The State Department is on the warpath against online censorship, and Republican lawmakers are rallying to the cause.
Several lawmakers, including Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), hailed the State Department after Samuel Samson, the senior advisor for the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, scolded Europe as a “hotbed of digital censorship” in the agency’s official Substack page on Tuesday.
“This is exactly right,” Schmitt wrote on X, sharing a screenshot of Samson’s comment about European digital censorship. “Globalism, liberalism, censorship, mass migration—for decades, the West has been [at] war with itself. We finally have political leaders who are brave enough to face the crisis head on.”
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Schmitt was not the only lawmaker to laud the State Department. Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV) reposted parts of the Substack blog and declared, “The West has spent the last 30 years governed by people who were ashamed of their past and hate Western civilization. President Trump is embracing our heritage, which built the greatest nation on the face of the Earth.”
Likewise, Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) endorsed Samson’s critiques: “The West’s liberal ruling class disdains its own culture, hates its heritage, and has contempt for its people. They’re ravaging Europe: mass migration of unassimilable foreigners; political persecution; desecrating their own cultural inheritance[.] Dems want the same thing here.”
The original State Department Substack blog minced no words either. Samson lamented that Americans have seen the results of such censorship efforts, particularly after Big Tech platforms banned President Donald Trump while still in office. He wrote that censorship—described as a “global liberal project”—is “trampling democracy, and Western heritage along with it, in the name of a decadent governing class afraid of its own people.”
While the Trump administration has launched efforts to restore free speech, Europe is using the Digital Services Act (DSA) and other pernicious legislation to suppress free speech. Samson warned that the DSA is being “used to silence dissident voices through Orwellian content moderation,” far removed from its supposed goal of protecting children from “harmful online content.”
He added that “independent regulators now police social media companies, including prominent American platforms like X, and threaten immense fines for non-compliance with their strict speech regulations.”
Citing examples of global censorship, Samson noted: “In Germany, the government has established elaborate systems to monitor and censor online speech under the guise of combating disinformation and preventing offense.”
In response to this overreach, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has taken bold steps against censorship, vowing to revoke the U.S. visas of those who target Americans’ free speech rights online.
ICYMI: Marco Rubio Promises Global Crackdown on Anti-Free Speech Authoritarians
Free speech is under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
