The Committee on the Judiciary of the US House of Representatives has issued an important report. Its title is an officialese mouthful: “The Foreign Censorship Threat, Part II: Europe’s decade-long campaign to censor the global internet and how it harms American speech in the United States.” Yet even if the report’s almost 160 pages may be a little dry, they pack a powerful and well-deserved punch. A punch directed at the EU.

In essence, the House Judiciary report shows how the EU, in particular its happily unelected and power-grabbing apparatchik rulers in the European Commission, have used the pretext of fighting online “disinformation” and “hate speech” to suppress legitimate speech, information, and debate. The report also details how this policy of behind-the-scenes (so much for public accountability) manipulation and censorship has already been deployed to finagle six national elections (so much for sovereignty, democracy, and the rule-of-law).

And that is not counting the fiasco that ensued when former EU Commissar – pardon, Commissioner, of course – Thierry Breton tried to pressure X into suppressing an interview with Donald Trump. Or the less well-known scandal of another high-ranking EU bureaucrat – a Commission Vice President, no less – telling TikTok representatives she wanted to discuss both EU-related matters (sort of her turf) and US elections (boundaries, please?).

In Europe itself, according to the Judiciary Committee report, “the European Commission has pressured platforms to censor content ahead of national elections in Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Moldova, Romania, and Ireland.” And note, please, that one of these countries, Moldova, is not even in the EU.

In addition, the EU has been taking care not only of national elections but itself, too. TikTok alone, for instance, “reported to the European Commission that it censored over 45,000 pieces of alleged misinformation,” including clear political speech on topics including “migration, climate change, security and defense, and LGBTQ rights” ahead of the 2024 EU elections.

The nature of this EU interference has been bluntly biased. In the Slovak elections of 2023, for instance, content censored as “hate speech” included: “There are only two genders,” “Children cannot be trans,” “We need to stop the sexualization of young people/children.” Whatever you think about these statements, it is absurd to label them “hate speech.” To do so means suppressing legitimate speech and betrays bad faith as well as the intent to deceive and manipulate.

The key mechanism for this decade-long influence campaign was almost a hundred meetings – that we now know about – between representatives of the EU and of........

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