Secretary of State Marco Rubio fired the latest shot heard 'round the world, making clear that President Donald Trump‘s effort to shame Europe for backsliding on liberties like free speech comes with a consequence. More could be coming.

Rubio on Tuesday announced sanctions on five European citizens who he alleged were part of a "censorship-industrial complex" that infringed the free speech rights of Americans on social media and other platforms.

"The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship," Rubio posted on X. "Today, the State Department will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course."

The order targets five people who have "advanced censorship crackdowns" on American companies and speakers. However, the secretary did not name the individuals.

Rubio said he determined that the five individuals' "entry, presence or activities" in the country could have serious foreign policy consequences for the U.S. and is thereby imposing visa restrictions on "agents of the global censorship-industrial complex," who will be barred from entering the United States. 

While federal law does not allow the enforcement in the U.S. of speech-related judgments issued by courts from nations lacking a corollary to the First Amendment, the militancy towards censorship the five individuals may engender if present in the U.S. is not covered by that law. 

Vance: "The threat from within"

Rubio’s latest move came 10 months after Vice President JD Vance issued a stark warning to Europeans that they were abandoning the key tenants of freedom-loving countries, and after the State Department issued a stark warning this fall that mass migration posed an "existential threat to Western civilization."

"The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within," Vance declared in February. "The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America."

Undersecretary of State Sarah B. Rogers told the Liz Truss Show, a Just the News podcast that aired Wednesday, that more U.S. penalties could be forthcoming for those in Europe who have attacked the freedoms central to Western civilization.

"So there have been many public calls for my office to use its sanctions authority to this end," Rogers told Truss, the former British prime minister. "And all I can say is that if there were sanctions, it would not be my prerogative to fine tune them, execute them and announce them. It would be that of Secretary Rubio and everyone should watch closely Secretary Rubio's twitter feed in our press office for more on this issue."

The five sanctioned censors

Rogers identified on her social media account the five Europeans who were sanctioned on Tuesday as:

• Ex-European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton;
• Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate;
• Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, leaders of HateAid, a German nonprofit; and
• Clare Melford, who runs the self-appointed censorship group, the Global Disinformation Index.

The sanctioned individuals denied wrongdoing and suggested they were in fact the real victims of censorship by the Trump administration.

Breton compared the sanctions to "McCarthy’s witch hunt," referring to the late Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin who conducted Cold-War-era hearings into alleged communists who he claimed had infiltrated the U.S. government and Hollywood.

“To our American friends: ‘Censorship isn’t where you think it is,’” Breton wrote on X.

Rubio's order generally bars the five from entering the United States, and some may face removal proceedings if already in the country, officials said. 

Rubio's first actions on punishing alleged censors were long awaited and cheered by free speech advocates like Mike Benz, the founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online, which worked with Just the News to chronicle how federal agencies between 2021 and 2024, like the FBI and Homeland Security Department's CISA, worked with taxpayer-funded nonprofits to censor Americans on social media and in search algorithms.

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., said on X that "For years, the State Department was a vehicle for exporting leftism to the world. Under President Trump and Secretary Rubio, it's protecting Americans from the world's attempts to impose leftism on us. Talk about an upgrade." 

NIH Director: "Curtain of digital censorship"

Dr. Jay Battacharya, a prominent medical professor who was censored during the Biden years for challenging some of the erroneous but official COVID-19 narratives and recently was named National Institutes of Health director, applauded Rubio as well.

"The Biden Administration's war on free speech depended on foreign NGOs to impose its silicon curtain of digital censorship in the United States. Grateful to @SecRubio for dismantling this infrastructure," he wrote on X.

Former Assistant Secretary of State Bobby Charles told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Tuesday that Rubio's strike was a game-changer in U.S.-European relations.

"The bottom line is, you either stand up for freedom or you bear the responsibility for having let down not only your own generation but all the generations that follow. So what Marco Rubio is doing, and what Ronald Reagan did, and in many ways, what President Trump regularly does, is to say truth and freedom are not negotiable.

"God bless Marco Rubio for saying you can be our ally, and that's fine and good, but you have to be our ally in the defense of the ideals that preserve the Western world and all the freedoms that distinguish that world, that fight never ends," he added.

Former Trump Deputy National Security Advisor Victoria Coates told the John Solomon Reports podcast that the administration has been increasingly concerned about Great Britain, where comics and people praying silently on sidewalks have been arrested for speech or thought crimes.

"You need to look no further than the United Kingdom, which has a protocol. It's not even a law, but it's a protocol that says, if somebody accuses you of doing something hateful, even if you haven't done it, but if they felt that you did, you can be censored under the law," she explained. "That's how chilling it is in the UK.

"And so what has also been going on is attempts to squelch anything that seems pro-American," she added, noting the $130 million in fines the European Union has imposed on Elon Musk for allowing unregulated free speech on X.

While Europe has retreated significantly on personal liberties, it can be reversed and Rubio's actions Tuesday were a key step in pressuring the EU to move in a different direction, Coates said. "I think it can be rolled back," she said.

"There is a lot of good still in Europe, and what we need to do is encourage it, and hopefully the people of Europe will take that to the ballot box," Coates said.