Musk vs Brussels: The battle over free Speech | MCC Brussels Podcast

This week, Jacob Reynolds is joined by Agnieszka Kolek and Richard Schenk to break down Brussels’ assault on X, Washington’s blunt verdict on Europe’s decline, and the Commission’s extraordinary pressure campaign against Belgium over frozen Russian assets.

Brussels fines X to tame the last free platform.
The Commission has slapped a €120 million penalty on Elon Musk’s platform, dressing it up as “transparency” enforcement. In reality, X is the only major network Brussels cannot control. It allows unfiltered footage, dissenting voices and inconvenient facts to circulate. So the EU is trying to discipline it through fines.

America calls Europe a civilisation in decline.
Washington’s new national security strategy says the quiet part out loud: Europe is losing confidence, population, and purpose. For all the EU’s grand rhetoric, the US sees a continent heading for demographic crisis and cultural fragmentation, while Central and Eastern Europe now look more stable than the West.

The battle over Belgium’s Russian assets turns surreal.
EU leaders insist Belgium must take on the entire financial risk of seizing frozen Russian funds to help Brussels fund the war in Ukraine. A liability no other member state is willing to share. When Belgian leaders object, they are smeared as “pro-Russian.” It is less strategy than headless panic. Brussels needs money for Ukraine, has none of its own, and is now bullying individual member states.

00:00 Intro: EU clampdown on X
05:10 Blue tick changes & raw news on X
09:40 Bluesky ‘safe space’ flop & free speech
12:50 Western values & leaderless Europe
17:38 Europe vs Russia: capability vs will
22:18 EU vs Belgium over frozen Russian assets

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