Europeans starting to realize that NATO is a protection racket is pretty funny.
Well this is certainly one flaming hot take
A protection racket usually involves paying a potential attacker not to attack.
Plus NATO has bombed / attacked europe many times, it dismantled Yugoslavia, the last surviving socialist bloc in europe after the USSR.
But which countries have been attacked for refusing to pay into NATO?
Yugoslavia. Also a lot of eastern europe was coerced into joining the EU and NATO, and adopting bourgeois parliamentary democracy (IE capitalist dictatorship), and it wrecked a lot of their social welfare programs. They were forced to do so under threat of economic and military attack, because they can see what happens to countries that don’t accept the western model.
Yugoslavia was engaging in some high crimes of their own. The whole thing was a clusterfuck on the NATO side of things, but Yugoslavia was hardly blameless.
