I recent weeks, German and French politicians have denounced free speech, and especially the concept of “freedom of speech” as long envisioned in the libertarian tradition of natural rights. French President Emmanuel Macron on September 29 stated that ”The so-called American ‘free speech’ today, which some people have promoted, is the opposite of free speech.” Macron compared speaking freely as comparable to walking down the street assaulting other people.
A week earlier, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared, ”Don’t anyone come to me with free speech!“ He asserted we must “still be able to protect citizens from false information.”
Both were speaking on issues related to online speech through social media and similar platforms. Both see a grave danger to the ruling class posed by the ability of unvetted or anonymous users to post opinions freely.
In both cases, these attacks on freedom have been in the context of European regimes’ repeated efforts to impose new regulations on social media platforms to limit speech.
This has been going on for several years. For example, back in February, Macron stated that “free speech is pure bullshit.”
In Europe, the anonymity issue is no minor affair. In Germany, there are literal speech police who will arrest ordinary citizens merely for saying things online or reposting memes. It’s easy to see why anonymity could be an essential tool in posting ideas and facts the regime doesn’t like.
A European regime insisting on abolishing online anonymity is essentially tantamount to announcing that these regimes want the ability to make more arrests for wrongspeech.This is a growing problem across Europe, and a 2025 study concluded that British police were making 30 arrests per day for non-violent “offensive online messages.” Under British law, one can be prosecuted for hurting someone else’s feelings. That’s not how British apologists describe it, of course, but that is the essential reality.
Euphemisms for Censorship
Whether we’re talking about France, the UK, or Germany—all places where the despotic enemies of free expression have seemingly free rein—the regimes’ forces do not, of course, come right out and say that they support censorship.
They couch their censorship in the soft language of Leftwing ideology. The claim is that speech must be regulated in order to combat “hate speech” or to reflect the “common good” or to combat “disinformation.”
To wit, in recent years, European politicians have insisted that speech be made to fit into “a common framework”—to use Macron’s phrasing—and to be subject to some standard determining what is “false information.”
But here is the rub: Who is to determine what falls within this common framework? Who is to determine what constitutes “false information”? It is the ruling oligarchy and its political allies, of course, that will determine if some proposed fact or idea is to be allowed to be spoken freely.
The ruling elites will decide if some sentiment or phrase is to be defined as “hate speech” and thus will be punished by state police and regime jailers. The ruling elites will determine what is “science,” and therefore what constitutes “disinformation.” This was on full display in the United States during the Covid Panic, when the government bureaucrat Anthony Fauci effectively declared “I am the science.”
It is through these state-created and reasonable-sounding “exceptions” to free speech that the regime smuggles in its despotism.
For example, this has been the case for many years with defamation laws. Those who defend legal sanctions for “defamation” essentially advocate for government censorship to combat hurt feelings. Moreover, for centuries, governments have used defamation laws as a means of punishing criticism of the regime. Laws against “seditious libel”—employed by absolutist kings of old—have always essentially been laws against free speech.
An Assault on Truth Itself
The individuals who are directly punished will not be the only victims of this censorship. Truth and critical thinking themselves will be the victims as the regime’s subjects will no longer be allowed to fully and publicly examine the veracity of claims made by the ruling elites. It means that “truth” will be whatever the regime says it is.
This problem of using free speech to hide and distort reality itself was well described more than 100 years ago by the radical free-market libertarian Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto was no naive democrat who thought that freedom could necessarily be protected by elections or written constitutions. But he did understand that freedom of speech is at the very foundation of a free society, regardless of the type of regime or whatever other freedoms might be protected in writing.
Even as Pareto was facing the rise of violent radical socialists in Italy—and thoroughly doubted the ability of the liberal state to deal with it—he never wavered on the key importance of free speech. That is, Pareto remained a dogmatic hardliner on free speech, and in this was like nearly all libertarians before him, from the anarcho-capitalist Molinari to the American Revolutionaries.
Not surprisingly, then, Pareto concludes there were no “mitigating factors” that could legitimately limit speech in the name of some common good. Writing in 1916 he stated:
[B]efore a theory can be considered true, it is virtually indispensable that there be perfect freedom to impugn it. Any limitation, even indirect and however remote, imposed on anyone choosing to contradict it is enough to cast suspicion upon it. Hence freedom to express one’s thought, even counter to the opinion of the majority or of all, even when it offends the sentiments of the few or of the many, even when it is generally reputed absurd or criminal, always proves favourable to the discovery of objective truth (accord of theory with fact). ...
Pareto goes on to insist that there can be no exceptions, even for the sake of protecting “truths” long held to be precious. Not even those assertions said to be essential to humanitarianism can be considered protected from the scrutiny of free speech. He continues:
Nor can an exception be made for humanitarian dogmas, nor for the dogmas of the sex religion so dear to Senator Berenger and other geniuses of the same magnitude.1 Let us keep the point strictly before us: There is no scientific liberty unless everything is open to doubt — even Euclid’s geometry and three-dimensional space. It is ridiculous to say that one is disposed to grant liberty for “truth” but not liberty for “error”; for the point at issue is none other than to discover where the “truth” lies and where the “error”; and it cannot be settled if “error” cannot be defended by every possible reason that can be advanced in its favour.2 Only after such reasons have been validly refuted is judgment of error affirmed — pending further investigation. Many people fail to understand that, because in judging of truth or error they substitute a criterion of sentiment for the logico-experimental criterion.3
Clearly, the fact that free speech is now so under siege in Europe is simply the latest evidence of how far out of favor old historical liberalism has become in Europe. Every year, Europe more enthusiastically embraces its worst tendencies in which human rights are repeatedly jettisoned to protect the “rights” of those who rule over the continent. Yet, the antipathy toward free speech also demonstrates the weakness of the European regimes and their political programs. Were the German, French, and British states not so hampered by political division, economic decline, and public dissatisfaction, they would not be so fearful.
Americans have no yet traveled so far down this road. But the foundation is already being built. Republicans support laws deeming all criticism of a certain foreign government to be “anti-semitism” and therefore “hate speech.” Covid laid bare the American Left’s enthusiasm for anti-speech tyranny. All that is necessary for the First Amendment to be wiped away is for a handful of federal judges to agree with the enemies of freedom. There is no guarantee.
- 1
This is apparently a reference to the fashionable (in some circles) theories of Henry Bérenger, a socialist French Senator from 1912 until 1945. Bérenger was a member of the French Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis which advocated for more extensive sex education in France. Pareto appears to have not been a fan of Bérenger or many claims made by Bérenger and his colleagues in the field of sex education.
- 2
This appears to be a reference to the sentiment, favored by some Catholic integralists and hardline ultramontanists, in which “error has no rights” when it comes to political theories that conflict with Catholic teachings. The Catholic libertarian Lord Acton would not be found among these.
- 3
Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society, ed. Arthur Livingston (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1935), p. 343. Pareto’s book was originally published in Italian in 1916, under the title Trattato di Sociologia Generale: https://archive.org/details/mindsocietytratt01pare/page/342/mode/2up
