OPINION:
Bureaucrats in Brussels and London are cracking down on traditional Western values. Their increasingly brazen assaults on free speech are having a global impact.
On Monday, a British court branded former Premier League soccer star Joey Barton a criminal over naughty social media posts. “Given the gravity, persistence and impact of this offending … there will be concurrent terms of imprisonment for each of these associated offenses,” Liverpool Crown Court Judge Andrew Menary pronounced.
The six-month prison sentence was suspended, but Mr. Barton will still have to perform 200 hours of community service and attend mandatory “rehabilitation” meetings for an entire year. In the words of prosecutors, his misdeeds amounted to the following: “He publicly expresses a variety of views, including disapproval of female commentators on what he regards as the male preserve of football.”
A sane country would consider that an expression of opinion. It would understand that athletes might express such opinions without tact or grace. That certainly describes the uncomplimentary messages Mr. Barton directed at soccer critic Eniola Aluko.
“Eni, sorry luv, you’re dreadful as a pundit. Tone deaf, can’t count and most importantly you know next to nothing about men’s football,” he wrote in his felonious note on X, adding that she was “Only there to tick boxes.” He was equally unkind toward BBC’s Jeremy Vine, asking whether he had been to “Epstein Island” recently.
This case is a symptom of a growing problem across the Atlantic. On Friday, the European Union assessed a $140 million fine against Elon Musk because he refused to do the Commission’s bidding regarding “the dissemination of illegal content.” His crime was his failure to censor people with disagreeable views, such as sophomoric soccer celebrities or Republican presidents.
In an interview with Sean Hannity, Vice President J.D. Vance recognized that these moves revolve around the establishment’s obsession with importing cheap labor and voters from the Third World. The U.S. public rejected this agenda last year, but we’re only an election away from reinstating policies that are tearing apart the Continent.
“What are the biggest drivers of violence in European societies? It’s mass migration, it’s people who haven’t assimilated into European societies, driving cars into Christmas festivals, killing tons of innocent people. Very often, the European response to that is … to try to silence and shut down their own citizenry,” he said.
Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, took advantage of the freedom of the X platform to declare he won’t give in to bullying from Brussels designed to force him to accept more foreigners. “We will not take a single migrant in, and we will not pay for others’ migrants. Hungary will not implement the measures of the Migration Pact. The rebellion begins!” he wrote Monday.
Given Europe’s hostility to freedom of speech and democracy, it makes little sense for the United States to continue pumping billions of dollars into Europe’s defense. We cover 16% of NATO’s budget, shouldering more of the burden than any other member nation, not including the billions handed to Ukraine.
President Trump intends to rewrite the rules. Instead of subsidizing the destruction of the West, the administration’s newly released National Security Strategy calls on Europe “to stand on its own feet and operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations, including by taking primary responsibility for its own defense.”
If Britain and the EU choose to continue this illiberal path, at least we won’t be paying their bills.
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