The EU’s Digital Gulag

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The EU’s Digital Gulag (or How to Catch Wild Hogs)

By Seth Hertlein, VP and Global Head of Policy at Ledger.

 

Good morning.

It is an honor to be here, to speak to a group whose very name—Patriots for Europe—invokes a deep and abiding commitment to the sovereignty, the culture, and above all, the freedom of its people.

I represent Ledger, a company dedicated to empowering individuals with the tools they need to take back control over their own digital and economic lives.

[HOLD UP LEDGER STAX] In short, we put freedom in your pocket.

But my personal motivation, and the reason I am here today, is simpler. It is to defend and expand the fundamental rights of the individual against the ceaseless, creeping, and accelerating encroachment of an overreaching state.

And what better place to deliver such a message than here in Brussels – the belly of the beast, the Leviathan – whose tentacles have pried and wormed their way into seemingly every aspect of the daily lives of European citizens . . . and now it’s starting to squeeze.

I am not here today to talk about mere policy adjustments. I am not even here to talk to you about crypto, although that will factor in.

I am here to talk to you about survival; about the future of liberty itself on this continent.

The Archipelago

Fifty two years ago, the world was given a book that tore open the façade of a monstrous ideology. That book was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.

It is not, as many believe, simply a history of prisons. Rather, it is the anatomy of a system. An organism. Solzhenitsyn describes it as a metastatic cancer, a network of “sewers” running beneath the grand, utopian façade of the Soviet Union, into which millions of its citizens were flushed.

The Gulag was not an accident of the Soviet state; it was its most perfect and necessary expression. It was the state’s primary organ of digestion, processing “human material” that the system, or its rulers, deemed undesirable, problematic, or simply . . . “un-managed.”

And how did one end up in this archipelago of ice and death? What were the great crimes that warranted ten years, twenty-five years, or all too often, a life sentence of hard labor?

It was terrifyingly simple. The system was codified in the infamous Article 58 of the criminal code. It had sections for “Treason,” “Armed Uprising,” and “Espionage.” But it also had sections for “Propaganda or agitation” against “the Soviet power” (section 58-10) and, most terrifyingly, “Any organizational activity directed to the preparation or commission of [such] crimes . . . as well as participation in any organization formed for the preparation or commission of one of [these] crimes” (section 58-11).

This was the Soviet “thought crime” statute, and it was a blank check for terror.

Solzhenitsyn tells their stories.

  • There was the engineer, an “Old Specialist,” who was denounced as a “wrecker” and arrested because a piece of factory machinery failed. He went to the Gulag for “sabotage.”
  • There was the plumber arrested for “terrorist activity” simply because he carried a set of tools in his bag near a government building.
  • There was the woman who, in a private letter to her husband, complained about the shortages in their town. She was arrested for “anti-Soviet agitation.”
  • There was the man who told a private joke about Stalin. Ten years.
  • There was the shopkeeper who wrapped a piece of fish in a newspaper that happened to contain a picture of Stalin. He was arrested for “counter-revolutionary propaganda.”

Does any of this sound familiar?

The Gulag was not built for murderers and thieves. It was built for plumbers and engineers, poets and farmers. It was built for anyone who knew the wrong person, said the wrong word, or thought the wrong thought.

But the machine could not run on terror alone. It needed a fuel. And that fuel was surveillance. The system sought to be omniscient (or as close to it as was possible at that time). It ran on the seksot, the “secret collaborator.” Neighbor reporting neighbor. Child reporting parent. The postman reading the postcard.

The goal was to atomize society. To destroy trust. To isolate every citizen, terrified of each other, capable of confiding in no one. The state, in its godlike ambition, sought to erase the very concept of a private sphere. This was a society where every citizen was both a prisoner and a guard, where the most dangerous crime was simply to have an independent thought.

We sit here today, in the comfort of this chamber, and we tell ourselves, “That was then. That was them. That could never happen here.”

But, we are wrong, and it already is.

The Digital Gulag

We are all familiar with the parable of the boiling frog. The one that says if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out. But if you place it in cool water and slowly, degree by degree, turn up the heat, the frog will sit passively, acclimate itself to the rising temperature – perhaps even enjoy it – until its organs fail and it boils to death, having never perceived the point of no return.

Distinguished members, advisors . . . the water is getting hot in Europe.

While we have busied ourselves and distracted ourselves with the conveniences of the modern age, a new and far more sophisticated system is being built all around us. A new archipelago of control is being assembled piece by piece, not with watchtowers and barbed wire, but with vast real-time data collection and predictive analytics linked to personal identities.

It is a new architecture of total, administrative control. It is the Digital Gulag.

The regime building it is not the overt, brutal socialism that Solzhenitsyn faced. This is something more subtle, and perhaps more insidious. This is the new oligarchy of managerialism.

As writers like James Burnham, Christopher Lasch and, more recently, N.S. Lyons have described, our new ruling class is not one of ideological zealots, but of credentialed so-called “experts.” A transnational professional class of technocratic managerial elites who believe, to their very core, that the common person—the demos—is, according to Woodrow Wilson, a “clumsy nuisance,” or, if you ask Hillary Clinton, a “basket of deplorables.” At best, we are a problem to be managed.

They do not see their subjects as citizens to be represented, much less, served. They see us more like livestock: a population to be administered; sheep to be shorn.

Their highest value is not freedom, which is messy and unpredictable. Nor is it democracy, despite their platitudes, for the same reason. Nor is it truth, because the truth has a knack for getting in the way of a well-planned agenda. No, their highest values are stability, because stability keeps them in power, and consensus, provided it is a consensus they define, but above all, compliance. A good subject, after all, is one who does what he’s told and doesn’t ask too many questions.

And to achieve this managed, sterile, “safe” society, they require the same fuel as the Soviets: total information.

Despite their exhortations, the managerial class despises democracy, because it is a threat to their unchallenged control. It is the un-managed, unpredictable, and authentic voice of the people – the demos. And so, to protect their system from the dangers of a fickle populace, they build fences.

The Fences Go Up

There is another parable I’d like to share with you: The parable of the wild hogs. It goes like this:

A professor asked a young exchange student, who had fought communists in his home country, “Do you know how to catch wild hogs?”

The student said, “Yes, of course. We all know it. First, you find a clearing in the woods and scatter some corn. When the hogs find the corn, they will come back again the next day to see if there is more. You keep scattering corn like this for several days.

Soon, you build one side of a fence near the corn. This frightens the hogs, so they watch it for a day or two, but while their hunger grows, their caution shrinks and soon they come back to eat the corn. Then you build a second side. The same thing happens, but now they’ve seen this before and they are more confident, so they come back sooner. And so you build the third side. By now, they depend on the corn, and they are used to the fence.

Finally, you build the fourth side with a gate in it. The hogs are now so used to the whole situation that they walk right in. After all, they’ve come here for weeks and nothing bad has happened to them. But this time, you slam the gate shut. They panic, they squeal, they run, but it is too late. They are caught.

But soon enough, they calm down and go back to eating the corn. They are by now so dependent on it, they have forgotten how to forage for themselves. They accept their captivity in exchange for the corn.”

Ladies and gentlemen, look at the “free corn” the EU is spreading. The corn of “convenience.” The corn of “safety.” The corn of “protecting the children.”

And look at the fences being built while we eat.

Fence One: The End of Private Thought

They call it the Child Sexual Abuse Materials Regulation. We call it “Chat Control.” But, what a noble cause? Who could be against protecting children? No one, of course. But therein lies the danger. They use this unassailable pretext to perpetrate a grave injustice.

The original proposal was blunt. Mandatory surveillance of all private communication. And when Europeans rightfully spoke out, the Commission and its supporters in the Council simply reframed. The new version is more subtle. In place of mandatory screening, it would place the burden on communication providers to “take all reasonable risk mitigation measures,” which it leaves to the Member States to define.

And, because a managerialist state must always grow, the Chat Control proposal calls for the establishment of a new “EU Centre on Child Sexual Abuse,” to serve as a central hub for spying on European citizens in the name of “protecting the children.”

In the digital age, end-to-end encrypted communication is the only truly private way for citizens to communicate with each other. And the chat control proposal remains squarely on the table.

Following closely behind Chat Control is the so-called “ProtectEU Roadmap.” Here again the Commission demands breaking encryption so that law enforcement can have what they call “lawful access to information.” These are top notch Orwellian euphemisms that actually mean the opposite of what they say.

The police, of course, already have lawful access to information. They can go to a court, swear out under oath the evidence they have against a suspect, and if it passes muster, a judge will issue a warrant. This legal process protects the rights of citizens who are, after all, innocent until proven guilty. But the Commission finds due process too tedious and time consuming. It wants information in real time and it doesn’t want to have to justify it. It also wants information not only on criminal suspects, but on everyone all the time. So, what it calls “lawful access to information” is actually unlawful access, or, more precisely, extra-legal access in that they want it outside of the law.

But make no mistake about what this so-called “lawful access” is. It is the Stasi opening your mail and staking out your home; the KGB tapping your phone and planting listening devices in your bedroom; a commissar in place of a priest in the other side of the confessional. The only difference today is how much easier it is.

[PULL OUT PHONE] We carry the listening devices around in our pockets . . . voluntarily! We put “smart” devices in our homes that are always listening. And it no longer takes one human agent to watch one citizen. AI agents and algorithms can digest whole populations’ worth of data in real time. The state wants nothing short of a key to every lock; a window into every mind.

And, what happens to a human soul when the state infiltrates the private sanctum of one’s own mind? Solzhenitsyn saw it. It creates a permanent chilling effect. You stop innovating. You stop questioning. You stop dissenting. You stop trusting your family, your friends. You self-censor. You become that atomized Soviet citizen, terrified that your private thoughts will be flagged by an algorithm and misinterpreted by a bureaucrat. In short, you lose your humanity. And this is but one side of the fence.

Fence Two: The End of Truth

The Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Media Freedom Act (more Orwellian naming there) are not policies for freedom; they are tools of narrative control.

The DSA’s Article 34 on “systemic risks” and Article 35 on “crisis response” are catchalls, just like the Soviet’s Article 58. They are blank checks for the Commission to define what is “disinformation,” “misinformation,” or “harmful speech,” as it sees fit, and then to muzzle it.

What is “misinformation”? It is any fact the managers do not want you to know.

What is “hate speech”? It is any opinion that challenges the managers’ agenda.

In Germany, we have already seen police raiding homes and making arrests for “hateful” online posts. A German was criminally investigated for calling a fat politician “fat.” A German rape victim was given a harsher sentence than her rapist because she called him a “pig” in a private, encrypted message! And, just last month, the Finnish Supreme Court heard arguments in a case going back six years in which a former Finnish MP was prosecuted for “hate speech” for posting Bible verses! This is the Digital Gulag’s Article 58-10. It is the criminalization of undesirable thought, enforced by the state’s monopoly on violence.

As a result, Europe now has the dubious distinction of being the world leader in speech-related arrests. Thousands of Europeans are jailed annually by the regime for tweets. Because of this, the UK and Germany now rank in the top ten globally for their numbers of political prisoners, outpacing even Russia and China. And, with new weapons like Chat Control and the ProtectEU Roadmap coming online, that number will only grow. Speech crime is only one step removed from thought crime.

But the end of truth has two phases. First, you must cut off the supply of truthful information, which you do through censorship and criminalization. And second, you must fill the resulting void with un-truth, or what is commonly called propaganda.

Just yesterday morning, I woke to news of the Commission’s new “European Democracy Shield,” which, at first glance, appears indistinguishable from Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. The Commission proposes to set up a new monitoring center, the “European Centre for Democratic Resilience” – a continent-wide censorship and propaganda machine of EU-funded “fact checkers” who will decide what information is “safe” for European eyes.

This would be on top of the DSA and the EU’s already extensive censorship, propaganda, and election manipulation apparatus, which includes such deceptively-named programs as the European External Action Service’s Rapid Alert System, the European Cooperation Network on Elections, the European Digital Media Observatory, the Media Resilience Programme, the CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values) programme, Creative Europe, and the Jean Monnet Initiative which together directly interfere in European elections while funneling billions in taxpayer money to a wide network of NGOs, think tanks, academia, the arts and culture, and the traditional media to promote EU narratives and suppress all others.

This is bad enough on its own, but when the state decides what is true, democracy itself is an illusion. Despite their constant prattle about “our democracy,” the EU elites have nothing but contempt for real democracy, because they have nothing but contempt for the demos – the people. Recent elections in Romania, Moldova, France and Germany are cases in point. European elections are only allowed to stand if the people make the “correct” choice – the EU-approved choice. If the people choose wrongly, the EU stands ready to nullify the outcome on whatever trumped up grounds they can think of – Russian interference has been a popular excuse of late – and to send the people back to the polls as many times as it takes for them to “get it right.” A disgraced former EU Commissioner even bragged about this, saying “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary.” In short, none of you are safe at the ballot box, and they want you to know it.

So, when a eurocrat speaks about protecting “our democracy,” understand what they’re actually saying. They’re not talking about honoring the will of the people – no, the “our” in the phrase “our democracy” is possessive. It literally refers to an owned, controlled democracy. A democracy that serves its owner. The question, then, is owned by whom? I suggest to you that it is owned by the people who can simply cancel election results they don’t like, or the people spending billions on the litany of programs I just mentioned that are designed to control the outcome. Control the outcome; control the demos: that is what “our democracy” means. This new “Democracy Shield” does not seek to protect democracy for the people; it aims to shield the state from democracy itself.

Fence Three: The End of Free Movement

The managers are building a world where you cannot move, speak, or even read without being logged. We see it in recent proposals in France and Spain to require government-issued identification to access the internet – once again, to protect the children. They want everyone to have to link to their official ID, held in their EU-issued digital wallet, of course, when logging on to the internet.

Starmer’s Digital ID plan in the UK is the leading example. If the British people allow it, by 2027 it will be compulsory for Brits to present their digital ID in their Gov.uk Wallet in order to work, obtain a place to live, or access public services, effectively transforming the rights to work and to provide oneself with shelter into privileges to be granted – or withheld – by the state. Digital ID is the modern equivalent of “Show us your papers!”

We also see it in the facial recognition and biometric scanning now required to board a plane and to enter or leave the Schengen Area. Soon that will be expanded to public transport and perhaps even buildings. This is how they will enforce their “15-minute cities.” Like those before the Berlin Wall fell, these new checkpoints, both physical and digital, will determine where you can go, what you can do, and what information you can access.

Marry these policies with recent technological advances and what do you get? Networked cameras in every public space equipped with AI-powered facial and gait recognition. Automated license plate readers. Drones. Matched against a real-time social credit database. This is neither hyperbolic nor hypothetical – it is already deployed in China – and the EU admires it greatly. Everywhere you go, you will be watched – and you will know that you are being watched.

Fence Four: The End of Private Property

This is the final and, perhaps, most terrifying section of the fence. It is the keystone of the entire structure. The state wants to control not just what you say, what you read, and where you go; they want to control what you can do with your own money.

The process takes three steps:

Step 1 – Phase out the private option: The EU has already banned large cash transactions. We can only expect the threshold of that ban to shrink ever smaller until cash itself disappears, forcing every citizen out of the physical, private world and into the digital, surveilled system – for our safety, of course.

Then comes Step 2 – Monitor the system: The new Transfer of Funds Regulation is a dragnet. It forces crypto asset service providers to collect and report personal data on every transaction, no matter how small. A related regulation created yet another new directorate, the AMLA or Anti-Money Laundering Authority, which will need to be staffed by more managers who will busy themselves coming up with new ways to monitor and control citizens and further entrench the power of the regime. For those of you keeping score, this is the third such new bureaucracy I’ve mentioned after the Chat Control Centre and the new Ministry of Truth.

I’d also like to introduce you to BORIS, the Beneficial Ownership Registers Interconnection System, which came into force in 2020. BORIS is an EU directive that mandates member states to maintain central registers of beneficial ownership information for companies and legal entities. But that wasn’t enough. In 2021, the EU commissioned a feasibility study for creating a European Asset Registry to catalog the belongings of European citizens. The list of asset types to be logged included, but was not limited to, real estate, bank accounts, securities, vehicles, works of art, precious metals, and cryptocurrencies. Both of these programs would be overseen by the AMLA. How much easier it would be to tax – or appropriate – property when you know exactly where it is and who owns it.

And, then there is the DAC8 directive, which creates a total, centralized reporting regime for all crypto-asset transactions, delivered straight to the tax authorities, even for transactions that involve no taxable event. Why, you ask, would a tax authority need to know about non-taxable transactions? Well, surveillance, of course. The state needs to know what you own and what you’re doing with it, probably for your own protection.

The EU brags about being a “regulatory superpower,” but Tacitus saw the truth of it some 2,000 years ago when he wrote: “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” What would he think about the EU?

And, finally, Step 3 – Seize the system: This is the gate in final section of fence. The Digital Euro. A Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC, is not just digital cash – the lie the ECB is so fond of peddling. Rather, it is the most powerful tool for human oppression yet devised by man. Let me say that again:  CBDC is the most powerful tool for human oppression yet devised by man. Why? Because it is programmable.

Programmable means self-enforcing. It is a tool of total, automated, algorithmic enforcement. Once the Digital Euro becomes mandatory, the gate in the fence will slam shut.

Imagine a world where your Digital Euros are frozen because your phone’s GPS data shows you attended a protest the government didn’t like. Imagine having your balance deducted because you posted a non-approved message on social media. Imagine your funds “expiring” if you don’t spend them in the time period dictated by the ECB, while other more “favored” people, migrants perhaps, receive bonus interest. Imagine being programmatically blocked from buying too much meat, or gasoline, or a book the state has deemed “misinformation,” or donating to a political party, like the Patriots, that is considered by the managers to be “extreme.” All these things and more are possible with a Digital Euro. A Digital Euro means the government can control on a terrifyingly granular level how much you are allowed to spend, on what, when, and where.

That is not a new form of bank account. It is a gun to your head.

The Davos set speaks in terms of a sort of neo-feudalism, where “you will own nothing, and be happy.” The overlords of this system will still own things – lots of things; very nice things – but the serfs won’t, and we’re supposed to be happy about it.

So, what will we have constructed with these four sections of fence?

We will have built an AI-powered panopticon. A system where everywhere you go, everything you do, everything you say, buy, read is known to the authorities in real-time, analyzed by algorithms, and logged forever…just in case.

A good mental model to use in evaluating any new EU proposal dealing with any of the topics I have just outlined is to ask yourself:  How would the Stasi have used this new technology or new legal power had it been available to them? The answer is very likely to be the same for the EU.

This is the system that seeks, in its managerial perfection, to eliminate the unpredictability of humans, which is to say, our freedom.

In 1946, Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain had descended across the Continent.”

Today, a new and more insidious curtain is descending. A Digital Iron Curtain—one that is built not just to keep people in, but to create a perfectly managed, perfectly surveilled, perfectly unfree population.

The Arsenal of Freedom

This is the test of our generation. As Ronald Reagan once warned, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Yes, the situation today is grave. But I don’t mean this to be a speech of despair. It is a speech of hopeful defiance. We know how this story ends. Authoritarianism always eventually fails because the repressive systems it must impose to cling to power run counter to human nature. The human spirit is born free; Liberty is its natural state. Therefore, we innately resist the yoke of tyranny. Just as an open hand can easily hold sand, the tighter you squeeze your fist, the more sand slips between your fingers.

For every tool of control in their Digital Gulag, a countervailing tool of liberty has emerged. Just as America’s Arsenal of Democracy once liberated Western Europe from the tyrants of the last century, internet cypherpunks and “shadowy super coders” are the technological freedom fighters building an Arsenal of Freedom to liberate Europe and the world from the tyrants of today.

The managerialists build their panopticon because they are afraid. They are afraid of you. They are afraid of a free, sovereign, and self-sufficient citizenry. This is why they squeeze. But, even when they squeeze – especially when they squeeze – these technologies give us the power to be free.

  • Against their surveillance we have end-to-end encrypted communication tools like Signal and Proton, and VPNs like Mullvad. These are the digital envelopes for our private thoughts, the safe rooms where we can speak our minds.
  • Against their censorship we have free speech social media platforms like X that cut through the groupthink of state propaganda and a coopted media. But even more powerfully, we now have decentralized protocols like NOSTR—”Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays.”

NOSTR is fully censorship resistant. It is not a platform you sign up for; it is a protocol, like email. No one can “deplatform” you from NOSTR, any more than they can deplatform you from the internet itself. Your identity is a cryptographic key that only you control. Your messages are passed through “relays” that are as dumb and neutral as the postman should be. It is the direct technological antidote to the DSA: uncensorable. It is the new Radio Free Europe, beaming truth over the Digital Iron Curtain.

  • And against their financial controls we have the most powerful tool of all: Bitcoin and self-custodial cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin is not, as its critics claim, a tool for criminals. It is a tool for humanity. It is the single greatest threat to the managerial state’s monopoly on control and the most powerful tool for individual liberty invented in our lifetime.

Why? Because bitcoin has five unique attributes:

1- Self-Custody: Unlike a bank account or a Digital Euro wallet, you can hold your assets yourself, in your own digital wallet that only you control, secured by a device like a Ledger. Coins in your custody cannot be seized or frozen without your consent. “Not your keys, not your coins” is not just a slogan; The Bitcoin Whitepaper is a Declaration of Financial Independence.

2 – Permissionless Access: You do not need to ask a bureaucrat for permission to join the network. You do not need to show your papers. If you have an internet connection, you can participate – whether the managers like it or not.

3 – Peer-to-Peer Transfers: You can send value to (and receive value from) anyone, anywhere on earth, at any time without a managerial middleman taking a cut, denying the transaction, or asking you “Why?”

4 – Anonymous, open-source code: Individuals and companies, no matter how strongly they cleave to their principles, can ultimately be coerced by governments. This is why anonymous open-source code like Bitcoin is the ultimate tool of freedom. Bitcoin’s immaculate conception is what keeps it safe. There is simply no one for them to threaten.

5 – Censorship Resistance: This is its genius. Because the network is so thoroughly decentralized, distributed across thousands of computers in every country on earth (and now even in space), no government can stop a valid transaction or cut off access to the code. Tick tock, next block.

Look at the Canadian truckers’ protest. With a few phone calls, a corrupt state froze the bank accounts of peaceful protesters simply for exercising their rights. It was quick, clean, managerial tyranny. But they could not freeze the truckers’ Bitcoin. The network does not care about politics – it exists beyond the state.

And this is why they hate it. This is why they pass things the TFR and DAC8 and MiCA 2 and whatever they are planning next.

Mussolini famously articulated the central tenet of modern managerial ideology: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” To a totalitarian, nothing can be permitted to exist outside the state. It is not because they are protecting you. It is because they are protecting their control over you.

You see, they understand a fundamental truth: Freedom anywhere is a threat to tyranny everywhere.

A single person who can transact freely with Bitcoin, a single person who can speak freely on NOSTR, a single person who can think freely behind the shield of encryption, is a living, breathing refutation of the state’s claim to total control.

They are a contagion of liberty. A light shining in the dark. They are proof that the fence has a hole, that the corn is a trap, and that foraging for oneself is still possible. This is why the state seeks to close every exit, plug every hole, and stamp out every spark of this Arsenal of Freedom.

A Call to Action

But this is where you come in. My message to you, the Patriots for Europe, is this:

The battle for the 21st century will be fought on this ground. The managerial elites of the old parties have finally exposed themselves. They are building the Digital Gulag in plain view now, and rushed, for all to see.

This is an opportunity for you. There is no champion for digital freedom and individual sovereignty left in Europe. That lane is wide open. And the people are hungry for it.

Look to the United States, where embracing cryptocurrency and the cause of economic freedom proved to be a massively successful political strategy for President Trump and the Republicans in 2024. Look at the UK, where Nigel Farage and the Reform Party are surging by promising to be the party of freedom against the managerial consensus.

This is your fight. This is your moment. This is your opportunity to prove you are, in fact, Patriots for Europe—not for the “Europe” of the Brussels bureaucracy, but for the people of Europe. I’ll offer three concrete things you can do:

1 – First, Get Your Own House in Order. Please forgive me, but I must be blunt here: Some Patriot-led member states have missed this moment. They have supported Chat Control in the Council. They have “gold-plated” MiCA at the national level, making it even more restrictive than Brussels demanded. There may be good reasons for this, but it goes against your principles. Go home to your national capitals and reverse these policies while there is still time. You must defend liberty at home first, before you can claim to fight for it here.

2 – Second, Be the Shield. In the European Parliament, you must be the wall against which these proposals break. Block Chat Control in all its forms. Defend encryption as a non-negotiable human right. Kill the Digital Euro before it is unleashed.

3 – And Third, Be the Sword. Slovakia passed a national supremacy law for cultural matters, declaring that their word, not Brussels’, reigns supreme. This is good, but it does not go far enough. All Patriot-led countries should replicate that, but apply it universally to protect the fundamental, God-given rights of your citizens. When Brussels passes a law that violates your people’s right to privacy, to free speech, or to private property . . . nullify it. National sovereignty and individual liberty go hand in hand.

And if nullification doesn’t work, then you must Exit. No trade block is worth the enslavement of your people. This, ultimately, is the path to freedom, because the mangers will never cede power voluntarily.

The managerialists in the Berlaymont are offering the people of Europe a bargain. They are offering the corn of safety and convenience in exchange for the fence of total control.

As patriots, we must stand and remind them of the words of Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

But I must warn you: this path is not an easy one. To be a patriot is to sacrifice. Thomas Jefferson reminds us that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Tyrants are not hard to find here in Brussels. Anyone who takes pleasure in exercising power over others can be a tyrant. But patriots – true patriots – are rare, because they must carry in their hearts the answer to this question:  What are you willing to sacrifice for freedom?

This conference asks, “Whose side are you on?” I hope you will join me on the side of liberty.

The wild hogs were trapped because they forgot how to be free.

The frog was boiled because it never realized it was in danger.

Soviet citizens went to the Gulag because they were paralyzed by fear.

We cannot afford to repeat these mistakes. We are men and women of a free continent, the heirs to a civilization that invented the concept of natural rights and the sovereign individual. The continent of Locke, Montesquieu, and Bastiat.

Yes, let us recognize the danger we are in. But let us also remember what freedom feels like. Let us reject the corn and break out of the fences.

Let us speak and hear the truth.

Let us tear down this Digital Iron Curtain. And let us never find ourselves in the Digital Gulag.

Thank you.

 

This is a transcript of the author’s speech at the conference on “Crypto, AI, Ethics: Whose Side Are You On?”, hosted by the Patriots for Europe Foundation in Brussels on 19 November 2025

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