From Jeff Childers

Politico ran a story yesterday headlined, “France extends detention of Telegram chief Pavel Durov.” Over the weekend, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was nabbed by French police when his private jet landed there to grab a quick espresso. Yet to be charged, media articles all suggest Pavel’s detention is related to Telegram’s failure to cooperate in stopping ‘criminal activity’ on the social media platform.

SHOW: Tucker Carlson interviews criminal mastermind Pavel Durov (58:28).

https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1780355490964283565?

CLIP: Pavel Durov tells Tucker about deep state efforts to bribe Telegram engineers (2:52).

https://x.com/ShadowofEzra/status/1827467035229745463?

Telegram advertises itself as a protected free speech platform with over 900 million users. It was created and is owned by Pavel Durov. Pavel was born in Russia, but fled to Dubai in 2014 after Russian efforts to control his first social media platform, described as a Russian ‘Facebook.’ I’d name it but I can’t do the dialect. Rhazhivashi-something.

Anyway, most people view Pavel’s detention (not arrest) as a kind of hostage scenario. If Telegram plays ball, Pavel’s problems will magically disappear! All the platform need do is build a few government backdoors into the Telegram system, for safety, not for monitoring and censoring citizens, no, never.

It’s unusual for a corporation’s CEO to be arrested for crimes committed by others. Media calls it “unprecedented.” We can compare Pavel’s predicament with Mark Zuckerberg’s. Zuckerberg learned how to play ball in 2020, generously donated to Democrats, and, despite originally warning employees not to take the jabs, hired a battalion of security-state drones and built the government its own misinformation portal page during the pandemic.

Zuckerberg has never been detained, not even for the child pornography rings running rampant on Facebook. Nor detained for anything else, since he’s a good little deep-state doggie.

Other corporate bigwigs evade prosecution even for crimes they commit themselves. Take the pharmaceutical industry, for example, whose executives escape detention even after pleading guilty to literally killing people through fraud, like opioid maker Purdue Pharma, which just paid a fine (using money collected from customers) to the government.

Maybe Telegram should hire pharma lawyers. In any event, the French can only legally hold Pavel for 96 hours without charging him. So we’ll see the government’s next move soon.

In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which was pretty much a ponderous, inky mess for a while. Still, governments spent centuries trying to rein it back in. For example, in 1662, Great Britain passed “An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses.”

The 1662 Act, which required citizens to purchase licenses to legally own and operate printing presses, was repeatedly extended and wasn’t repealed until 1863, even though it was initially supposed to be in effect for only two years.

The British government justified the 1662 Act by citing the circulation of disinformation that caused public panic and unrest (although they hadn’t yet invented that Orwellian term ‘disinformation’). You could quibble with comparing Telegram to the printing press, but you get the idea.

Was Pavel’s detention a genuine effort to protect the public, or a repeat of historical patterns where governments wield the power of arrest to shut down the free flow of information?