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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