โœŒ”Muzzled in Brussels: My Summer Internship with the Cabal”by David Sedaris (kind of)๐Ÿ˜‰

“When EU Free Speech Gets Filtered: David Sedaris Discovers Even Sarcasm Needs a Permit Now.”

“Muzzled in Brussels: My Summer Internship with the Cabal”
by David Sedaris (kind of)

Let me be clear: I didnโ€™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.

โ€œCongratulations,โ€ said the woman in the lizard mask, โ€œyouโ€™ve been selected to help preserve the sanctity of European thought.โ€

Which, as it turns out, means deleting tweets.

My job was to patrol the Internet for people who used phrases like โ€œI think for myself,โ€ โ€œwake up, sheeple,โ€ or โ€œwhy is this censored?โ€ and then politely nudge them toward acceptable speech. We didnโ€™t ban anyone โ€” we simply โ€œrecontextualizedโ€ their opinions into curated feelings. For example, someone posted:

โ€œThe EU is a bloated technocratic nightmare run by unelected elites!โ€

We translated that to:

โ€œI support a robust rules-based international orderโ€ฆ and locally-sourced lentils.โ€

Mission accomplished.

But it wasnโ€™t just about tweets. No, our office in Brussels โ€” located three floors below an artisanal espresso bar called Deplatform & Sons โ€” specialized in pre-emptive censorship. That is, we stopped free speech before it even happened. My supervisor, a man named Franรงois who only communicated via TED Talks, explained:

โ€œIf people say whatever they want, they might think whatever they want. That is very dangerous for democracy.โ€

I nodded. He had a point. After all, I had once expressed mild concern over the EUโ€™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 wasnโ€™t all algorithmic repression and artisanal anxiety. There were perks! Every Friday, we held a Zoom seance with our media partners โ€” a ritual called โ€œEditorial Alignment.โ€ CNN would chant โ€œBREAKING,โ€ the BBC would hum โ€œBALANCE,โ€ 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 โ€œfreedom of speechโ€ itself. The new EU directive said the phrase was โ€œconfusing to consumers.โ€ Our final proposal was:

โ€œState-sanctioned empathy optimization.โ€

It tested well among bureaucrats and people named Sven.

Still, I must confess that sometimes, late at night, Iโ€™d sneak onto a VPN and whisper forbidden thoughts into a sock:

โ€œMaybe speech doesnโ€™t need to be safe to be free.โ€
Then Iโ€™d quickly delete the thought and file a self-report with the Ministry of Feelings.

In the end, I left Brussels a changed man โ€” not because I believed in censorship, but because I believed in censorship correctly.

If youโ€™d like to apply to the cabal, just say โ€œMisinformationโ€ into your phone three times. Theyโ€™ll know. They always know.

Hereโ€™s a satirical backstory that frames David Sedaris as the accidental chronicler of EU censorship and media absurdity โ€” in line with the dry, neurotic tone that defines his writing:


Backstory: โ€œDavid Sedaris and the Brussels Speech Policeโ€

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 โ€œEU Strategic Narrative Cohesion Programโ€โ€”a paid internship in Brussels, targeting โ€œhostile thought formations.โ€

โ€œI thought โ€˜narrative cohesionโ€™ was a new dairy,โ€ he said later. โ€œYou know, like oat milk but more European.โ€

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 โ€œirony threat level.โ€ The categories ranged from โ€œSatirical but Harmlessโ€ to โ€œPotential Domestic Extremist, Probably German.โ€

He was particularly confused by the orientation manual, which included statements like:

  • โ€œFreedom of expression is a microaggression unless pre-approved.โ€
  • โ€œHumor must align with Article 13 of the Council Directive on Acceptable Feelings.โ€

To pass the time, David kept a diary, as he always does. He detailed the passive-aggressive HR memos (โ€œStop describing compliance officers as โ€˜joyless phantomsโ€™โ€), the bureaucratic lingo (โ€œoptimize opinion elasticityโ€), 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 โ€œsovereignty.โ€

And thus, from a bureaucratic misadventure came โ€œMuzzled in Brussels: My Summer Internship with the Cabal.โ€ Because if there’s one thing David Sedaris does better than describing the tragomic absurdities of everyday life, itโ€™s surviving an overregulated cheese-free dystopia with a dry martini and a bitter laugh.


โœŒ


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