Those in foreign governments who have tried to censor Americans, or have supported speech restrictions that could impact Americans’ rights to express their opinions, now will be facing a retribution.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced new visa restrictions for any foreign authority who has been “complicit” in censorship.
“For too long, Americans have been fined, harassed, and even charged by foreign authorities for exercising their free speech rights,” Rubio said on social media.
“Today, I am announcing a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans. Free speech is essential to the American way of life – a birthright over which foreign governments have no authority.”
Rubio continued, “Foreigners who work to undermine the rights of Americans should not enjoy the privilege of traveling to our country. Whether in Latin America, Europe, or elsewhere, the days of passive treatment for those who work to undermine the rights of Americans are over.”
He cited one threat coming from the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which could “effectively export European-style censorship” to Americans through pressure on tech companies.
Those who have adopted that regime already have ordered X and other platforms to follow their rules. Those authoritarians also fine American companies for failing to follow that regime.
In fact, Vera Jourova, an official with the EU’s executive European Commission, recently threatened that the U.S. soon would be required to have “hate speech laws.”
As he’s been targeting college students on visas who have authored op-eds unaligned with US “national interests,” Rubio announces today that the US will restrict visas for foreign officials who “take flagrant censorship actions” against US companies and citizens pic.twitter.com/NcDhKiQFr4
— Sam Stein (@samstein) May 28, 2025
Those are laws that criminalize thoughts and statements that do not align with the leftists in power.
In the United Kingdom, for example, there already have been people arrested for having the wrong thoughts inside zones set up to protect the lucrative abortion industry.
According to the Independent Sentinel, Jourova said, “What qualifies as hate speech, as illegal hate speech, which you will have soon also in the U.S. … I think that we have a strong reason why we have this in the criminal law; we need the platforms to work with the language simply and to identify such cases.”
It’s also common for such authoritarians to call speech they dislike “disinformation,” “misinformation” or even “malinformation” and ban it.
The report, in fact, explained, “The DSA is horrendous and vague enough to keep going further. The UK is locking people up for praying silently outside abortion clinics and Germany’s fining or imprisoning people for memes and spoken phrases.”
A report from Fox News explained the U.S. long has condemned censorship and repression from the Chinese Communist Party, from Russia, from the extremist regimes in Iran and Cuba.
But President Donald Trump also has noted the threat from Europe’s leftist agenda.
Vice President JD Vance just weeks ago accused European leaders at the Munich Security Conference of suppressing dissenting opinions by categorizing those views as “misinformation” and “disinformation,” the report said.
He cited the “threat from within – the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.”
* * *
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
This article was originally published by the WND News Center.
