How to Survive the Broligarchy

01/03/2026

When someone tells you who they are believe them. Donald Trump has told us what is coming for Europe. It’s the same language of regime change that he’s using for the Americas.

Here, it’s not even just about America’s national security or economic interests. The USA has a self-defined responsibility to prevent “civilizational erasure”. The continent is under threat from migration, the EU, and “free speech censorship”.

“We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”

What we can see in Venezuela is how the US prepared over months for this moment: from deporting Venezuelan nationals to inhumane incarceration in El Salvador to the strikes on fishing vessels to blockading Venezuelan ports. And, what we need to see clearly is that a process has already begun in support of US foreign policy goals in Europe.

Those policy goals include the election of “patriotic European parties”.

And as he points out in the National Security Strategy document, Trump has so many tools at his disposal.

I woke up this morning, before I’d seen any of this, thinking about just one of them. And that’s where I want to end this. The UK government has been embarking on a disastrous and suicidal set of deals with US tech companies. I’ve written about that and will continue to write about that because it’s a five-alarm fire that almost no-one in parliament seems to understand.

But what we’ve also learned is that Trump has a new weapon to use against anyone who stands in his way. On the night before Christmas Eve, Trump sanctioned five European citizens involved in disinformation policy and research. I wrote about that here but what I hadn’t realised when that news dropped is what “sanctions” mean in an age when so much of our lives are dependent on US technology platforms.

Trump has already sanctioned six judges from the International Criminal Court and one of them, Nicholas Guillou, gave an interview to Le Monde in which he set out what that meant to his life.

This is the power that the US government can bring to bear on any individual anywhere in the world engaged in any activity it considers contrary to its national interest.

In my last newsletter, I wrote pretty personally about my efforts to overcome the attempts to silence my voice and prevent my work because I think they’re directly relevant to what lies ahead. (And thank you so much to very many kind and supportive comments: thank you thank you.)

I did so because what happens to me will happen to you.

And I’ve been thinking about this latest, newest weapon because the targeted individuals come from a small community that tracks and investigates and attempts to regulate tech platforms; a community I’m part of.

And because my journalistic activity could be defined as contrary to the US national interest, certainly to the economic interests of its biggest companies.

And currently my income comes from this newsletter hosted on a US technology platform whose revenues come via a US payment provider. I feel the chill winds of that precarity. Just as I’ve felt the chill winds of reporting on Russian disinformation and sabotage. There is no difference.