
“Muzzled in Brussels: My Summer Internship with the Cabal”
by David Sedaris (kind of)
Let me be clear: I didnโt 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.
โCongratulations,โ said the woman in the lizard mask, โyouโve 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 โI think for myself,โ โwake up, sheeple,โ or โwhy is this censored?โ and then politely nudge them toward acceptable speech. We didnโt ban anyone โ we simply โrecontextualizedโ their opinions into curated feelings. For example, someone posted:
โThe EU is a bloated technocratic nightmare run by unelected elites!โ
We translated that to:
โI support a robust rules-based international orderโฆ and locally-sourced lentils.โ
Mission accomplished.
But it wasnโt 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:
โIf 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 EUโs 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 wasnโt all algorithmic repression and artisanal anxiety. There were perks! Every Friday, we held a Zoom seance with our media partners โ a ritual called โEditorial Alignment.โ CNN would chant โBREAKING,โ the BBC would hum โBALANCE,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 โfreedom of speechโ itself. The new EU directive said the phrase was โconfusing to consumers.โ Our final proposal was:
โState-sanctioned empathy optimization.โ
It tested well among bureaucrats and people named Sven.
Still, I must confess that sometimes, late at night, Iโd sneak onto a VPN and whisper forbidden thoughts into a sock:
โMaybe speech doesnโt need to be safe to be free.โ
Then Iโd 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 youโd like to apply to the cabal, just say โMisinformationโ into your phone three times. Theyโll know. They always know.
Hereโs 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: โDavid 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 โEU Strategic Narrative Cohesion Programโโa paid internship in Brussels, targeting โhostile thought formations.โ
โI thought โnarrative cohesionโ was a new dairy,โ he said later. โYou 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 โirony threat level.โ The categories ranged from โSatirical but Harmlessโ to โPotential Domestic Extremist, Probably German.โ
He was particularly confused by the orientation manual, which included statements like:
- โFreedom of expression is a microaggression unless pre-approved.โ
- โHumor 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 (โStop describing compliance officers as โjoyless phantomsโโ), the bureaucratic lingo (โoptimize 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 โsovereignty.โ
And thus, from a bureaucratic misadventure came โMuzzled 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, itโs surviving an overregulated cheese-free dystopia with a dry martini and a bitter laugh.
โ
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