The European Union straitjacket

 by Bill Ponton

The European Union is essentially the project of a statist, bureaucratic elite and undemocratic at its core. From its inception, it was designed to wrest power from the democratic institutions of individual European members and vest it within the EU bureaucracy. In recent decades, it has taken on a hideous form with the embrace of climate eschatology and destruction of industry in the name of net-zero. Even worse, it has promoted unrestricted immigration to dilute and dissolve the distinctive European cultures and repress any assertion of European ethno-nationalism, while being blind to an assertive political Islam growing in the heart of Europe.

The European Union is a straitjacket in which its citizens are confined. As the recent protests in Ireland demonstrate, the citizenry may object to what is being imposed upon them, just as peasants in the Medieval period rioted to vent frustration, but essential control by the EU elite remains. The European Union’s central tool for keeping a lid on political dissent and protest is the Digital Services Act. It institutes what amounts to a modern-day version of the East German state security service or Stasi, for short, to keep an eye on restive elements of the populace so that online discourse remains within boundaries acceptable to the EU elite. It is the enabler of a surveillance state writ large.

With the DSA, the EU bureaucracy becomes the sole arbiter of what constitutes “hate” speech and disinformation. Never mind that “hate” speech is a relatively new term with differing interpretations and disinformation is any information that one disagrees with, so vague is its meaning. Like the East German Stasi, the EU bureaucracy employs legions of informants, what the DSA refers to as “trusted flaggers.” These trusted flaggers are approved organizations whose reports of illegal platform content get immediate attention. These flaggers do not make final legal judgments, but they can strongly influence the outcome — think of watchdog organizations like SPLC or Greenpeace wielding infinitely more influence than they do in their present state.

Under the DSA, Digital Services coordinators act on the recommendations of their trusted snitches and supervise a process that requires platforms to address these complaints thus ensuring compliance with the EU rules. Under this system, platforms have every incentive to exercise caution and censor content before it draws the attention of Digital Services coordinators. I recommend readers to watch the movie, The Lives of Others, for a depiction of life in East Germany under the watchful eye of the Stasi.

The police, prosecutors, and courts ultimately get dragged into this witch hunt. Unlike in the USA where citizens’ right to freedom of speech is recognized under the First Amendment, police and prosecutors in the EU decide whether to investigate or charge based on their assessment of the criminality of particular speech and ultimately, courts decide whether a specific statement is illegal hate speech. Whereas in America, ideas are voiced freely and compete on their merits in the public forum, the EU elite does not trust the populace to choose wisely. By wisely, they mean unquestioning submission to the dogma of the climate eschatological cult and the belief that migration is good in any form and at any scale, even if it subsumes your own culture in the process.

The framework for the formation of the European Union is unlike what our Founding Fathers provided to us with the US Constitution. The EU’s Founding Fathers—Schuman, Monnet, and Adenauer—were distrustful of the European populace to do what would be in their long-term best interest. They proceeded forward with the recent memory of the Nazi era and subsequent European destruction. What started out as a plan for a common market evolved into a plan to integrate Europe politically. It has matured into a statist central planner’s delight with the same sclerotic bureaucracy that once gripped the Soviet Union. At any rate, the EU model of governance is at odds with the U.S. model, which makes it almost inevitable that the EU and the Trump administration are on a collision course with regards to the DSA.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/04/the_european_union_straitjacket.html