Tesla chief Elon Musk has called for the abolition of the European Union as a political entity and a return of national sovereignty to the continent in the wake of Brussels announcing a $140 million fine against his X social media platform for supposedly violating the bloc’s censorship law.
“The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people,” Musk wrote on his X account on Saturday morning.
It came after the unelected European Commission imposed a €120 million ($140 million) fine on X on Friday for allegedly breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA), the overarching censorship law crafted by Eurocrats in Brussels which seeks to prohibit the proliferation of content deemed to be hateful, disinformation, or harmful to “civic discourse” in Europe.
The bloc has long been at odds with X since Elon Musk took over the social media platform in 2022, even going to so far as to publicly warn Musk about conducting a live interview with then candidate Donald Trump ahead of last year’s presidential election.
The decision to fine X looks to further sour relations between Washington and Brussels, with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio writing: “The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.
“The days of censoring Americans online are over.”
Meanwhile, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau noted that the United States uses its military might to protect the “very countries attacking us” through the European Union.
“The nations of Europe cannot look to the US for their own security at the same time they affirmatively undermine the security of the US itself through the (unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative) EU. This fine is just the tip of the iceberg,” Landau said.
The senior diplomat said that the United States has “long failed to address the glaring inconsistency between its relations with NATO and the EU,” arguing that the same countries will argue for deeper Transatlantic ties when discussing NATO military matters only to turn around and advocate against American interests when they “wear their EU hats”.
Landau said that “they pursue all sorts of agendas that are often utterly adverse to US interests and security—including censorship, economic suicide/climate fanaticism, open borders, disdain for national sovereignty/promotion of multilateral governance and taxation, support for Communist Cuba, etc etc.”
“This inconsistency cannot continue. Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not. But we cannot pretend that we are partners while those nations allow the EU’s unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels to pursue policies of civilizational suicide.”
It comes as President Donald Trump warned that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure” through its globalist policies of open borders, censorship, and suppression of political opposition via transnational organisations like the EU.
In the latest U.S. National Security Strategy document, the Trump administration warned that the “continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less” if such policies are not reversed. The White House therefore said that it supports “the growing influence of patriotic European parties” to revive the “individual character” of European nations.
The bluntness of the document apparently riled some feathers across the Atlantic, with German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul saying that Europe does “not need outside advice” in terms of freedom of expression or democratic standards. Germany, which has long relied on the United States for its national security, has come under fire from the Trump administration for its frequent arrests of citizens for posts made on social media.
