The WEF’s War on Your Words and Your Wheels

As we noted, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has plans for your automobile. In the style of Josef Stalin, who pulled The Grapes of Wrath from Soviet theatres, WEF bosses dislike the concept of people owning cars and driving wherever they want. Now from the same quarters comes strange ideas about what people should be able to say. 

In a recent WEF panel titled “The Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation,” Vera Jourova, Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency, said the United States would “soon” have laws against “what qualifies as hate speech, as illegal hate speech.” 

Commissioner Jourova did not define the speech she thought was deserving of prohibition. 

For all but the willfully blind, “hate speech,” “disinformation” and such are any departure from the official government line and laws against hate speech attempt to criminalize dissent. That’s a concept Vera Jourova, born in Czechoslovakia in 1964, should understand. 

Czechoslovakia fell to a Stalinist coup in 1948. As in other captive nations, Stalin’s USSR crushed all dissent. In 1968, the Czechs pushed back with their “Prague Spring,” but the Soviets crushed that too. It wasn’t until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that the Czechs could again express themselves freely. 

The struggle of man against power, said Czech novelist Milan Kundera, is “the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Those struggles, and their lessons for the present day, seem to have escaped the notice of Vera Jourova, who previously served as the E.U.’s Commissioner for Justice, Consumers, and Gender Equality.  

The Commissioner for values and transparency didn’t say how she knew the USA would soon impose laws against hate speech. That could have been due to the presence on the WEF panel of U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, Massachusetts Democrat. While this plays out, Americans might keep a few things in mind. 

Americans don’t get to vote for E.U. officials like Vera Jourova. When it comes to freedom of movement and freedom of speech, the U.S. Constitution is better than anything coming out of the World Economic Forum and the European Union. Americans should feel free to drive where they want and say what they want, as they have done for generations, while they can still do so. In 2023 moving forward, it’s all about memory against forgetting.