberty goes to die.

The newest frontline in the battle for free will and expression was established recently when French authorities set off a firestorm by arresting Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov.

Telegram, popular because of the lack of surveillance and government interference, amassed nearly 1 billion users for a simple reason: People around the world want to communicate freely.

According to the Paris prosecutor’s office, some Telegram users took advantage of the app’s freedom ethos to engage in nefarious activities.

First, if European authorities are just now waking up to the fact that the internet is being used by bad people to do bad things, then they have bigger problems on their hands than Pavel Durov and Telegram.

Second, in the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s bombshell announcement recently, every defender of free speech should be concerned about the persecution of Mr. Durov.

Zuckerberg confirmed that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Meta to intentionally mislead Americans during the COVID crisis, an Orwellian attempt to control how to think and act.

Perhaps that is the reason we haven’t heard a peep about this high-profile arrest from the Biden-Harris administration after the news of this blatant assault on free speech broke.

Mr. Durov languished in a jail cell for a week before French authorities finally brought trumped up charges against him, hoping to prove that somehow, he was complicit in criminal activity.

This is how ridiculous the French case against Durov is: Arrest the guy who made the app, not criminals who use it, and case closed.

Based on that rationale, if the French police clock a Ferrari speeding down a highway at 200 MPH, they will arrest Ferrari’s CEO Benedetto Vigna on his next visit to the French Riviera, while allowing the driver to get off scot-free.

Just across the English Channel, all is not well either. United Kingdom (U.K.) authorities are hard at work constructing a censorship program targeting Americans.

On August 10th, after weeks of riots gripped Britain in the wake of a mass stabbing, London’s Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, warned U.S. who citizens offer content criticizing the British government for mishandling the chaos. “We will come after you,” Rowley said.

In response to this threat against American citizens, I wrote to U.K. Ambassador Karen Pierce asking her to repudiate Rowley’s statement.

The mere thought of Britain seeking to extradite U.S. citizens for using their protected speech, from the comfort of their homes on American soil is reprehensible. To date, the U.K. government has not denied or renounced Sir Mark Rowley’s words.

Lashing out against Americans is just a symptom of a decaying kingdom that has become a shadow of what it once was.

By opening its borders and forsaking its core values, Britain imported its own demise: an economic outlook more dismal than Chad, and growing distrust that mirrors that of authoritarian regimes like the Communist Chinese Communist Party.

In real time, I believe we’re seeing the final stages of the once-great British Empire’s demise. The British ruling class today can’t seem to figure out how to right the ship as it jumps from one failed Prime Minister to another.

And it’s hard to believe the greatest free-thinking philosophers of all time — John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Paine — called the U.K. home.

The same spirited flames that ignited the ideas that made Britain the strongest empire in the world centuries ago are now just embers of their former glory.

This shift reflects a growing list of nations curtailing fundamental freedoms under the guise of “national security.” For example, Brazil recently banned X, formerly known as Twitter, altogether. One thing is for certain: this anti-freedom infection is spreading, and very quickly.

Here in America, We the People have our own battle to fight against elites seeking to revise history and rewrite our Constitution. The fight to save our great Republic is real. It is also internal, as are those being fought across the Pond.

This time, we can’t save Britain and liberate France like we did in back-to-back world wars during the last century.

The West might be losing its way, straying from its foundational principles, but here in America, liberty will never be security’s collateral.

In Congress, I’m working hard every day to hold the line. Fellow Americans, we must uphold our Constitutional duty to protect freedom at any cost because it is our God-given right to do so.

We must keep the flame of freedom burning bright to fulfill the mandate of glory bestowed upon our great nation by God as foretold by our Founders, and repeatedly reaffirmed by every generation of patriots since the American Revolution.

Britain should have learned a lesson about freedom in 1776 and 1812. Come and take it. And see what happens.