“Muzzled in Brussels: My Summer Internship with the Cabal”
by David Sedaris (kind of)
Let me be clear: I didn’t intend to join the global cabal. I thought I was signing up for a vegan cheese workshop in Brussels. The ad said something about “curating narratives and tofu.” But on the first day, they handed me a black hood, a copy of The Guardian, and a packet of Soros-branded almonds.
“Congratulations,” said the woman in the lizard mask, “you’ve been selected to help preserve the sanctity of European thought.”
Which, as it turns out, means deleting tweets.
My job was to patrol the Internet for people who used phrases like “I think for myself,” “wake up, sheeple,” or “why is this censored?” and then politely nudge them toward acceptable speech. We didn’t ban anyone — we simply “recontextualized” their opinions into curated feelings. For example, someone posted:
“The EU is a bloated technocratic nightmare run by unelected elites!”
We translated that to:
“I support a robust rules-based international order… and locally-sourced lentils.”
Mission accomplished.
But it wasn’t just about tweets. No, our office in Brussels — located three floors below an artisanal espresso bar called Deplatform & Sons — specialized in pre-emptive censorship. That is, we stopped free speech before it even happened. My supervisor, a man named François who only communicated via TED Talks, explained:
“If people say whatever they want, they might think whatever they want. That is very dangerous for democracy.”
I nodded. He had a point. After all, I had once expressed mild concern over the EU’s mandatory diversity drone surveillance program and had found my microwave locked by AI for three days. Try explaining that to your Tinder date.
But working with the cabal wasn’t all algorithmic repression and artisanal anxiety. There were perks! Every Friday, we held a Zoom seance with our media partners — a ritual called “Editorial Alignment.” CNN would chant “BREAKING,” the BBC would hum “BALANCE,” and Le Monde would sob quietly into a scarf. It was magical.
The highlight of my internship came when I was invited to help rebrand “freedom of speech” itself. The new EU directive said the phrase was “confusing to consumers.” Our final proposal was:
“State-sanctioned empathy optimization.”
It tested well among bureaucrats and people named Sven.
Still, I must confess that sometimes, late at night, I’d sneak onto a VPN and whisper forbidden thoughts into a sock:
“Maybe speech doesn’t need to be safe to be free.”
Then I’d quickly delete the thought and file a self-report with the Ministry of Feelings.
In the end, I left Brussels a changed man — not because I believed in censorship, but because I believed in censorship correctly.
If you’d like to apply to the cabal, just say “Misinformation” into your phone three times. They’ll know. They always know.
Here’s a satirical backstory that frames David Sedaris as the accidental chronicler of EU censorship and media absurdity — in line with the dry, neurotic tone that defines his writing:
Backstory: “David Sedaris and the Brussels Speech Police”
It all began, as most disasters in David Sedaris’s life do, with a poorly understood email and a flight he didn’t mean to book.
David had meant to sign up for a cheese-tasting workshop in the South of France. Instead, due to an autocorrect issue and a deeply misleading link in The New Yorker, he found himself registered for the “EU Strategic Narrative Cohesion Program”—a paid internship in Brussels, targeting “hostile thought formations.”
“I thought ‘narrative cohesion’ was a new dairy,” he said later. “You know, like oat milk but more European.”
Two days and one Ryanair seatbelt panic later, David was seated in a repurposed NATO bunker beneath an organic falafel shop, holding a company-issued iPad and asked to categorize tweets based on “irony threat level.” The categories ranged from “Satirical but Harmless” to “Potential Domestic Extremist, Probably German.”
He was particularly confused by the orientation manual, which included statements like:
- “Freedom of expression is a microaggression unless pre-approved.”
- “Humor must align with Article 13 of the Council Directive on Acceptable Feelings.”
To pass the time, David kept a diary, as he always does. He detailed the passive-aggressive HR memos (“Stop describing compliance officers as ‘joyless phantoms’”), the bureaucratic lingo (“optimize opinion elasticity”), and his growing suspicion that several of his coworkers were ChatGPT with fake mustaches.
He never meant to write a political piece. He just wanted to know why his computer froze every time he typed the word “sovereignty.”
And thus, from a bureaucratic misadventure came “Muzzled in Brussels: My Summer Internship with the Cabal.” Because if there’s one thing David Sedaris does better than describing the tragomic absurdities of everyday life, it’s surviving an overregulated cheese-free dystopia with a dry martini and a bitter laugh.
✌
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