Remember when Americans were sold on all the “free trade” agreements like NAFTA and the TPP and how the European Union would be a vast free-trade zone to increase prosperity and increase freedom? Oh, provided that we all followed hundreds of thousands of words of regulations and agreements, all to promote “free trade” and be good little economic citizens?

Now consider “free speech.” Hmmm.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “free trade” as

1. Trade between nations without regulatory barriers such as tariffs or quotas.
2. international trade free from government interference, especially trade free from tariffs or duties on imports
3. international trade free of government interference

Which makes all of these vast, expensive, time-consuming negotiations and agreements between diplomats and bureaucrats and politicians into lying mockeries of freedom of trade. Perverted propaganda to let more government interference – and in reality, more money flowing from buyers and sellers of goods and services into government coffers. Or, bluntly, more theft. And incidentally create more government – job security for the bureaucrats and diplomats and politicians to “manage” (interfere with) free trade.

Free speech, on the other hand, is defined by American Heritage Dictionary as

1. Speech protected from government restraint by legal means, such as the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
2. The right to express an opinion in public without being restrained or censored.

So when that piece of work, French President Emmanuel Macron shows up for “cultural solidarity” in Louisiana’s New Orleans and has a “surprise meeting” with Elon Musk to order Musk that Twitter must comply with EU “free speech regulations” and ensure that the EU warning a few days ago was emphasized. Musk was warned that “the company must do more to protect users from harmful content.”

(Odd. I cannot find a single report online that anyone has been harmed physically, much less died, from reading content on Twitter. I did find where a man in Japan was convicted of torturing, murdering, dismembering and other nasty things to nine people whom he contacted because he read something posted by them on Twitter or other social media. I guess he was “harmed” by reading Twitter: he was sentenced to death for killing the nine people. He might be alive today if he had done that in Canada, where “health care providers” now routinely offer to help you off yourself if you are in “too much pain.”)

Anyway, exactly why are “regulations” needed to govern (regulate) free speech in Europe? It seems to us here at TPOL that the only laws and regulations needed might what is to be done to people who try to prevent free speech, or punish free speech. Things like regulating the maximum temperature of the tar, or the net weight of feathers, or how wide the rail has to be to prevent cruel and unusual punishment.

And looking at that definition, I don’t see it saying free speech is the right to express a “safe” or “harmless” or “politically correct” or “popular” opinion in public. Perhaps Twitter is not “public?”

In other words, this elected French dictator (look up how powerful the French president is) and the European Union political powers-that-be and bureaucrats want to treat free speech like free trade in today’s world. Pretend it is “free” and regulate it with thousands of words (and guns, of course).

Of course, we should not be surprised: the so-called “right” to keep and bear arms in the Fifty States has been regulated and limited and prevented and prohibited by millions of words and hundreds of thousands of guns (!!!!) for almost a century here in the Land of the Fee and the Home of the Bummed. (TM pending) Why should we not expect every liberty to be corrupted and stolen away?

To the thugs that rule our nations, our towns, our communities, there is no true freedom. There is no liberty, just privileges called “rights” for political purposes. To keep the masses fat, dumb, and happy.