European Kindness Is Threatening Freedom of Speech
Right-wing US critics of UK and European censorship have a point.
French philosopher Voltaire was a champion of free speech; Europe and the UK need to be wary of drifting toward censorship.
Photographer: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images
Britain and Europe have become “a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom,” according to Samuel Samson, a senior adviser to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. His punchy boss further threatens to bar European visitors to the US for “censoring” Americans online. Vice President JD Vance also condemned European “backsliding” on basic democratic values in a speech that outraged his audience at the Munich Security Conference last autumn.
It used to be liberal progressives and radicals who denounced the state for infringing freedom of speech. Now it’s the turn of the populist right to rage against “woke” censorship. President Donald Trump’s own respect for the democratic process is questionable, and administration officials, contemptuous of academic and artistic freedoms at home, make unlikely ambassadors for human rights abroad. But what if these populists have a point?