On April 2nd, The Federalist posted an article about the death of free speech in Europe.
The article reports:
It’s been a banner week for authoritarians in Europe, and it’s only Wednesday.
On Monday, a French court banned Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing National Rally party and the frontrunner in the 2027 presidential election, from seeking public office for the next five years. The same day, The Telegraph reported that a toddler had been booted from a U.K. preschool for being insufficiently supportive of LGBT politics. Over the weekend, a British couple revealed they had been arrested based on complaints they expressed in a WhatsApp chat about their daughter’s public school.
This is exactly the kind of crackdown on free expression that Vice President J.D. Vance chastised complicit European leaders about in February, in an address at the Munich Security Conference. This week’s insanity further proves Vance’s dire warnings were right.
The article notes:
France isn’t the first country to bar political opposition candidates from its elections. In December, Romania’s highest court suspended its presidential election, blaming Russian interference. (Where have we heard that one before?) Calin Georgescu, who cast himself as a Trumpy “Romania first” candidate, took the lead in the country’s first round of voting before the court canceled the election and then barred Georgescu from running again.
In Brazil, former President
is going to be put on trial for supposedly staging a coup. The politicians who oppose populist candidates are taking notes on how President Trump has been treated and attempting to duplicate those efforts in their own countries.The article concludes:
The European Union’s Digital Services Act, which took effect last year, ensures speech that authorities deem “hateful” can be punished across the continent. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr blasted the law as “incompatible” with the “free speech tradition.”
Jailing citizens for the expression of ideas and barring political candidates from elections are two sides of the same authoritarian coin. Neither is compatible with self-government.
“[S]hutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process,” as Vance told European leaders in February, “is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.”
He was right. Unfortunately, European leaders appear to have taken his statement as an instruction manual instead of an urgent warning.
This censorship would have come to America if Kamala Harris had been elected.