Clara Chappaz is the minister delegate for Artificial Intelligence and the digital economy in the government of Emmanuel Macron. At the weekend she appeared on a television discussion entitled ‘Trump-Musk: Are we ready?’
Chappaz, 35, is very much a Macronist, an entrepreneur who did her MBA at Harvard Business School before launching a successful start-up.
French progressives are flexible in their approach to free speech. They’re all for it, as long as they agree with it
She expressed her growing concern about the direction certain social media platforms were headed, and the consequences for millions of French people who use them. ‘We have to make sure that wrong opinions are taken off the platforms,’ she declared.
The programme’s moderator interrupted and wondered what constituted a ‘wrong opinion’. A look of embarrassment swept the face of Chappaz. She had, of course, meant to say ‘wrong information’.
Chappaz’s faux pas occurred just days after Macron had warned France’s ambassadors about Elon Musk, declaring in an address: ‘Ten years ago, who could have imagined it if we had been told that the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support a new international reactionary movement.’
As I wrote for Coffee House, Musk is not the leader of an international reactionary movement, he is simply challenging the progressive orthodoxy that has prevailed in the West for much of this century. Their standard bearers despise him for it, and in France this hatred reveals how much Macron’s centrists have in common with the radical left.
They may differ economically – an entrepreneur like Chappaz isn’t going to have much in common with the communists in Jean-Luc Melenchon’s New Popular Front coalition – but socially there is little to separate them. They champion identity politics, they are in favour of free movement and they see no harm in censorship if it silences those opposed to progressivism.
It explains why Macron’s Renaissance party sided with Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise in last year’s parliamentary elections. They were willing to overlook the party’s growing anti-Semitism, which included praising Hamas as a resistance movement. These flaws were insignificant compared to those of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally; they are ‘far-right’, which really means they are opposed to progressive dogma.
A judge will decide in March whether to disqualify Le Pen from political life for up to five years. Her alleged crime is to have misused EU funds. She claims it is a political witch-hunt, which is an apt description for the manner in which Paris’s progressive elite are going after Musk.
Marine Tondelier, the leader of the Green party, has demanded that X/Twitter be ‘banned in Europe’ as it was a destabilising influence under Elon Musk. ‘We must act strongly to protect information on our territory,’ she said.
Her call-to-arms came a few days after she and her party had vowed – on a post on X – that they would ‘always be Charlie’, a reference to the staff of the satirical magazine who were murdered by Islamists ten years ago.
French progressives are flexible in their approach to free speech. They’re all for it, as long as they agree with it.
There have been other calls to quit or censor Musk’s platform from centrist and left-wing politicians. The leader of the Socialist party, Olivier Faure, said it should be a collective decision; ‘We should all leave X together, and not one after the other’.
Yaël Braun-Pivet, one of Macron’s most loyal lieutenants, and the president of the National Assembly, said in an interview that Europe should develop its own ‘sovereign social networks… governed by our rules and which we would control for our public debates.’
‘Control’ is the key word. Europe’s elite have lost control of the political narrative. In the first decade of this century there was no X, no podcasts and no ‘rogue’ television stations. It was easier for governments to control the discourse. This didn’t stop the emergence of anti-progressive (or ‘populist’) politicians but it was possible to starve them of oxygen.
When Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round of the French presidential election in 2002, for example, his opponent, the incumbent president Jacques Chirac, refused to appear in the traditional televised debate. ‘Faced with intolerance and hatred, no debate is possible,’ said Chirac.
Chirac was the president who in 2005 – supported by most of parliament – ignored the result of the referendum on the EU Constitution. So what if it had been rejected by 55 per cent of the population?
Two decades on and a large swathe of the Paris elite is as contemptuous of the proles as ever. They must be controlled, and corrected, so that in future they hold only the right opinions.
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