Ranking Member Raskin Delivers Remarks Before European Parliament on Republicans’ Overblown Claims of EU Censorship Distracting from Rampant First Amendment Violations in America
Washington, D.C. (March 24, 2026)— Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered remarks before the European Parliament, at a hearing of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection entitled “The Digital Services Act in global context: addressing misleading narratives.” Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as prepared for delivery. Ranking Member Jamie Raskin Thank you, Madame Chair Anna Cavazzini and esteemed Members of Parliament for inviting me to speak with you today. It’s a high honor to appear before you. I also appreciate the chance to speak with you all in Brussels from my office in Washington D.C. Last year, when I learned that the Republicans on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee planned to hold hearings on foreign government threats to freedom of speech in America, I naïvely assumed we’d hear from Russian dissidents about Vladimir Putin’s persistent interference in our political campaigns or his jailing of American journalists like Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkowitz. I thought we might hear from Chinese pro-democracy activists about harassment, threats and violence directed against Uyghurs, Tibetans and other refugee victims and critics living in America, or perhaps from Saudi human rights activists about the murder conspiracy against slain Washington Post writer, Jamal Khashoggi, who was assassinated by agents of the Saudi Crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, for agitating for democratic liberty in his country. But silly me. I should have known that the MAGA Republicans who are allowing President Trump to trample freedom all over America today would have no quarrel with the autocrats of Russia, Saudi Arabia, North Korea or China violating our freedom too. Why would Trump criticize fellow authoritarians like Kim Jong Un (who he writes love letters to) or Vladimir Putin (who he brags of a “great relationship” with and whose word he trusts above our own national security agencies and whose own violations of liberty Donald Trump never comments upon) when they can attack their true enemy—liberal democracy in the European Union and anti-authoritarian European nations, like Germany—for banning the neo-Nazi and anti-constitutional political parties that Trump, Vance and Bannon have actually endorsed and promoted? A year ago, in Munich, J.D. Vance explained that the threat that worries him most is “Not Russia, it’s not China” it’s the “threat from within,” which he described as Europe’s “retreat” from our historic free speech values. And Trump’s MAGA allies have latched on to the Digital Services Act, which it has cast as a “comprehensive digital censorship law,” as the chief impediment to Americans’ right to spread hate speech throughout the world. Since then, the Administration has doubled- and even tripled- down on its efforts to intervene in the domestic politics of European countries to boost MAGA-aligned movements. Last November, the White House’s National Security Strategy spelled out a policy of “Promoting European Greatness,” an unsubtle signal that the MAGA movement now has its sights on Europe. The strategy called for the U.S. government to promote “patriotic European parties.” Just last month, the State Department announced it would fund efforts to promote free speech in Europe. The Trump Administration has been busy coordinating with Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. And this weekend, Trump filmed a message from the Oval Office pledging his “complete and total endorsement” to the Putin-backed authoritarian Viktor Orbán, the champion of illiberal democracy, in Hungary’s upcoming elections. As the Administration works hard to promote the MAGA movement in Europe, under the guise of defending free speech, I thought it might be helpful to remind all of you of this Administration’s crack downs on universities, law firms, libraries, newspapers, museums and broadcasters right here in the United States. The Trump Administration is engaged in an Orwellian whitewash of American history in our museums, our textbooks and our national parks. At our National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Bible that civil rights activist Rev. Brown carried when he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson was removed. In Philadelphia, an exhibit honoring enslaved people was removed by National Park Police at the Independence National Historic Park—within feet of the Liberty Bell. In our National Museum of American History, references even to Donald Trump’s impeachments in Congress have been removed. Trump’s MAGA movement is banning books in school libraries across America, and the Department of Defense is banning almost 600 books including 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Native Son, books on race like Between the World and Me and even books by service members like With Honor and Integrity: Transgender Troops in Their Own Words in schools that are attended by hundreds of thousands of children of American military service members. The Trump Administration is punishing private law firms, banning their lawyers from public courthouses and buildings, and revoking their security clearances simply for representing whistleblowers or taking positions in court against the Administration. The Trump Administration is destroying the freedom of public broadcasting with efforts to harass, intimidate, control, sue or shut down the press, including ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR and PBS. Trump has worked with the Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to blackmail, shake down, censor and control media companies, including when they forced Skydance and Paramount to install a spy, a human monitor, to police CBS news programs—to make sure that they are sufficiently pro-Trump—in order to get approval of a corporate merger. This is routine extortion now. And the Chair of the FCC, Brendan Carr, is now openly threatening to revoke the broadcast licenses of news networks that don’t censor negative stories about Trump’s war in Iran. The Administration is crushing academic freedom at private universities and colleges by canceling and withholding billions of dollars in scientific and medical research funding from their programs, even for urgent and life-saving studies about breast cancer or heart attacks, as a way to force them to impose a government orthodoxy and political thought control on academic studies, on faculty hiring, on student admissions, and on any student and faculty speech which MAGA considers politically incorrect, especially speech related to the Middle East. Worst of all, with Trump and Stephen Miller’s mass immigration roundup and authoritarian crackdown on protests against it, we are seeing deadly police-state style violence not just against immigrants but against U.S. citizens engaged in political assembly and expression in their own communities. The Trump Administration’s masked agents from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) are operating like a lawless private paramilitary force and secret police by attacking and even killing the political critics of the President. In the first few weeks of this year, ICE agents killed Renée Good, a U.S. citizen and 37-year-old mother of three, gunning her down in cold blood simply for exercising her First Amendment rights in Minneapolis. Days later, CBP and ICE agents killed Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen and ICU nurse in Minneapolis treating military veterans, simply for exercising his right to record government officials in action and to speak to, and render aid to, another U.S. citizen, a woman who had been violently shoved to the ground by an ICE agent. This small act of kindness on Alex Pretti’s part brought the hellfire of a gang of ICE agents down on him. As they pummeled and punched him, one agent discovered Pretti’s firearm, which Pretti had never drawn or brandished despite the instantaneous coverup lies and propaganda of the administration. The agent confiscated this lawful weapon, which he carried lawfully under the Second Amendment and Minnesota state conceal and open carry law, and then the ICE agents proceeded to shoot him ten times, gunning him down in cold blood simply for exercising his First and Second Amendment rights. In Chicago, Border Patrol police shot five times U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez, a Montessori schoolteacher, when she was on her way from her home to her church to deliver clothes she had collected for the poor. When she saw the violent raid taking place against people in her neighborhood, she honked her horn to warn people. This prompted an agent to swerve his car into her car at which point he began shooting into her car. She could feel “bullets continue to pierce her body.” “I saw my life flash before me and slowly began to think, “This is the end of me,” she told us. I could recite equally gruesome and shocking cases to you for the next two hours if we had the time. The bottom line is Americans are now being killed, tear gassed, bullied, chased, sued, jailed, intimidated, and harassed for the audacity of exercising their political free speech rights under the First Amendment—protesting Trump and lawfully recording the officers engaged in these authoritarian tactics. Democrats in the House and Senate, Democratic State Attorneys General, civil society, as well as Republicans who have remained faithful to the Constitution have fought back against these violations of the civil rights and freedoms of the American people. Together, we have brought more than 700 lawsuits against the Administration, and we have won the overwhelming majority of our cases in court. Even at the Supreme Court, which is stacked and packed with Trump-aligned justices, we have scored significant victories. Just last month, the Supreme Court, including two justices appointed by Donald Trump himself, overturned the President’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, a central part of his policy agenda. And it is not just litigation. Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the member of the cabinet charged with implementing Trump’s immigration agenda, appeared before our Committee and faced sustained pressure from Democratic and even some Republican Members about the corruption and lawlessness in her Department. Less than twenty-four hours later, she was fired. Of course, none of these suits can bring back Renée Good or Alex Pretti or any of the other people killed by federal agents—but we are fighting against this administration everywhere we can and winning again in the vast majority of cases. Undaunted by the fact that commanding majorities of the American people reject these lethal police-state tactics, our Republican colleagues are desperately trying to change the subject. They want people to be talking about the digital service laws of the EU instead of government violence in the streets of America. They have held three hearings to discuss a totally hypothetical and barely articulable assault on Americans’ First Amendment rights which they claim is happening an ocean away from here. They have spent huge amounts of money and time, issued dozens of subpoenas and even more letters, and convened us in endless hearings to examine the digital and domestic laws of our foreign democratic allies. They have invited far-right groups and leaders like the Putin-loving free speech imposter and Trump sycophant Nigel Farage to America to tell us how dire the situation in Europe is. To the handful of people in the EU who may be tempted to think that Trump and MAGA are sincerely working to protect freedom of speech in our country, come on over to America and see what they’re doing to destroy our freedom, to force companies to only host content they approve of, to kill people for peacefully exercising their free speech, to kidnap our college students for going to a political rally, to ban books from our libraries, to send the military into our cities, to take over our universities, to wreck our professional civil service and to turn the government into a money-making machine for Trump and his family. Think twice before taking any advice from these Orwellian free speech violators. Now, MAGA’s substantive attack on the EU is based on the fact that several countries that have experienced the trauma of fascism, aggressive war and genocide—including Germany and Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic)—have criminalized Nazi speech and hate speech generally since World War II. The DSA (Digital Services Act) gives effect to national speech laws, as I understand it, so that if something is criminal off-line to do in a specific nation, it is criminal to do online as well in that nation. This means that people in Germany can be prosecuted by Germany for posting swastikas or making pro-Nazi utterances online. But Germany has no jurisdiction to prosecute Swedish citizens who post Nazi material online from Sweden or American citizens who post Nazi materials online in America. The MAGA attack on the EU is based on the idea that the digital service providers will develop content standards around the anti-Nazi and anti-hate speech laws of the most restrictive countries in Europe, thus impinging on the rights of hate speakers and Nazis in America. There are multiple problems with this argument. The first is that, under the DSA today, German authorities can enforce German law, and American authorities can enforce American law, which is as it should be. There has been no erosion of the American free speech standard allowing hate speech and pro-Nazi speech or the German standard forbidding it. The only government that appears to want to globalize its own domestic law is the United States under Trump by legalizing pro-Nazi speech in countries where it is presently banned. This agenda has little to do with free speech absolutism and everything to do with promoting far-right parties in Europe. Second, even if the DSA applied Germany’s hate speech law in all of Europe, that would not change American First Amendment law any more than Germany’s law has changed our First Amendment approach. So why would we care? That would be up to Europe. The Republicans fear that EU members’ laws that prohibit unlawful speech offline will now be applied online. And to support this hypothetical fear, they repeatedly refer to cases brought by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) on behalf of protestors that violated safe zones around women’s healthcare clinics. Their examples of so-called thought policing include that of Adam Smith-Connor who was convicted in the UK for violating the safe zone around a healthcare clinic while he was praying for an abortion his romantic partner had some 22 years before. This argument is as nonsensical as it sounds. Smith-Connor violated a physical barrier around a building—it is hard to conceive of how that would be applied to online speech. Furthermore, this example fails to illustrate a severe free speech difference between us and the UK as we also have safe zones around women’s healthcare clinics under federal law. My Republican colleagues claim that their concern is that European laws on illegal speech will be internationalized by Big Tech companies. Yet the evidence shows the exact opposite. House Judiciary Republicans have used the Committee’s subpoena power to try to uncover evidence that social media platforms are planning on using their laws as the global standard for content on their platforms. They have used our Committee to interview company executives and obtain thousands of internal pages of company memos and communications. That evidence shows that social media companies are not looking to apply European standards to U.S. content. Instead, the evidence we have reviewed shows they are actively working on geofencing their content moderation policies so that content shown to users in Germany complies with German laws and content shown to users in the U.S. complies with U.S. laws Even Donald Trump’s own State Department could not find any evidence to support its claim that the DSA would be used to censor U.S. content. As fellow liberal democracies, we should be engaging, in good faith, about freedom of expression online and across borders. There are good faith debates and disagreements we could work through, as we do in fact have different understandings and rules around the bounds of free speech and expression. For instance, we could have an interesting discussion about contrasting approaches to the problem of hate speech and Nazi propaganda. Countries like Germany act on the assumption that Nazi antisemitism, racism and totalitarianism are the destruction of civilization and thus Nazi speech and propaganda have no value worth protecting in the political sphere. In America, although we have had numerous categorical exclusions from free speech protection—like blasphemy law and seditious libel—that have been eliminated and still do not extend free speech protection to defamation or child pornography, we do take an absolutist position constitutionally for political speech. This means swastika-wearing Nazis have had the right to march in Jewish neighborhoods in Skokie, Illinois and the category of “hate speech” simply cannot be criminalized. There are few people who would say Nazi, racist or hate speech has any intrinsic social, political or cultural value in America, but most people would still defend modern American First Amendment absolutism for political speech on the grounds that we will not know where to draw the line in defining hate speech, racist speech, fascist speech and so on, and also that we are better off hearing and seeing fascist expression out in the open, where it can be monitored and answered, rather than driving it underground and making martyrs of the censored victims of “liberal political correctness.” Thus, Germany and America have different approaches to dealing with the problem of Nazi speakers and hate speakers, but both countries have been (at least since World War II and before the Trump-Vance Administration) united around common opposition to fascism, antisemitism and racism. But now the Trump Administration wants to use the differing national approaches to fascist speech which go back 80 years to suddenly describe free liberal democracies, with free press, free assembly and free speech, as totalitarian dungeons for their people and a danger to our freedom. This is absurd and dangerous. Moreover, given the speeches, praise and political endorsements Steve Bannon and Vice-President-in-all-but-name Stephen Miller have made to far-right and neo-fascist parties in Europe like Alternative für Deutschland, Reform UK and Rassemblement National Français, the attack on European hate speech laws has a lot more to do with promoting authoritarian parties in Europe than it has to do with promoting strong First Amendment rights that Trump and MAGA are actively crushing in America. Under different circumstances, we could also have a meaningful discussion about our disagreement over the EU “right to be forgotten.” Under the EU General Data Protection Regulation, a person in the EU has the right to request the removal of information about them from online search engines and directories. But in the U.S., doing that is not defined as a right as it infringes on someone else’s free speech right to speak about you. This clash of rights implicates different social values, and this is indeed a conversation worth having. But it would be nonsensical to argue that one country is betraying liberal democracy by having its own laws that differ from ours. The Trump-MAGA Right is not engaging with your leaders in good faith. Their obsessive pushback on your tech rules is for one purpose only: to dismantle any laws around the world that would curtail far-right propaganda, disinformation and hate speech. The Republicans are vilifying robust European liberal democracies simply for engaging in the kind of normal line-drawing exercises that we engage in under the First Amendment with respect to child pornography, defamatory speech, online scams and false advertising, and speech inciting riots—all forms of speech that the First Amendment does not protect and whose contours must still be drawn by law. Democrats reject the Trump Administration’s brutal suppression of free speech in America and the fraudulent poser campaign for far-right racist speech in Europe. Be sure to check out how the President, members of his party, and his supporters treat Americans at home before you take to heart any of their criticisms of your country and your laws. I thank the Committee and the Chair for this chance to speak with you. |