Is free speech dead in Europe? Just this week in Belgium, police stormed a gathering of conservatives, attempting to overtake the event on the grounds of “public safety” and stopping “a public disturbance.”

The National Conservatism Conference, or “NatCon,” planned to host a conference for European conservative thought leaders such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and United Kingdom politician Nigel Farage. But those plans quickly changed as Brussels’s socialist Mayor Philippe Close reportedly pressured various venues to drop NatCon, while Mayor Emir Kir of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, where the event was ultimately held, told Politico he would “immediately take measures to ban” the conference. Kir worked with police to shut down the conference on Tuesday.

But in a defeat for the censors, Belgium’s supreme administrative court ruled a day later that there was no evidence that the conference presented a threat to public order, saying the mayor’s actions “derived purely from the reactions that its organization might provoke among opponents.”

Despite the court’s ruling, Europe’s disdain for free speech remains. What happened in Brussels is just one example of the European Union’s and its member states’ systemic assault on free speech.

Just weeks ago, Scotland enforced its “Hate Crime and Public Order Act,” an anti-free speech measure that received thousands of complaints in its first week, while only 3.8% were found to be authentic hate speech violations. 

The EU’s European Commission has sought new authority to criminalize “hate speech” and ban unpopular views, setting a goal of adoption by the end of the current legislative term. 

EU leadership is also working to silence conservative voices within government as well, blocking members of the European Parliament who hold “far right” views from holding any influential positions in the legislative body.

The attack on free speech expands even to free enterprise, as the EU and European governments are criminalizing the operation of private companies. Italy recently became the first Western country to ban its citizens from using ChatGPT, the popular artificial intelligence chatbot. The EU has banned certain types of advertising but only when those ads appear on Meta platforms.

The Digital Services Act recently imposed by the EU is a sweeping regulatory package that imposes onerous content moderation requirements on social media and tech companies to codify digital censorship in the EU and around the world. The DSA is a crackdown on private companies that platform speech that many say “threaten” free speech and will have a “chilling effect” on freedom of expression.

Because of these onerous regulations, Europe is now falling behind America and the rest of the world when it comes to technology and communications.

Why is all of this happening? Europe has an inherently different view of free speech than we do in the United States. These disturbing trends toward criminalizing speech have been festering across Europe for years. In fact, Europe’s leaders are now targeting the American system of free speech. 

In a 2012 decision by the European Court of Human Rights, a concurring opinion explicitly rejected America’s reverence for protecting freedom of speech in favor of utility, arguing that “today’s Europe cannot afford the luxury of such a vision of the paramount value of free speech.” 

Thankfully, these events would never have happened in America, right? Think again.

We now are seeing states such as California and others try to emulate the EU censorship model. Americans cannot allow the constitutional right to free speech to be sacrificed as the Left seeks to emulate Europe’s socialist agenda.

Europe may be an ocean away, but these events in Europe serve as a reminder of the importance of our First Amendment rights that we as Americans hold dear. It may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. without the First Amendment, but what is happening in Europe should set off alarm bells for Americans, especially at a time when conservatives are being silenced and, in some cases, criminalized here at home by the financial sector, Big Tech, and the media.

The radical ideas the Left is pushing — banning gas-powered cars, “Medicare for all,” and taxpayer-subsidized benefits for illegal immigrants — these policy ideas, which are now staples of the Democrats’ agenda, didn’t originate here. They were dreamt up by EU bureaucrats in Brussels.

Does this mean our freedom of speech is next on the chopping block?

Already, we’ve seen censorship of certain ideals in America: Credit card companies considered tracking gun owners’ legal purchases, the FBI raided a pro-life father’s home on baseless grounds, Big Tech companies are banning ads and locking users out of their accounts for promoting ideas that go against the Democratic agenda.

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The Left’s attempt to silence Republicans isn’t new, but we must stop these attempts to criminalize conservative voices and ban ideas that go against the narrative from becoming reality in the U.S.

Republican leaders must learn from our friends across the pond and stop these anti-free speech ideas from infiltrating mainstream American thought. 

Joe Grogan is senior adviser of the EU-US Forum and former director of the Domestic Policy Council in the Trump administration.