Treasons

Before the season ends, we need to at least start covering a topic that, I believe, will dominate the next one: the Commission led by Ursula von der Leyen’s betrayal of the Union.

You’ve surely heard how the Commission "requested an emergency vote from Parliament on the chatControl issue and managed to push it through."

This is a way of talking about the issue without actually saying anything: a tactic that guarantees you a job in the media, the editor’s favor, and token appearances on so-called “in-depth” talk shows.

An asteroid could never strike them soon enough, so let’s try to cover this in a more informative way.

The Commission has twice submitted a measure to the European Parliament (the infamous “chatControl”) that is theoretically intended to protect minors and combat child pornography, but which:

• does not protect minors (and never will)
• does not combat child pornography (and never will)
• institutionalizes mass surveillance (and always will)

No one asked for this measure except for Big Tech lobbyists, who want to cloak their despicable surveillance economy in legality, and their lackeys in the Commission.

The Commission’s first proposal was rejected by Parliament, then resubmitted in a form that was, if possible, even worse, and rejected again.

At that point, the Commission called for an urgency procedure for a matter that posed no urgency whatsoever, on the last day of Parliament’s session before the summer recess, for the sole purpose of counting the votes of absentees and abstainees as “in favor” (something the urgency procedure allows) thereby managing to have a measure deemed approved even though the majority of MEPs present had voted against it for the third time.

The net result of this measure is that, until 2028, Big Tech can preemptively monitor all content entrusted to it—text messages, audio, video, and images—under the theoretical pretext of combating child pornography, with two practical consequences:

1. allowing Big Tech to profile the entire continent for its own interests—something it has, in fact, always been doing amid the Commission’s glacial indifference—and
2. outsourcing state prerogatives to private actors outside the Union, whose interests are not even veiled.

At this point, we must ask: which side is the European Commission on? Because this is treason. In simpler times, princes and kings were thrown out the window or sent to the gallows for far less than this.

Let’s list a few of the misdeeds of this Commission of scoundrels (and this is not an exhaustive list; I’m just going off the top of my head) let’s see:

• this latest decision, extorted from Parliament, regarding ChatControl;
• the expansion of facial recognition by border police (FrontEx) under the pretext of the migrant crisis;
• the sacrifice of European interests on the altar of U.S. interests regarding Trump’s tariffs, Ukraine, Russia, Palestine, and Iran—all crises provoked by the United States and which, curiously enough, harm the Union;
• the refusal to acknowledge that NATO is now exclusively a tool of U.S. imperial policy that runs counter to European interests;
• the unconditional acceptance of the idea that Europe must view increased military spending as a priority (obviously to the almost exclusive benefit of U.S. manufacturers) in the absence of any strategic vision, that is, regarding what we should be spending more on and against whom;

and so on.

There you have it. I’d like to start hearing from someone outside the Pirate Party who takes these issues to heart and puts on the agenda (for the second time, surprise!) a motion of no confidence against von der Leyen and her entire Commission of Russophobes and US lackeys.

It’s time for the European Parliament to wake up and start firmly rejecting the infiltration of Russophobic right-wing agendas and U.S. lackeys into the heart of European politics. I couldn’t care less if Merz has to prove that he’s not Merkel.

There are first-rate minds in the European Parliament, but still too many who are deluded into thinking the situation is somehow still normal. It isn’t.

The only thing the United States, Russia, and China agree on is that the European Union is an obstacle to their oligarchy. Europe’s response cannot be more military spending; that is not the arena where we can exert any influence. Our strength lies in our laws, which economic oligarchs hate just as much as they hate any rule.

Europe’s response must be to strengthen (no ifs, ands, or buts) the enforcement for the rules the continent has chosen to adopt: the GDPR, the DSA, the DMA, the AI Act, and the entire Digital Compact.

Only then can we begin to talk about the much-vaunted digital sovereignty.

I’m sick of reading the daily whining of subsidized oligopolists who pass themselves off as brilliant entrepreneurs.

I want a Europe that wakes up and states, quite simply, that in Europe, we choose our own rules; and that those rules, in Europe, apply to everyone.

So I wish the Parliament a relaxing and restoring summer. Because, come September, there’s work to be done.