Elon Musk is calling for an end to the European Union. There are two rational ways to look at this. He’s got a point. The EU makes the lives of working people harder, more expensive, and less free. Only the truly naive would say that Brussels improves the lives of ordinary people. The last time Elon Musk made rational points about government, it ended badly. Well-intended politics usually do. The context of his call to shut down Brussels comes after the European Union fined X $140 million under its Digital Services Act. This is an authoritarian law passed two years ago that hands unelected bureaucrats unprecedented power over online communication. The EU alleges that X failed to comply with key provisions of the Act. But we can see right through this. This isn’t about “implementation” or “safety.” It is about censorship. The EU doesn’t even try to hide its bias when it comes to X. In 2023, Brussels commissioned a so-called “disinformation monitoring start-up” called TrustLab to produce a report on Twitter. TrustLab, which has documented ties to the CIA, claimed the platform was flooded with “Russian disinformation.” Yet the report never identified a single account linked to Russia. Not one. The conclusion was predetermined; the evidence didn’t matter. This comes at an important time. According to Elon Musk, X is now the number one news source for people in most EU nations. That stands to reason. Mainstream news in Europe is shockingly terrible, even compared to American media. U.S. Vice President JD Vance and other U.S. politicians condemned the EU’s fine, arguing that X was being punished “for not engaging in censorship.” And he’s right. X censors plenty but less than most other platforms and less at the demands of world governments. They did that during the Biden Administration and promised not to do it again and that alone makes it a target. This is not a regulatory dispute. It’s political. The Digital Services Act is being wielded as a weapon to pressure a private company into policing speech the way the European Union prefers. The message to X, and to the rest of the world, is clear: adopt our censorship or pay the price. This is one of oh-so-many ways that the European Union squeezes freedom from the lives of its citizens. If you’re interested in how I gained this perspective as a resident of the EU for more than six years, you can watch my speech about it here. The EU should — and likely will — come to an end one day, but it won’t be because of Elon Musk, who isn’t even a citizen of the bloc. The people of Europe will have to decide for themselves how much authority they’re willing to surrender to Brussels before they choose a different path. The question is how. How can the people of Europe decide anything freely when Brussels has every member state in a political chokehold? I only see two rational possibilities: 1. Invoke Article 50 and leave the EU (the Brexit path); 2. A financial or political crisis collapses the center (the Soviet Union/Rome path). I don’t have confidence that EU nation-states have the courage to do number 1, so realistically, number 2 looks like the EU’s slow, agonizing fate. Not even Elon Musk can save them. The post Is It Time To End the EU? appeared first on Redacted.