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Yesterday, Al Jazeera ran a very encouraging story headlined, “US bars five Europeans over alleged efforts to ‘censor American viewpoints.’” Not just any Europeans. The State Department banned entry to the US by five top architects of the censorship-industrial complex, including the European Union’s top minister for criminalizing speech, sorry, I meant for “digital safety.” Who is French, by the way.

In yesterday’s statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio correctly called the five individuals “radical activists” who had “advanced censorship crackdowns” against American speakers and American companies like Elon Musk and X. “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship,” he added.

“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose,” Rubio explained.

Ironically, the now-banned French minister, Thierry Breton, complained that he was being censored, and compared the travel ban to, wait for it, McCarthyism. (This is where I must defend “Tailgunner” Joe McCarthy, about whom everything you’ve been told is a liberal lie, and who was an American hero who liberals drove to an early grave and then salted the reputational earth. But I digress.) “To our American friends: Censorship isn’t where you think it is,” Mr. Thierry insisted.

Dainty French President Emmanuel Macron, whose handsome wife accompanies him everywhere, called it intimidation and coercion. “These measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty,” Macron whined. “The rules governing the European Union’s digital space are not meant to be determined outside Europe.”

Nobody’s trying to determine your stupid European rules. We just don’t want speech terrorists in this country. We don’t hate them; we just feel better when they aren’t around. And yes, this is what we voted for.

Earlier this month, the EU fined Twitter/X an eye-watering $140 million for a bunch of made-up nonsense, which everyone knows was actually meant to punish the social media platform for helping European citizens speak more freely, and for Musk’s recent advocacy against British rape gangs. The fine was levied under the so-called “Digital Services Act,” or DSA, which was passed in 2022 during the pandemic.

Not coincidentally, the now-banned Thierry has been called the “mastermind” behind the DSA.

The Trump Administration is once again “shattering norms and customs,” by punishing the individual officials behind anti-American activities, rather than treating them as if they were diplomatically immune from blowback. And it is driving the Europeans nuts.