Who was it that said Europe “clumsily stifles dissent” and exhibits basic hypocrisy on the questions of speech?
It certainly sounds a lot like JD Vance, who used the Munich Security Conference last year to chastise the entire European Union for “backsliding” on rhetorical freedom. Or maybe it was Elon Musk, who looks to Europe and sees censorious, dystopian hell. In fact, Maga writ-large has made the question of speech on this continent its cause du jour.
A year on from Vance’s intemperate performance at the Munich Security Conference, and the American right’s obsession with European speech laws has only grown deeper. Lucy Connolly – the mother imprisoned in the United Kingdom for tweeting “set fire to all the f**king hotels full of the bastards for all I care” during the Southport riots – has become one of its champions, ultimate evidence of government with bad priorities and worse morals.
And meanwhile, Stephen Yaxley Lennon (who goes by the man-of-the-people sobriquet Tommy Robinson) was hosted at the US state department and hailed as a “free-speech warrior”. Robinson’s rhetorical crusades tend toward the broadly anti-immigrant and the vehemently anti-Islam variety. He is too extreme for Nigel Farage, who wants him nowhere near Reform UK. As activists go, Robinson is on the sharp end of the wedge. And Maga loves him.
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It’s not hard to work out what Musk, Vance and the like think about the continent. When Maga looks at Europe it sees it sees a continent pushing itself to the brink with permissive migration policy. It sees a civilisation transformed by Islamic terrorism and sectarian conflict (as though Europe has only known serene harmony until now). It sees faceless Brussels drones using big-tech regulation to harm the cause of the European far right. And mostly, it sees tyrannical bureaucrats controlling the flow of information to its own citizens, and then locking up tweeters with impunity.
If they’re right, then, well, yes, Europe does sound pretty doomed.
But, to my opening question: who called out European hypocrisy on the speech issue? If you guessed Vance or Musk or even Trump you would be wrong. It comes instead from a 2006 New York Times op-ed titled “Europe doesn’t get free speech” written after the arrest of “historian” David Irving in Austria for Holocaust denial.
On the same story, Christopher Hitchens (a Brit, yes) wrote in the Wall Street Journal “Free speech uber alles (even for David Irving)”. That was one small part of a huge and sustained mid-noughties campaign from the WSJ on Europe’s so-called speech problem – including a flurry of op-eds and court cases. In 2014, the same paper was still hand-wringing about the UK and “the new threats” to speech.
[ A day with Tommy Robinson, leader of Britain’s right-wing nationalist upsurgeOpens in new window ]
Meanwhile, the American columnist Anne Applebaum had serious opinions in the Washington Post about a German opera that was cancelled (2006, again) for fear of inciting Islamist rage. On a similar “state of speech in Europe” theme, she was also concerned about how the pope’s remarks on Islam and the West were going down in the Islamic world, and whether a mode of self-censorship could start creeping in.
A piece in the Financial Times (same year), marshalled all of the evidence that speech in Europe appeared (from a US perch) in a precarious state. “I am currently ploughing my way through a lot of American books,” the unnamed writer opens the piece, “whose general theme could be summarised as ‘Europe is doomed’.”
Perceptive readers may have detected a resonance by now. The point is not that Vance is necessarily wrong in all of his 2026 diagnoses or Applebaum in her 2006 ones. I suspect both are more correct than liberal niceties permit me from saying. But rather, that this very American fascination with Europe’s damnation has been trucking along for some time – and it has not always been the preserve of the turbo-right wing of politics. Unless of course I missed a memo about the political character of the New York Times and the FT.
[ Inside Tommy Robinson’s world: Leader of Britain’s right-wing nationalist upsurgeOpens in new window ]
That the noughties liberal media and the 2026 far right are so united on the question really is a welcome reminder that the United States is a foreign country. As glibly obvious as it feels to point that out. Deference to the first amendment over there is so ingrained that sometimes I wonder if they forget that we don’t even have one of those over here. Maybe Robinson really does look like a martyr to them.
But I think it reveals more a deeper anxiety in the American psyche. Europe is a grand old civilisation compared with its Yankee cousins, who have barely been here for a whisper in comparison. The idea that a civilisation that old and that established could – through censorious and tyrannical governments that imprison their citizens – sleepwalk into its own ruination must strike terror into the heart of a young country behaving the way it is.
If it can happen to them, then why not us? Maybe even superpowers get nervous.
