Sam R OYKEN

A Letter to America, From a Frenchman Who Loves You Yesterday, the Prime Minister of Poland posted this: "Restoring the rule of law is our duty. After years of PiS-led lawlessness, this is a difficult process, sometimes painful, and it requires decisive action. There is no other way." Read it slowly. "There is no other way." In today's Europe, that is the sentence a government says right before doing something it could not do through the normal rules. I'm French. I'm the grandson of a farmer from Brittany. I taught myself to code at twelve, spent a year in Silicon Valley when I was young, and today I build a tech company between Paris and San Francisco. I'm writing to you because I watch what is happening to my continent, and I'm afraid you are about to take the same road. Let me tell you what "rule of law" means in Europe now. When Donald Tusk came to power in December 2023, one of his first moves was to take over Poland's public broadcaster. Rather than pass a media law the president would veto, his government used corporate law to replace its leadership, and the state news channel briefly went dark. When that was blocked, it put public TV into liquidation. When the Constitutional Tribunal ruled against the government, the government stopped recognizing its rulings. Tusk himself said openly that restoring the rule of law would sometimes require decisions that would not fully meet the criteria of legality. And Brussels? For years, the European Commission froze billions in EU funds to Poland over "rule of law" concerns under the previous conservative government. Once Tusk was in, it unfroze the money and closed its proceedings. That's the lesson. In Europe, the rule of law is no longer a principle. It is a label. When a conservative government reshapes the courts, it's an assault on democracy. When a pro-Brussels government ignores a court, it's "restoring the rule of law." It isn't only Poland. In Romania in December 2024, the Constitutional Court annulled the first round of a presidential election after the wrong candidate came first. In France, a TV channel, C8, lost its broadcasting license in 2025, and this week a member of parliament declared that shutting down CNEWS, the most-watched news channel in the country, is "a priority." In Germany, domestic intelligence labeled the main opposition party extremist. In Brussels, the Digital Services Act gives unelected commissioners the power to fine platforms up to 6% of global revenue, and its first fine ever went to X, with more investigations into "disinformation" still open. There are no gulags here. Let me be precise about that. But there is a reflex: an elite that knows better than the people, that decides what the people are allowed to read, and that corrects their vote when it comes out wrong. Now let me tell you why you are the first power on earth. It's not oil. It's not size. It's not luck. Europe has had all of those. You are number one because you built your entire system on a radical idea: the individual comes before the state. Your First Amendment doesn't say "speech shall be protected unless it's disinformation." It says Congress shall make no law. Your Constitution protects private property against the government that wrote it. And your culture lets people fail and try again. In France, a founder who fails carries it for life. In America, a founder who fails is called experienced. In Europe, we passed a law to regulate artificial intelligence before we had an AI industry. You built the industry. That's not an accident. That's what happens when a society trusts its citizens more than its bureaucrats. Your system is not perfect. Your politics are loud, ugly and polarized, and I see it. But it is fairer than ours, because it was designed by people who distrusted power, including the power of good intentions. That distrust is the most valuable thing you own. So here is what worries me as I watch you vote on Tuesday. From Paris, when I look at the Democratic side, I recognize the European reflex. I saw an administration lean on social media platforms to take down posts; Mark Zuckerberg later wrote to Congress that the government had repeatedly pressured Meta to censor content and that he regretted not pushing back. I saw a proposal to tax unrealized gains, meaning taxing wealth you haven't even sold. I hear calls to end the filibuster, add seats to the Supreme Court, and add new states to the Senate. Each one can be defended on its own. Together, they look like what Europe did: when you can't win under the rules, you change the referee. And a majority that rewrites the rules in its favor doesn't plan on being a minority again. The twentieth century already ran the collectivist experiment, and it ran it to the end. Every time a state decided that individuals were a means to a collective goal, and that some category of people stood in the way of justice, it ended in camps and mass graves. Tens of millions dead. But it never started with camps. It started with good intentions, a moral elite, and a list of things that were too dangerous to say, too much to own, too misinformed to count. I'm not telling you Democratic voters are Bolsheviks. Most of them are your neighbors and they want good things. I'm telling you the reflex is real, that I live under it every day, and that you are the last big country on earth built to resist it. When Europeans want to build something, we look at you. When we leave, we go to you. If you become us, there is nowhere left to go. Keep your First Amendment. Keep your property. Keep your right to fail. Vote on Tuesday. From Paris, with love, and with fear.