Thank God for the First Amendment — Europe Is Losing Free Speech

It’s time to hit your knees right now and thank God for the First Amendment.

Countries in the European Union (EU) aren’t as blessed as we are. The globalist EU overlords have unleashed a new plan to crack down on free speech on the continent in the name of “anti-racism.”

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

The European Union on Monday unveiled an "anti-racism" plan that presses member states to censor online "hate speech" and adopt an "intersectional approach" to "structural racism."
The plan, which also calls for training on "unconscious bias" and "microaggression," is likely to intensify the Trump administration’s diplomatic fusillade against European hate speech laws. It also illustrates the degree to which American racial politics have been exported to the European Union.

If you think that sounds so 2020, you’re not alone. The last EU “anti-racism” plan from that year has the fingerprints of 2020 woke superstar Ibram X. Kendi.

In an antiracism plan from 2020, the European Commission endorsed Black Lives Matter and described racism as a "global problem."
"It is not enough to be against racism," the 2020 plan said, echoing the now-famous formulation of American author Ibram Kendi. "We have to be active against it."

The preamble to the plan, which goes by the title, “Union of Equality: Anti-Racism Strategy 2026-2030,” sounds like just about every woke cliché worked into a single paragraph:

The European Union (EU) stands for unity, democracy, and respect for human rights. The diversity of the people living in the EU is one of its greatest strengths, as acknowledged by the founding treaties. The EU is a Union of Equality ‘founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of people belonging to minorities’. This foundation of the EU legal order implies an environment free from racism, where everyone can thrive and contribute to the prosperity of their societies. At times when these values are put into question, the EU stands by its people, their rights and freedoms, and there is no acceptance in the EU of any form of racism or discrimination on the grounds of racial or ethnic origin.

The new plan admitted that the 2020 framework was a start in achieving some sort of “anti-racist” vision, but it led to each one of the EU member states running with its own legislation. Of course, that just won’t do, will it?

The new framework seeks to tighten censorship of what the EU deems to be “racist” language and add more teeth to enforce censorship. It also seeks to streamline the different nations’ standards into a single standard.

What’s so troublesome about this is that it adds to the increasingly draconian censorship regime that has characterized the EU over the past few years. In recent times, the EU has prosecuted people for criticizing COVID-19 lockdowns and supporting the biblical sexual ethic. These actions have caught the eye of free-speech advocates.

"Racism has existed around the world and throughout history, but ‘antiracism’ is a recent American export rejected by American voters," Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Sarah Rogers told the Washington Free Beacon. "One of its most consistent claims is that racial spoils, not markets or merit or moral sense, should structure our economy, our laws, and even our ‘micro’-level social interactions. This ideology impairs free expression, workplace fairness, and other Western values."

Let’s be grateful to the founding fathers for enshrining freedom of speech in the Constitution. While we’re at it, let’s be grateful to God, who gave us those unalienable rights that the founders recognized.

Europe may be surrendering free speech to unelected bureaucrats and woke ideologues, but we’re not. At PJ Media, we tell the truth plainly, defend the First Amendment unapologetically, and refuse to kneel before censorship culture.

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