Olly Haynes reports on the transatlantic traffic in far-right ideas

The Trump administration’s attitude to Europe and the EU was vividly demonstrated in an article published on the official Substack of the US State Department in May titled “The Need for Civilisational Allies in Europe”.

In it, its author – Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s advisor Samuel Samson – claimed that Europe has been captured by a “global liberal project” which is “trampling on democracy”, turning the continent into a “hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance”.

Samson criticised the embezzlement conviction of France’s National Rally Leader Marine Le Pen, which bans her from running for office for five years; arrests over social media posts in the UK, the designation of the AfD as an extremist organisation by German intelligence, and the labelling of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as authoritarian by its critics.

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