The following are excerpts from a speech recently given by Seth Hertlein to the Patriots for Europe Foundation, Brussels. Mr Hertlein is Vice President and Global Head of Policy at Ledger, a leading hardware wallet company for securing cryptocurrencies and digital assets.
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 Soviets’ Article 58, the “thought crime” statute, which had sections for propaganda or agitation against Soviet power. The EU articles are blank cheques 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 criminalisation 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. 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 criminalisation. 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 centre, 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 programmes 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 funnelling 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 is 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 honouring 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 programmes 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.
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.
Keir 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.
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