Last week, the State Department published a strikingly radical screed on its official Substack. Titled “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe,” the piece accused Europe’s governments of waging “an aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself.”

These Western nations, according to author Samuel Samson, have turned on their own heritage: abandoning democracy in favor of a repressive liberalism that threatens to snuff out the heart of their own civilization.

“The global liberal project is not enabling the flourishing of democracy. Rather, it is trampling democracy, and Western heritage along with it, in the name of a decadent governing class afraid of its own people,” Samson writes.

Samson asserts that German and French criminal investigations into far-right factions are politically motivated repression, but provides no evidence to support this extraordinary claim about the internal politics of key allies. He inflates the (real) problems with free speech law in Britain, while whitewashing the only authoritarian state in the European Union (right-wing Hungary). He presents a bizarre intellectual history of the Declaration of Independence, replacing Jefferson’s chief influences (Enlightenment liberals) with Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas.

The essay isn’t just poorly argued: It has policy implications. Samson both insults and threatens allied governments, implying there will be some kind of US punishment if European states do not change their policies on free speech, election administration, and (for some reason) migration.

“Secretary Rubio has made clear that the State Department will always act in America’s national interest. Europe’s democratic backsliding not only impacts European citizens but increasingly affects American security and economic ties, along with the free speech rights of American citizens and companies,” he writes. “We will not always agree on scope and tactics, but tangible actions by European governments to guarantee protection for political and religious speech, secure borders, and fair elections would serve as welcome steps forward.”

Samuel Samson’s title is “Senior Advisor for the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor,” but he is not an experienced diplomat. In fact, he is a 2021 college graduate with no background in European affairs or foreign policy. His last job was........

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