Prosecuting ‘Unacceptable Opinions’: Europe vs. the United States

A cultural war appears to be brewing between Europe and the United States.

At the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance surprised attendees by downplaying external threats to Europe, instead emphasizing what he called “the threat from within” Europe. Vance argued that the greatest danger to European democracy stems from its own leaders’ retreat from fundamental values, such as freedom of speech and democratic principles. He lambasted European governments for suppressing free speech, citing examples like Sweden’s conviction of a Christian activist for burning a Quran, Germany’s crackdowns on anti-feminist online comments, and the UK’s restrictions on religious expression near abortion clinics. Vance compared these actions to “Soviet-style” censorship, suggesting Europe is abandoning the liberties it once championed during the Cold War.

On CBS television recently — in a scene straight out of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police for political repression — three German prosecutors being interviewed explain that their job is to suppress “unacceptable opinions.” When the journalist asks them for an example of such an unacceptable opinion, one of the prosecutors replies “reposting false information.”

If disseminating false information becomes a criminal offense, every political party will immediately have to close up shop. All political parties, as well as many of us imperfect creatures, are constantly disseminating questionable information, false at the margins or at the core.

In Europe, for instance, when Belgian and German environmentalists for years passionately maintained, with the support of most of the media and a host of “experts,” that the destruction of civilian nuclear power would be beneficial to the “climate” but have no impact whatever on electricity bills, it was a lie wrapped in a massive untruth sprinkled with falsehoods. If disseminating such an exquisitely pure lie should lead to imprisonment, just about everyone could provide the judicial authorities with a list of at least 100 green politicians, along with a host of other offenders, who straightaway belong in prison.

The question, however, clearly is not actually about repressing all false information – just that, it seems, which displeases the so-called “left” as well as many of Europe’s newcomers. As one of the three German prosecutors put it, “Freedom of expression is fine, but there are limits.” There are, and they are carefully laid out in the 1969 US Supreme Court decision Brandenburg v. Ohio, which found:

“A state may not forbid speech advocating the use of force or unlawful conduct unless this advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

The so-called “left”, nevertheless, appears to have reinvented itself in a form that rejects everything that is not itself. Many of that bent sometimes seem to be on a permanent hunt to kill, destroy and debone anything it regards as “different”. From the UK to Germany, if you express an opinion contrary to the mood of the doctrine of the hour, it presumably becomes legitimate for the courts and the media to tear you apart. The police knock on your door in the middle of the night to arrest you in front of your children because of something you said that your neighbor might not have liked.

Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, a politician from Germany’s right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland, was convicted in May 2024 by the district court in Verden for incitement to hatred. She had posted on social media in 2021, questioning the socialist mayor of Hamburg’s decision to welcome Afghan refugees, by citing statistics about Afghan men’s involvement in gang rapes in Germany. The court ruled that her statements violated the “human dignity” of Afghan refugees as a group, and fined her more than €6,000. The court did not contest the validity of the statistics. She was therefore convicted not for peddling “false information,” but for telling the truth.

In July 2024, a woman, 20-year-old Maja R, in Hamburg, Germany, was convicted of a hate crime and sentenced to prison for calling a man involved in the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl a “disgraceful rapist pig” on social media. The man had received a suspended sentence, prompting her outrage. The “disgraceful rapist pig” is free; Maja is in jail.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested and fined in Birmingham, England, on December 6, 2022 for praying silently outside an abortion clinic within a “Public Space Protection Order buffer zone.” Under the “Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022,” protests in such zones are restricted, including prayer that deemed “intimidating.” In fact, in the UK, praying inside your own home is illegal when your home is close to an abortion center.

The truth is that in the Europe of 2025, the police can knock on your door in the middle of the night for a post on Facebook or X, or even a silent prayer. In Europe, freedom of speech is dying.

The effect of these German prosecutors on the American conscience is immeasurable. Americans are horrified to discover that the continent that saw the birth of European civilization is ferociously repressing opinions on the grounds that they displease the ruling class.

The irony is, of course, that this repression of opinions is primarily an American concoction. Herbert Marcuse, Judith Butler, and others who provided the conceptual tools for this totalitarian repression, are Americans. It was the humanities departments of major American universities that forged those weapons, pliers, and conceptual machetes of this new totalitarianism, before Europe greedily gobbled them up. Marcuse promoted the concept of “liberating tolerance,” which he described in Orwellian terms as “intolerance toward movements from the Right, and tolerance for movements from the Left.” Europe practices Marcuse’s concept exactly: freedom to express left-wing and Islamist opinions, fierce repression of all supposedly “right-wing” speech and ideas. The American USAID development programs massively financed the media throughout Europe, to try to justify the legitimacy of repressing, punishing and monitoring so-called “hatred” and all the political “phobias” (trans, Islam, etc.)

Freedom of speech, like it or not, is a cornerstone of free societies, there to protect the minority from John Stuart Mill’s “tyranny of the majority” Without it, there would have been no abolition of slavery, no women’s vote, no racially integrated education, admittedly badly in need of repair — and no civil rights movement. As the freed slave Frederick Douglass said:

“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason…. Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money…. [T]here must be no concessions to the enemy. When a man is allowed to speak because he is rich and powerful, it aggravates the crime of denying the right to the poor and humble…. A man’s right to speak does not depend upon where he was born or upon his color. The simple quality of manhood is the solid basis of the right – and there let it rest forever.”

Truth requires debate: no one has a monopoly on truth. Freedom of speech lets ideas slug it out in the open — “bad” ones get dismantled, “good” ones appear sharper. Without it, we are stuck swallowing whatever the powers-that-be decide is “correct.” History shows us that suppressed speech protects dogma, not facts—think Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Darwin or the Soviet Union’s Lysenkoism.

The good news is that the funding of this industry of lies by the US government is over. You can be skeptical of certain practices in Islam without being “phobic” and refuse to allow biological men (xy) to take part in women’s (xx) competitions without being “hateful”. Let us hope this trend will jump the pond.

Drieu Godefridi is a jurist (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain), philosopher (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain) and PhD in legal theory (Paris IV-Sorbonne). He is an entrepreneur, CEO of a European private education group and director of PAN Medias Group. He is the author of The Green Reich (2020).