Better in their words…

In a recent appearance on France Inter’s morning show—France’s rough equivalent to CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper or MSNBC’s Morning Joe—American progressive thinker Yascha Mounk found himself in the awkward spot of fact-checking two prominent guests over wild distortions of US conservative figure Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination.

Fellow panelist Amy Greene, a Franco-American tied to the unabashedly pro-Macron Institut Montaigne think tank, wrongly pinned racial slurs like “chink” on Kirk, referring to Mounk mangling Cenk Uygur’s name on The Young Turks podcast. Meanwhile, Le Monde reporter Ivanne Trippenbach twisted his words into a claim that Black women lacked the “brainpower” for certain jobs. Mounk set the record straight, and the exchange exploded online, spotlighting what he dubs “elite misinformation” in French media.

It’s telling that Mounk pushed back so sharply, given his steady diet of the New York Times and Washington Post and his appearances in the US on the side of quite brazen censors such as former Stanford Internet Observatory Renee Di Resta. But the moment on France Inter hit close to home: it gave Mounk a glimpse of what America might look like if official voices drown out everything else.

Sure, US legacy media peddles its share of polished, ideology-fueled lies, but France’s version feels more brazen, less veiled. The gap boils down to counterforces. Here in the US, hundreds of podcasts outdraw legacy outlets, relentlessly dismantling the spin.

In France? Not so much, despite courageous resistance from a few players. The void finds its origin in three phenomena: a repressive legal framework rooted in a Jacobin obsession with a monolithic “general will;” a media landscape strangled by state and oligarchic monopolies; and a subtle cultural trap where upstarts unwittingly adopt the establishment’s script.

As Mounk’s exchange so vividly illustrates, this void in French media resilience carries profound stakes for America. Not every American shares Mounk’s instinctive recoil from official overreach; indeed, many are drawn to the Jacobin model precisely because it offers psychological solace — a tidy illusion of harmony enforced from above. It’s no mere coincidence that the flagship magazine of the rising ideological wing within the Democratic Party, championed by figures like Zohran Mamdani, bears the name Jacobin.

We might even frame the 2024 presidential election as a seismic fracture in the American psyche: a raw collision between those embracing and those rejecting what commentator Auron McIntyre has termed the “Total State”—an all-encompassing apparatus of control.

In this transatlantic drama, France emerges as the true frontline, more so than the UK or Germany, for it is here that the eternal clash between the dead hand of officialdom and the vital pulse of life has raged longest within the national consciousness. This makes France the prime target for the EU’s bureaucratic behemoths, like the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA) and the misnamed European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), which will pour their energies into dismantling an already frail ecosystem of independent media and publishers. Should that delicate balance rupture in France, the psychological conquest of Europe by a Chinese-style authoritarianism becomes not just plausible, but inevitable.

This piece addresses the intertwined threats that are playing in the French speech and media landscape — legal, economic, and cultural — while charting a path forward. A MAGA-driven US could take advantage of a weak extreme center power in France to experiment with free speech diplomacy there.

Back from the brink, the US can reestablish itself as the leader of the free world by sending a lifeline to embattled free media in Europe, exporting America’s podcast insurgency, challenging concentrated power, and inspiring format-breaking innovation to nurture a French media scene where unfiltered truth finally gets room to breathe.

Historical Roots: From Revolutionary Ideals to Jacobin Constraints

France’s approach to speech couldn’t be further from the Anglo-American free-for-all. It springs from the Jacobin mold, echoing Rousseau’s “general will,” a noble-sounding rationale for quashing dissent in the name of collective harmony. The classic US defenses of free expression: speech as self-government’s engine, truth’s chaotic forge (John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes’ old marketplace of ideas), the spark for virtuous citizens (à la Brandeis), or simply the folly of any censorship? These barely register in Jacobin France.

Even the landmarks Art. 10 and 11 of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the 1881 Law on Freedom of the Press — born in rare classical liberal blooms — nod to this tension. Though these instruments solemnly affirm freedom of thought, expression, and printing and publishing rights, they left wide “abuse” loopholes ripe for later squeezes. The first real crack showed in particularly revealing circumstances: the 1939 Marchandeau Law, rushed through amid Nazi shadows, banned racial smears and slights, setting the stage for wider content clamps. If anything, it shows that even the most morally justified regime of censorship at the best of times always has dangerous precedents…and it does not stop the Nazis anyway! Censorship is like Tolkien’s ring of power. It is a force that cannot be harnessed for good.

Postwar, the momentum snowballed with the 1972 Pleven Law, inaugurating broad content restrictions meant to stoke “discrimination, hatred, or violence” tied to ethnicity, nationality, race, or faith. It handed a roster of anti-racism and rights NGOs, such as the MRAP (Movement Against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples) or the LICRA (International League Against Racism and Antisemitism), the keys to civil suits in criminal courts — a list that has ballooned over decades — sidestepping prosecutors and strong-arming the state into speech crackdowns. Europe’s top court rubber-stamped this mindset in its 1976 Handyside ruling. As ex-registrar Paul Mahoney put it, it baked in “pro-government discretionary power,” letting nations tailor curbs to their “cultural quirks.”

The 1990 Gayssot Law cranked it up, tweaking the 1881 statute to ban Holocaust denial and downplaying it as pegged to Nuremberg’s 1945 verdicts, while arming “memory groups” such as the CRIF (Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions) with lawsuit muscle. This unleashed a flurry of “memory laws” under Socialist PM Lionel Jospin’s watch (1997–2002) and center-right governments under Jacques Chirac’s second term, etching state-approved history into code. One particularly odd example is the 2001 Armenian Genocide law, which contained a unique article: “France publicly recognizes the 1915 Armenian genocide.”

The same year, the socialist-led majority pushed through the Transatlantic Slave Trade Act, branding the Transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades as “crimes against humanity” and greenlighting anti-racism suits against people who would challenge that qualification. A few years later, Dominique Villepin’s center-right government championed the divisive 2005 Colonization Law, forcing schoolbooks to tout France’s “positive” colonial legacy.

Overnight, history became a minefield of enforceable dogma. The slave trade law’s debut snared historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, whose prizewinning Les Traites Négrières (The Slave Trades) landed in court for “downplaying” slavery — merely by questioning whether it really fit the international law definition of a genocide and for exploring the existence of the Arab and African slave trade.

Nuance blurred into negation, and the prosecutions piled up: Michel Houellebecq, Éric Zemmour, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Oriana Fallaci, Renaud Camus, Alain Finkielkraut: the list is long of prosecuted personalities. Sometimes they were even found guilty of negating or downplaying a crime against humanity, like Zemmour and Le Pen. A fresh outrage: French-Cameroonian Charles Onana and his publisher Damien Serieyx were nailed for Holocauste Congo: L’Omerta de la communauté internationale (Rwanda, the Truth About Operation Turquoise). They were found guilty of soft-pedaling the Rwandan genocide.

The Digital Turn: From Regulating the Digital Economy to Content Control (2000s–2010s)

As mass immigration vaulted to the voter forefront, when Jean-Marie Le Pen was invited to the presidential election runoff in 2002 or when the banlieues erupted into riots in 2005, the temptation to control all expression on the web became irresistible. Framed as digital housekeeping, these moves quietly snared political fringes and narrative challengers.

The 2004 Law for Confidence in the Digital Economy (LCEN) established a framework for platforms to manage illegal content and required them to process complaints. It introduced publisher-ID mandates, e-commerce guardrails, and opt-in spam blocks. Harmless on the surface? Hardly—the fine print primed surveillance via moderation mandates.

Then came the 2009 HADOPI law’s “three-strikes” rule, birthing the Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet (High Authority for the Publishing of Works of Art and Rights Protection on the Internet “HADOPI”) to protect copyrighted works from piracy. The law was challenged before the Constitutional Court, which held that only a court, not the HADOPI agency, could order an internet cutoff due to its impact on free expression. Ultimately, the “three strikes” rule proved, at the time, unworkable, and was replaced by a system of automatic fines, which was abandoned for a system of warnings. But the fox was in the henhouse. HADOPI worked as an enabler of the idea that online habits needed to be constantly monitored by State bureaucrats.

Just ahead of HADOPI, the interior ministry unveiled the Plateforme d’Harmonisation, d’Analyse, de Recoupement et d’Orientation des Signalements“PHAROS” (Platform for Harmonization, Analysis, Cross-Checking, and Orientation of Reports, in French), parked in the heart of state security, as a way to flag child porn. It slithered into flagging terror praise, race-baiting, slurs, and libel. Visit the site, and the banner screams Official Portal for Signaling Illicit Internet Content; it tells it like it is, a state-sanctioned snitch line.

Macron Era: ARCOM and the Onslaught Against “Fake News” (2017–Present)

Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 victory over Marine Le Pen turbocharged the urge to control, pivoting from infrastructure to ideology. Enter the Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Agency, or ARCOM (Autorité de Régulation de la Communication Audiovisuelle et Numérique), 2022’s mashup of the 1986-born Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel “CSA” (Audiovisual Superior Council). ARCOM regulates the audiovisual and digital sectors. It allocates frequencies to radio and television stations while imposing on them a very precise set of specifications.

It has the mission of ensuring respect for human dignity and journalistic ethics, and positions itself as the guarantor of pluralism in information, particularly by ensuring equitable speaking time for all political actors during election periods. Composed of nine members, it should, in theory, be an independent public authority, but its president is appointed by the President of the Republic, and its other members by the presidents of the National Assembly, the Senate, the Council of State, and the Cour de Cassation (France’s Supreme Court), for a single six-year term.

In the field of media and communications, Macron’s presidency could be labelled ARCOM’s mission creep. It started with the 2018 “fake news” law, which let ARCOM monitor foreign feeds in election times for disinformation, fast-tracking judges for 48-hour takedown calls. Does your platform reach over 5 million French eyeballs monthly? Then, you should be prepared to cough up report buttons, algorithmic peeks, yearly disinformation audits…or face the court.

Named after its originator, representative Laetitia Avia, the 2020 Avia Law aimed at combating hateful content on the internet. It considerably ramped up the heat. With its 24-hours removal mandates, the whole thing was so egregious that it was half-slashed by the Constitutional Council, but the pièce de resistance made it safely through the cracks, with the creation of ARCOM’s Online Hate Observatory for speech sweeps. It gave ARCOM a full license to scrub the internet for signs of wrongthink.

One of the most egregious battles of the Macron years has been the handling of channels owned by billionaire Vincent Bolloré’s Vivendi group, particularly C8 and CNews, amid accusations of inconsistent enforcement on pluralism and neutrality.

In July 2024, ARCOM denied renewal of C8’s terrestrial broadcasting license, citing repeated violations, including fake news, conspiracy theories, and failure to uphold pluralism, especially on ultra-popular Cyril Hanouna’s controversial talk show Touche pas à mon poste (Hand off my TV), which drew a record €3.5 million fine in 2023 for homophobic remarks. The Conseil d’Etat, France’s high administrative Court, upheld the decision in February 2025, leading to C8 ceasing broadcasts on February 28, 2025, after airing the anti-abortion film Unplanned. French conservative politicians, including Marine Le Pen, decried it as “censorship” and a threat to media pluralism, sparking protests and legal challenges.

In addition, Bolloré’s CNews, often likened to Fox News for its establishment conservativeness, was criticized for lacking editorial balance, allegedly amplifying “far-right” views on immigration, crime, and climate skepticism. In February 2024, the Conseil d’Etat ordered ARCOM to probe CNews for insufficient pluralism following a Reporters Without Borders (RSF) complaint labeling it “opinion media.” Following the probe, ARCOM issued fines, including €80,000 in July 2024 for unchallenged climate denial and biased migration coverage, and €200,000 earlier for incitement to hatred.

The European Straightjacket: DSA, EMFA, and Supranational Surveillance

EU regulations only sharpened the blade, which should not come as a surprise, considering that none other than Frenchman Thierry Breton was internal market commissioner at the time the EU decided to appoint itself as the police of the World Wide Web.

The infamous 2023 DSA blazes a censorship trail, cloaked as online safety with transparency, accountability, risk checks for all — from “mom-and-pops” to VLOPs like Meta or Google. It updates older rules like the e-Commerce Directive, requiring platforms to swiftly remove illegal content (e.g., hate speech, disinformation, or child exploitation material) and imposes many obligations on broadcasters, which are, of course, much easier to comply with for “lawyered up” large platforms than for small and medium enterprises. The sanctions can be stiff. For failing to censor “illegal content,” platforms can face fines of up to 6 percent of their global revenue and risk potential suspension.

One particularly problematic component of the DSA is the “Trusted Flaggers” framework under Article 22, which tasks independent organizations with “proven expertise in detecting illegal content,” such as NGOs, government bodies, and industry associations, with flagging disinformation content. These entities receive certification from national Digital Services Coordinators such as ARCOM and can flag suspect material directly to platforms, which must then prioritize and review these reports “expeditiously” (often within hours) without undue delays.

The European Union went even further recently by launching an authentic Ministry of Truth with the EMFA, a regulation adopted on April 11, 2024, and championed by staunch surveillance advocates like Sabine Verheyen (Germany), Geoffroy Didier (France), and Ramona Strugariu (Romania) from the European People’s Party (PPE) and allied groups. Presented as a safeguard for journalists, the EMFA establishes a centralized supranational control system over media services—from TV and podcasts to online press and small creators—via a pyramidal structure linking national regulators like France’s ARCOM to a new European Board for Media Services “EBMS” (not unlike the botched Disinformation Governance Board attempted by the Biden administration).

Replacing the European Regulators Group for Audiovisual Media Services (ERGA), the EBMS supervises markets, arbitrates disputes, and moderates content, with the European Commission wielding significant influence through its secretariat role and consultation powers. Article 4 ostensibly protects sources by banning forced disclosures or spyware but allows vague “overriding public interest” exceptions, potentially enabling urgent actions without prior judicial approval, thus undermining journalistic integrity under the guise of countering terrorism.

Further provisions institutionalize censorship and bias. Article 13 empowers the Board to restrict non-EU media for “geopolitical” reasons if two member states request it, while Article 17 coordinates bans on foreign outlets posing a “serious risk to public security” — notions critics call dangerously expandable. Article 18 creates a two-tier system, where only “reliable” (state-validated) media on platforms like social networks receive preferential treatment, erecting an official divide between “good” and “bad” journalism based on compliance criteria set by Brussels.

Article 22 shifts media merger oversight from national to EU level, citing “pluralism” risks ripe for ideological abuse. In essence, the EMFA moves the EU one step closer to Orwell’s 1984, mirroring the “Chat Control” surveillance law in building a “Western China”—a control apparatus expanding sector by sector under the banner of public good, eroding sovereignty and free expression.

Oligarchic Concentration and the Chilling Effect

Beyond laws that would make US Democrats salivate, French free voices must grapple with a media cartel gripped by state and tycoon tentacles.

A Dec. 2024 exposé by left-leaning publication Basta! showed that just four billionaires control 57% of all French television viewership; four control 93% of the newspapers, and three control 51% of syndicated radio market share: the main actors include “LVMH” Bernard Arnault (Les Échos, Le Parisien), “Free” Xavier Niel (Le Monde, L’Obs), “Altice” Patrick Drahi (Libération, i24), “Vivendi” Vincent Bolloré (Canal+, JDD, Europe 1) and “CMA-CGM” Rodolphe Saadé (BFM TV, RMC, La Provence, Corse Matin, La Tribune, now also click-monster Brut since sept. 2025). But Basta! misses the elephant in the room: the French State owns the juggernauts—France Télévision, Radio France, and France Média Monde (RFI, France 24).

Other significant media-owning oligarchs include fighter jets manufacturer Dassault (Le Figaro), construction, real estate, and media mogul Bouygues (TF1, LCI), German Family Mohn (M6, RTL), banker Mathieu Pigasse (ex-Le Monde with Niel; nabbed Les Inrockuptibles, Radio Nova), and Czech oligarch Daniel Křetínský (Elle, Marianne, brief Le Monde chunk).

This ownership web blurs real indies from faux. Brut is Saadé’s now, but it was kicked off by oligarchs Xavier Niel and François Pinault (Salma Hayek’s father-in-law). “Indie” hits like Hugo décrypte (3.5 million subscribers) are independent in name only, as highlighted by the fact that the channel had Macron coming to chat twice and hosted Volodymyr Zelensky for a sitdown. Never would such figures venture risk interviews if it was not a safe-center, stake-free forum.

The question is, what is the true litmus test for independence? In the current context, sanctions are a true indication. In other words, if a media outlet has not been debanked, hacked, shadow-banned, called a “Russian disinformation” outlet, and is not routinely called far-right or far-left, then you are in front of an independent media in name only.

Then true indies can wave more or less directly a partisan flag, like TV Liberté, with the Rassemblement National and Frontières with Zemmour’s Reconquête, while others are hazier, such as “sovereignist” Tocsin, co-founded by reporter Clémence Houdiakova and economist Guy de la Fortelle, investigative journalism Omerta, founded by war reporter Régis le Sommier, Yellow Vests-inspired Nicolas Vidal’s Putsch, and loose-left QG, founded by Aude Lancelin. There are also many YouTube channels with impressive audiences that are more or less a one-man band, such as Idriss Aberkane or Tatiana Ventôse, but little real podcasts.

France’s Independent Media’s Worst Enemy: The Captive Mind

One of the most striking contrasts between French and American independent media isn’t legal or financial—it’s cultural. While US powerhouses like Joe Rogan and Theo Von have forged bold, boundary-breaking formats that dwarf mainstream rivals in reach and relevance, their French equivalents often succumb to “model capture.” They end up shadowing the slick, establishment playbook, inviting inevitable—and unflattering—comparisons to their deeper-pocketed foes.

Though legacy media, like the 8:00 PM news hour, have fallen from their pedestal (TF1 news hour had 10 million viewers 15 years ago, now it has 5) and are less structural to shape the minds of the French people, they remain hegemonic. Sometimes, they actually reach more readers than in their heydays, as explained by TV Libertés reporter Edouard Chanot about Le Monde and Le Figaro in his book Brèches dans le Mainstream (Breaches in Mainstream). Though they are increasingly distrusted, French mainstream media like BFM TV and France Inter are less an object of ridicule than CNN or MSNBC, and they have less competition.

Consider indies like Tocsin, Frontières, or TV Libertés: they frequently ape the two-hour morning extravaganzas or crowded panel debates of legacy TV, even zeroing in on the same hot-button issues. For example, I often get requests of topics which come from what is covered by French mainstream media, on which I am asked to give my own alternative take, but I’m always surprised about how many essential topics concerning the US are simply unknown by my interlocutors at Tocsin (e.g. the clashes between the federal administration and democratic governors and mayors about ICE Raids, Irina Zaruska’s murder went almost unnoticed).

Indies aping mainstream models are successful at it, when we look at the impressive figures of Tocsin (450 K+ subscribers, 10 million views per month). These figures rival mainstream and sometimes even outshine them. But this format raises a fundamental question: Why pour resources into a model aping mainstream when audiences prefer something raw and revolutionary?

This imitation game is a big reason France hasn’t seen the explosive split that defines the American scene — where podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience, This Past Weekend, or The Tucker Carlson Show don’t just rival traditional media but eclipse them, attracting audiences with their unfiltered candor. Here, the chasm in credibility stems straight from the chasm in style, namely, long-form dialogue forces a level of raw honesty that is impossible to fake.

Rogan, Von, and Carlson embody this. Just try spinning falsehoods for three uninterrupted hours, and the facade crumbles every time. In an era of scripted officialdom, they aren’t just entertainers — they are the unvarnished cure. And they do not only focus on the running commentary of politics. When Theo Von casts a young Amish farmer for over 90 minutes, 4 million viewers tune in, more than 1 million more than when the guest was JD Vance. Most of Joe Rogan’s guests are stand-up comedians, fitness instructors, athletes, and entrepreneurs, often generating more views than when the guest is a politician or pundit.

Yet cultural hurdles run deeper. France lacks a thriving Substack culture, despite a budding wave of writers migrating there. Too few are able to channel the strategic flair of top American or British creators, who wield the platform as a fortress for direct, loyal readerships that bypasses gatekeepers entirely.

Adding insult to injury is the stubborn access gap; mainstream outlets still hold exclusive sway over the powerful. As a Le Figaro insider confided to Edouard Chanot, the conundrum independent media face is how to generate news while being far from the source. Without that insider pipeline, independents are left chasing echoes rather than breaking stories.

An Opportunity for US Free-Speech Diplomacy?

In his very important essay written just after Trump’s victory in November 2024, Substack author and now State Department Official Nathan Levin, aka N.S. Lyons articulated several actionable items if the incoming administration wants to “win bigly.” One of his most important recommendations concerned starving the managerial regime’s money by strangling its NGO Complex. Here’s what Lyons wrote:

“The first [recommendation] is to begin the offensive outside of government. Don’t forget that the managerial regime is much larger than the state! And much of the regime’s power is actually exercised through these other channels, not the state. Yet its non-state elements are also significantly reliant on government largesse and good will – of a kind that may be easier to disrupt than the administrative agencies themselves. These institutions include the universities […] and the mainstream media […] Most importantly though is the activist-NGO-foundation complex, which works tirelessly to fund and advance a vast array of left-managerial causes, undermine democracy, and crush dissent.”

Though we are now way past the US unipolar moment, the US remains THE global power, and they have at their helm probably the greatest political genius about mastering the tools of communication of his times to talk directly to the people. If the Trump administration takes seriously its MAGA mandate as refocusing the energies on the homeland’s health and not the unending expansion of its empire, it must restructure its global power projection to that end. In this respect, the very early days of the administration were full of promise with the revelation of what USAID truly was…an imperial tool of subjection of all the people on the planet, and not the do-gooder it pretended to be.

Free-speech diplomacy would, at the very least, dismantle the network of censorship and subjections which have been established outside of the borders of the United States with US funding lines. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, it becomes an absolute necessity for the protection of Americans from the unleashing of political violence.

The same forces, such as the Open Society Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Tides Foundation, which seed political violence on the US homeland, have many bases abroad…and they have a particularly welcoming haven in the technocratic paradise of Europe. Worse, these same forces can actually reorganize from their exile in Europe to strike the American homeland. One of the ways they can do so is by nurturing an alternative tradition of speech, one better adapted for controlled democracy. We were indeed very close to seeing that alternative tradition roll triumphantly on our land had the Democratic Party won the last presidential election.

If the US starts to view Europe, including Western Europe, as a potential destabilizing force for the homeland, like the Eastern bloc was during the Cold War, it also needs to help free forces there as it did then.

In this respect, France is an interesting test case because it is the cradle of this alternative tradition of speech, as highlighted in this piece, and there are many ways and many bargaining chips US free speech diplomacy has at its disposal to wage this fight on European shores. Besides, it is estimated that there are more than 200 million French speakers worldwide, mostly on the African continent, a land where enormous Chinese influence is not exactly promoting American-style free inquiry.

An obvious place to start is to give full transparency about US funding lines to the French censorship complex. The dark years since the US spearheaded the information wars during the Obama era are well documented in Jacob Siegel’s “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.” One particularly key information point is to reveal whether US money from USAID or the US Agency for Global Media has been flowing to French and European fact-checking organizations such as Conspiracy Watch, Les Déconspirateurs, Les Surligneurs, or media-integrated fact-checking entities such as Les Décodeurs (le Monde), Les Vérificateurs (TF1), etc.

We know full well that even oligarch-owned media groups like Le Monde or Altice receive generous subsidies from the French State. Thanks to the DOGE revelations, we know that the whole media landscape of places like Ukraine was completely fueled by US public money, so there is definitely more than a few hints that US funding lines exist to fund the European industrial censorship complex, and it is essential to expose these.

A complementary line in this battlefront is cultural. The very idea that there is an official version of history that can be imposed through statutory proclamations, judicial interpretation, and bureaucratic apparatuses must be put to rest. This idea has indeed exerted an unsound fascination on the US network of powers. From its university incubator, the very un-American idea of hate speech, which equates words and thoughts to action, has found a public in progressive circles and spread like wildfire into all the corners of corporate America and of government.

In this drama, legislative developments abroad, such as the Pleven and Gayssot Laws, may have been overlooked as remote experiments unthreatening to the US free-speech tradition. But these laws have created a dangerous precedent that has eroded the First Amendment free-speech conception worldwide. At least 21 countries have in their books hate speech laws and formal Holocaust and/or other genocides’ denial prohibitions. And they include common law countries such as Australia and Canada, which have become a vanguard nation in terms of hate speech repression.

Even socially conservative Poland has such laws. As these laws gain ground internationally, more and more voices in the United States look at them with envy, and one can only guess what catastrophic consequences formal hate speech laws would have in the identity politics US cauldron if the First Amendment were ever interpreted to allow for such content restrictions.

To loosen this historical noose, MAGA free-speech diplomacy could build cross-Atlantic cultural bridges, waving America’s First Amendment as the ultimate shield against enforced lore. In passing, this could actually lead the US to preach by example. No more temptation on the part of the MAGA majority to venture into the hate speech minefield, as Pam Bondi recently did, sparking backlash from the free speech right.

We could envision State Department fellowships shuttling French historians and reporters to free US forums for fear-free debate drills—then filing joint briefs in Strasbourg or UN reports to nudge the European Court of Human Rights off its “cultural” crutch, pushing a US-France “ideas marketplace” accord that swaps imposed consensus for open inquiry.

In the field of media, free-speech diplomacy should start outside of the US Government by promoting a wide awareness of what is happening to free voices in media. Maybe a first step would be to actually nurture free-speech watchdogs, keeping and publicizing a record of what kind of sanctions independent media face abroad. In this regard, maybe it is time for US Diplomacy to radically alter its policy toward formerly free and democratic European countries and revamp what was the US Agency for Global Media and its affiliates (Voice of America and Radio Free Europe) into a collaborative network with certifiably independent media around the world, with a pilot network with French independent media.

True Free-Speech diplomacy along these lines could flip this script by championing truly independent voices like Tocsin, TV Libertés, Frontières, and QG, among others, as censorship foes. It can host their creators at free media bashes in DC, syndicating their fire on US airwaves for global echo. The federal administration could also probe France’s disinformation walls as trade fouls via Section 301, bargaining independent exemptions, and grant visa havens for ARCOM targets to broadcast from American freedom zones, seeding a homegrown pushback against France and the EU’s mind guards.

As highlighted by JD Vance’s speech in Munich and Trump’s successes in his transactional relations with the EU highlighted by trade renegotiations, Europe’s strategic dependence upon the US opens many opportunities for free-speech diplomacy. The US could rely on a “Free Expression Transatlantic Alliance” with Hungary and Poland to link NATO cash to EMFA retreats. It can haul DSA/EMFA to WTO as US media trade blocks. It could hold old EU perks hostage until the Trusted Flaggers fold, it can bankroll French EBMS suits through US NGOs. It can pump “independence grants” to lifeline-debanked media groups like TV Liberté, forging indie pipelines.

A true US free speech diplomacy could also nurture a podcast insurgency by exporting the Rogan/Von/Carlson model to embattled Europe, sparking France’s media wildflowers. MAGA free-speech diplomacy could ignite a cultural renaissance by sponsoring “format bootcamps”—immersive workshops where French creators from Tocsin, QG, Frontières, or TV Libertés and others train under US podcasters in the vein of Rogan or Carlson, honing the art of marathon authenticity.

The US embassy in Paris could host “Truth Nights” to shatter the access barrier, linking dissident voices straight to influencers and elites, sidestepping the technocratic center’s velvet ropes. And by championing Substack as a tool of sovereignty, with tailored training on audience-building, America could equip French writers to erect direct-to-reader empires like Bari Weiss’ Free Press or virtuoso journalism like Matt Taibbi’s Racket News —making oligarchic overlords not just obsolete, but irrelevant.

Conclusion: Pluralism in the Shadow of Control — And a MAGA Blueprint for French Media Renewal

France’s tangled constraints – legal fortresses built upon hate speech, oligarchic webs choking diversity, and cultural echoes of the mainstream – enforce chase-supervised harmony over raw expression. ARCOM’s protection veil is a freeze-out machine. Memory edicts petrify the past; digital nets are to cyberspace what the Enclosures were to the Commons. Yet scrappy independents like Tocsin, TV Liberté, Frontières, and QG play David to the Goliath. What is the real fix? Torch Jacobin culture, scatter ownership, welcome wild debate. If nothing is done, the US will sit by helplessly, watching the Open Society and the Ford Foundations prepare the revenge of the forces of controlled democracy from their European rear bases.

That’s where Free-speech diplomacy can play a role. Washington can help birth a tougher French media web, lifting independent voices. Jumpstart with quick wins—expedited visas for hounded talents from TV Liberté, US-syndicated slots for Tocsin and Frontières, State blasts tagging ARCOM actions as First Amendment sins. Scale to big swings: Link NATO cash to EMFA retreats, seed a “Transatlantic Truth Fund” with €100 million for dogged indie podcast launches, host yearly summits plotting bulletproof tech with creators from these outlets.

By pitting America’s free-speech roar against Europe’s muffle, a First Amendment diplomacy would not just help France — it would spark a global revolution against officialdom. Media freedom isn’t bureaucrat-boxed; it’s people-powered. France, grab the line: Your Rogans are calling.