In case anyone doubted what Vice President J.D. Vance said in Munich back in February, I can confirm that everything he said was correct—but I can also add that it was only a scrape on the surface.

Europe is going downhill. A wave of anti-democratic, anti-freedom laws, policies, and campaigns are rewriting the landscape of the continent where democracy and freedom were born.

This is nothing new per se—the Europeans not only invented the institutions of modern, Western civilization, but they also created Fascism, National Socialism, and Stalinism. It also ignited two World Wars in the last century. On the upside, its political leaders spent a good long time after 1945 trying to stamp out all forms of totalitarianism—and yet here we go again:

A 16-year-old was recently removed from her high school by police in Germany. Her crime? Reposting a pro-AfD video on TikTok involving the Smurfs (the populist-right wing party’s color is blue). A woman in the United Kingdom was detined for silently praying outside of an abortion clinic; the land of George Orwell has someone arrested for a literal thought crime.

It gets worse:

An Austrian woman was arrested for calling Muhammad, who married a nine-year-old girl, a paedophile. Another woman, this time in Germany, was fined €80,000 [$87,190] for making a Nazi salute. Again in Germany, an AfD politician was arrested and fined for claiming that migrants commit more gang rapes than German citizens do (the court did not dispute her facts, but said they incited hatred).

On February 3, a court in Stockholm, Sweden, sentenced a man for so-called “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. The court applied the Swedish “hate speech” laws, make it a crime to criticize any ethnic or national group—except for ethnic Swedes. You can de facto get sentenced for blasphemy against Islam, but not against Christianity.

Most of the attacks on individual freedom are taking place within the borders of the European Union. The Orwellian Digital Services Act from a few years ago, and by ominous rulings by the Court of “Justice” of the European Union, show that the crackdown on citizens’ freedom is not a spur of the moment. However, as Britain is demonstrating with its efforts to lead the anti-freedom crusade. leaving the EU is no guarantee that a country will protect even the most basic rights of its citizens.

The totalitarian ambitions of Europe’s political leadership are not limited to free speech. Back in January,

Thierry Breton, the European Union’s former internal market commissioner, admitted in a French TV interview … that the Romanian Constitutional Court (CCR) bowed to EU pressure. It annulled the country’s presidential elections last month, following the first-round victory of the Eurosceptic and anti-NATO, right-wing populist candidate, Călin Georgescu.

In other words, Bretton—who has also been referred to as the EU’s special “censorship czar” for his role in advancing encroachments on free speech—openly admits that the EU interfered with the domestic affairs of a member state to have an election result nullified. Why? Because the EU’s top brass did not like the outcome of the election.

The annulment of the election result was ordered by Romania’s supreme court, which—it might be worth mentioning—is a mixture of judges and politicians. It based its decision on allegations of “foreign interference” where foreign, of course, refers to Russia.

To date not a shred of evidence has been presented in support of the supreme court’s ruling.

After Thierry Breton admitted to the EU’s active, foreign interference in the Romanian election, he threatened that the EU would do the same to Germany if the national conservative party Alternative fur Deutschland, AfD, got too many votes.

Along the same line of contempt for conservatives and for the integrity of democratic elections, the EU has waged an administrative, judicial, and increasingly fiscal war on Hungary. For the past 15 years, the Fidesz party has governed Hungary based on a consistent but in not way radical conservative platform.

Given the unending hostility toward Hungary, you might think that the country’s prime minister Victor Orban has been restraining free speech and rigging or annulling elections. He has done none of that: all his government is ”guilty” of is promoting traditional families, protecting children from the LGBTetc movement, enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, keeping taxes moderate, and encouraging foreign direct investment.

The result is a safe, economically thriving, socially cohesive, and family friendly country, right there in the heart of Europe. The Hungarian election system—the integrity of which has been proven time and time again—is an intriguing combination of proportionate and simple-majority representation. Voters get not one, but two votes to cast, one for each part of the system.

Four elections in a row, the Hungarian people have elected conservatives who prioritize Hungary and the needs of the Hungarian people. For this, they have received repeated showers of scorn from Brussels, including a barrage of accusations that Hungary is a semi-totalitarian state.

The implication, of course, is that Hungary does not have free elections, and yet every single election since at least 2010 has been meticulously scrutinized by foreign election observers. Not a single one of them has come up with any evidence of interference or wrongdoing by the government.

This is unsurprising, but it is also a point that leads us directly back to what former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said about the Romanian and German elections. In the view of the European Union, the democratic nature of an election is not determined by the form under which the election takes place. It has nothing to do with the secrecy of the ballot, the equal right of every citizen to vote, or the government’s respect for the election outcome. The democratic nature of an election is determined entirely by what opinions the winning parties hold.

If those opinions are conservative, the election was undemocratic.

The European Union has now reached the point where it actively tries to prohibit election outcomes that it ideologically disagrees with. This means that elections where the EU engages in foreign interference—as Breton explained happened in Romania—are about as democratic as elections in Russia.

Add the growing crackdown on free speech, and the comparison to Russia becomes even more compelling. Throw into the mix the blatantly political prosecution of Marine Le Pen in France, which has eerie similarities to the prosecutions of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny—and the difference between the European Union and the Russian Federation boils down to a matter of time.