Pavel Durov, the creator and CEO of Telegram, was arrested in France on Saturday, August 24th in Paris, on the presumptions “surrounding his alleged failure to sufficiently limit criminal activity on Telegram.”

Telegram has 900 million users, and the reason it has such a following is because it is a free speech platform on a worldwide scale. Russians use it, Ukrainians use it, Democrats use it, Republicans use it… Its high level of personal security allows one of the most open forums on the whole internet, where anyone may say pretty much anything he wishes about any topic and not be canceled or caught…

Until now, if the “People in Charge” have their way.

Now, I do not personally want to get into who these “People in Charge” are, but they are revealing themselves, or at least their proxies. Retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a “Ukraine is always right, Russia is always wrong… and so is Trump…” flunkie, one of the guys who was a key witness in an impeachment trial against President Trump, is apparently ballsy enough to threaten Elon Musk with jail.

However, in Vindman’s woke splutter, he said one of the absurdly hilarious statements I have ever seen quoted in mainstream media news. Fox News reported that he literally said this:

“Free speech absolutist weirdos”??

Coming from a supposedly upstanding honorable military man, for the United States of America? Whatever happened to “The land of the free and the home of the brave“?

And yet, as we have seen over the last several years, the whole notion of free speech has been relentlessly squashed unless that “free speech” is adoring any sort of liberal perversion: “Pot never killed anyone”; “Drag queen story hour for your kids”; “Trump is a Putin stooge”; “Zelensky is a saint”; “J.D. Vance is weird”, and the amazing ability of such claims to run rampant through the blogosphere and the mainstream press is quite at odds with things like “Living a Christian life.”

(For that matter, we don’t hear that much about living a tradition Muslim life or even a tradition Jewish life either, not when we mean that aspect of these people simply trying to follow God as they understand Him – NOTE: I do not mean jihadists or the people who claim Judaism while practicing its diametrically opposed opposite – go see Davos, folks…)

A lot of Telegram indeed has some pretty harsh content. But the need thing about this free speech platform is that one only sees what one WANTS to see. I do not get advertisement “reels” for pornography like I get on Facebook / Meta nowadays, (I cannot have Facebook open safely around my children), I do not get horrifically abhorrent video game ads, or cannabis-promotion, I don’t see the true weirdos at play on Telegram… unless I really want to.

Telegram is one of the best sources for real on-the-ground accounts of the Special Military Operation Russia is conducting against Ukraine’s IZAN government. Both sides use it extensively, and they make their PR and propaganda plays, as would be expected, but they also report a lot of factually real information that helps us understand the progress of that war. This is repeated in countless ways with countless situations.

Orthodox Christians and I am sure, Christians of other confessions, have a lot of safety in Telegram, free to discuss things with one another via text, post, phone call or video live chats, and unlike its US competitors like Facebook, Instagram and all things META, with present exception of WhatsApp for the most part (to be fair), those Christians do not have bots mocking them, provoking arguments and infighting among people who should be loving one another as they love Christ.

I can go on, but the point is that Pavel’s arrest for supporting free speech (which means free: good, bad or indifferent) is meant to scare all of us who rely on alternative media for real honest communication.

We must not let them intimidate us.