Welcome to 'Resist Much, Obey little' | By Eva Vlaardingerbroek

Censorship of dissident voices is gaining legal ground - and none of us are safe.

It’s needless to say that we conservatives have been dealing with online censorship for a long time. Lots of you are probably on this platform because of that very reason. Especially since the start of the pandemic, many people have experienced firsthand what it is like to be censored themselves. Just take the mere fact that Instagram puts a banner with a link to ‘official government covid information’ under every single post that contains information about the virus or the vaccine. Unfortunately, this is something most of us have started to believe to be normal, although I highly doubt people would have ever accepted it so easily if the ‘official government narrative’ would be automatically linked to any other issue than the ‘pandemic’. However, the censorship of dissident voices is no longer something that only exists in the realm of the Mainstream Media or on social media, it’s something that is quickly making its way into the legal realm as well. And we should be incredibly worried about that.

As some of you might know, I used to be active in Dutch politics and have been active on multiple European media platforms for some years; but my actual academic background is in Law. With the ever growing government overreach we’re experiencing here in Europe, I felt I should try and put my knowledge of the law to use by fighting the mandates through legal means. That’s why currently I work as a Fundamental Rights and Litigation lawyer at a Dutch law firm that has carried out multiple lawsuits against the Dutch State with regard to its Covid policies.

Out of deep personal conviction and as a part of my job, I follow the European response to covid and the subsequent restrictions very closely. Due to the fact that the regultions change all the time and every European country has its different rules, I understand it can get very complicated – especially to a non-European audience. However, it’s of the utmost important that the world knows about the insanity that’s unfolding under our eyes, because anything that can happen here, can happen elsewhere too. So from the European Digital Identity Project, the digital Covid Pass, the lockdowns, to possibly even active compulsory vaccination here in Europe, you can be sure that I will write about it – and try to legally fight it, of course. Because trust me, the situation in Europe is worse than most people outside of the old continent can even begin to imagine, especially when you’re not vaccinated like myself.

So with that said, let’s start off with some specific news from Sweden that is related to all of this. Although the Swedish government has taken a much better approach when it comes to covid than most European countries, the current Swedish government does not deserve much praise in general. Last year, I lived and worked in Sweden as the host of a political show for a YouTube channel called Riks. On my show I often talked about the dire situation the country found itself in as a result of the social democratic governments policies. When I launched my first episode of the show, talking about the consequences of mass migration, the Swedish Minister of Justice actually took to Twitter and responded rather piqued. It turns out, as I mentioned on Tucker Carlson Tonight some months ago, that the Swedish Government doesn’t like it much when the truth comes out and somebody actually holds them accountable for their policies. In fact they hate it so much so, that the government has decided to launch an agency called ‘The Swedish Psychological defense Agency’ – yes, psychological defense, I kid you not – to fight the spread of misinformation in and about Sweden. “The purpose of psychological defense is to safeguard our open and democratic society, the free formation of opinion and Sweden’s freedom and independence,” the website states in a page describing its mission.

It honestly never ceases to amaze me how the Establishment has mastered this incredible level of newspeak. It’s truly incredible how these people literally put an official government agency in place that has censorship as its core essence; and they are then able to sell it as an agency to protect freedom of speech. You’d think that anyone with a functioning mind who knows anything about history or has read Orwell’s 1984 for example, realizes how dangerous this is. In fact, if you ask me, if the Swedish government had been more truthful about their motives, they should have called it ‘Pshycological warfare agency’. But as per usual in this post-truth society, nothing is what it seems anymore.

Before I go into what this trend means for our actual right to freedom of speech, it’s important to note that these agencies in Sweden are actually very influential. They are government agencies, that are state-controlled organizations that act independently to carry out the policies of the Government of Sweden. By comparison, the Swedish ministries are relatively small and merely policy-making organizations, whereas the agencies have lots of freedom and the people who are in charge of them are not democratically elected. Most people don’t even know who runs them, so it’s very hard for the Swedish population to hold them politically accountable for anything.

Although Sweden has taken it, as per usual, one step further than the rest of Europe, the ‘fight against misinformation’ under the pretext of ‘protecting liberal democracy, freedom of speech and the rule of law’ is a dangerous trend we’ve been seeing here for many years. The Leftwing national parties and the European Union for example have been talking about it for a long time, because it’s obviously an amazing opportunity for them to censor unwanted opinions and information that doesn’t serve their agenda. Even more so now, with regard to Covid.

All over Europe, there are more and more prominent voices stating that people who oppose the covid measures are the now the main threat to their respective national security. This type of rhetoric is obviously incredibly dangerous. Once the State, with the help of the institutions and media, starts labeling certain dissident voices and opinions that are critical of the State as ‘a threat to the State’, that that will give them the legal foundation or prerogative to take legal action to silence these dissidents - or worse.

And this is actually already very much happening. In The Netherlands for example, a law has recently come into effect that makes it incredibly easy for a judge - without a lengthy trial - to ban so called ‘anti-democratic and subversive organizations’, allocate their funds to the state and put their leaders in jail for up to two years if they don’t immediately cease their activities. The Dutch government also formed a special military (!) unit, to combat disinformation. Last year, this unit was already discredited for unlawfully collecting information on citizens and organizations that ‘might pose a threat’ to the handling of the Covid crisis. Go figure.

A lot of conservatives – from a law and order type of standpoint - used to be in favor of these types of laws, thinking they’d be targeting radical Islamist organizations that are actually undermining our societies and are willing to use violence to overthrow our legal system. But that now turns out to have been incredibly short sighted. We all know the left and the establishment has been wrongfully accusing conservatives of being radicals who are continuously spreading ‘fake news’. So what do you think will happen if spreading fake news will legally be classified as a ‘threat to democracy’ and they have their own agencies to combat it. Then who do you think they’ll target first? That’s right, it’s people like us. So the only way we can turn this around is having as many people as possible wake up to these tactics; and the only way we can do that, is by continuing to push as much information out there as long as we still can. So that’s exactly what I’ll continue to do. And so should you.

- Eva Vlaardingerbroek