Mike Benz

Elon Musk got fined $140 million, X did, for basically defying the EU Digital Censorship Act's requirements to allow them to police narratives that are available to users on X. Well, the National Endowment for Democracy was one of the significant forces behind the EU Digital Censorship Act.

I just posted on my X feed a planning, coordinating Zoom call they all had about this, about how to use the EU Digital Censorship Act to put huge fines on X in order to force them to give the old jobs back to the trust and safety team that Elon fired.

I mean, this is as close to treason as you can argue in a civil case using a foreign country censorship law.

Let me touch on that first and then I'll connect it to Ned.

So first, this is unsurprising when I read that reporting from Gabe Kaminsky.

That is consistent with sort of what I expected.

There is a bipartisan

unspoken social contract, if you will.

It was violated in the past through things like Arctic Frost and the mass investigation of right-wing NGOs, if you will, right-wing nonprofits like the Heritage

Foundation and the Conservative Institute, Conservative Partnership Institute and the like by the FBI.

Obviously there's the famous Lois Lerner IRS scandal targeting the Tea Party affiliated nonprofits.

But given that that's kind of a nuclear weapon, if the other party takes power, I had been watching with some eagerness to see how exactly the second Trump administration would navigate that.

The fact is, is the political left does have a much vaster NGO ecosystem than the right, but the rights are still

a significant and very, very powerful pillar of everything from thought leadership to funding to all manner of kind of

the political soup that goes into running an administration and putting out a campaign.

Even though these things are not supposed to operate like that, they not only do on both sides, but neither party is particularly shy about blurring the lines there.

But the fact is, what I read in that reporting

to me is also kind of the logic that gets into the lawfare issue.

I don't know whether the reticence to pull the trigger on prosecutions of very high profile

outright criminal actors in the Democrat Party is because of a fear of retribution by Democrats that if you go hard on them, they'll go hard on you when they get into power.