The European Union has successfully stifled speech within its borders, and now it wants to do the same in America. Will our leaders let it?

From The Hill. Eighty years ago, the U.S. government launched a war bond campaign featuring a painting by artist Norman Rockwell in the struggle against the authoritarian threat from Europe. The picture they chose was Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech depicting a man rising to speak his mind at a local council meeting in Vermont. The image rallied the nation around what Louis Brandeis called our “indispensable right.”

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Now, that very right is again under attack from another European government, which is claiming the right to censor what Americans are allowed to say about politics, science and other subjects. …

In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss the inspiration for Rockwell’s painting: a young selectman in Vermont named James “Buddy” Edgerton. The descendent of a Revolutionary War hero, Edgerton stood up as the lone dissenter to a plan to build a new schoolhouse over the lack of funding for such construction. …

In the 1940s, people like Edgerton had to travel to small board meetings or public spaces to speak their mind. Today, the vast majority of political speech occurs over the Internet and specifically social media. That is why the internet is the single greatest advancement for free speech since the printing press.

It is also the reason governments have spent decades seeking to control speech over the internet, to regulate what people can say or read. …

In Europe, free speech is in free fall. Germany, France, the United Kingdom and other countries have eviscerated free speech by criminalizing speech deemed inciteful or degrading to individuals or groups. …

Some in this country have the same taste for speech-regulation. After Elon Musk bought Twitter and dismantled most of the company’s censorship program, many on the left went bonkers. …

The EU immediately responded by threatening Musk with confiscatory penalties against not just his company but himself. He would have to resume massive censorship or else face ruin. …

This campaign recently came to a head when Musk had the audacity to interview former president Donald Trump. In anticipation of the interview, one of the most notorious anti-free speech figures in the world went ballistic.

European Commissioner for Internal Markets and Services Thierry Breton issued a threatening message to Musk, “We are monitoring the potential risks in the EU associated with the dissemination of content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political — or societal — events around the world, including debates and interviews in the context of elections.” ,,,

To recap, the EU is now moving to force censorship upon American citizens to meet its own demands of what is false, demeaning or inciting. And that includes censorship even of our leading political candidates for the presidency.

The response from the Biden administration was not a presidential statement warning any foreign government from seeking to limit our rights …

That’s because Biden and Harris are not displeased with but supportive of letting the EU do what they are barred from doing under our Constitution. This administration is arguably the most anti-free speech government since John Adams signed the Sedition Act. …

So, after only 80 years, our leaders are silent as a European government threatens to reduce our political speech to the lowest common denominator, which they will set according to their own values. …

If free speech is truly the “indispensable right” of all Americans, we need to treat this threat as an attack on our very existence. It is not only the rawest form of foreign intervention into an election, but a foreign attack on our very freedoms. This is why we must pass a Digital Freedom Act.

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(Excerpt from The Hill. Photo Credit: Norman Rockwell – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16925968)