“Julian Assange’s freedom.”

The state failed to break him.

Homeward bound. Over the Pacific Tuesday. (Screen shot, Wikileaks.)

25 JUNE—Julian Assange, at this writing and as best I can reckon, is now in Saipan in the Northern Marianas, awaiting his first and last court appearance before an American judge. The conclusion of this proceeding is foregone. After apparently lengthy negotiations via his attorneys, the WikiLeaks founder has agreed to plead guilty to one felony charge of illegally obtaining and publishing U.S. government documents of various kinds—many standing as evidence of war crimes and human rights abuses, others exposing the Democratic Party’s corruptions during the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Assange is to be sentenced Wednesday to a term of five years and two months, precisely the time he has spent at Belmarsh, the maximum-security prison in southeast London. It has been from Belmarsh that Assange has fought requests for his extradition to the U.S., where he would have faced multiple charges and a lengthy sentence under the 1917 Espionage Act. When he departs for Australia at the conclusion of the proceeding in Saipan, the largest of the Northern Marianas and also the capital city, he will be a free man for the first time in 14 years, counting from his time under house arrest in 2010.

Let us take the utmost care with our diction at this surprising and welcome turn. This will enable us to fathom the moment clearly.

Julian Assange has not been freed, passive voice, the beneficiary of decisions taken by the American and British judiciaries—and almost certainly in the Biden regime’s upper reaches. Julian Assange has achieved his freedom, actively. Even during the darkest moments of his years under house arrest, in asylum at Ecuador’s London embassy, and at Belmarsh, he never surrendered his sovereignty. He remained ever the captain of his soul, and never did he allow his captors entry onto his ship.

It was for this, most fundamentally, that Assange has suffered these past years, especially the five he spent in a cell at Belmarsh. The project was precisely to destroy his sovereignty, to break him one way or another, and he refused to break. His will—and I simply cannot imagine the awesome muscularity of it—has seen him through to victory.