It’s been a banner week for authoritarians in Europe, and it’s only Wednesday.

On Monday, a French court banned Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing National Rally party and the frontrunner in the 2027 presidential election, from seeking public office for the next five years. The same day, The Telegraph reported that a toddler had been booted from a U.K. preschool for being insufficiently supportive of LGBT politics. Over the weekend, a British couple revealed they had been arrested based on complaints they expressed in a WhatsApp chat about their daughter’s public school.

This is exactly the kind of crackdown on free expression that Vice President J.D. Vance chastised complicit European leaders about in February, in an address at the Munich Security Conference. This week’s insanity further proves Vance’s dire warnings were right.

Vance called out the U.K., Germany, Sweden, and the European Union for censoring and criminalizing the free expression of their citizens, citing police raids against Germans for comments posted online and the prosecution of a British man who dared to pray in silence outside of an abortion facility.