Spoiler Alert: This Is What The Left Wants For America, Germany’s Approach To “Free Speech”

The American Left has been spit polishing its jackboots for years for a moment like this and if we didn’t have the First Amendment AND a Supreme Court committed to defending it (9-0 in most cases), this would be happening to many of us right now.

German law enforcement detained at least 100 people on charges that they engaged in hate speech. They arrested people for things they said or shared on social media. So, what was it that was so terrible?

“The basis for these investigations is Section 188 of the Criminal Code (StGB), which was revised in spring 2021 and makes insults, slander and defamation of people in political life particularly punishable,” the statement reads. “Public officials and elected representatives are given special criminal protection under [Section]188 StGB, regardless of the political level, against hate postings.”

They express an unfavorable opinion in public about politicians so they arrested them. This will have a net effect of suppressing or silencing speech directed at elected or public officials, even when that speech is necessary.

It will shut people up.

Democrats want this in the worst way. We even had local Dems in New Hampshire attempt to advance something similar along a slightly different vein.

The problem for Democrats is that like all fools they assume they will always be in positions of power and protected or will have friends in positions of power to protect them.

That’s their utopia.

But it never works out that way as I noted here in my written testimony on HB1159:

I am deeply honored to be the target of Democrat Sponsored speech suppressing legislation. The effort confirms what I have long claimed. A point that Noah Rothman just made in Commentary Magazine. Free Speech is a threat to the authoritarian tick.

That’s an amalgam of his thesis. He’s referring to a politician’s urge ” to criminalize the forms of expression [they] find distasteful.” What he calls “an old idea…that your freedom of expression is a threat to the public good.” …

The decision to claim you are being bullied stalked, or harassed (and when)  is not only entirely subjective and decided by the lawmaker, the potential object of HB1159’s force has no way to know what or when they will have broken the law.

Perhaps I can frame it another way, in terms that might elicit the opprobrium suited to this effort. If you would not want this power in the hands of President Trump, then you had damn well not, under any circumstance, give it to yourselves.

The moment any party secures absolute power in perpetuity there will be cheering from their water carriers as political opponents are rounded-up, arrested, detained, or disappeared. But history and the lesson progressivism eschews for obvious reasons, tell us that the very people on the ground who made that one-party state possible are next, if not first.

Nothing offends a despotism more than agitators of the same cloth freely expressing their opinion. Words that while aligned in appearance will draw the same ire under the very same hate speech laws these new victims worked so hard to enshrine in law and culture.

You can hate free speech or the speaker as much as you like but hate speech is a trap from which no one will escape, including the people who advocate for it now thinking it will be their master later.

There can only be one master and it won’t be you.