Congress Challenges Censorship Czar

When an unelected Australian bureaucrat becomes a “direct threat” to the First Amendment of the United States, you know we’ve officially entered the era of the global nanny state.

Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s so-called “eSafety Commissioner,” has finally been summoned to explain herself before the United States Congress. About time. Because this censor-in-chief has been gallivanting across the globe peddling her Online Safety Act like it’s the Ten Commandments carved into an iPad.

Let’s call it what it is: digital authoritarianism wrapped in pastel PR and corporate doublespeak. This isn’t about keeping kids safe or removing violent content. It’s about power. The power to decide what you can say, see, and share, not just in Australia, but anywhere with a working internet connection.

That’s the real scandal.

The Americans get it. Congressman Jim Jordan, a staunch defender of free speech and close ally of Donald Trump, has had enough. He’s accused Inman Grant of being a “zealot for global takedowns,” someone who believes her jurisdiction extends beyond Bondi Beach to Boston, Baltimore, and the Bible Belt.

And he’s not wrong.

Just last year, she dragged X through the courts, demanding a global removal of footage related to a Sydney church stabbing. It wasn’t enough to block the content in Australia; she wanted it nuked from existence worldwide. Forget geo-blocking. Forget jurisdiction. Forget sovereignty. If she doesn’t like it, it has to go. That’s censorship with a passport.

This same commissioner has been busy racking up frequent flyer points, jetting to Stanford University, home base for some of the most influential censorship activists in the Western world. It was there, behind closed doors, that she delivered the keynote at a private roundtable alongside officials from the EU and Brazil, two jurisdictions infamous for demanding that American platforms censor content globally. And what bound these attendees together? A shared conviction that “misinformation” conveniently includes anything that challenges their politics or punctures their narratives.

Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, and particularly its Internet Observatory, has already been exposed by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee for helping shape the pressure campaign that pushed American tech companies to silence dissenting voices during the 2020 election. That’s the crowd Inman Grant chose to mingle with, and by all accounts, she blended in seamlessly.

The fact that her warm relationship with these censorship engineers is now part of a congressional investigation tells you just about all you need to know. Yet back home, our media and political class look the other way, terrified of acknowledging the authoritarian drift embedded in the very laws they champion. Australia’s establishment doesn’t want to confront the truth: their eSafety tsar has been collaborating with the intellectual architects of global speech control. And they’re perfectly fine with it.

In fact, the Albanese Government cheers Inman Grant on while preparing to ban under-16s from social media and resurrect its failed misinformation bill like Frankenstein’s monster of free speech suppression.

Make no mistake: this is not a partisan issue. It’s a civilisational one. Free speech is the foundation upon which all other freedoms are built. If the words you say, write, or read must first be approved by an unelected commissioner with a globalist agenda, then we’ve surrendered far more than just our privacy, we’ve handed over our sovereignty. Once bureaucrats start believing they have the moral right to silence voices within borders, let alone across borders, democracy begins to rot from the inside out.

Julie Inman Grant is not a true commissioner for safety. What she is, in truth, is an ideological crusader in a technocrat’s cloak, armed not with democratic accountability, but with bureaucratic overreach, Silicon Valley contacts, and the arrogance of someone who thinks she knows what’s best for the entire world.

If she has nothing to hide, she should testify before Congress. But something tells me she’ll find a reason not to. That’s how censorship cowards usually operate: always behind the scenes, never on the public stage.

Because sunlight, after all, is the best disinfectant. That's perhaps why Inman Grant constantly wants to pull the shades on everything.

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”
– H.L. Mencken