Critical events can fall victim to a dramatic news cycle. This is especially true of creeping “liberal-democratic” authoritarianism that the mainstream media willfully ignore when it suits their aims. It applied in 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine immediately overshadowed the Canadian government’s freezing of bank accounts of trucker-protesters and relegated the story to the more distant regions of public discourse.

Now, after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, the selection of Senator J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, and the palace coup against President Joe Biden, there is limited appetite for news beyond Washington.

Despite these monumental events across the Atlantic, or perhaps because of them, the European ruling class is doubling down on authoritarian excesses.

On July 12, European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton announced (ironically, on X) the European Commission believes X’s system of verified “blue checks” is deceptive to users and constitutes a breach of the recently passed Digital Services Act. He added, “if our view is confirmed we will impose fines & require significant changes.” Those fines will ostensibly total six percent of the company’s annual income. Margrethe Vestager, the Commission’s Executive Vice President for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age, asserted the platform “misleads users, fails to provide adequate ad repository and blocks access to date for [EU-sponsored] researchers.”

X owner Elon Musk responded, “We look forward to a very public battle in court, so that the people of Europe can know the truth.” He also alleged E.U. officials floated an “illegal secret deal” if the company “quietly censored speech.”

It is no mystery why European institutions want to stifle the iconoclastic tech platform. In Ireland, it has been instrumental in rallying citizens against government efforts to burden small towns and villages with unwanted migrant relocation centers. After two elite-endorsed referenda surprisingly failed this spring, Irish opponents were quick to credit X for its mobilization capabilities. In Poland, the new government had to address brutal police tactics toward protesting farmers despite the mainstream media dutifully ignoring them. In Germany, fed-up citizens are finally willing to test the long effective deterrent of “Nazi shaming,” now that proof of the country’s policy failings is so readily accessible. From the beaches of Spain to the banlieues of Paris, smartphone owners can break the stranglehold of establishment media and government mouthpieces.

On July 16, the German government shut down the right-wing publication COMPACT Magazine (not to be confused with the American publication by that name), and over 200 police officers raided editor Jürgen Elsässer’s home and office. Tipped off media were on hand to photograph the pajama-clad editor being escorted from his home, and videos show police loading chairs and other office equipment into a police van. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser boasted (again, on X) of her department’s measures and proclaimed, “We will not allow ethnic definitions of who belongs to Germany and who does not.” Far from a neutral, benevolent bureaucrat, Faeser previously wrote for a German Antifa magazine.

Faeser’s ideological comrade Ilaria Salis, an Italian Antifa member, just assumed her seat in the European Parliament. Salis and other Antifa members injured nine people, four severely, with hammers and batons in a bout of public violence in Budapest last year; her election as a MEP gave her legal immunity that allowed her release from detention. The assailants, including Salis, reportedly targeted innocent passersby who “looked like” Nazis, based on their clothing. Salis’s detention and trial in Hungary became a cause célèbre for European leftists, and the Italian Green-Left alliance duly nominated her for a parliamentary seat. As Anglo-Hungarian author Tibor Fischer has asserted, “the European parliament is littered with far-left debris.”

Salis’s release has not been the only recent barb targeting Hungary. A group of 63 E.U. parliamentarians demanded a suspension of Hungary’s voting rights after Prime Minister Viktor Orbán completed his “peace mission” with stops in Kiev, Moscow, Beijing, and Washington. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ordered a boycott of Hungary’s recently commenced European Council presidency. The Commission stated it would only dispatch low-ranking civil servants for informal meetings in Hungary.

E.U. hopeful Georgia has also experienced the Hungary treatment. Brussels and Washington balked at the country’s new law requiring foreign financed NGOs to declare their funding sources. Rod Dreher once wrote on this subject, “What they really want is a Color Revolution.” Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has claimed a European Union official warned him he might experience a fate like that of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, who survived a May assassination attempt. “Look what happened to Fico, and you should be very careful,” Kobakhidze recalled of the conversation. If the Georgian’s allegations are accurate, this is damning evidence of the E.U. elite embracing the Kremlin mafia tactics it claims to abhor.

The European power structure is not just overstepping boundaries on contentious social issues. An overreliance on Russian energy has aged poorly, and aggressive climate policies have caused expensive self-inflicted wounds. Now E.U. officials are floating the idea of seizing the assets of the China-funded “Belt & Road Initiative” in the event of a wider conflict with Russia. Thus, in the increasingly likely event of a second Trump Administration, the European Union will have cultivated hostile relationships with Washington, Beijing, and Moscow alike.

This is an unfathomable strategic gambit from a continent that manufactures little, imports much of its energy, and lacks military defense capabilities. Europe’s entrenched political hubris is yielding predictable results.