How the EU legislates

 

Most Western democracies have been hacked. Not with code. With institutional architecture. Let me show you how it works, using the most advanced example: the European Union. First, how it works. Once every five years, you vote for a European Parliament that cannot even initiate legislation. The body that proposes laws is the Commission: 27 commissioners nobody elected, appointed after backroom bargaining between heads of state. Bills are then negotiated between the Commission, Parliament and Council in "trilogues", closed-door meetings where the real decisions get made. A law that will apply to 450 million people goes through corridors that 99.9% of them will never see. Now look at who's in those corridors. Brussels has become the lobbying capital of the world: nearly 18,000 organizations on the transparency register, tens of thousands of lobbyists, more than 50 for every single MEP. And that's just the declared part. Add the revolving door: a former MEP only has to wait six months before becoming a lobbyist to the EU himself. The real problem is distance. A national MP who votes for a law that ruins the farmers in his district runs into them at the market on Saturday. In Brussels, the decision-maker never meets the people who live with his decisions. But he meets lobbyists every day: at lunch, at cocktails, at conferences. So the system doesn't optimize for the wellbeing of the people. It optimizes for the interests of whoever is in the room. You don't even need corruption for that, incentives are enough. Although sometimes, as Qatargate showed, there's corruption too. The result: the system has a structural incentive to accept things the people would never vote for. Take Mercosur. Twenty-five years of negotiations. France votes against it in the Council in January 2026 and gets outvoted. To keep national parliaments from blocking it, the Commission splits the deal into two texts, including a trade agreement that only needs a vote in Brussels. The European Parliament itself writes, in black and white, that this split circumvents the right of national parliaments, and refers the deal to the EU Court of Justice. The Commission's response: it has been applying the agreement provisionally since May 1, 2026, without waiting for the Court's opinion. Farmers were protesting outside Parliament. They lost anyway. And remember the one time the people were actually asked about Europe directly: in 2005, France and the Netherlands rejected the European Constitution. The text came back two years later as the Lisbon Treaty, ratified by parliaments. No more referendums. But the worst of it is immigration. In 2015, relocation quotas were imposed by qualified majority on countries that had voted against them. Since June 12, 2026, the Pact on Migration and Asylum applies across the entire Union, with its "mandatory solidarity" mechanism: you take people in, or you pay. Not a single European people has ever been consulted directly on this, even though it's the issue that is transforming our societies most profoundly. And this is where we have to talk about the most sophisticated piece of the machine: George Soros. Soros understood before anyone else that you don't need to win elections if you shape the ecosystem around the people who make decisions. His network, the Open Society Foundations, describes itself as the largest private funder of advocacy groups in the world. In Brussels, it runs its own lobbying arm aimed at EU institutions, the Open Society European Policy Institute. Here's what we know from internal documents leaked in 2016: a document titled "Reliable allies in the European Parliament" listed more than 200 MEPs. Strategy papers described building "inside-track groups" to caucus "internal allies" who could advance their goals in their daily work. Training sessions were organized for MEPs on how to counter so-called populist parties. The mechanism is brutally elegant. Think tanks produce the "expertise". NGOs produce the "demand from civil society". Legal NGOs litigate in the courts. Funded media outlets produce the narrative. The Brussels decision-maker, cut off from the population, hears the same message from every direction and ends up believing that this is what people want. And the craziest part: the institutions fund the loop themselves. Between 2021 and 2023, the EU paid around €7.4 billion to NGOs, and the European Court of Auditors found the use of that money insufficiently transparent. It even came out that the Commission had funded NGOs to lobby MEPs in favor of its own Green Deal legislation. The institution pays "civil society" to ask it to do what it already wanted to do. All of this is legal. That's exactly what makes it a hack and not a crime. The system works exactly as designed, except nobody designed it for the people anymore. The patch is simple to state and hard to impose: bring decisions back closer to the people who bear them, hold referendums on issues that change a civilization, create a mandatory register for every influence actor, NGOs included, with their funding sources, and shut the revolving door. Until that happens, European democracy will remain what it has become: a user interface sitting on top of a system that runs for someone else.

https://x.com/brivael/status/2114088268199518595?s=20

Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

I've been saying it for months: we're heading toward a new 1989. Not the fall of the Berlin Wall this time. The fall of the globalist project, and its fundamentally collectivist vision of humanity. Remember the video Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum published in 2016, the "predictions for 2030." Prediction number one: "You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy." You'll own nothing, rent everything, and smile about it. They presented it as a desirable future. Marx summed up communism in a single sentence: the abolition of private property. The WEF just rewrote it with a delivery drone. Their problem is that two forces are now tearing this project apart. The first is AI. For the first time in history, a single individual can own a lever of production that used to require an army of employees, a bank, and a state. AI doesn't centralize capital. It hands it to the people who build. That is the exact opposite of "you'll own nothing." The second is reality. Exploding debt, collapsing public services despite record taxes, rising insecurity, schools that no longer teach anything. You can lie about reality for decades. You can't stop it from arriving. So here's what they're going to do now. First, activate their networks. Soros's foundations, starting with Open Society, have spent years pouring money into NGOs, activist collectives, and "anti-repression" groups that form the ideological and logistical breeding ground of the crowds we're seeing today from Paris to Montreal. When the argument no longer works, all that's left is chaos. Second, manipulate the youth. This is how communists have always taken power. Mao, speaking to Chinese students in 1957: "The world is yours. You young people are like the sun at eight or nine in the morning." Nine years later, he unleashed the Red Guards: high schoolers and university students who humiliated their teachers, denounced their parents, and burned books. And once they were no longer useful, he shipped some 17 million of them off to the countryside to be "re-educated." Youth is always the fuel of the revolution. Never its beneficiary. Third, the globalist elites will do everything they can to keep the chaos going. Because a country in chaos demands more state, more control, more surveillance, more "governance." Chaos isn't a bug in their project. It's how it runs. But either way, their project has only two possible endings. Neither one goes their way. Ending one: political Islam. They think they can use it as an ally against the West, against the nation, against the family. They forgot Iran. In 1979, the Iranian left, led by the communists of the Tudeh Party, marched hand in hand with Khomeini to overthrow the Shah. Four years later, the party was banned, its leaders in prison, many of them executed. Islamism never lets itself be used by Marxism. It devours it. Your Marxist project will end up eaten by the very people you thought you were manipulating. Ending two: economic collapse. Because let's say it plainly: the elites running this project are, on the whole, economically illiterate. Brilliant at storytelling, hopeless at incentives. Ludwig von Mises proved it back in 1920: without private property there are no prices, without prices there is no economic calculation, and without economic calculation there is only waste and shortage. Hayek drove the point home: no central planner can aggregate the dispersed knowledge of billions of people. Global collectivism can't work. Not because it's been badly implemented. Because it is structurally impossible. The USSR learned that in 1989. They're about to learn it now. The wall is already shifting.

https://x.com/brivael/status/2114099112060551651?s=20

How many Western Governments will survive?

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of this blog.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/many-western-governments-won-t-survive/

Many Western Governments Won’t Survive

Why would citizens defend governments that abuse them?

J.B. Shurk | October 21, 2026

Western governments have put themselves in mortal danger.  

They are actively doing things that are destroying their countries: (1) replacing their native citizens with unassimilable foreigners; (2) centralizing government power in unelected and unaccountable bureaucracies; (3) censoring and criminalizing public dissent; (4) offshoring industrial and manufacturing jobs; (5) exacerbating energy costs and general inflation by demonizing hydrocarbons and pushing “global warming” delusions; (6) increasing taxes, government spending, and public welfare in unsustainable ways; (7) demolishing their nations’ historical identities, traditions, beliefs, and common cultures; (8) providing foreigners with “free” homes, food, and educations, while accusing native citizens of being “racists,” “xenophobes,” and “white supremacists”; (9) discouraging healthy marriages and stable families; and (10) indoctrinating the youngest generations to believe that war, “climate change,” overpopulation, and economic collapse will prevent them from ever having happy, hopeful, purposeful futures.

Those are just ten ways that Western governments are hurting their citizens.  There are many more.  But a reasonable person should be able to read the above paragraph and understand that nations cannot survive under such a destructive barrage of harmful policies.  

Western governments are waging wars against their own nations.  The progress of these wars may look a little different in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Australia, Canada, and the United States, but what happens in one country soon enough spreads to all the rest.  It is as if Western leaders got together many years ago and agreed that their countries would drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and take long dirt naps.  

Perhaps they formed this suicide pact during an “elite” gathering of the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, or the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Perhaps they chanted, “Build back better,” in unison while voting to euthanize the West.  

Adversarial political parties ostensibly compete for control of Western governments, but, in reality, the party system is kabuki theater wherein the same special interests own the politicians on both sides of the aisle.  Until so-called “populist” parties emerged in the West, voters were given merely the illusion of choice.  

After all, the Conservative Party held power in the United Kingdom for fourteen years, and despite repeated promises to do so, its leaders failed to secure Britain’s borders from foreign invasion or to extract the kingdom from regulatory enslavement to the European Union. 

In the United States, President George W. Bush calls President Bill Clinton his “brother” and Hillary Clinton his “sister” and once described Michelle Obama as his “best friend.”  Establishment Republicans such as lame-duck senators Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis spend more time attacking President Trump and the 95% of Republican voters who support his MAGA policies than they do warning Americans about the growing number of communists in the Democrat Party.

Western nations have political Establishments that pretend to fight in front of the public but largely conspire behind closed doors and agree about most everything.  We know this to be true because we have witnessed how these political Establishments work together to prevent “outsider” political candidates from reaching higher office or holding power.  

In Europe, the political Establishment enjoy enforcing so-called “cordons sanitaire,” or “firewalls” meant to hinder the leaders of “unacceptable” political movements from obtaining power.  In the Netherlands, the political Establishment have blocked Geert Wilders from becoming prime minister because of his opposition to mass immigration, Islamic supremacy, and the European Union and despite the fact that the party he leads has significant public support.  In France, the political Establishment have done the same thing to Jean-Marie Le Pen, his daughter Marine, and their National Rally because of the party’s pro-national-sovereignty and anti-immigration policies.  In the United Kingdom, the political Establishment have blocked Brexit stalwart and Reform UK chief Nigel Farage from leadership roles in parliament.  In Germany, the political Establishment have attempted to delegitimize the popular anti-immigration party, Alternative for Deutschland, by defaming its members as “domestic terrorists,” “Russian agents,” and anti-constitutional “national security threats.”  

In the United States, Establishment Democrats and Republicans did everything they could to prevent President Trump’s election and then to remove him from office after he soundly defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.  The Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, actively campaigned against Trump in 2016.  So-called “conservative” political pundits, such as Bill Kristol and George Will, repudiated Republican voters and supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.  Even though Republicans controlled Congress, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan advanced the Clinton-Obama-Intelligence-Community operation to frame President Trump as a Russian spy.  Senator Romney twice voted to remove Trump from office.  Democrat prosecutors spent years trying to imprison Trump for life, and Establishment Republicans worked desperately to keep Trump from becoming the party’s presidential nominee once again in 2024.  America’s political Establishment tried to remove Trump from ballots, bully him with investigations, and paint him as a “dictator” in an incitement campaign that encouraged would-be assassins to seek his death.

What have these widespread Establishment efforts across the West to undermine elections and silence public dissent accomplished?  Western institutions — government agencies, universities, news media, banks, corporations, and NGOs — have never been more distrusted.  That makes sense.  Western institutions are hostile to Western citizens.  

While ordinary Westerners are proud of their countries, Western institutions tell them that they should be ashamed of their ancestors and their nations’ histories.  While ordinary Westerners wish to work, buy homes, and have families, Western institutions support mass immigration policies that replace Western workers, increase demand on housing, and make it much more difficult for Westerners to support and protect their families.  When Western citizens object to the political Establishments’ open borders, Western news media demonize them as “racists” and “white supremacists.”  When Western citizens organize around their national flags and march peacefully down city streets, the political Establishment demonize them as “fascists,” “right-wingers,” and “Nazis.”  When Western citizens try to protect themselves from violent foreign nationals, Western law enforcement agencies condemn the Westerners and defend the violent foreigners.  

The West’s political Establishments would rather allow foreigners to burn down churches, town halls, stores, schools, and private homes than take action to protect Western citizens from the deadly consequences of Establishment policies.  The U.K. Establishment allowed Islamic supremacists to rape tens of thousands of British girls without any consequence.  The French Establishment allowed Islamic supremacists to hunt police officers, loot stores, set buildings and vehicles ablaze, and terrorize French citizens without any consequence.  

In Germany, 87% of suspects with open arrest warrants are foreigners.  Despite all evidence to the contrary, London’s police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, says that it is critical to replace merit-based hiring with preferential treatment for black and Muslim applicants (and calls criticism of his “diversity” policies “toxic”).  Western NGOs preposterously claim that capitalism and “climate change” should be blamed for Islam’s penchant for sex slavery and child marriages.  In the U.K., 80% of jobs go to foreign immigrants.  In the U.S., Democrat Senator Elissa Slotkin promises to politically prosecute President Trump’s supporters in order to “deter” them from opposing Establishment policies.  

Even as Western governments attack Western citizens, however, they still expect those citizens to sacrifice their lives in a looming global war.  The head of the British Army, General Sir Roland Walker, recently told soldiers: “Very soon, the political leaders of this country will start to have a frank conversation with the citizens of this country about just what is going on.”  At that time, citizens “have got to consent to sacrifices to prioritize defense and security.”

Nearly half of military-aged Brits say there are “no circumstance” in which they would defend the United Kingdom.  That’s no surprise.  Why would Western citizens defend governments that abuse them?  If the West already “belongs” to foreigners, what else is there to defend?

Western governments’ cascading failures are leading to their demise.  Citizens owe them nothing.

Image via Picryl.

the reunification of the West

 

Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

Something historic is happening across the West, and the legacy press can't see it, because the press is part of what is collapsing. Peoples who were told for forty years that they had nothing in common are converging. Americans, French, Italians, Danes, British, Dutch. Different languages, different histories, and the same conclusion reached at the same time. They have all seen the same thing at work in their own countries: what the French call islamo-gauchisme, the alliance between the radical left and political Islam. And they are all saying no. To understand why their hegemony is close to total collapse, you have to use their own concept. "Hegemony" comes from Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who understood that power doesn't rest on force. It rests on consent, on people accepting a worldview as obvious, as the only respectable one. That's why the left spent fifty years on what one German activist called the long march through the institutions. Universities, newsrooms, publishing houses, cultural ministries. Own the narrative and you own the country. But hegemony has a weakness Gramsci himself understood. It dies the moment consent dies. And consent is dying everywhere at once. They are losing the media war. In the 1970s, around 70% of Americans trusted the mass media. Today it's less than a third. In France, the gap between what the TV news says and what people see on their own street has become a joke. The gatekeepers lost the gate. An engineer with a phone can now reach more people than an evening news broadcast. The monopoly on the narrative, the foundation of the whole edifice, is gone. And reality is finishing the job. Look at France. A movement that started in high schools ended on October 17 with city halls stormed, Limoges city hall burning and looting across Marseille, while the radical left blamed the police. The French saw it with their own eyes, without a filter. Today's polls show the radical left's candidate losing a presidential runoff by roughly two to one. You can deconstruct a text. You can't deconstruct a burning city hall. Then comes the blow they can never recover from: abundance. Collectivism has always been a politics of scarcity. Its whole logic is that the pie is fixed, so someone's gain is someone else's theft, so the state must take and redistribute, ration and control. That's why its latest form is degrowth. Planners need scarcity the way fire needs oxygen. What is being built right now makes that logic obsolete. AI is collapsing the cost of intelligence. Robotics is about to collapse the cost of labor. Reusable rockets have already slashed the cost of reaching space. Elon Musk and thousands of builders like him are proving every day that the pie is not fixed. It can grow faster than anyone imagined. In a world of abundance, envy loses its grip and the planner loses his excuse. And AI does one more thing: it ends opacity. When any citizen can trace public money in minutes, the networks that live in the dark have nowhere left to hide. So what comes next? Two things, in this order. First, the reckoning, and this is where we have to be better than them. There will be no purges and no lists, and nobody will be prosecuted for having been wrong. Being wrong is not a crime, and we will never become what we fought. But aggravated corruption is a crime. Public money diverted to networks, fraud, abuse of office: those must be investigated, proven and judged one by one, by independent courts, with evidence, due process and the presumption of innocence. We don't jail people for their ideas. We jail people for stealing. That difference is the whole difference between a free civilization and the regimes we oppose. Second, the reunification of the West. That doesn't mean another supranational empire run by unelected officials, which is the model that failed. It means a West of strong, sovereign nations that choose to work together. Agreements between countries that control their borders, produce their own energy, build their own AI and defend themselves, and that trade and cooperate as equals because they share the same foundations: the free individual, the rule of law, the right to build. Gramsci's heirs spent fifty years winning the institutions. They are losing them in five, because they forgot that hegemony only lasts as long as reality cooperates. Reality has stopped cooperating. Now it's our turn to build.

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Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

I don't think you realize how lucky we are to have an Elon Musk at this level, actually fighting this thing. Because let's be clear about the sides. On one side, the people. The vast majority. Common sense, hard work, family, and one simple wish: to live in peace. On the other, an illegitimate elite. Mostly globalist, which at its core is a communist project: managing humanity from the top, like a system. And since that project doesn't work (it has never worked anywhere), they survive in only one way: lies. To hold on, this elite built systems of coercion and corruption. Ukraine is one of them. They've also captured and corrupted a huge share of the institutions that were supposed to protect us. Take Bill Gates. On this line for years. It's no accident he ended up at the heart of Covid policy. Just ask yourself: why is a software billionaire talking directly to Fauci before the vaccine rollout even starts, as if he were part of the operation? These people see humanity as a herd to be administered. But they're terrible at economics. They don't understand their model can't work. So instead of saying "we were wrong, let's change," they lie. They double down. And that's exactly what makes them dangerous. Honestly, this system was almost impossible to break. And then, by the most improbable of chances, there's one man. The richest man in the world. Who chose the side of the people against these illegitimate, mostly left-wing elites. And who's throwing all his power into this fight. The system is dying. And he's the one pushing. Think for two seconds. If Elon wanted to enslave humanity, he could have done it long ago. All he had to do was make a deal with the globalists. He'd have everything he wants, right now. He did the opposite. That should tell you whose side he's on.

https://x.com/brivael/status/2113968954892763233?s=20

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Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

You don't understand anything happening in the US right now unless you read Elon Musk all the way through. When he says that by 2036 money won't matter anymore, most people hear a billionaire's provocation. I hear something else. Money is the fuel of every corruption system. Earmarked subsidies, public contracts negotiated behind closed doors, lobbies, front NGOs, regulatory rents. The day AI and robots produce more than humanity can consume, that lever disappears. And everyone who lives off that lever disappears with it. There are a lot of them. And they've understood perfectly. That's why we're now reading that Musk is preparing for "war" if Democrats take back Congress. He's not the one declaring war. It's an entire system that knows it's fighting for its survival. Because we're at a turning point in human history. And there are only two ways out. Either the Democrats win, and we enter 1984. A hyper-class that controls the AI models, the robot fleets, the data, the currency, and owns 99% of everything. Below them, the rest of humanity on life support, dependent on an income that can be granted and taken away. Klaus Schwab's Davos Forum summed up this world in one sentence: "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy." It's communism, except instead of promising equality, it embraces caste. And for the first time in history, a caste won't need the consent of the people to hold power: robots will do the policing, AI will do the surveillance. Or we build a new order founded on merit, freedom, and private property. Where everyone remains the owner of their life, their work, and their share of the abundance. Where the collective ambition isn't managing scarcity, but understanding the universe and colonizing the cosmos. That's Elon Musk's project. The technology is the same in both cases. What changes is who owns it. Choose carefully which world you want to live in. And beware of socialists who promise to share the pie: they always end up keeping the knife.

https://x.com/brivael/status/2114008788101390455?s=20

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Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

Elon Musk often says there's a good chance we're living in a simulation. Let's take that seriously for a second. If we're in a simulation, it isn't absurd to think everyone arrives with a role: a mission, a trajectory, something to accomplish. What our education system does is erase that role. It takes curious, unique children and turns them into NPCs, characters who recite their scripted lines, never ask questions, and follow the script. But if everyone has a role, some roles carry more weight than others. Some characters serve the lie. Others come to break it. For 30, 40, 50 years, we've lived in a world built on lies. Everyone knows it. Corruption sits on every floor, and institutional lying is accepted as normal. It isn't even an accident anymore. It's the system itself. Experts know and stay silent. Media know and cover it up. Officials know and sign anyway. Then a player showed up with a quest: restore truth to the system. In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand imagines John Galt, the man who stops the motor of the world. He pulls the creators out of a system that lives off their work while despising them, and he lets it collapse under the weight of its own lies. Musk goes further than Galt. He doesn't just stop the motor of the old world. He builds a new one. SpaceX takes access to space away from governments and bureaucracies. Tesla rebuilds energy and transportation outside the cartels. X gives speech back to the people it was taken from. Each company is a brick in a parallel system built on a single rule: reality. A rocket can't lie. A battery can't lie. An open algorithm can't lie. That's what terrifies the other side. A lie only survives as long as there's no alternative. The moment another system works in plain sight, the old one becomes indefensible. Covid was the turning point. Before it, most people were asleep. Then they saw what was imposed on them, what was hidden from them, and how anyone who asked questions was treated. They woke up, and people who wake up don't go back to sleep. History will judge this era. I think it will look at the architects of this system of lies the way we now look at collaborators. So I'm speaking directly to the people on the inside. The ones who know, the ones who've seen, the ones who lie every day knowing they're lying. From a purely rational standpoint, if I were in your shoes today, I'd ask myself one question: how do I cross over? The answer is simple. You speak. You say: "I was inside a system I no longer believed in, and today I'm telling the truth." You publish what you saw. You name what you kept quiet. It isn't too late, but the window is closing. In this simulation, everyone can still choose their role. Choose the right one while there's still time.

https://x.com/brivael/status/2114003119134687559?s=20