The Trump administration has issued an export ban on Anthropic’s two most advanced models — Fable 5 (the safety-bridled, guardrail-laden public version of Mythos 5) and Mythos 5 itself — barring all foreign nationals from access, including those on US soil. The catch: one of Anthropic’s chief scientists, Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI co-founder, Tesla alumnus, and the man responsible for pre-training — the single most critical phase in model development) is not an American citizen and can no longer, in theory, work on the very models he helps build.

Doesn’t this ring a bell? Remember Apple’s PowerPC M4 chip in 1999, or PGP encryption in 1991 — both banned from export on grounds of national security that were, to put it plainly, idiotic? Donald Trump’s decision — in which Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO and one of Anthropic’s principal shareholders, whose company counts Anthropic as its biggest AWS AI client, representing 80% of its backlog, is said to have played a significant role — will have catastrophic consequences that will accelerate the implosion of the bubble. China is rubbing its hands together, as we reported as early as January 2025.

Faced with the export ban targeting Fable 5 and Mythos 5, Anthropic's latest flagship models, a holy terror has seized France's political and media class, which promptly broke into its customary chorus: sovereignty — European sovereignty, naturally, a phrase that means approximately nothing —, the geopoliticisation of AI, technological warfare. Given the depth of knowledge and understanding these people actually bring to the subject, we might as well be taking tech policy advice from the Simpsons' Mayor Quimby

The tech-brained simpletons, meanwhile, are rolling on the floor, weeping and tearing their hair out — already traumatised by Apple's suspension of Siri in Europe, without which they cannot figure out how to order their sushi and their artisanal sourdough.

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Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky delivers a damning verdict.

What the hell happened? Hypernormalisation, as Adam Curtis lays bare in his seminal documentary?

The term was borrowed from Soviet scholar Alexei Yurchak, who used it to describe late Soviet society: everyone — citizens and officials alike — knew the system was broken, dysfunctional, and built on lies, yet everyone kept performing as though it worked. Not out of genuine belief, but because no alternative was imaginable - which did not mean that one did not exist. The collective pretence became the social glue.

It is striking how those who claim to offer an alternative to globalism, Europeanism, and progressivism operate with the same mindset, the same intellectual framework, the same reflexes, and exhibit the same behaviours as those they purport to fight. Pure mirror play: oppositions only oppose each other symmetrically. No one has an angle. The reflection plane - the script - never changes.

Hypernormalisation.

Take the victimhood reflex — that insufferable posture. While progressives cry discrimination on grounds of gender, colour, or sexual orientation to demonise their opponents, “conservatives” — let us call them that, for want of a better generic term — have simply swapped it out for the censorship they claim to suffer on account of their ideas.

We are not saying this is entirely without ground. Discrimination exists. So does censorship. But not in the structural, all-pervasive way we are meant to believe — a convenient fiction that allows each camp to monopolise suffering, dodge accountability, and blame for their failures external forces they claim are beyond their control.

Progressive climate alarmism failing to land with the public? Blame social media for platforming sceptics. Eighty percent of French people opposing uncontrolled immigration? Blame social media for reflecting that majority view. Conservatives losing elections? Social media censorship, obviously.

Nobody stops to ask whether their message actually resonates with public opinion — shaped by lived reality, not by media — and subsequently whether their actions match their words.

Take La France Insoumise, the French radical left-wing party that has loudly demanded Macron’s departure since 2017, yet helped elect him twice (2017 and 2022), then squandered the 2024 legislative opening to give him the boot by engineering the election of 159 Macronist MPs in the second round — all to fend off a thouroughly fictitious fascism. The National Rally did no better, twice abstaining on no-confidence motions that would have cornered Macron into either a new parliamentary recall or resignation. That is the reality of what these two parties actually do. The script never changes.

But back to censorship. The grievance has become so lucrative it now functions as a fully-fledged business model for certain French alternative media outlets — outlets with no qualms about burning the bulk of their audience’s donations on washed-up, irrelevant boomer commentators who’ve been around for fifty years, bellowing into microphones and contributing close to nothing to public debate.

Indeed, at the height of woke capture, employees at certain platforms — Twitter and Meta in particular — did exercise censorship, because they were allowed to. Yes, during Covid, any criticism of government policy was systematically suppressed, and those same governments seized the moment to try to silence political opponents.

The platforms, however, quickly grasped the commercial damage. A social network only works when all opinions present in society are fairly represented. Anything less means haemorrhaging users, advertising revenue, and data.

Today in Europe, extra-judicial censorship is virtually non-existent. Contrary to what both progressives and conservatives insist, the Digital Services Act is a comprehensive failure as a speech-control instrument — because it is simply unenforceable. Not our claim, but the assessment of sources inside the regulatory apparatus itself: Digital Services Coordinators, the European Commission, and judicial institutions.

Take X. The €140 million fine handed down by the Commission is being challenged in court — the CJEU will decide, not the Commission. Don’t hold your breath: It’ll take years before the first ruling. The DSA is so toothless that the French government has resorted to weaponising criminal justice through asymmetric prosecutions - possibly unlawful ones, since the charges brought against X could equally apply to every other platform, none of which are being prosecuted.

Not everything in the DSA is without merit, it should be said. For instance, it explicitly stipulates that providing a digital intermediation service guaranteeing encrypted communications and user anonymity cannot be deemed illegal or criminal, unless the service was designed specifically to support criminal activities.

As for state-approved trusted flaggers, a senior executive at a major platform was refreshingly blunt when we spoke with him: “Trusted flaggers get priority processing. We respond to them first — and in the majority of cases, we flip them the bird. Meanwhile, these NGOs can no longer sue us the way they used to. We couldn’t be happier.”

It is also worth recalling that last year in July, within sixteen days, the Paris judiciary tribunal handed down three landmark rulings with regards to DSA implementation, stating: that freedom of expression is the rule, not the exception; that it can only be restricted in cases of manifestly unlawful speech supported by concrete evidence; that subjective opinions cannot be censored; that freedom of expression and the right to information take precedence over the right to oblivion; and that anonymous speech is not in itself unlawful.

Anyone familiar with the chronic backlog of French courts knows this was no coincidence. It was a message from the judiciary: it will not tolerate having its monopoly over the control of the exercice of freedoms encroached upon.

We are not arguing that the censorship impulse should not be fought tooth and nail — freedom of expression is the bedrock of any democracy. What we are claiming is that every party that reaches power will, all things being equal, behave exactly like those already there, in order to stay there. One would have to be profoundly naive to believe that La France Insoumise or the National Rally, once in office, would not reach for state power to silence critics and opponents. They will be no better on freedom of expression than the centrist bloc.

Donald Trump was elected twice because his message was in tune with public opinion, against the establishment. During his first term, he proved incapable of delivery, unable to overcome the machinations of the deep state and the mainstream media. Elected a second time on the back of the Biden disaster, he promptly did the opposite of what he was elected for.

Hypernormalisation.

Today’s politicians are professional talking heads congenitally incapable of action — and it is on this basis that political personnel are selected, across all parties. Because they have nothing but words, because they are genuinely convinced that speaking is acting — which speaks volumes about their magical, infantile thinking — they will never stop trying to control speech by every means available, including censorship.

Let us close with elections — which in European countries, unlike the United States, are extremely difficult to rig, since voting requires ID and is conducted overwhelmingly on paper ballots, one race at a time.

It took intervention by the French senior judiciary in 2017 to sideline François Fillon so that Macron could clear the first round and ultimately win. In Romania, foreign pressure strong-armed the Constitutional Court into annulling the entire 2024 presidential process — just one week after it had validated first-round results in which Călin Georgescu had come first. In Hungary, Peter Magyar’s victory is explained primarily by Orbán’s fatigue after sixteen uninterrupted years in power, compounded by Brussels’ structural funds blackmail — without which virtually every country in Central and Eastern Europe would be in default.

Spending billions funding NGOs and media outlets to control political discourse has proven ineffective. So has platform regulation.

Which means that in France or Germany next year, attempting to cancel an election on grounds of foreign interference will not fly — neither legally nor in public opinion — given that we now have concrete proof that media and social networks lack sufficient influence to meaningfully compromise the integrity of a vote. And it does not look like the French judiciary will intervene, with a view to remain unscathed and preserve its prerogatives in case of an alternation.

Those in power have run out of solutions. The problem is that those hoping to replace them have none either.

Hypernormalisation.

Athanasios Rantos, Prosecutor General at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), has delivered his opinion in a key case concerning public access to Covid-19 vaccine procurement contracts. He has recommended that the Court uphold the EU General Court’s July 2024 rulings, which sided against the European Commission on transparency issues.

During the pandemic, the Commission negotiated multi-billion-euro contracts on behalf of EU member states with pharmaceutical companies including Pfizer and BioNTech. When MEPs and citizens requested access to the documents, the Commission released heavily redacted versions. It withheld, among other details, the names of the negotiators — information needed to check for potential conflicts of interest — and the pharmaceutical companies’ liability and indemnification clauses, citing privacy and commercial confidentiality.

As the ECJ typically follows the Advocate General’s opinions in most cases, the Commission appears headed for a formal rebuke. Brussels will likely be required to improve transparency and grant better public access to official documents. It may even have to publish less-redacted versions of the contracts to comply with the judgment.

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Apple is, technologically speaking, one colossal scam. It always has been.

Steve Jobs quite literally stole the concept of the mouse and graphical user interface after glimpsing a prototype during a visit to Xerox PARC, the R&D center of Rank Xerox. MacOS? It’s nothing more than a dressed-up version of UNIX (open source) built on a foundation called “Darwin.”

iOS — the operating system powering iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and the rest of the shiny menagerie — is equally Unix-based, except Apple has buried it under such a mountain of restrictions that it functions as a fully proprietary, locked-down system designed for one purpose above all else: total control. Control over app certification, control over app distribution, control over you.

How convenient. What a racket. Developers get to pay through the nose for access to the development toolkit, the APIs, and the privilege of selling their apps — apps that must, naturally, be signed with an Apple certificate. And Apple, ever the gracious host, helps itself to a tidy commission on every app sale. The device you handed over your hard-earned cash for? It’s yours in name only. You can’t actually do what you want with it.

Google pulled the exact same trick with Android — a Linux distribution dressed up with proprietary add-ons courtesy of the Palo Alto giant. The key difference, at least, is that Android remains open source, which curtails some abuses — as we’ll examine further on in this article.

The latest drama in this ongoing saga: Apple’s decision to withhold its AI Siri features from iOS in the EU. That’s not about the EU’s Digital Market Act. That’s about over 25 years of anti-trust and competition case law, on both sides of the Atlantic.

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The European digital wallet is shaping up to be deeply problematic. The Commission is pushing it through for political reasons while backing a technical solution that is, in practice, wholly dependent on Google and Apple.

And this is not a fringe view — it is the considered assessment of every prominent cryptographer, security specialist, and privacy expert we consulted. The four articles that follow speak for themselves.

Without trust — and public trust in European and national institutions is at a historic low — this wallet will appeal only to what one might unkindly call the euro-techno-sheep: roughly 10 to 15% of the population. Any attempt to impose it by stealth- de facto - would carry serious social and political consequences, not least a fundamental breach of equality before the law.

What makes this all the more striking is that the solution chosen by the Commission does not actually meet the requirements of the European Council regulation — go figure! In plain terms, what DG Digital EU intends to implement is unlawful. A referral to the Court of Justice of the European Union would be enough to bring the entire edifice down.

So what is really going on? What gives? The answer requires a degree of technical detail that cannot be avoided. In this first part, we turn to the security issues.

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Brussels has appointed its first “Special Envoy for Industrial Artificial Intelligence”: Danish executive Jim Hagemann Snabe.

To understand where AI development is heading within the European Commission — not across the continent broadly, but inside the institution itself — it helps to look closely at the man they chose. His profile carries the unmistakable scent of the Jutland coast and slightly off herring. This is the old world, refusing to die.

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While the West obsesses over AI stock valuations—profitability can wait—China has chosen a far wiser and more disciplined path. Instead of crippling its own industry with unsustainable electricity prices driven by the voracious appetite of data centers, along with every other negative externality (soaring costs of critical raw materials like copper and beyond), Beijing has focused on developing open-source AI models that require far fewer resources and are dramatically cheaper to run.

Now for a darker theory. Who remembers Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” in the 1980s, better known as Star Wars? It was a masterful psychological operation that lured the Soviet Union into pouring colossal resources into an arms race it could not afford—resources desperately needed elsewhere. Within less than a decade, that misallocation helped accelerate the USSR’s economic and then political collapse.

Is China now running the same playbook against the West with AI? By goading the West into flushing trillions into glittering infrastructure that delivers no returns and no productivity gains, while those monstrous data centers cannibalize the real economy, China is quietly locking in its industrial supremacy.

Read our lips, mark our words and make no mistake: the concommittant IPOs of Open AI, Anthropic and StarX merged with xAi are motivated by the fact that the credit crunch’s here, and that acquiring more capital for structurally loss-making businesses means going public. A nice way, too, to pass on capital losses to retail investors.

Constrat that with the European Commission’s pronouncements on its digital “sovereignty” plan and its appointment of a Davos fixture and Siemens chairman, Jim Hagemann Snabe — cozy with Google for years — and the picture becomes clear: not only are we nowhere near out of the woods, the EU will do everything in its power to keep us there.

AI as it is being sold to us is one gigantic con. See our series on the subject for the evidence.

We are republishing our article from January 26, 2025, in which we argued that China had just sunk American techno-capitalism. Time to take a small bow, since no one else will give us credit: we were right.

Proof: even Nvidia — the company supplying most of the “gold rush shovels,” meaning the GPUs that power AI systems — has just released its latest Nemotron 3 Ultra model as open-source.

Open-source AI models are now abundant and perform close to on par with ChatGPT, Claude, MistralAI and their ilk. Enough to perform calculations that matters for business, mainly optimization.

You can simply pick one (or several) up, audit it, test it, and build proprietary applications on top of it at minimal cost. Why pay a premium to rent proprietary models — the same ones your competitors are using — that bleed your accounts dry without delivering any tangible return (as Uber recently discovered the hard way)? No wonder Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, is now calling for AI development to slow down or pause: Anthropic can’t keep up. No one can.

As for Mythos — for those who haven’t caught on — it’s a myth, a psychological operation designed to maintain the illusion that the US dominates the AI sector and for Anthropic a way to get back into the Pentagon game. Star Wars again. The real kicker: The U.S don’t have AI domination. No one does. The old world, in America as in Europe, refuses to die. Let’s help it along.

Originally published January 26, 2025

While OpenAI — the organization behind ChatGPT — is in the process of converting from a non-profit foundation to a for-profit corporation (note the audacity: a $6.6 billion donor-funded war chest quietly absorbed into a commercial entity) and is busy locking features behind proprietary walls, Chinese startup DeepSeek has just released the entire source code of its AI engine. It outperforms ChatGPT and costs 96% less to run — meaning it demands far less computing power, less electricity, less capital expenditure. Published under the MIT License, right as the Davos crowd assembled. The timing was not accidental.

To grasp the full weight of this development — a genuinely Copernican shift — you need to understand what open source actually is, and what an AI engine actually does.

Open source means making a software’s source code publicly available. Anyone can use it, and those with the skills can inspect it line by line, modify it, and improve it, provided they distribute their modifications under the same terms. This transparency is a security asset: bugs, vulnerabilities, and backdoors are caught and patched quickly. Open source is a bet on collective intelligence — consistently more effective than managerial hierarchy and its voracious, self-serving elitism.

The most famous open-source project is Linux, a kernel — the core software managing a computer’s hardware resources. Developed by Linus Torvalds, it spawned an ecosystem of distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and most notably Android, installed on 82% of smartphones worldwide) that are available at no cost. Where paid versions exist, you’re not buying a software license — you’re paying for maintenance services or supporting the development team.

Remember Windows NT and Lotus Domino Server? Those bloated, overpriced disasters that dominated server rooms in the 1990s and early 2000s? Linux killed them. Today, Linux commands over 80% market share in servers. The entire cloud runs on it.

That’s precisely why Microsoft, IBM and others pivoted to cloud infrastructure services. When Linux wiped out the server OS licensing market, the only money left to be made was in hosting, storage, and managed services.

An AI engine is not so different from an OS kernel. By open-sourcing DeepSeek, China has made it nearly impossible to monetize proprietary AI engine licenses — starting with ChatGPT. That is also why Elon Musk quietly made Grok free on X — it was behind a paywall just a month prior — to accelerate its training. As for Google’s Gemini, it is so riddled with bias and dysfunction that the Palo Alto giant appears to be in irreversible trouble.

This means one thing and one thing only: American predatory techno-capitalism in AI is already dead. The tech giants are finished. Donald Trump can spend $500 billion if he likes — it will change nothing, except to throw $500 billion out the window. Open-source engines are transparent, more secure, vastly cheaper, faster to develop, and offer a wider range of distributions and features. There is simply no rational case for the alternative.

There is another massive problem for the transatlantic techno-predators: the US has also fallen behind on hardware. The latest-generation chips required to run large-scale AI are now led by Taiwan and China. Nvidia, the only American semiconductor player in this space, will not hold. All the more so because DeepSeek runs on off-the-shelf chips — the kind you find in gaming graphics cards.

Europe? Hardly worth the question. The servile, compromised bureaucrats who run it would rather, in a bid to cling to relevance, impose Kafkaesque content regulations — as ineffectual as they are stifling — than address what actually matters: full digital sovereignty for every European citizen and every European nation over their data and infrastructure.

France alone holds thirty years of unified health data on its entire population, courtesy of the Carte Vitale system. Priceless. Without data, AI is worthless. So let’s continue allowing Americans to plunder it, with the full complicity of our leaders.

By open-sourcing DeepSeek, China has done humanity an enormous favor. Not our words — those of Marc Andreessen, towering figure of Silicon Valley and creator of Netscape, one of the first web browsers.

China’s AI lead did not materialize overnight. It was built through early, deliberate regulation of algorithms — imposing rights for users and duties for developers. Which throws a wrench into the worldview of Western “liberals” who recoil at any mention of regulation, confusing it reflexively with restriction.

Democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people. Xenocracy is government of the foreigner, by the foreigner, for the foreigner. So — which one do you think we're living under?

The eurozone is limping along at a projected 2026 growth rate of just 1.1% to 1.3% — a pitiful crawl that trails the global average of 2.7% by a mile, following an already anaemic 1.5% in 2025.

The energy shock triggered by Israel and the United States’ war on Iran has sent commodity prices surging, choking economic activity while inflation roars back — expected to hit 3.1% in 2026, a full point above earlier forecasts, before supposedly easing to 2.4% in 2027. The European Commission says so. Cold comfort.

In France, the damage is visceral: household purchasing power is being hollowed out, and Social Security is haemorrhaging — a €15.3 billion deficit now threatens the very survival of the healthcare system.

For all of Emmanuel Macron’s grandiose speeches, France keeps deindustrialising at a terrifying pace.

In 2024, it was the subsidiaries of multinational corporations switching off the lights. In 2025, it’s the mid-sized companies, the unsung backbone of France’s industrial fabric, that are quietly shutting their doors.

These are not faceless conglomerates. These are the firms that anchor local economies, sustain supply chains, and keep entire communities alive. And they are going under, one by one. “Choose France,” Emmanuel Macron says. French industrial companies, it seems, have not other choice but to vanish.

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Europe’s response to Covid-19 quietly became a laboratory for experiments whose consequences are only now coming into focus.

The economic experiment

The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) — a €750 billion fund conceived to rescue economies battered by lockdowns — introduced a quietly radical shift in how public money flows. Rather than reimbursing costs already incurred, funding was tied to the achievement of milestones and the delivery of reforms. It was a fundamental change in the logic of EU spending, and one the European Commission now hopes to entrench: as we reported, Brussels is pushing to extend this model to the next multiannual EU budget.

The social experiment

The first lockdown also functioned as an extraordinary test of administrative reach and popular compliance. Sociologist Nicolas Mariot and historian Théo Boulakia documented this dynamic rigorously in their book L’Attestation: exit permits, QR-coded health passes, emergency powers routinely invoked — all of it normalising the idea that a crisis could justify the temporary suspension of fundamental freedoms, with surprisingly little public pushback.

As researcher Yuwen Zhang observed in a recent study, “this social QR-code-isation during the health crisis has translated into a system for classifying individuals based on personal data. In today’s digital society, whoever controls the data and the rules governing its use holds the power.”

The technological experiment

Which brings us to the third dimension: continuous, real time mass surveillance.

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The 2027 presidential campaign is now underway, in case you hadn't noticed. A swarm of candidates are busy outdoing each other with increasingly deranged platforms — while carefully avoiding the actual problems. Take the latest round of riots and looting after PSG's victory yesterday. The response? Not arresting rioters or stopping them from burning things down — no, let's authorize algorithmic surveillance instead. Not cutting state spending — let's go after social benefits. The left, for its part, won't examine the root causes of fiscal injustice. It will simply parrot Gabriel Zucman's claim that French citizens are not equal before the law — which is flatly false in terms of tax law. What is accurate is that tax law has been partly engineered to benefit the wealthy.

We are republishing our article from September 23, 2025, in which we dismantled Zucman’s nonsense — which is a symptom of the left’s endemic hypocrisy.

The French left is forever in search of the next Jacques Attali.

Its latest discovery: Gabriel Zucman, a doe-eyed little darling who has declared himself profoundly traumatized by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s accession to the 2002 presidential runoff. That event, he tells us, shaped his entire academic and political mission: to ensure it never happens again. An endeavor in which he modestly concedes he has failed so far. We will show why he will keep failing — and why that was always inevitable.

This French left — as bourgeois as it is intellectually bankrupt and morally dishonest (so is the French right)— has always needed to anoint “intellectuals” who supposedly possess the truth and hold the cure for all of society’s ills. Fifteen years ago it was Thomas Piketty. Magical thinking — proclaiming cause-and-effect relationships between events or actions without any logical basis — is a drug French politicians simply cannot quit.

For the record: Zucman’s doctoral supervisor was Thomas Piketty. His research is funded in part by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. He is actively involved in drafting the Socialist Party’s economic program, and is close to Raphaël Glucksmann.

This magical thinking allows a left without voters to acertian that power is always its rightful inheritance — even though it bears primary responsibility for the country’s catastrophic state since Mitterrand and Delors made their hard-right-to-austerity pivot in 1983. (Though the French right, arguably the most stupid right-wing political class in the world, did nothing to purge or reform a system from which it gorged itself just as shamelessly. Nobody, it goes without saying, wants to touch the state’s lavish lifestyle.)

What matters is that nothing must change. That France continues to spend €1.5 billion so that a handful of hipsters can swim in the Seine. That it pours hundreds of billions into wind energy so that well-connected cronies can stuff themselves through the manufactured creation of a market that is unprofitable and without any energetic, industrial, economic, or environmental justification. That it persists in disbursing — with zero oversight and zero economic efficiency — nearly €250 billion a year in corporate subsidies, because when the state directs the economy, what you get is incompetent senior bureaucrats and corrupt politicians presiding over a system of sinecures, clientelism, and cronyism.

And here walks Gabriel Zucman, conjured from the hat like a magic rabbit, with his tax that will — by the grace of the Holy Spirit — undo forty-plus years of catastrophic public management and the colossal transfers of public wealth into private pockets that such management conveniently conceals. Hallelujah! All our problems, starting with the disastrous state of public finances, are solved! Hosanna in the highest!

So what exactly is the Zucman Tax?

In the name of fiscal justice, it would impose a minimum floor tax of 2% on the net worth of households or individuals whose fortune exceeds €100 million. Why €100 million and not €50 million or €10 million? A mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a press release.

The Zucman Tax is, in reality, a tax on asset valuation — because income from those assets (rent, dividends, interest) and capital gains realized on their sale are already taxed. It is a perfectly idiotic measure that will improve fiscal fairness not one iota and that does not begin to address the actual problem, which this bourgeois, hypocritical — in short, neoliberal — left (and right) goes out of its way to obscure.

The moral (and therefore demagogic) argument underpinning the Zucman Tax is that the ultra-wealthy — as we have taken to calling them in France — multiplied their fortunes by 9.4 between 2003 and 2023. Yet financial markets during the same period merely tripled in value. By what dark sorcery, by what sleight of hand, is this possible?

Through what are known as Lombard loans and leverage effects. Because banks only lend to the rich.

Here is how it works.

Suppose you own a rental property portfolio worth €10 million, generating a gross yield of 5% per year — €500,000 before taxes and charges. You visit your bank and request a €5 million, 10-year loan to buy additional properties, on the grounds that the additional rental income will cover the repayments. This is called leverage. The bank agrees, taking part of your existing portfolio as collateral, at a current rate of around 3% per year.

Now imagine that your property portfolio is held by a société civile immobilière (SCI — a French real-estate holding company), of which you are the principal partner. Instead of pledging part of your property as collateral, you pledge your shares in the SCI — you use these moveable assets as security. The bank will then grant you what is called a Lombard loan, at a rate comparable to a mortgage, not on the total value of the pledged shares but on a portion thereof. This loan will be structured as an in fine loan — meaning the capital is repaid in full at maturity rather than amortized over the loan’s duration. Interest is paid annually on the full borrowed amount. You retain full ownership of the pledged shares and continue to receive the income they generate. And unlike a standard property loan, which must be used exclusively for a real-estate purchase, a Lombard loan carries no earmarking requirement. You spend it however you like.

Now imagine you lend the €5 million from your Lombard loan to your SCI in the form of a partner’s current account contribution, remunerated at 5% per year. Your SCI, in turn, goes to the bank and borrows €10 million to expand its rental portfolio — investing a total of €15 million: the €5 million you lent it (treated as equity) plus the €10 million it borrowed. In simplified terms, you have multiplied your effective asset base by 2.5, and your SCI pays the interest on your Lombard loan.

Now go one layer deeper. Suppose your SCI shares are not held directly by you but by a personal holding company — a company whose sole purpose is to hold stakes in other companies. You lend the €5 million from your Lombard loan (secured against some of your holding’s shares) to the holding company as a partner account contribution. The holding lends €2.5 million to the SCI, which borrows another €7.5 million to develop its rental activities. The remaining €2.5 million? Your holding might lend it to a subsidiary created expressly to acquire and commercially operate a yacht or private plane. And all the while, you benefit from the tax advantages of the holding structure, and the interest on your companies’ debts are deductible charges, reducing their corporate tax liability. Base your holding in Luxembourg — an EU member state — and you pay no tax at all.

Do you see where this is heading?

Replicate this structure in a context where, for nearly twenty years, Western central banks created money at full throttle to preserve bank and market liquidity — remember that the 2008 crisis was first and foremost a US dollar liquidity crisis — all at near-zero or even negative interest rates; and bear in mind that banks have a pressing commercial need to lend and will only lend to people who already have money. You will then understand perfectly how the wealthy, by pledging, multiplied their fortunes ninefold over twenty years.

When you possess substantial assets, it is far more advantageous to live on credit without touching your capital, since borrowed funds used to finance your lifestyle are not taxable. But at some point, you may object, the Lombard loan comes due and must be repaid. Certainly — by taking out a new Lombard loan, since you never touched your capital in the first place.

The Zucman Tax is therefore not merely misguided — it is a monument to misdirection.

It is not the valuation of assets that needs to be taxed. It is the financial operations that render those assets liquid without encumbering them.

The 2% should be levied on loans granted by banks on the basis of collateral pledged by private individuals or their personal holding companies. Because it is precisely these loans that finance the lifestyles of the “ultra-rich,” who have remarkably little taxable income. And then there would be no logical reason to set a floor at €100 million: 2% on every pledging operation, every Lombard loan, contracted in France or abroad. If fiscal justice is the goal, you won’t find a better instrument.

But the bourgeois French left taking aim at banks and the private investment industry — the very heart of the problem? Surely you jest. In France, bankers vote left. It’s the insurers who vote right.

In the first three installments of this series, we demonstrated — evidence in hand — that AI will generate no productivity gains and will prove economically unviable for the overwhelming majority of tasks.

We have also established that the business model of AI companies is structurally, mechanically loss-making — because an additional user does not drive down the cost per user. The same prompt typed by two users at the same moment demands the same computing capacity, and therefore generates the same cost. No economies of scale. None. Ever. Don’t bother looking for them. It’s quantum, stupid!

All these high priests descending upon us to evangelize are after two things: to mobilize into utter nonsense capital that is desperately needed elsewhere, and to stoke the fear of employee replacement in order to force wages down — particularly among the young. Yes. That part is quantum too. Stupid.

The sheer intensity of the ongoing communications blitz serves one purpose only: to manufacture the fear of missing out — FOMO, in the vernacular. The bet being placed by the hyperscalers and chipmakers who are bankrolling AI companies to the tune of hundreds of billions is this: that the IPOs, by generating fat capital gains, will cover their infrastructure investments — which are, let us be clear, consumables, given that a chip under intensive use has a lifespan of two to three years — and that the inevitable, abyssal losses will be mopped up by retail investors who were foolish enough to take the bait. It’s quantum, stupid.

And after the bubble implodes, those same hyperscalers and chipmakers are fully expecting to hoover up the intellectual property of the collapsed AI companies. For a song.

Once again: this is pump and dump. And it is qu-an-tum, stupid!

Arthur Mensch, the CEO of Mistral AI, takes us for stupids — quantum-style.

He is opposing a law that would regulate AI and protect copyright. Why? Because Mistral AI’s models, like all the others, were trained on data. On content. A substantial portion of that data and content falls under intellectual property law — specifically, copyright. And to use copyrighted material, you are required to pay for it. Mistral does not pay. Neither does anyone else.

Mistral AI’s models are proprietary. They are protected by patents and intellectual property law — the precise equivalent of copyright. So what Mr. Mensch is telling us, with a straight face, is that he opposes authors reaping the legitimate fruit of their labor — so that he and his shareholders can line their pockets by appropriating that very labor to develop proprietary models shielded by the exact same legal protections he would deny to everyone else.

This has a name: fraud. A quantum fraud, stupid.

Because beyond literature, music, photography, cinema, and video — beyond the entire public internet — there are also all the scientific publications.

Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, has just woken up and executed a screeching U-turn upon realizing that in AI, the model is not what matters — it’s the data. The only genuine source of competitive advantage lies in accessing data on an exclusive basis — meaning no one else can use it — on which to train your models. Because it is the data on which an AI is trained that makes the AI. Are you following? We sincerely hope so, because it’s quantum, stupid.

To do what Larry Ellison is now preaching, there are exactly two options: either create that data yourself, or purchase the exclusive right to use data created by others — which means paying for it, including, notably, in the form of copyright royalties.

Game, set, and match to L’ÉCLAIREUR, Mr. Mensch.

Now let us consider the hundreds of billions already incinerated by AI companies on data center rentals — and add, just for the laugh, the hundreds of billions they will additionally need to spend purchasing exclusive data rights. Their business model goes from being mechanically loss-making to being quantumly loss-making, stupid.

And if we add one more layer — with Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI, which is well worth reading, as it is a work of reflection that has nothing remotely parochial about it — one realizes that the debate has barely begun…

The latest fashionable gimmick is “The Quantum” — to be pronounced with great solemnity, like Emmanuel Macron delivering a deeply felt recitation of the Canticum Canticorum1.

But what exactly is this quantum beast?

The processor of a “normal” computer performs its calculations using bits, whose value can only ever be one thing at a time: zero or one. It is built from thousands of transistors — switches, essentially.

A quantum computer, by contrast, does not use bits but qubits, which can be zero and one simultaneously. Hence the term “quantum” — a direct reference to Schrödinger’s cat - you know the cat that’s alive and dead at the same time until his life status has been observed.

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No, the European Authority for Political Parties and Foundations is not about to ban the AfD, as Politico’s headline suggested. If the process succeeds - and it will result not in an outright ban but in a form of isolation - the mechanism is far more subtle, and represents a perversion of democracy.

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Ukraine! Ukraine! Ukraine ! fateful plain
Like a wave boiling in an overfull urn,
In your circus of woods, hills, and valleys,
Pale death mingled the dark battalions

(Victor Hugo’s original goes “Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Fateful Plain!”)

You dear readers will have noticed that while our output on the Ukraine and Iran wars was prolific at the outset, we did not turn them into a serial. The belligerents' postures and the very conditions of these wars not having changed, we would have condemned ourselves to paraphrasing our own work — which may be good commerce, but is decidedly not good journalism.

Hypernormalization has as its first effect that those who claim to lead us are incapable of conceiving that any path other than their own might exist.

“A new criminal escalation,” thunders Benjamin Haddad, Secretary of State for European Affairs — a man whose career, before his election as MP in 2024, consisted exclusively of working for the Hudson Institute and the Atlantic Council - European sovereignty practiced. Russia did nothing more than retaliate against Ukrainian drone strikes on its own territory.

The difference being that when the Bear unsheathes its claws, it takes your head off in one swipe — not quite the mosquito bites that Kiev has been launching via the airspace of NATO member states.

How curious, don't you think, this parade of French presidential hopefuls making the pilgrimage to Kiev? Attal, Retailleau, Philippe… Were we feeling uncharitable, we might wonder about the real motives behind these visits. There is precious little to be gained from them electorally — the overwhelming majority of French voters are utterly sick of Ukraine, and no endorsement is to be found there. Campaign financing, then? Given the hundreds of billions poured in — of which, according to the Americans themselves, at least 30% was embezzled — does Ukraine now play the same role our old colonies once did? We haven't seen anyone turn up in Algeria yet — but rest assured, they'll all get there eventually.

Édouard Philippe intends to make Ukraine one of the grand themes of his campaign, a matter of both interest and principle, he tells us. But here is the thing: France has never had any interest in Ukraine, and still doesn’t. As for principles — if Monsieur Philippe had genuinely cared about Ukraine and Ukrainians, his policy as Prime Minister should have consisted of encouraging Kiev to maintain good relations with Moscow, and of doing everything possible to prevent a war that was lost before it started and could only lead to Ukraine’s destruction. Reactivating the Normandy Format, for instance. Instead, Édouard Philippe did the opposite.

Vladimir Putin put an end to the plundering of Russia’s vast resources that the West gleefully indulged in throughout the 1990s. Like it or not, he restored order in his country and hauled it out of the economic ditch. This was not achieved through consensus or quiet deliberation. He reasserted Russian sovereignty by expelling the organizations — NGOs, USAID, Western finance, and the rest — that, under cover of lofty universal principles, were engaged in carving Russia up for the taking. Russians have long memories, and serfdom — one wonders why, perhaps something to do with history — doesn’t suit them particularly well.

The only response Western leaders could muster to Russia’s return to the ranks of great powers was to expand NATO — in direct contradiction to the promises made at the time of the Wall’s fall, and in full exploitation of Moscow’s momentary weakness. A weakness that proved temporary: NATO’s creep to Russia’s borders, made possible by the Maidan coup of 2014, triggered the conflict whose final convulsions we are now watching.

Russia’s war aims have not changed since 2022. “Denazify the Donbas” — done. Destroy Ukraine’s military capabilities? Accomplished for a generation, given the number of Ukrainians — over a million, some say two — who died for nothing. Since Ukraine is financed and armed by NATO, the objective was also to drain the alliance’s arsenals. Hence the war of attrition that emptied Western stockpiles — European ones above all. Mission accomplished.

You will therefore understand our genuine exhaustion at having to discourse on conflicts whose outcome we already knew, in Ukraine as in Iran. You will also understand our profound irritation that no one speaks of what the State of Israel is doing in Lebanon, of what Paul Kagamé’s Rwanda is doing in Congo, or of the atrocious civil war in Sudan — instigated by the usual suspects: the United States, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates.

We possess neither the immaculate white Charvet shirt, nor the fortune, nor the requisite cynicism to hold forth atop a pile of corpses.

The world is in a bad way. This is, in the main, the West’s fault. More precisely, the fault of the West’s leaders — elected or otherwise. Replacing them would resolve a good part of the problem.

We sat down with Bart Preneel, one of the most influential figures in applied cryptography in Europe. A professor at KU Leuven (the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium), he leads the COSIC group — Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography — one of the world’s most respected research teams in its field.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Preneel was among the architects of DP-3T, the Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing protocol, which went on to form the backbone of contact-tracing applications across Europe in 2020 and 2021. Countries such as Belgium and Germany adopted this privacy-respecting approach — though in practice, it depended on Apple and Google APIs. The applications were decentralized by design, intended to keep user data out of governments’ hands.

In effect, protection from state surveillance was guaranteed by two American corporations. At the time, this was considered an acceptable compromise: the urgency of the crisis justified it, and the system’s temporary, limited scope kept the stakes manageable.

That background gives Preneel particular authority when he raises concerns about something far more consequential — the structural, permanent deployment of sensitive personal data through the European Digital Identity wallet and age verification applications, both of which similarly rely on Google and Apple APIs.

“Google, which already exerts extensive control over the Android ecosystem, could use this to further strengthen its influence, particularly in future developments,” he warns. “Here, Google and Apple control everything; they see everything that happens on the internet. This is a considerable advantage handed to them by the European Commission.”

Preneel’s expertise has earned him wide recognition: the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics in 2014, the ESORICS Outstanding Research Award in 2017, and the presidency of the IACR (International Association for Cryptologic Research). In 2024, he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium.

L’Eclaireur – Is there a direct link between Immuni, the Italian StopCovid app, and the European digital identity application? Immuni, which had major vulnerabilities, did it serve as a “model” for the European app? In both cases, we see that the promised anonymity is illusory, that these tools are highly vulnerable, and that proven solutions exist to address these issues - blind signatures for Immuni, BBS anonymous credentials for the European app - yet they were not used…

Bart Preneel - Immuni, the Italian contact-tracing app developed during the Covid-19 crisis, was not the best solution either technically or in terms of privacy protection. Other countries, such as Switzerland, Germany or Belgium - where Bart Preneel was technically responsible for the development, editor’s note - put forward solutions that showed far greater respect for user data.

That said, what we managed to achieve was to deploy an application to more than 100 million Europeans in just three or four months. This success actually inspired the European Commission to launch a similar project, this time for a digital identity application. That is precisely what is generating a great deal of interest today.

Immuni did indeed have significant shortcomings in terms of privacy protection, but it was developed under extremely difficult conditions. There was also a clear tension between the objectives of the medical community, which wanted to collect as much data as possible, and those of the technology and privacy experts, who were far more cautious about the information to be gathered.

It was around that time, in 2021, that the European Commission announced it would create a European identity application within two or three years - what later became the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet).

As was the case with the contact-tracing applications during the Covid pandemic, this is not a single app managed at the European level, but rather a set of common rules and standards. Each Member State then develops its own version.

In this digital age, I believe it is a good idea for governments to offer an integrated identity application. Personally, I do not see any major problem with it. In my view, it is preferable to entrust this to governments rather than to the private sector. After all, a State already legitimately requires data on its citizens to manage healthcare, taxes, social benefits, and many other public services.

The big issue with this application, in my view, is that it will not be used solely for public services. It will also be used by the private sector - for booking plane tickets, train tickets, rental cars, hotels, and so on. In reality, it will become an app for almost everything. If we entrust this to governments, we protect privacy in the most effective way possible. Because we certainly do not want the State to develop tools that would allow private companies to track citizens everywhere and obtain authenticated information such as their address or date of birth.

The European Commission has understood this well. The legislation includes numerous safeguards designed to protect privacy to the greatest extent possible. In this area, the eIDAS 2 regulation is not a bad piece of legislation. Moreover, the wallet will be optional — this is clearly stated in the 2.0 digital identity regulation. The application will not be mandatory and must not exclude any citizen.

The real challenge now lies in its practical implementation.

The Commission has chosen technical methods that allow a person to be identified or to prove that they are over 16 years old, without transmitting any additional information. Neither the full date of birth nor the address nor any other unnecessary data is shared. Technically, this is entirely feasible. This was more or less the vision we wanted to implement.

With this application, the government will therefore have access to all the necessary information about the citizen. In contrast, the private sector will only receive the data that is strictly necessary - what it needs and nothing more. This is the underlying philosophy of the entire project.

On paper, it is a very good idea.

The problem is that it is extremely complex to implement. We are not ready yet - but the European Commission is pushing very hard anyway, in order to move forward quickly. First of all, we need protocols that can resist attacks from quantum computers (post-quantum cryptography). In addition, the Commission has mandated that the application must be tied to a single mobile phone. This creates significant technical constraints and raises questions about which technical solutions are actually viable.

With more than a billion different phones in use, this also gives far greater control to Google and Apple.

Many European researchers believe that the current solutions are not the best way to tackle this complex problem. They are calling on the Commission to give them time to propose solutions, conduct an in-depth study, and then select the best option. This would likely take one or two years.

However, Paolo de Rosa, the CTO of the EUDI Wallet project, naturally does not want to see his project slowed down or halted. In March, he presented Google’s Longfellow solution 1 at the RSAC conference in the United States. This choice has strongly displeased several Member States. France, in particular, is far from satisfied with a solution that is too dependent on Google, and it is not the only one.

At its core, there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. But the fact that the solution is not yet fully mature, that it has certain shortcomings, and that it is tightly controlled by Google is far from ideal.

It is true that the wallet data would not be centralised on Google’s servers and that the code for their proposal is open source. The problem, however, is that Google - which already exerts extensive control over the Android ecosystem - could use this to further strengthen its influence, particularly in future developments.

It should also be understood that the solutions chosen by the Commission emphasise official standards and norms. Therefore, even if an academic researcher were to come up with a far better solution today, or if we started from an open-source technology, it would still take twelve to eighteen months for it to become a recognised standard.

Google, on the other hand, has far greater resources and much larger budgets. It is clear that, in this debate, a major corporation like Google enjoys an enormous advantage over academics or small companies. That is the core of the problem.

If we choose to tie the application to a single phone, we are de facto placing ourselves under the dependence of Google and Apple. Because to bind an application to a smartphone, you have to go through iOS or Android. The problem with open-source mobile operating systems (such as GrapheneOS or certain solutions offered on Fairphone) is that they give the user full control, which could allow them to clone their identity across multiple devices. This is why the anti-cloning requirement restricts the choice of operating system to iOS and native Android.

In this situation, Google and Apple control everything; they see everything that happens on the internet. This is a considerable advantage handed to them by the European Commission.

L’Eclaireur - Have the independent experts who have been raising the alarm and publishing open letters since 2022 been involved in these discussions?

Bart Preneel – We do have discussions and there are regular meetings on the subject. Belgium is represented by an expert. As for myself, I do not participate in them physically. I can answer questions, I can speak with the Belgian expert, but I am not admitted to these meetings. By contrast, Google seems to enjoy much broader access. It is quite strange. That is how things work.

But I must be honest: there is currently no academic solution that matches the same level of maturity and reliability as Google’s Longfellow proposal.

L’Eclaireur - In short, what we need is a European Google...

Bart Preneel – Or else they should genuinely give power to the researchers and organise an open competition. In two years’ time, we would clearly see which is the best solution. But the Commission no longer has that patience. The Commission wants to move forward at all costs. It wants this application to be available by the end of the year.

L’Eclaireur - Why?

Bart Preneel – For the Commission, this is a matter of honour: they want to roll out this application now. There are also very strong personal commitments at stake. In 2021, they promised a launch in 2024. That was then pushed back to 2026… and now it will probably be 2027 for several countries.

If we decided to launch an open call for tenders to find better protocols, it would cause a delay of several years. The project could have been managed better since 2021, particularly in terms of collaboration with the academic community.

L’Eclaireur - Whether it is the DSA for online hate, ChatControl, or the age verification on line for the protection of the most vulnerable, these initiatives address legitimate issues but ultimately fail to deliver the right technical solutions…

Bart Preneel – There is still work to be done, yes. At the same time, we must also consider that another application is currently under development: the age verification application. And this has become a political priority. The major difference is that this application will be mandatory for everyone. Without it, it will no longer be possible to use social networks. Indirectly, this risks making the digital identity wallet almost compulsory.

That is not the optimal solution either. The Commission asked Deutsche Telekom and Scytáles to develop a reference application for the Member States in order to speed up the process. The result: the application was hacked and broken within the first hour of its release.

L’Eclaireur - Is going through an application and all these technological solutions the only way forward?

Bart Preneel – From our experience, we believe this is a very bad solution. In Australia, where access to social networks has been banned for under-16s since December, a majority of them continue to access them. There are many ways to bypass the restriction, particularly through VPNs. Not to mention the problem of people who do not have a smartphone.

What about elderly people, for example, who do not own a mobile phone and go to the library to check Facebook and keep up with news from their children and grandchildren?

And the European Commission has already announced that it intends to ban VPNs. We risk ending up with the same kind of social control as China’s Great Firewall. Social networks must be held accountable: they are toxic. They need to be improved, rather than shifting the entire problem onto users.

I have just come back from the Belgian Federal Parliament. Politicians want an immediate solution to address the legitimate concerns of citizens. Even when we explain all the problems to them and make it clear that there is no technical solution that does not come with very significant negative side effects, they still insist. It is a political response: they have the feeling that they have done their job and taken every possible measure.

L’Eclaireur - Behind this online deanonymisation enabled by these technological flaws, do you see a risk of mass surveillance?

Bart Preneel – I believe mass surveillance already exists today, but it primarily takes place through social networks. Even if you use a pseudonym, it is not truly anonymous: a government can always request companies such as Google or Meta to reveal the real identity of the person behind the account. So the situation is not straightforward, and this new application will mainly introduce far more surveillance.

It may perhaps make it slightly easier for governments to know who is doing what on social networks… But for me, mass surveillance is not the real issue. The real problem is the exclusion it will create, the high cost, and the inconvenience for many people.

Looking at what is happening in the UK and Australia, we know that half of the children will continue to access social networks despite the bans. Is this really the solution? We already know in advance that we will end up with the same result.

If we really want to make this mechanism effective, we will end up with a Chinese-style system. In China, the government has total control over what happens on social networks. It can block pornographic images or any information it dislikes. It can do whatever it wants. Certainly, it “protects” citizens, but unfortunately we lose diversity and freedom. It may be a political solution, but at what cost?

For us technical experts, there simply are no good solutions to this problem. The real solution, in our view, is to tackle the social networks directly - which are toxic - and to change their economic model based on capturing users in order to maximise advertising revenue.

Emmanuel Macron has announced that the French government will put one billion euros on the table for the quantum sector — on top of the €1.8 billion from the 2021 plan and the €500 million in 2024 allocated through public procurement to support the defense industry. He also announced €550 million for the semiconductor industry, to be added to the €5 billion disbursed since 2018 — out of the €8 billion originally pledged.

The political optics are there. The genuine will, that’s another matter. As for the financial commitment — which, by any reasonable measure, ought to reflect political will — one has to acknowledge that it falls well short of what the United States or China are investing, since it is against them that France, through the EU, intends to compete.

In short, don’t hold your breath — Kaja Kallas notwithstanding — before the EU starts keeping China up at night. The EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy treated us in February 2025 to a memorable line: “If Europe cannot defeat Russia, how can we defeat China?”

The reality is that in terms of cumulative commitments — and, more to the point, any results worth showing for them — the numbers simply don’t add up, even with all Twenty-Seven member states combined.

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Iran is threatening to tax the submarine telecom cables running through the Strait of Hormuz — or even disrupt global data traffic. Economic blackmail? Geopolitical pressure? A bargaining chip? Undoubtedly. But beyond the immediate threat, Iran is merely exposing a brutal reality: whoever controls critical infrastructure holds asymmetric power of enormous consequence.

This issue extends far beyond the Middle East. During a hearing before France’s National Assembly inquiry commission on structural dependencies and systemic vulnerabilities in the digital sector, Henri Verdier — the government’s chief digital officer — stressed just how technologically dependent France has become. Not just in software and cloud services, but at the level of infrastructure itself: physical networks and hardware.

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The pro-Israel lobby has thus succeeded in defeating Thomas Massie in the Republican primary in Kentucky’s 4th congressional district, where he had held his seat without interruption since 2012. We will not speculate on potential fraud, including in mail-in voting.

This was the most expensive primary in American history. No less than $15,3million was poured into Political Action Committees — among them MAGA KY (funded by three pro-Israel Jewish American billionaires, the same figures who contributed to financing the White House ballroom Trump had long desired), the United Democracy Project (an offshoot of AIPAC, the leading pro-Israel lobby in the United States), and the Republican Jewish Committee for Victory. The goal: to install Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL whose track record is, in his own words, extraordinary — but one he cannot speak to, as it remains classified.

Thomas Massie, a mechanical engineer with an MIT degree, belongs to the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. Though he backed Trump in 2024, he opposed his One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July 2025 on the grounds that it amounted to a spending bonanza driving the deficit to record levels.

With Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, Massie initiated and shepherded through — by a unanimous vote minus one — legislation compelling the Trump administration to release the complete Epstein files, implicating primarily heavyweight figures within the American Jewish elite, among them current Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Thomas Massie has consistently voted against military and financial aid to Israel. He also banned AIPAC from accessing his offices and staff from his very first term.

He had long been in the crosshairs of the pro-Israel lobby. He unsettles a great many people. He will not be able to run again under the Republican banner in next November’s midterms, but remains in Congress until next January, free to exercise his mandate without constraint.

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At a war council in June 1940, amid the full collapse of French forces under his command, General Weygand made a single intervention — duly recorded in the minutes: an armistice was necessary, he argued, because the State must retain enough security forces to suppress any insurrection. History only repeats itself because the same people remain in power.

The tired refrain of merging the French national identity card with the carte vitale1 refuses to die. Sold under the banner of cutting redtape and cracking down on fraud, the idea was floated as early as 2019 and has since enjoyed the backing of every government — Gabriel Attal, Michel Barnier, and Bruno Retailleau, then Interior Minister, all championed it.

This is the public being taken for fools. First, because legally resident foreigners in France are entitled to a carte vitale but not a national identity card — they are not French citizens. There is therefore no logical connection between drawing social benefits and holding French nationality. Far from closing a loophole, this merger would open one: it would create an unlawful breach of equality, since any legal resident — French or not — holds identical social benefit rights. A parallel system would then have to be built just to paper over the contradiction the reform itself created.

Second, the merger is entirely redundant as an anti-fraud tool. The relevant data has nothing to do with the national identity card; it is structured around the social security number assigned to every beneficiary, regardless of nationality. A genuinely effective measure would be to refuse benefit payments to accounts held outside the European Union or the SEPA zone. Those not resident within it would simply be required to open a non-resident bank account. Clean, targeted, and legally coherent — everything this proposal is not.

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The European Union’s draft budget – the multiannual financial framework for 2028-2034 – is stacking up debt without a clear plan for how to repay it. As outlined in a previous article, the EU’s 2028–2034 budget proposal piles on massive new borrowing, relying heavily on uncertain new “own resources” that may never materialize.

The draft also maps out yet another power grab by the EU's executive arm, the European Commission. To grasp how the bloc has quietly maneuvered itself to this point — despite the draft budget still requiring unanimous Council approval and parliamentary consent — one must rewind five years.

The Covid: crisis management, or the perfect alibi for institutional experimentation

The foundations for these power grabs were laid by the Recovery and Resilience Facility — and the Commission has wasted no time exploiting them to seize competences the treaties never granted it. The Facility was sold as a temporary emergency instrument born of the Covid-19 pandemic. In practice, it became the principal disbursement mechanism for the €750 billion NextGenerationEU programme and one of the chief engines driving the EU's mushrooming debt. The price of admission for member states: submitting national plans packed with reforms and investments, each shackled to a web of milestones and targets.

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Here we go again. Another round of collective hysteria.

On one flank, self-styled champions of the “new world” desperately clinging to the old one that handed them power — like Macronist MP Paul Midy, who wants to apply François Hollande’s notoriously rigged airtime rules to social media, allocating speaking time based on previous election scores. Imagine the 100-metre Olympic final where the defending gold medallist gets a 30-metre head start. That’s the logic.

On the other flank, a significant chunk of the French independent press and influencers — driven partly by ideology, partly by the appetite for effortless engagement — are drowning their audiences in apocalyptic warnings about the censorship allegedly enabled by the DSA. Like the mainstream media they claim to oppose, they're playing the oldest trick in the book: weaponising fear for clicks, thus nudging toward self-censorship to self-censorship.

As the 2027 elections draw closer, expect this to get considerably worse.

Some necessary history.

The Twitter Files France exposed the distinctly French origins of the privatisation of criminal prosecution in free speech matters — a tradition stretching back to the 1972 Pleven Law. Then came the Avia Law of June 2020, designed to force near-instant removal of terrorist and child abuse content, and 24-hour takedowns of “hateful” content on major platforms. The Constitutional Council struck it down on two grounds: it unlawfully outsourced judicial oversight of free expression to private companies whilst it is the prerogative of the judiciary, and its leadtimes and penalties were so extreme they would inevitably trigger mass deletion of perfectly legal content.

The DSA entered into force in March 2024. It changes nothing. The eight organisations currently holding “trusted flagger” status in France cannot order the removal of a single piece of content, they have no authority to do so. They can flag it. Platforms are then obliged to examine those flags within a reasonable timeframe — an obligation of means, not results. That’s it.

The selection of those eight organisations — curated under Minister Aurore Bergé — tells you everything about who actually governs France. Each group guards its designated cardinal sin: racism, islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, “masculinism,” and so on. In a republic where every citizen is equal before the law, there are officially no minorities — yet these NGOs, generously funded by the governement thus conveniently pliable, have been handed the mandate to speak for communities they don’t actually represent (refer also the Twitter Files France).

French courts have already spoken.

Three landmark rulings with regards to DSA enforcement, all from the Paris tribunal, all delivered within 16 days of each other in autumn 2025:

In the “Point Sun” case (3 September 2025), the court ruled that filing a complaint does not establish that disputed speech is illegal, and that under the DSA a critical video posted on TikTok shall not be suppressed. Personal, subjective testimony falls within admissible criticism.

Two days later, a related ruling (5 September 2025) reaffirmed the foundational principle: freedom of expression is the rule; restrictions of speech require concrete, proven, manifest illegality. Courts shall not transform platforms or any other organization into arbiters of public discourse.

Then came the Wikimedia Foundation case (19 September 2025), where a litigant attempted to weaponise DSA compliance obligations against Wikipedia. The court declared the claim inadmissible: only Arcom (the Digital Services Coordinator and French broadcasting regulator) and the European Commission hold supervisory competence under the DSA, as it is administrative. The ruling further enshrined the primacy of free expression and the right to information over the right to erasure and oblivion, and confirmed the protected anonymity of Wikipedia contributors.

Sixteen days. Three unambiguous verdicts. The message is consistent: criticism is admissible; illegal speech requires proof thereof and cannot be restricted otherwise; only courts can order the takedown of content; freedom of expression and right to information prevail; anonymity is legal.

That is the real world. That is law as actually practised — not the anxiety-industrial complex peddled by self-appointed experts.

Censorship is not coming tomorrow. The DSA does not enable it, let alone reinforce it.

Without the active cooperation of the platforms themselves — who have zero incentive to over-moderate, given that moderation is expensive and legally risky — extra-judicial censorship is structurally impossible. It was e.g. Jack Dorsey’s Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta that secretly collaborated with US intelligence agencies on behalf of the Biden administration to police political speech. Every major platform systematically suppressed criticism of official Covid narratives when governments pushed them to — and most have since regretted it. Today, they stick to their terms of service, which already prohibit illegal content. In grey areas, they quietly de-amplify - which is not censorship.

During election periods, every candidate has the full arsenal of electoral law — emergency injunctions for defamation, fake news, and abusive propaganda — already at their disposal.

So what is actually going on?

Yes, the European Commission, Parliament, and member states harbour anti-democratic instincts. Yes, they want incumbents to stay incumbents. Yes, they want to control the narrative.

But their primary goal is not censorship per se — it is mass surveillance. The Court of Justice of the EU has repeatedly prohibited it. So Brussels keeps trying to outsource it: to platforms, via the Avia Law (struck down), via the DSA (ineffective). They are pushing for age verification schemes designed to register every user, and for ChatControl and its assault on encryption. Every one of these measures collides with the others — making them both legally and technically unenforceable. Digital identity is incompatible with ChatControl on security grounds and incompatible with General Data Protection Regulation on legal ones.

There is also a transatlantic dimension. The United States promotes free speech as the cornerstone of democracy — and rightly so. What goes unsaid is that the American model treats personal data and privacy as collateral. Europeans have privacy protections; Americans have absolute speech protections in practice, but negligible privacy and data protection. The real prize, for states and corporations alike, is not the control of words — it is the control of data. Personal data is an inexhaustible gold mine.

The DSA is regulatory theatre. It was designed to look threatening. On that narrow measure, it has succeeded: everyone screaming about censorship has walked straight into the trap — and is doing the scraremongering work for the incumbent powers pushing the public to self-censor.