Everyone Is Now A Foreign Agent

A German court has just ruled that reposting a video makes you a criminal. It is the last gap in a machine we have watched assemble itself for four years — and it has now closed on the ordinary citizen with no platform at all.

On 2 July 2026, in a courtroom in Luxembourg, the highest court of the European Union settled a question that ought to have been unaskable in a free society. The question was whether a man who reposts a video is a criminal. The answer was yes.

The man writes under the name Traugott Ickeroth and runs a blog out of the German Saarland. It carries no advertising. It charges nothing to read. It survives the way independent writing has always survived, on the small voluntary sums of the people who value it — €60,038.65 in donations over sixteen months. On four occasions in 2023 he embedded videos from RT, the Russian state channel the Union had banned. For that, German prosecutors charged him under a law that turns a sanctions breach into a prison sentence, and the case climbed all the way to the Court of Justice of the European Union.

The word the whole case turned on was “operator.” The sanctions regulation forbids “operators” from broadcasting banned content, and the German court that first heard the case was honest enough to be unsure whether a private individual with a donation button was any such thing. The Court of Justice removed the doubt and, with it, every limit. An operator, it held, is any natural person who makes the content available to the public — no company required, no profit, no professional standing, no threshold of scale or duration. Four videos or one. For money or for nothing. The act of sharing is the offence.

There is a detail in the ruling that tells you which direction this machine now turns on its own. The European Commission — the Union’s own executive — had issued guidance saying the ban applied only to those exercising a “commercial or professional” activity. The Court swept that aside and reached further than the executive had asked, down to the private citizen the Commission had been prepared to leave alone. When the judges strain to be harsher than the government that wrote the rule, you are no longer watching a policy. You are watching an appetite.

Those of us who have been following this apparatus assemble itself will recognise where this sits. It is not a new outrage. It is the closing of the last gap.

Recall the pieces of it, because the ruling only makes sense as the final move in a sequence. At Allied Command Transformation in Norfolk, NATO has run a cognitive-warfare programme since 2020, and its own architect, François du Cluzel, confirmed on a recorded panel that its reach extends “way beyond our service members” to the alliance’s own populations — the doctrine that reclassified the home citizen as terrain to be managed. Then came the legal instrument: on 8 October 2024 the Council of the European Union adopted Decision (CFSP) 2024/2643, the hybrid-threats regime that lets a council of ministers freeze a person’s assets by administrative decision, no trial, on a ground — “information manipulation” — the text never operationally defines. Then the designations, and this is where the wrapper came off the word “Russia.” The regime that began with Kremlin broadcasters was turned on a Swiss-Cameroonian activist for adopting positions the Union disliked, then on think-tank analysts and former Western police and military officers, and by March 2026 on a British and a French national named outright.

Every stage of that sequence reached a public figure — someone with a platform, an audience, a name. What the Traugott Ickeroth ruling adds is the last category that was still, in practice, exempt: the private person with no platform at all, whose only offence is the act of passing something on. The doctrine named the home population as a target in 2020. The sanctions framework built the administrative machinery in 2024. The designations proved the “foreign” pretext elastic across 2025 and 2026. And now the criminal law reaches the individual who simply shares. The gap is closed.

It is worth being honest about the thing the Union points to when it defends all this, because the honesty is what separates analysis from noise. Russian state information operations are real. RT and Sputnik did function as instruments of Russian state messaging, and the original 2022 broadcasting ban on those outlets rested on firmer ground than this later extension to a donation-funded blogger ever could. A serious reader can hold both facts at once: that a hostile state ran influence campaigns, and that the remedy has quietly grown into something that no longer distinguishes between a state broadcaster and a citizen with a tip jar. The most revealing admission is the Union’s own. Its diplomatic service defines the “foreign information manipulation” it exists to suppress as “a mostly non-illegal pattern of behaviour.” The conduct is lawful. The apparatus proposes to punish it regardless.

None of this is confined to Europe, though the European machine is further along. In the United States the same premise wears a different instrument: the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which does not forbid speech outright but requires those acting for a “foreign principal” to register with the government and label their output as the work of a foreign agent, on pain of prosecution. It was invoked against the scholar Sue Mi Terry in part for the act of publishing — and when the ACLU and the Knight First Amendment Institute challenged it as indistinguishable from ordinary journalism, the court let the prosecution proceed. What restrains FARA now is not the Constitution but the discretion of the Attorney General, and a September 2025 presidential order has already begun aiming it at citizens abroad and the organisations they work with. The same premise, the same direction, a few years behind.

Which returns us, at the end, to the tip jar — because the donation button that so troubled the German court is where the abstraction becomes something you can hold in your hand. A reader values a writer’s work and sends him a few euros. No one is defrauded. No one is coerced. Nothing is taken from anyone who did not choose to give it. It is the oldest and most ordinary act of free association there is, and it is the reason independent writing can exist at all outside the reach of advertisers and states. That this, of all things, is now the fact that converts a citizen into a criminal “operator” — that the voluntary support of readers is what the law reclassifies as a professional enterprise deserving of prison — tells you exactly what the machine was built to reach.

It was built to reach the space between a person and the people who choose to hear him. That space is where every one of these instruments finally points, and it is worth naming plainly, because it is the same space this page occupies right now.

From karat.substack