The frequently repeated keystone lie that Europeans have equivalent or greater rights, freedoms, and protection from authoritarianism than Americans, which is and has always been objectively and completely false.
Citation? Every democracy index I've ever heard of rates most of Europe as more democratic than the US. (Eastern Europe will typically be rated lower, all of the former USSR states seem to be struggling with various degrees of corruption or similar problems)
Well according to press freedom indices many European countries and the US are quite similarly ranked. Some countries better some countries worse.
Some countries have stronger institutions against dictatorships than others but unfortunately we have seen that even the US isn't immune and that slides auch as in Poland and Hungary are possible.
There is always hope that things can turn around (as in Poland even though the road is hard and there are setbacks)
As an european living and feeding of mostly US sources online, I completely agree. In the US people do really have freedom of speech. This doesn't exist in the EU. Just try to say 1/10th of what you can say in the US and you'll be thrown behind bars in the EU.
The biggest one being that most newspapers in the EU are state-controlled, Pravda-style, propagandist outlet pushing pro-EU narratives. Once you live across several EU countries and speak several languages, you can see how all the topics are synched and pushing the exact same narrative.
Basically: the EU is very good at producing people repeating that the EU is great.
To me the biggest problem is that the EU Commission is way too busy turning the EU into a totalitarian nightmare instead of trying to compete economically with the US and China. As a result in 17 years China's GDP went from $4 trillion to $20 trillion, surpassing the GDP of the eurozone (which only grew 25%: 25% vs 400%).
That's an abysmal failure and the EU is sinking and it shows anywhere you go to in the EU: cities are becoming shitholes at an alarming speed. And everything is done to try to damage control and prevent people from talking about what is ongoing.
The EU is heading straight into a wall (actually it already hit it).
Well, when fascists are in power, paper won't help anyone. But at this point, as a European I enjoy enumerated human and civil rights from multiple constitutions and several international treaties, which are directly enforceable by courts at the state, national, and European level.
The human and civil rights guaranteed by the US constitution are a complete joke in comparison, and most of them are not guaranteed directly constitution, but by Supreme Court interpretation of vague 18th century law that can change at any time.
You seem to have missed the Bill of Rights. Which is odd, because whenever we tell you during online arguments that our rights are guaranteed, you all say that absolute rights are dumb and it's actually more sophisticated and European to not have them.
Not that courts, legislators, and administrations haven't tried and succeeded in abridging them somewhat in any number of different ways for shorter or longer periods, but the text remains, and can always be referred to in the end. They have to abuse the language in order to abridge the Bill of Rights, and eventually that passes the point of absurdity.
No such challenge in Europe. Every "right" is the right to do something unless it is not allowed.
