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Europe's Free-Speech Problem
Republicans are right to criticize Europe for attacking free expression, even if that makes them hypocritical.
In contrast, the American system protected expression as vile as neo-Nazis marching through a town of Holocaust survivors because, by First Amendment logic, fascist speech poses less of a danger than enabling the state itself to engage in viewpoint discrimination. When a middle-aged mother lashes out at asylum seekers in a social-media post (later deleted), or a pro-Palestinian marcher chants a slogan that some but not all see as genocidal, or a flyer calls gays “deviants,” a tolerant society can exercise forbearance and respond with counterspeech. In Switzerland, a man was fined and sent to prison for 40 days, a sentence upheld last year on appeal, for calling a journalist a “fat activist lesbian” and saying that queer means “degenerate.” After police in Austria raided the home of a Muslim academic at gunpoint, a regional court cited his work on Islamophobia as justification.
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