Vice President JD Vance went to the Munich Security Conference last week and delivered a speech warning Europe that the greatest threat to its existence comes “from within,” specifically from mass immigration and censorship.
Vance’s speech upset many European and American elites. And to prove that Europe wasn’t alone in these suicidal inclinations, CBS News deployed a full-court attack against free expression.
First, in an interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, host Margaret Brennan argued that Vance “was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide, and he met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups. The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you know that, that the censorship was specifically about the Right.”
Rubio quickly pointed out that “free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. … There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany.”
All of that is true, of course. But even the democratic Weimar Republic that preceded the Third Reich had hate speech laws on the books. The infamous newspaper Der Stürmer was shut down by the government scores of times between 1922 and 1932, with its copies destroyed and files confiscated. The paper’s psychopathic editor, Julius Streicher, was frequently brought up on charges and hauled down to police stations. The Nazi propagandists Joseph Goebbels and Theodor Fritsch, among many others, were both charged with spreading antisemitic rhetoric. All these prosecutions did was shower the upstart Nazis with attention and transformed fascists into martyrs. None of it stopped the Nazis.
It shouldn’t go unnoticed either that Brennan rationalized modern German censorship by noting that it was “specifically about the Right,” as if fascism was the only toxic ideology to exist in the world. Czarist censorship didn’t stop the communists from rising to power. And, fortunately, Soviet censorship did not stop communism from falling, either.
In any event, later that night, 60 Minutes ran an entire segment championing contemporary German censorship as well. “Free speech needs boundaries,” a German lawyer named Josephine Ballon explained. “Without boundaries, a very small group of people can rely on endless freedom to say anything that they want while everyone else is scared and intimidated.”
If the producers of the once-respected news program had bothered to find even one person to defend free speech on principled grounds, the audience might have heard that Western nations already have laws that make threatening or intimidating people illegal. That’s not free speech.
But in Germany, trolling politicians will get you in trouble with law enforcement. Sharing a puerile political cartoon can end with the police raiding your home. In six European Union member states, defaming a public official is more severely punishable than defaming a private citizen. In Britain, “hateful” speech is regularly investigated. You might be arrested for reading passages from the Bible in public or you may get a four-year jail sentence for believing truly “toxic ideology.” Most of the censorship in the European Union, however, is done by proxy, controlling social media outlets, on which about 98% of posts that are deleted have nothing to do with threats or intimidation.
Remember, it’s not just about the prosecutions and investigations. The project is meant to chill speech. Think of it like the Biden administration labeling parents who are protesting school boards as “terrorists.”
This, it seems, is the system the contemporary American Left would like to institute here.
Not long ago, Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia, took to the pages of the New York Times to argue that free speech was “spinning out of control.” The courts, Wu says, have “extended” the reach of the First Amendment “to protect nearly anything that can be called speech, regardless of its value or whether the speaker is a human or a corporation.”
Granted, I’m not a constitutional law expert at an Ivy League school, but I am quite comfortable contending that the founders never envisioned courts adjudicating the “value” of our political speech.
The New York Times has been a clearinghouse for scaremongering essays about the perils of open discourse. In 2020, the paper’s magazine published an 8,600-word opus by staff writer and Yale fellow Emily Bazelon that noted that “scholars of constitutional law, as well as social scientists, are beginning to question the way we have come to think about the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. They think our formulations are simplistic — and especially inadequate for our era.” I think “social scientists” are prone to authoritarianism because they believe people need technocratic control to thrive. And the contention that “democracy” is uniquely dangerous in this “era” is one of the enduring rationalizations for censorship in all eras.
“Other democracies, in Europe and elsewhere, have taken a different approach,” Bazelon goes on. “Despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain democratic.”
Do they?
Free speech in the EU is protected by Article 10 of its “Convention of Human Rights.” You can tell it’s useless because the text goes on for two paragraphs. While the First Amendment ensures the individual freedom of religion, speech, press, petition, and assembly in one extraordinary sentence, Article 10 features a litany of state “restrictions” and exemptions, including attacks on “national security,” “territorial integrity,” “public safety,” “disorder or crime,” “health or morals, and “reputations of other people,” among many other things.
In the EU, the right of speech is bestowed on the person by the state rather than protected by it. This is the central philosophical distinction.
The European conception of free speech (except for Britain) has never been the same as ours. Vance can blame European states for imposing this vision, but if you ask average Europeans about impartial speech laws, they will likely look at you in bewilderment.
Ultimately, the German people were the ones who weaponized “democracy” by bringing the Nazis to power. They are also the ones who helped erect the modern censorship regime. (Which is a warning for us to stop conflating “democracy” and liberty and why individual rights trump the highly malleable “common good.”)
Nearly every censor in history, sooner or later, expands the definition of “harm” or “hate” to micromanage innocuous but distasteful speech or undercut the rights of their political opponents. Democrats just spent the past 10 years accusing every policy and statement they disagree with of being an existential threat to “democracy.” Using EU concepts of speech, the Left would have most of us censored, if not arrested.
The same people who admire German laws that make it illegal to “lie” online spent years spreading conspiracies about the Russian takeover of the government. The Biden administration was successful in pressuring social media platforms to engage in censorship, though it got over its skis by opening a Ministry of Truth. If you don’t want President Donald Trump appointing a speech czar, don’t create the position.
Moreover, the state doesn’t have morality or wisdom to put an imprimatur on “truth.” For years, bureaucrats pressed Facebook to ban people from discussing whether the COVID virus had originated from a lab in Wuhan, which is probably the truth.
Thankfully, free expression is still generally held up as a virtue in the United States, though for how long? Nearly every poll of college-aged Americans finds that a majority have an antagonistic view toward unfettered expression. We live in a world where young people are taught to equate words with violence — trigger warnings, microaggressions, and whatnot. The leftist on campus cheers on the pro-Hamas protester, even when he or she breaks the law, but has no qualms about physically shutting down “conservative” speakers. If you believe free expression is fostered and thriving in institutions of higher learning, you haven’t been paying attention.
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Now, obviously, there are things that are objectively hateful to say. Some taboos on speech are governed by stigma. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany party, even if its contemporary iteration isn’t as bad as the Left claims, is more popular than ever, while in the U.S., racists and fascists still lurk, for the most part, on the fringes of our political debate. Part of the reason for the difference is the moderating nature of the two-party American political system, but another part of it is also the nature of its citizens.
It shouldn’t need to be said that innocuous and uncontroversial speech doesn’t require defending. Either Americans will be free to hear wrongthink, transgressive ideas, disinformation, and even bigotry, or they’re not living in any kind of “democracy” envisioned by the Constitution.