The First Amendment is our sacred safeguard against becoming a censorious hellscape — like Germany, where insulting a politician can land you in prison.
Even supposedly “free” Western countries are liable to crack down on free speech at a moment’s notice, as a recent “60 Minutes” segment makes clear.
It follows German police as they beat down doors and confiscate laptops over “offensive memes,” while insisting that free speech exists in Germany — just with “limits.”
It should make us all grateful that expressive rights are enshrined in our Constitution. But it’s also a reminder of how vigilant we need to be to ensure we don’t succumb to the same censorious fate.
As Germany demonstrates, banning “hate speech” is a slippery slope to abandoning free speech altogether. On Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes,” journalist Sharyn Alfonsi follows Lower Saxony police as they bang on the doors of citizens who posted “offensive” memes on the internet.
One individual, who received a knock at 6:01 am on a Tuesday, was accused of sharing a racist cartoon online. Six armed officers searched his home and confiscated his phone and laptop. Meanwhile, fifty raids were being conducted across the nation in a “coordinated effort” to curb hate speech.
The whole segment was essentially a ride-along with the meme police — and yet the framing of the “60 Minutes” segment was almost laudatory.
As Alfonsi explained, Germany was merely “trying to bring some civility to the world wide web” and was actually “protecting democracy and discourse by introducing a touch of German order to the unruly world wide web.” That’s rich.
She then interviewed three prosecutors from Lower Saxony, who process 3,500 cases of “crimes of talking, posting, and internet” annually in their region alone.
As they explained, the German constitution protects free speech but not hate speech — defined as any speech that could incite hatred or be deemed “insulting.” That literally means insulting someone in public or online is a crime.
“The fine could be even higher if you insult someone on the internet, because on the internet it stays there,” one hall monitor — I mean prosecutor — explained. Even reposting an insulting comment could be a crime punishable by a fine in the thousands of Euros, or up to a year jail time for repeat offenders.
The prosecutor trio were snickering and giggling while recounting how the accused typically respond when police show up at their door: “They say, ‘No, that’s my free speech.’ And we say, ‘No, you have free speech as well, but it also has its limits.’”
Therein lies an important truth: once you open the door to prosecuting “hate speech,” you no longer actually have free speech. “Hate speech” is an amorphous term that can be defined differently by every judge, every prosecutor, and every individual.
The crackdown on “hate speech” in Germany has been applied in some pretty laughable contexts.
In September, a criminal investigation was opened into a German citizen who called politician Ricarda Lang fat on Gab. Under Section 185 of the German Criminal Code, that individual could serve up to a year in prison.
Subtext: fat-shaming isn’t just rude or politically incorrect, it’s illegal.
And in 2021, a German Twitter user called politician Andy Grove a “pimmel” — German for male anatomy — which caused police to raid his home after the politician complained. Imagine if every American who ever called Donald Trump or Joe Biden a d—k on Twitter got raided by the FBI?
“Germany seems to have completely misunderstood the lessons of its evil totalitarian past,” free speech org FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff said. “The lesson was… to distrust the centralization of power, particularly over thought and speech.”
But this isn’t just happening in Germany. In the UK, more than 3,000 people were detained and questioned for non-crime “hate incidents” related to internet speech in 2016 alone.
Former cop Harry Miller, for instance, was visited by officers at his Humberside home in 2020 for posting “transphobic” comments online, such as: “I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don’t mis-species me.”
An internet troll in Scotland was also fined for posting a video of not himself but his pug doing Nazi salutes on YouTube.
Meanwhile Ireland was forced to put the kibosh on an Orwellian hate speech law proposed in 2023 that would have criminalized “speech that a person has neither uttered nor published” that one “merely [possesses], perhaps on [their] phone, that a judge deems offensive.”
And, in Australia, police arrested pregnant Zoe Buhler in her pajamas in front of her husband and children after she promoted an anti-lockdown event on Facebook in September 2020. She pleaded with them, “My two kids are here. I have an ultrasound in an hour. I’m happy to delete the post.”
The First Amendment protects Americans from that same fate. But we have to remain vigilant against those eager to bring the illiberal fight against “hate speech” to our shores.
Our free speech has very limited contours, including defamation, threats, and actionable incitement to violence. But the Biden Administration tried to roll out a Disinformation Governance Board in 2022. Fortunately they rolled that back in a matter of months amid public outrage.
And some states have already rolled out chilling initiatives not that dissimilar to those abroad. Vermont solicits tips from citizens about bias incidents that “do not involve either a criminal or civil violation but instead involve speech or expressive conduct that is constitutionally protected.”
Worse yet, Oregon maintains a state database of “non-criminal hostile expression,” and provides examples of “hate speech” like “creating racist images/drawings” or “telling or sharing offensive ‘jokes’ about someone’s identity.”
While we won’t end up in jail for those supposed transgressions, we should all be disturbed that free expression is being gradually chipped away at by illiberal forces here at home.
“There are many Americans, particularly on college campuses, who look to Europe as a model,” Lukianoff warned. “Americans [are] safe from morning raids by police for calling a politician a penis, [but] we should not be complacent.”
Here in America, we’re allowed to call our politicians pimmels. Let’s keep it that way.
