EU vs. Elon Musk: The Battle Over Free Speech Escalates In Paris

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

A raid on Elon Musk’s company X in Paris: On Tuesday morning, the French public prosecutor gained access to the company’s offices. The stated purpose of the investigation is the dissemination of child pornography and violations of personal rights through the spread of Deepfakes.

X’s offices in Paris, which were searched by investigators from the Paris prosecutor’s office, the national cyber crime unit and Europol

The French prosecutor’s office carried out the search Tuesday morning at Elon Musk’s X offices in Paris. Officially, the raid targets suspicions of distributing child pornography, according to a statement from the authority. As a further justification, the “Internet and Cybercrime” division cited the recently criticized so-called sexual Deepfakes.

These photo and video manipulations are generated using the AI of the Grok application, which the X platform provides to its users. Another allegation against the platform’s operators concerns the distribution of material denying the Holocaust.

The French prosecutor’s office is thus deploying maximum heavy artillery against X at the next escalation level. These appear to be politically motivated accusations, as the operator of a communication platform ethically cannot be responsible for content published by individual users.

Different Stage 

Clearly, there is more at stake. At the center is the conflict between the European Union and the U.S. government. The recurring point of contention: enforcing European censorship laws under the Digital Services Act (DSA)—now using a morally escalated strategy. Child pornography, Holocaust denial—hardly worse can be imagined. Such content is commercially damaging. And this aligns precisely with the French government’s strategic line, acting here as the executing arm of the EU Commission.

The fight for free speech in Europe has now shifted to a moral battlefield, where rule of law, freedom of expression, and responsibility for certain content are merged into a politically exploitable attack vector.

The message is clear: Those who do not comply with our censorship framework will be pelted with dirt until something sticks. The framework covers the entire conceivable range of direct and indirect censorship—from chat monitoring to editorial oversight of forum content, to post deletion or algorithmic reach limitations.

There is no other way to interpret it: rising criticism from the European public regarding EU Commission policies, open borders, and the green transition has gone too far for the leadership circles. Political fractures loom, seemingly irreparable.

The raid at the Paris office also resembles a classic political smoke screen. France, one of the many fading stars in the EU sky, would have every reason to debate other pressing topics rather than media-staged raids on X in the style of classic police states. Over all government action—or more precisely, inaction—hangs a veritable fiscal crisis. The welfare state is overstretched, the migration crisis forces the country into ever-expanding social programs, and debt is rising again this year by a dramatic five percent of GDP. France is approaching 120 percent debt-to-GDP, nearing de facto insolvency.

Wouldn’t even this visible plunge into the debt spiral alone warrant a deeper debate and new elections, Monsieur le Président?

That a president without a popular mandate, Emmanuel Macron, with approval ratings around 15 percent, chooses to engage in an escalating conflict with Elon Musk on a side front to distract from fundamental problems may be politically understandable. Yet it also exposes the full impotence of France and European politics in general.

The European Union presents itself as a political paper giant, now seeking open conflict with perceived internal and external enemies: internally corroded, lacking trust from the public, economically in decline, and an energy parasitic actor that has shot itself in the foot multiple times by entering a conflict with its most important supplier, Russia, blindly. The colossus staggers toward its end like a mindless schoolyard bully.

Against this backdrop, the rising pressure on opposition voices must be understood. Open resistance is forming in the digital space against the Euro-regime, now fighting back against the unraveling of its climate and power complex, which can no longer be saved. That efforts are being intensified to suppress dissenting opinions fits seamlessly into this logic of decline.

In the case of platform X, the conflict culminates with the disliked American government under President Donald Trump, alongside whom Elon Musk stands as a vocal defender of free speech—and against whom EU elites are now aggressively focusing their attacks. Whether one likes it or not: Trump remains one of the last relevant actors actively defending core Western values like free speech and market economy, while the EU mutates into a substantial control leviathan across all levels of society.

Eerie Silence 

In Europe, it has become eerily quiet around proponents of enlightened politics, those who would defend individual freedoms against an increasingly repressive state apparatus. Tuesday’s actions by French authorities fit perfectly into the EU’s general line: gradually undermining civil rights and freedom of speech through the growing censorship apparatus of the DSA.

And the more cohesive, powerful, and vocal the opposition in Eastern Europe and beyond the Atlantic becomes, forming a strategically acting unit against Brussels’ centralism, the more aggressive—and simultaneously defensive—the Brussels body reacts. Its gestures resemble a staggering boxer sensing the next punch could switch off the lights.

Repeated references to child pornography or alleged copyright violations to justify censorship appear as crude deception maneuvers that even the last supporter of the von der Leyen-Macron EU can see through. These are classic issues for which existing criminal law would suffice.

Yet this finding does nothing to change the central fact: Europe still lacks a firm, decisive confrontation of the bourgeois remnants of our society with this increasingly despotic pseudo-elite.

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About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a Germany a graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.

Tyler Durden Wed, 02/04/2026 - 07:20

Gold Giant Bundesbank Signals An Open Vote Of No Confidence in Global Monetary Stability

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

The German Bundesbank hoards the second-largest gold reserves among central banks. The precious metal serves as an insurance policy for both states and private individuals. Its massive price surge shows that the dice have already been cast: governments will attempt to inflate their debts.

Anyone acquiring precious metals in these weeks simultaneously casts a verdict on their currency. This may be a conscious portfolio decision or simply an undefined desire to have a monetary insurance policy at hand. One never knows what the future holds.

Gold jewelry or collectible silver coins are aesthetically appealing and trigger our instinct to collect. What private purchases and the massive hoarding of gold by central banks share is their monetary-policy background.

In honest moments, looking at the soaring global sovereign debts and escalating geopolitical conflicts, we know that our monetary system is heading for severe turbulence. In many places, the fiscal Rubicon has long been crossed. With debt-to-GDP ratios well above 100 percent—in the U.S., China, and numerous European countries—only a massive expansion of the money supply can ensure the public sector’s ability to pay.

Bundesbank Holds Massive Gold Reserves

This occurs at the expense of those trusting in cash. In this context, it is noteworthy that the German Bundesbank hoards the second-largest gold reserves among global central banks.

3,350 tons of gold, with a market value of roughly half a trillion euros, are split between the Bundesbank’s vaults in Frankfurt (50 percent), the New York Federal Reserve (37 percent), and a storage facility in the City of London (13 percent). It is an inheritance from the old Bretton Woods system, when gold was stored near major global trade hubs.

The time is drawing closer to bring the reserves stored abroad back home. In a fragile monetary system, precaution is not alarmism—it is pure self-protection.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni must have thought the same. She is working under intense pressure to formally transfer the Italian central bank’s gold reserves to the state—a step equivalent to an open vote of no confidence against the European Central Bank. 

Italy holds 2,452 tons of gold, ranking third internationally behind the U.S. and Germany, giving it, like Germany, a bargaining chip to restart its own currency should a severe euro crisis ever occur.

From the Frankfurt ECB Tower, these developments are viewed with the utmost concern. Nothing corrodes a monetary system faster and more effectively than a loss of confidence in creditworthiness. The banking system, as well as pension funds and retirement insurance, rely on the stability of government bonds recorded on their balance sheets.

Once it became clear that states could no longer consolidate fiscally, the bond market corrected sharply. Billions in losses are on the books, only not written off due to special valuation rules granted by lawmakers.

From the ECB’s perspective, the hoarding of national gold reveals dangerous secession tendencies. It still holds around 500 tons of gold from the early days of the monetary union, when member states contributed gold reserves proportionally to their GDP to support the euro. This is far from sufficient to provide the euro with a stable, metal-backed anchor after decades of money growth.

The repeated desire of ECB President Christine Lagarde to centralize national gold reserves at the ECB vault is almost universally rejected by eurozone members. So much for the repeatedly touted integration of the euro system.

Gold as a Global Trust Anchor

Elsewhere, gold has also become central to stabilizing trust. The BRICS nations have for years worked on creating a payment system independent of SWIFT but have failed so far because no one trusts the Asian hegemon, China.

The solution—the pegging of mutual transfers to gold—was adopted by China during the global financial crisis more than fifteen years ago, when it became the largest buyer in the precious metals market. With roughly 2,300 tons, China now holds the fourth-largest gold reserves in the world.

Besides China, Russia, Turkey, India, and Poland, as well as countries like Egypt and Thailand, have significantly increased their gold holdings since 2008. The price increase is therefore justified and likely to continue in the long term, albeit with growing volatility. 

A positive side effect of this reevaluation is a kind of balance-sheet repair. The deep gaps created by the bond market crisis are closed by the appreciation of gold for those who recognized the approaching sovereign debt danger early.

In Germany’s Bundesbank, gold now represents roughly 80 percent of the entire balance sheet. There is thus motivation in many places to continue boosting the gold price. It is an elegant way to stabilize the monetary system while simultaneously repairing past damages across different institutional levels through a simple repricing.

States Strive for a Gold Monopoly

It is almost a historical irony. When U.S. President Richard Nixon terminated the dollar’s convertibility into gold in 1971 amid soaring debt and massive inflation of liabilities, the so-called fiat credit money system was set in motion. Debts exploded, and states could borrow nearly without limit.

Unbacked credit, combined with ever-lowering reserve requirements, created a perfect Ponzi system, which has now entered its crisis stage.

German policymakers tried to escape this debt spiral by enshrining the so-called debt brake a few years ago. Yet the corrosive erosion of this fiscal constraint began immediately afterward and was ultimately buried last year by Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his high-stakes special fund gamble.

With this policy of unlimited state credit, citizens are driven toward safe havens such as precious metals, accelerating the decline of the fiat credit money system.

The relationship of states to gold remains ambivalent. Aside from committed fiat regimes like Canada, which holds no gold at all, it is becoming increasingly clear that gold can either extend the Ponzi scheme or initiate a new monetary system.

However, citizens fleeing into the safe haven of precious metals become potentially dangerous antagonists, prompting an immediate political counterreaction. Gold purchases are recorded, limited, and legislated in ways clearly designed to capture future portfolio gains.

The Netherlands, for example, is expected to begin taxing unrealized capital gains in 2028—a clear warning.

A general, sharp appreciation of precious metals could create tens of thousands of capital-strong, independent families, particularly in Europe. It is precisely this independence that vexes the etatists in Brussels and EU capitals. The fiscal effect of harvesting book gains in the private sector also plays a role, given runaway sovereign debt.

The ambivalence of gold—and this applies to precious metals as well as other assets without counterparty risk, such as Bitcoin—inevitably provokes massive repression in political regimes focused on citizen control.

Expect other European states soon to follow the Netherlands’ example. The fight for sovereignty has begun.

* * * 

About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a Germany a graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.

Tyler Durden Wed, 02/04/2026 - 03:30