Secretary of State Marco Rubio fired the latest shot heard ’round the world, making clear that President Donald Trump‘s effort to shame Europe for backsliding on liberties like free speech comes with a consequence. More could be coming.Rubio on Tuesday announced sanctions on five European citizens who he alleged were part of a “censorship-industrial complex” that infringed the free speech rights of Americans on social media and other platforms.”The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship,” Rubio posted on X. “Today, the State Department will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”
The order targets five people who have “advanced censorship crackdowns” on American companies and speakers. However, the secretary did not name the individuals.
Rubio said he determined that the five individuals’ “entry, presence or activities” in the country could have serious foreign policy consequences for the U.S. and is thereby imposing visa restrictions on “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex,” who will be barred from entering the United States.
While federal law does not allow the enforcement in the U.S. of speech-related judgments issued by courts from nations lacking a corollary to the First Amendment, the militancy towards censorship the five individuals may engender if present in the U.S. is not covered by that law.
Vance: “The threat from within”
Rubio’s latest move came 10 months after Vice President JD Vance issued a stark warning to Europeans that they were abandoning the key tenants of freedom-loving countries, and after the State Department issued a stark warning this fall that mass migration posed an “existential threat to Western civilization.”
“The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance declared in February. “The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”Undersecretary of State Sarah B. Rogers told the Liz Truss Show, a Just the News podcast that aired Wednesday, that more U.S. penalties could be forthcoming for those in Europe who have attacked the freedoms central to Western civilization.
“So there have been many public calls for my office to use its sanctions authority to this end,” Rogers told Truss, the former British prime minister. “And all I can say is that if there were sanctions, it would not be my prerogative to fine tune them, execute them and announce them. It would be that of Secretary Rubio and everyone should watch closely Secretary Rubio’s twitter feed in our press office for more on this issue.”
The five sanctioned censors
Rogers identified on her social media account the five Europeans who were sanctioned on Tuesday as:
Ex-European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton;
Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate;
Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, leaders of HateAid, a German nonprofit; and
Clare Melford, who runs the self-appointed censorship group, the Global Disinformation Index.
