According to recent reports, the U.S. State Department plans to spend at least $25 million on civil-society groups in Europe, including $4 million to support European conservative media outlets and journalists focused on issues of free speech, sovereignty, and migration. For a European conservative writer like me, this sounds like a potential windfall. Even so, I think it’s a terrible idea that will hurt the very cause it aspires to help.
And that’s not because of some misguided sense of fairness toward our political opponents. The European Commission is already pouring millions of euros into projects designed to counter anti-migration politics. On paper, the State Department plan would merely help level the playing field. Knowing the Trump administration, however, the funding is not intended to support mainstream European conservatives or even national conservatives generally, but only those Trump-aligned voices willing to join the ever-shrinking choir of Europeans singing the president’s praises.
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