EU Commissar: Free Speech Is a Virus, Censorship the Vaccine
Ursula von der Leyen, non-popularly-elected president of the European Commission* and ultra-girlboss extraordinaire, recently came out swinging against free speech in a white-knuckle speech in which she likened “malign information” to a “virus” that society must be inoculated against (by the state, obviously) via the “vaccine” of “prebunking,” a euphemism for censorship.
*Fun fact: von der Leyen was so wildly unpopular in her own country that Germany was the only EU member state to abstain from the vote on her nomination in 2019. Democracy™!
“And finally, it takes resilience. As technology evolves, we need to build up societal immunity around information manipulation. Because research has shown that prebunking is more successful than debunking… in short, prevention is preferable to cure.
Perhaps if you think of information manipulation as a virus. Instead of treating an infection once it has taken hold—that is debunking—it is much better to vaccinate so that the body is inoculated.
Prebunking is the same approach. Because disinformation relies on people passing it on to others. It is essential that people know what malign information influence is and what the techniques are that are behind it…
And as the knowledge goes up, our chances of being influenced goes down, and that builds up the societal resilience that we will need.”
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Related: German Minister Announces Pre-Crime Surveillance, Prosecution of ‘Far-Right Extremists’
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Relatedly — and I’ll tie this all together into a neat bow in a moment — “agonized” psychopath-posting-as-heroic-nerd Bill Gates recently lamented U.S. funding cuts, via the Trump administration, to his vaccine hustle “nonprofit” GAVI.
Related: RFK Jr. Axes ALL Funding for Bill Gates’ Global ‘Vaccine Alliance’
Here he is playing a tiny violin for himself at the Global Summit on Health & Prosperity through Immunisation, June 25, 2025:
Of course, this is a challenging time. All the progress we’ve made is at risk. Budgets are tight, and we all have to show our priorities when there’s tough trade-offs to be made.
There’s no denying: this is a global health crisis. Between the U.S. cuts and other funding cuts, in total, aid in total has gone down by 30 billion this year alone. It reinforces the incredible values being shown by the people who are showing up here today and being incredibly generous.
But with the cut in health resources, along with the financial situation a lot of these low-income countries are in, we are going to have a few years where things will go backwards.
As we think about this, think of a mother who will bring a baby wheezing for breath to a help center, and because the vaccines aren’t available, that baby will not survive.
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Fortunately, Gates has still got a sugar mommy in Ursula, courtesy of the EU taxpayer.
In the face of the aforementioned MAHA cuts to GAVI, at the last Global Citizen Festival in New York (note the recurring theme of “global,” as in “globalism”), Ursula pledged hundreds of millions of European Union funds funneled to GAVI (which, by the way, no one in the EU tax farm base voted to approve).
In addition to pimping censorship “vaccines,” von der Leyen is also a fan of using public money to proliferate literal vaccines (including, of course, in that category mRNA shots that aren’t actually vaccines).
Those $290 million in Euros, she promised, would literally vaccinate — and we’re using the term “vaccinate” loosely here, as it would presumably include the mRNA gene-editing shots that the Public Health™ authorities misleadingly label “vaccines” to make them more marketable to the rubes — “500 million children by 2030” in the developing world, the questioning of which by the subjects under her dominion of the EU Commission would presumably be subject to her metaphorical “prebunking” “vaccine”:
A better world also means a healthier world. And vaccination is our best chance to do this. Vaccines have saved millions of lives in the past 50 years. But right now, millions of children are still at risk. They need vaccines. So we must continue to support vaccination around the world. And today I am pleased to pledge 290 million dollars for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Each child should be protected. And more will come. Together with GAVI we have the goal to vaccinate 500 million children by 2030. Europe will do its fair share. You can count on us.
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Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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Reminder:
Give up your free speech at your peril. Once they are able to silence you, the game is over. The loss of all of your other freedoms will fall like dominos after. Anyone that advocates to censor you, or to unmask your anonymity is your adversary. Treat them like one - no matter what else they say.
But why is it so vital and necessary for the combined monolithic apparatus of government, corporations, and NGOs, to brute force censor everyone while decimating the careers and reputations of the dissenters? Here is why:
The reason the First Amendment is prime directive order 1, is because it is the most important freedom we have for the same reason it is the first target an adversary subverts, disrupts, and destroys during a crime, a war, or a takeover—preventing a target from assembling, communicating, and organizing a response to an assault grants an enormous advantage to the aggressors.
"If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent will be led, like sheep to the slaughter." -Washington
Second Amendment is second because it is the remedy for anyone trying to subvert the First.
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"The 1-A is first for a reason. The 2-A is it's twin. Together they make a bond of freedom." —S.P.H.
Powerful unpacking of how medical metaphors get weaponized for ideological control. The virus/vaccine framing for speech is insidious because it pathologizes dissent while positioning state intervention as therapeutic. Ive studied authoritarian language patterns and the prebunking-as-vaccine analogy is designed to bypass rational resistance by triggering biological threat response. What's particularly clever is how it inverts the Enlightenment ideal of robust debate as societal immune system into somthing that requires externally administered prophylaxis from designated authorities.