Begin with so many of NATO’s European members welching on their financial and equipage commitments to NATO. This represents less a matter of their word being worthless, important as that is, but represents far more an utter betrayal of their fellow members. It’s these shirkers’ insistent reliance on their fellow members for protection even as they refuse to be capable of contributing to their fellows’ protection. That betrayal includes us. Europe’s nations might not be able to contribute much to our defense, but as many insist (for the most part correctly), allies are important to our national security.

But Europe’s essential lack of friendliness extends, now, to naked attempts to censor Americans’ speech within our own nation and anywhere else in the non-UK world. Europe intends to (try to) dictate to us what we are permitted to say.

The European Commission’s coercion of Big Tech to globally censor disfavored narratives goes much further than previously thought, according to a House Judiciary Committee interim staff report released Tuesday that tees up Wednesday’s hearing featuring an Irish comedian who was arrested in London for criticizing gender ideology while visiting the US.

And this, from a 2023 handbook by the EC-created EU Internet Forum:

tech companies were expected to moderate content from “populist rhetoric” and “anti-elite” sentiment to “political satire” and “meme subculture.”

Globally, too—which means within the US as the arrest of the Irish comedian demonstrates—not just inside Europe.

And this, giving concreteness to Europe’s enmity toward American businesses and their leadership teams and to us American citizens in general:

Paris police…raid[ed] X‘s local office Tuesday and summoning owner Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino for “voluntary interviews” April 20.
The EC fined X €120 million, or 6% of its global revenue, in the first such DSA action in December, “in obvious retaliation for its protection of free speech around the globe,” the committee said Tuesday.

It’s possible to argue that President Donald Trump’s (R) tariffs are the wrong tool with which to deal with Europe, but it’s increasingly clear that he’s not wrong about the need. My suggestion to Musk and Yaccarino: don’t go to France for the interviews; conduct them, instead, via video over the Internet. There’s little reason to expect that these two, were they to go to France for the interviews, would be freely and easily able to leave after the interviews.