Before South African establishment media starts siding with the aggrieved European Union (EU) outraged by sanctions imposed by the United States (US) state department including the revocation of five visas or green cards previously belonging to five European and United Kingdom (UK) citizens, maybe first we should first hear the story of Freddie Sayers, the co-founder of unHerd.

unHerd is a moderately intellectual, largely normie opinion website that occasionally ventures into gender critical analysis, mostly composed by either Kathleen Stock, an academic, or Julie Bindel, a writer and campaigner, or Debbie Hayton, an actual transgender.

Around a year ago, Sayers starting seeing unHerd’s advertising revenue decline. Puzzled, he researched why he was meeting only between 2% and 6% of targets, and encountered a group called the Global Disinformation Index, or GDI.

Founded by a woman called Clare Melford, the GDI worked to construct an index of news websites it didn’t like, then went squealing to advertisers to avoid them. Melford had – without telling unHerd – noted a gender critical editorial position emerging, a pattern of scientific reviews (Stock), coupled with the views of a popular lesbian (Bindel) who wasn’t enjoying hard-won women’s rights tossed into the fire of the LGBTQI+ matrix. Advertisers, Sayers discovered, appeared genuinely terrified of Melford, or any other self-appointed, dark-money funded chaos pawns masquerading in the name of “fact-based information”, so had heeded her warning, leaving unHerd scrambling for cash from its funders to pay staff.

Like most men working in media in the UK – like most men in working authority in UK public life – Sayers is gay, and girlbosses like Melford, in my experience, tend to make light work of these guys. But Sayers, measured and gently defiant, decided to fight back a little by making a video explaining what had happened. All sorts of faux outrage erupted in the British Parliament, but nothing was actually done. Donald Trump’s State Department led by Marco Rubio on the other hand, decided enough was enough with the UK and the EU’s obsession with censorship.

Melford was one of the five individuals sanctioned. Another was Imran Ahmed.

Imran Ahmed

Ahmed’s influence extends into Downing Street, where his best friend Morgan McSweeney is Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Ahmed was exposed by South African investigative journalist Paul Holden in The Fraud, where the author explains how money that was raised by a shadowy group in Starmer’s party was used to censor views on both the right and the left. That money was never declared to the election commission, making it a criminal offence.

Ahmed is a hostile combatant whose smug bravado has won him legions of enemies. His NGO, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, the successor to his work with McSweeney in Labour, basically did what Melford’s GDI did, except he was more explicit, on one occasion articulating the group objective of “killing Musk’s Twitter”.

In interviews he is assertive and quick to try humiliate interlocutors for not subscribing to prestige beliefs – like transgender folk – with a level of acceptable reverence.

Thierry Breton & The Germans

Another is an infamous Frenchman, a former teacher called Thierry Breton who led legislation of the EU’s Digital Services Act, or DSA. Before Elon Musk interviewed Donald Trump in 2024, Breton sent Musk a preposterous – now infamous – note warning him about “disinformation”. Even the EU couldn’t excuse the blatant intimidation; some days after the note had circulated, the unelected institution subtly distanced itself from the letter’s content.

The final two names are German. Like Melford and Ahmed, Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of NGO HateAid censored views they didn’t like, specifically those belonging to the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a party that has already been documented by German intelligence as a threat to the country’s democracy. Germans are notoriously touchy about these sorts of things, so you can understand heightened caution, but the problem is enhanced by the fact that several AfD officials have already died (as yet no authoritative evidence has emerged that relates these deaths to politics).

Response

If you understand speech and the desire to control it, then you would note the timing of precise responses as positive indicators that censorship really does exist in Europe – basically, if you don’t practise censorship, then you don’t need or have the crisis mechanisms that channel deflection the moment you are accused of it.

In rapid succession premiers responded, then groups – all of whom are closely aligned to the EU. Another wave then emerged – this time of professionals, mostly tech, who wrote exhausting letters of how fed up they were with the US under Trump, and wished to enter any and all divorce proceedings as quickly as possible.

There were journalists, such as my former friend Nick Cohen of The Guardian, who lied about Ahmed. “All he was doing was expose how MAGA had bought off Silicon Valley and the tech oligarchs,” he opined disingenuously.

Fortunately, this performance – like all political theatre from all perspectives – doesn’t have agency on the contemporary attention span, so the issue is now almost dog-eared, and only has a few gasps left – one of which will be the South African media elite who’ve taken a few weeks off as instructed by their therapists.

The truth

Melford’s defenders claim that her work “defends democracy”, which is a regrettably stupid line poached from whichever Democratic Presidential candidate in whatever American election: “democracy is on the ballot”.

But since when did democracy include the spectacle of a woman censoring speech, then adding another feature to her own censorship paradigm that expressly stated her pursuit of “adversarial narratives”? That’s exactly what Melford did: anything she encountered that she felt in some way too confrontational, or too critical, or too off the beaten path of establishment norms, she reported, her work resulting in a few – most likely innocent – people losing their income.

These people are not defenders of democracy, or real journalists like Paul Holden, but agents of parameter enforcement to views that should – must – align with the likes of Keir Starmer’s, or Emmanuel Macron’s in France or Mark Carney’s in Canada. They are mostly damaged, socially awkward, or like Ahmed and Breton, intolerable personalities seeking meanings to their own existence by depriving others the parts that make theirs. They have no concept of justice, possibly on account of being overeducated, or not being challenged enough.

The Trump administration has its critics, and that’s fine, but what Rubio and his deputy Sara Rogers have done is a fine thing for a world increasingly maddened by unnatural barriers.

Not that this will impede the EU’s quest for facts-it-prefers information environments. In fact, it may lead to more investment in a censorship-by-stealth model where a person becomes unpersoned without knowing how or why – without any guidance as to what they’re done wrong, or how to atone.