12-13-25 The Weekend Hour 2: Germany's Free Speech Laws: A Blueprint for America's Future?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
To night. Michael Brown joins me here, the former FEMA
director of talk show host Michael Brown. Brownie, No, Brownie,
You're doing a heck of a job. The Weekend with
Michael Brown broadcasting from Denver, Colorado. Hen, it's the Weekend
with Michael Brown. Glad to have you joining the program
again today. So you know the rules of engagement we've
gone over the last hour. The text line, as always
is always open three to three one zero three on

(00:22):
your message app three three one zero three, keyword Micha
or Michael. Then if you want to go, follow me
on x formerly Twitter at Michael Brown USA. So let's
get started. Critics of this speech regime that's going on
in Europe right now are trying to argue that the
European continent has built this system that, according to them,

(00:42):
will nudge citizens toward silence through law, BUREAUCRACYPT and the
quiet but unmistakable pressure of public police power. That's what
the critics argue, and I think they happen to be
right and right at the middle of all of this,
the epicenter of all of this is Germany. Germany sits
at the center of this structure, and Frederick Mertz, who

(01:05):
is the Chancellor of Germany right now, is a very
skilled lawyer. He's the leader of the CDU, their party,
and he has offered a case study of how these
laws are going to function in practice. And I keep
telling everyone we need to watch what goes on in
Europe because when we think about what's going on in

(01:26):
New York, or what's going on in HU, what's going
on in Minnesota right now and Chicago another great example
where these really far left, progressive Marxist mayors take hold.
That's the proverbial foot in the door. And when you
think about if you step back away from Chicago and
New York City, for example, and you look at what

(01:46):
progressive Marxist kind of Democrats do in the Congress. If
they could eviscerate obviously the Second Amendment, but if they
could deviscerate the First Amendment too, that would make them
really happy. And the way they're doing it in Europe
is the way that it could be done in this
country if we don't pay attention to it. Mertz, the

(02:06):
Chancellor of Germany. Chancellor Mertz, he didn't write these laws,
and he didn't design the bureaucracies that are applying the laws,
but he has used them in ways that illuminate the
deep states deeper tendencies. For example, when a politician signs
four nine and ninety nine, let's just say, five thousand

(02:28):
criminal complaints against online critics, the issue really is not
the number of criminal complaints, but it's the structure that
made that effort even possible to begin with. Europe's anti
speech laws are often described as protective devices. Oh well,
they're just designed to shield these vulnerable groups that can't

(02:50):
take care of themselves from hate, or to prevent social discord.
The argument is understandable. I mean, there's a lot of
social discord, and I understand that hate is in of
itself bad, but we have to learn that what we
do to counter hate is more speech trying to control

(03:10):
the hate. Speech is not going to control the hate.
That's what exists in a person's heart, and you're not
going to change that. Speech can wound, speech can hurt,
but speech can also be an antidote. Speech can also
do be an anesthetic, and speech can counter those things
that hurt. Yet, constitutional democracies constitutional republics are premised on

(03:31):
the idea that political leaders have got to learn to
tolerate really sharp criticism. Why because politicians possess a colersive
power that ordinary citizens don't possess. And Germany has inverted
that logic by enhancing something that's called section one eighty eight.

(03:52):
That section increases penalties for insulting public officials. Can you
imagine think about me insulting a public official if we
had a section one eighty eight in our code that said,
you know, if you offend an elected official, well we
can come and arrest you and or give you a
ticket of summons of some sort, and then we can

(04:12):
hold you accountable for that by imposing a fine or something.
Be crazy, I wouldn't be here today. You know. A
puzzled listener, you might ask, well, how does the republic
or a democracy like Germany benefit when the leaders of
those countries enjoy more legal protection from criticism and the

(04:33):
voters that they're supposed to serve. The simple answer is
that it does not. So the Chancellor's decision to rely
on a private enforcement firm called so Done exposes this
inversion that I'm talking about. The firms scoured the internet
for any kind of possible insult that they can find,

(04:55):
and then they forward those cases to the prosecutors, and
in turn, they collected fifty percent of the damage. It's
almost like the express lanes, if you have express express lanes.
I know LA has these. I know that some places
in DC have them. We have them in Colorado. They're
built by tax dollars. But then all of the rules
are enforced by a private company. And that private company scours,

(05:17):
you know, has the cameras up and they they catch
your license plate and you cross the line at the
wrong time or whatever, and then they send you a
They send you a fine, and oh, you can ignore
the fine, and you might want to argue unite, and
I would argue, you have no authority to enforce that fine.
Yet what's happened in Colorado is they've given this private

(05:37):
organization the power to enforce the fines by withholding registration,
so I can't go register my car when that renewal
comes up at the end of the year or whenever
it might come up for renewal. That's kind of what's
going on here. They're scouring for possible insults, they ford
those cases to the to the public prosecutors, and then
they get fifty percent of the damages or the fines

(05:59):
that the prospcutter collects. So a politician that delegates the
task of monitoring public rhetoric to what's no better than
a bounty, a bounty like operation. That alone demonstrates that
Europe's speech laws do more than protect, they incentivize enforcement.

(06:19):
Imagine a road that widens every time a driver brushes
the curb. Well, eventually the curb is going to disappear. Right,
over time, it's going to just start to crumble and
crumble and crumble, and pretty soon that concrete curb has disappeared. Well,
I think something similar has happened to the boundary between
what's considered critical speech and criminal speech. And when the state,

(06:43):
private firms, and political actors all kind of align in
a straight line, the definition of punishable speech starts to expand.
And then what happens well in Germany, police raids following
minor insults make this pretty clear. In several Chancellor related cases,
prosecutors authorize home searches and device searches for comments that

(07:08):
fall well within the rough and tumble of just the
normal political debate, and critics ask, wait a minute, what
public interest is served by sending law enforcement officers to
confiscate the phone of a disabled woman who called a
politician a little Nazi. Now, even if the comment was rude,

(07:30):
the escalation of force is difficult to square with liberal
in the traditional sense of the word liberal, the norms
of a liberal democracy, a liberal republic. So you might
wonder whether prosecutors genuinely believed that those actions were necessary. Well,
the more plausible thinking about this is that speech laws

(07:52):
furnish a legal pathway for punitive investigations. And just like
every everything else, once Congress or in this case, the
German Parliament, once they create a path, and once someone
sees that a path exists, somebody's gonna walk it. When

(08:13):
I was working for the Oklahoma Senate back in my
days as a baby lawyer down in Oklahoma, the Secretary
of Transportation in Oklahoma told me one time, you can
build a road anywhere, doesn't make any difference, just if
it just goes from point A to point B. Eventually
that road will get filled with cars because people will discover, oh,
that's a path I can take to get from point

(08:34):
A to point B. That's different than the path I
normally take. And right now it's not very crowded, and
then boom over time, everybody's using that road, and I
think that same analogy applies here. Berlin prosecutors went further.
What did they do? They labeled vulgar humor as extremism. Really,

(08:56):
vulgar humor is extremists. Let's see how that works at
it so we can with Michael Brown. Text the word Michael,
Michael the three three one zero three, Hang tight, I'll
be right back. Hey, the Weekend with Michael Brown. Glad
to have you with me. Appreciate you tuning in. As always,
text lines always open whether you're listening, you know, delayed

(09:18):
or on a podcast. I read the text all the
time at text line three three one zero three. Keyword
Mikero and Michael. Do me a favor on your podcast app.
Be sure to subscribe to the Situation with Michael Brown.
When you hit that look on your podcast app, search
for the Situation with Michael Brown, hit that subscribe button,
leave a five star review, and then here's what will happen.

(09:38):
It will download all five days of the weekday program
that I do from Denver, plus the weekend program, so
you'll get six days of Michael Brown. Back to Germany.
These these laws that are being active by the German Parliament,
and they're being taken advantage of by the German Chancellor.
I think are a serious case of extremism being taken

(10:01):
or the fear of extremism being taken to an nth
degree that really violates the natural right, the natural law
that you and I have to speak our minds, and
certainly if we do in this country, maybe not so
much in Germany anymore, but at least in this country,
we still have the right to criticize the people that
we elect to public office. And if your skin's not

(10:22):
tough enough to deal with the fact that we criticize
you in public office, then maybe you shouldn't be in
public office. Berlin prosecutors, as I said earlier, went further
with this section one eighty eight and they labeled some
vulgar humor as extremism. And I think that is a
very conceptual pivot point, because extremism is obviously a very

(10:46):
serious category in German law because of their heritage in
their and their history with the Nazis. But this law
justifies expanded surveillance and really stiff penalties, so that if
you reverent political mockery can be classified as extremism, then
the boundary that used to exist between dangerous ideology and

(11:09):
everyday satire. Those boundaries begin to blur, and a legal
system that emits such elasticity is going to invite political
actors to use that elasticity strategically. It goes back to
the example that if you build a path and that
path has a curb on it, and people keep pushing
the curb, they keep bumping up against the curb all

(11:30):
the time, pretty soon the curb is going to disappear
and you've broadened and you have widened that pathway. So
a legal system that emits that elasticity is just going
to invite the political actors who are thin skinned to
use it strategically. And the danger is not that the
chancellor is going to act alone aggressively, but that the

(11:51):
system that they've put in place encourages aggressive use by
anybody that finds the criticism inconvenient. So Germany's network of
state aligned reporting centers that in strengthens that concern. Hubs

(12:11):
like one of their TV channels, Hens and Goggan hets
I'm sure I mispronounced that that channel tens of thousands
of online comments into the police pipelines, So it would
be like, if you're on X, you know, I asked
you to follow me on X formerly Twitter. It would

(12:32):
be as if Twitter takes or X takes an algorithm,
and anything that they in the algorithm deemed to be extremists,
they just automatically feed that into the computer systems in
the police stations, and so it really becomes very easy
to monitor what an algorithm has determined to be extremism,

(12:56):
and then a law enforcement officer can look at that
and say, yeah, we agree extremism too, or they can
just be lazy and not really just say oh, they
send it to us, so it must be extremism. Well,
all of these centers that they now have around the
country are presented to the German citizens as community tools

(13:17):
for promoting civility. But what's their effect. Their effect is
to erase the transition between speech and investigation. So a
citizen might believe that she is, you know, notifying a
moderator about something that she found offensive, when in fact,
what she's really doing is launching a prosecutorial inquiry. She's

(13:38):
launching an investigation simply by saying to the you know,
say to X, hey I found this offensive. That gets
tunneled channeled right into the law enforcement agency. The process
becomes so streamlined that political figures don't even have to

(13:59):
file complaints at all. They just sit back and the
system takes over. And you know, I criticize, you know,
a politician in Germany. The politician may never even hear
the criticism. They may never even read the criticism. It
gets fed into law enforcement, and law enforcement automatically channels

(14:19):
that into a prosecution complaint, and the next thing you know,
there's been a ward arrested or a summons issued for
my arrest or a fine issue because I did something
that they found offensive. That system is would make George
or Well proud. It would make, you know, nineteen eighty

(14:40):
four seem like, ah, that's just play stuff. The process
becomes so stream law that politicians don't even pay attention
to it because the system itself monitors, collects, and delivers
all these possible violations. In that kind of environ the
line between community moderation, say on X, and what I

(15:05):
would call state surveillance, I don't know that there's a difference.
I think it becomes one and the same. And even
some legal scholars are starting to recognize this, and they
begun to register alarm. One legal scholar in Germany, among many,
notes that this system is producing disproportionate reactions to protected

(15:27):
and even marginally unlawful speech. And this one legal expert
argues that the enhanced protections for politicians violates a constitutional
principle that those who wield the power must be able
to endure more criticism, not less criticism. And I think
that point is simple, but it's profound if laws, or

(15:50):
if a law subtly shifts public life so that ordinary
citizens face police intervention for political satire or political mockers,
while the elected leaders are shielded from that ridicule, in
other words, they never face it because all of that's
going on in the background, then the democratic orientation of

(16:11):
that system has invariably changed and changed for the worst.
Citizens internalize these signals, and what happens next. Suddenly you
become afraid to say anything. And when you become afraid
to say anything, what's the natural reaction? I say that

(16:32):
self censorship becomes the rational action that people will engage in.
I don't want to pay a fine of X number
of German marks or X number of US dollars or
x number of view of British pounds. So if I
don't even if I think that I'm just posting something
on X, I keep using X as example, but could

(16:54):
be anything in Germany if I just keep posting something
to social media because I really am pissed off at
some particular politician, and that politician never hears it, sees it,
reads it, or even knows about it. Yet the system
flags it as being somehow violation of section one eighty
eight of this German law about hate speech. And then

(17:18):
that just automatically that automatically triggers an investigation, and that
investigation automatically triggers a summons or automatically sends it to
a court, and I'm summoned and I have to pay
the fine. Just like violating an express lane, you didn't
even know you were doing it. I got to take

(17:39):
it in La one time for violating an express lane
and I didn't even know I was in and I
called the company and you know, I said, I listen
to you know, I was in a rental car. I
didn't know where I was, what I was. It was
rush hour. I was trying to get to La accident
so I wouldn't miss a flight. And fortunately I had
somebody that was kind of friendly and they said, oh,
don't worry about it. Well the first time, we'll let
you go. You think they do that in Germany. I

(18:02):
hardly doubt it. Hang tight, I'll be right back to night.
Michael Brown joins me here, the former FEMA director of
talk show host Michael Brown. Brownie, No, Brownie, You're doing
a heck of a job the Weekend with Michael Brown.
Welcome back to the Weekend with Michael Brown. Glad to

(18:23):
have you with me. So again, you think about when
the law begins to shift public life so that just
the ordinary people face police intervention because of political satire.
As I said in that last segment, self censorship is
what becomes rational. And when you have self censorship, people
don't express what they really believe or what they really feel,

(18:46):
or they close their curtains and they lock the doors
and they turn the lights off and they sit around
the dinner table. It is it's just like Nazi Germany, right,
It's like something you've seen out of the diary Van
Frank and people are just whispering and whispered tones. You know.
I think the Chancellor is crazy because he did X
Y Z or I think this particular representative was crazy

(19:09):
or the senator is crazy because they did X, Y Z,
and suddenly everything goes underground and there's no public discourse anymore.
The vanishingly number small number of convictions that has come
out of this whole complaint system clarifies the purpose of
the machinery. Most of the cases that that I've been

(19:33):
talking about here in Germany, most of those cases were
actually dismissed because the courts found that several raids were
actually unconstitutional. Yet the investigation still happened. Phones were still seized,
homes were still searched, and so the distinction between conviction
and investigation becomes blurred. And I think there's a huge

(19:55):
distinction between an investigation and a conviction, at least in
this co we call it due process, and we say that, oh,
if you're going to investigate, before you can even start
that you have to have probable cause. And if you
think you have probable cause, then you have to investigate.
You have I have to know who my accusers are.
I have the right to face my accusers, and I

(20:18):
have the right to challenge them in court. But again,
I like a traffic ticket, Oh yeah, uh, well, officer,
what'd you stop me for? Well, because you were doing
eighty five and a sixty five mile hour zone. Yeah, well,
I'm gonna challenge you in court. What's what's what difference
does it make? They've got you on radar. What are
you gonna do challenge the radar. The distinction between conviction

(20:42):
and investigation, in my opinion, matters deeply because if the
aim is justice, then we would expect that in the
case of Germany, there would have been a lot of convictions.
But as I said, there were a very small number
of convictions. And if the aim is to deter this
these criticisms, the process itself is the penalty. You have

(21:09):
to endure the investigation. You have to endure that your
phones and your computers have been seized and they've been
taken away by law enforcement, and so you either have
to go buy a new phone, or you have to
do without until you get your phone back, or they
now have access to everything that's on your computers. That's
the conviction, that's the punishment. They don't really care if

(21:32):
you ever pay a fine or not. They have intimidated
you and kept you from speaking your mind. Mission accomplished.
This is what students of self authoritarianism authoritarianism observe about
what's going on in Germany, because the state doesn't really

(21:53):
need to imprison or actually find the dissenters. It needs
to only convince citizens that criticizing the powerful is going
to put them in legal peril or they're going to
endure all of the process, and the process itself becomes
the punishment. Now, I know, I've talked a lot about Germany,

(22:16):
this is not confined to Germany. France often prosecutes political
speech under their broad hate speech laws. They'll target critics of,
say immigration policy. Ireland is actually considering legislation that would
criminalize just the possession of hateful material, a concept so
expansive that satire or private messaging messaging between individuals, even

(22:42):
they're encrypted, might fall within that sweep. Spain has used
sedition and extremism statutes to contain separatist sentiment and to
police right leaning criticism. Brussels, Belgium, they pressure large platforms
under the Digital Services Act to remove what they claim
to be harmful content. They just make their own independence.

(23:05):
Oh we think this is hateful, so you got to
take it down, And the fines are so devastating. So
companies comply even if the legal basis is ambiguous, but
the message is clear, they absolutely deliver a clear message.
The boundaries of permissible speech are determined not by open debate,

(23:27):
but by the bureaucrats, by the system, by the process
to precede the system as a whole. Imagine a very
wide net cast over just all public discourse. The mesh
in that net is very very fine. Oh it'll catch
some minor insults, It might check, you know, and catch
some off color caustic jokes. It might even catch a

(23:50):
few ideological challenges here and there, and even emotional reactions
to political events might get oh you were mad about
what was said at this rally, that was said by
the Chancellor, or by the Prime minister or somebody. Go
back to the four thousand, nine ninety nine complaints that

(24:13):
Chancellor Mertz filed in Germany. Those complaints reveal how easily
a determined actor can pull that net really tight. The
underlying structure is what matters. A system that enables the
state to search homes over trivial rhetoric, that's a system
that mistakes disagreement for danger. The EU's political class has

(24:38):
learned to defend that mechanism by invoking, well, we've got
to do it, so we'll have social cohesion, so we'll
have democrat democratic stability, and of course, as always we're
going to protect minorities. Don't get me wrong, those are
noble aims. But if you're an objective listener, you should

(25:00):
be asking whether coercion is the appropriate means to obtain
social cohesion, or democratic stability, or the protection of minorities.
History teaches us that speech restrictions seldom remain proportionate. Just
like any other government program. They expand. And why do

(25:23):
they expand. They expand because those in power. Those in
power seldom seek to restrict themselves. They want their power
to grow larger and larger and larger. So to strengthen
the argument that Chancellor Mertz and these other European leaders

(25:47):
use anti speech laws to silence dissent, then I want
to focus for a minute on incentives, because the political
actors respond to incentives exactly as you know a company
of responds to the marketplace. When laws grant officials special
protection from ridicule and then furnish a really easy enforcement pathway,

(26:10):
those government officials are going to use those pathways. When
bureaucracy streamline reporting, and prosecution enforcement just becomes routine rather
than exceptional, and when courts rarely convict but often authorize
the searches, that's the chilling effect, and that chilling effect grows.
None of this requires malice. You don't have to be hateful,
you don't have to be mean spirited about it. No malice.

(26:32):
I'm just, you know, just like a good Nazi. I'm
just following the structure. I'm just following the laws itself.
And I think that presents a deeper worry, and that
is that Europe has built a legal environment in which
the courage to criticize political leaders is treated as a

(26:53):
risk instead of a virtue. Imagine that in this country.
That's the erase, that is the destruction of Western civilization
that is taking place in Europe right now. I don't
want that coming here. It's the Weekend with Michael Brown.
Text line as usual, always open three three one zero
three keyword micro Michael, go follow me on X you

(27:15):
know before they start, you know, finding us for that.
It's at Michael Brown, USA. I'll be right back. Welcome
back to the Weekend with Michael Brown. Glad to have
you with me. Hopever, you know, it is everybody getting
in the Christmas spirit. I'm not sure that this story
is going to get people in the Christmas spirit, but

(27:36):
that's at least what I'm trying to do is just
remind you that, you know, as we go about and
we get into that season where we start to you know,
celebrate with family and friends and we're all in a
happy mood and everything, I'm like the Grinch that stole Christ.
And I'm just reminding you that while we're happy and dumb,
fat and happy here in this country right now, on
the other side of the pond, they're actually destroying Western civilization,

(28:00):
and they're doing it based on political correctness. George Orwell
would be proud. Nineteen eighty four is coming true. It's just,
you know, we're a couple of decades later, but it
really is coming true. I think the deepest worry about
Europe for me is that they have built this legal
environment in which the courage to criticize political leaders, as

(28:22):
I said in the last segment, is treated as a risk,
not a virtue. In this country, we actually recognize that
our ability to criticize our elected officials is a civic
virtue that we actually, if we sincerely believe that Senator X,

(28:42):
Congressman Y, Governor B, whoever it might be, that if
they're doing something that we don't think is in our
best interest, in the economy's best interest, in the country's
best interest, not only should we criticize them, but it
is our public duty to criticize them, And I think
it's a duty of those elected officials as costing. Now,

(29:05):
I never encouraged people to be costing or to be
rude or demeaning or anything else when they criticized, particularly
face to face when they criticize our political leaders. But
I do encourage people to challenge them because they wanted
the job. They're the ones that signed their name on
the petition to get on the ballot or raise the money,

(29:28):
got the votes, they went through a primary, if there
was a primary, they went through a general election. They
got more votes than the other person. They got elected
because they thought they had good ideas and they wanted
to represent. And when they ran, they may have run
on a platform that represented one party more than another party,
but once they got elected, they're supposed to idealistically anyway

(29:50):
represent their entire constituency, whether that be a US senator
and a state, a governor in a state, a congressman
in a district, or even a city councilmen in award
or something. Theirs to represent everyone. So part of our
job is to tell them what we think about the
job they're doing or what we need, and their job

(30:12):
is to listen and to take that into consideration, not
to try to prevent us from criticizing them. That's why
I argue so vehemently that what they're doing in Europe
is treating criticism as a risk rather than a virtue.

(30:32):
That's why citizens learn to avoid provocative statements. Artists, satirists,
they'll temper their language. Journalists will tread carefully. Can you
now in this country we have a somewhat similar problem,
but an entirely different problem too. Part of the problem
with the cabal in this country is that oftentimes the

(30:54):
journalists simply act as stenographers for their particular ideological point
of view, when what they really should be doing is
just reporting to us on the facts about what elected
elected officials are doing. But in Europe, journalists learn to
tread carefully told the line, even if they are of

(31:17):
the opposite party or they have different beliefs. Oh, be
very very careful in how you treat that. That filters
in into the news, that gets consumed by the citizens
of Germany, France, Belgium, or whomever it may be, and
suddenly they're starting to be persuaded. You see how it's
like a disease and it just takes hold and you
can't let go of it. Speech becomes managed speech and

(31:42):
not free speech. Now, this is not totalitarianism in a
brutal sense, but it is a form of totalitarianism in
the sense that it is a form of control that
relies on the law, It relies on the bureaucracy, and
it relies on the discomfort of being investigated. I don't

(32:04):
know whether you've ever been investigated. You know, Back when
I practiced law, I've represented a lot of clients who
had to appear before a grand jury or who are
being investigated, or part of a even a civil lawsuit
where they have to attend a deposition, answer interrogatories, they
get grilled by the other side. The process itself is grueling.

(32:25):
It takes time, energy, and resources, and so oftentimes when
clients would come to me and say, you know, I
was wronged by so and so, and I'm gonna go
sue them. I first calm them down and explain to them, Yeah,
you know what, I think you're right. I think you
were wronged, and I think you do have a lawsuit here. However,

(32:46):
it's going to cost you here what my fees are,
so that's going to be painful too. There's not just
one side. I may believe and you may believe, and
we may even be able to prove that you were wronged,
but the other side is going to believe that they
were right. And so they're going to dig into everything

(33:07):
about you, your business, your past. They're paying legal fees
to they're fighting everything everything that we do. They're doing
its madness, mutually assured destruction. Do you really want to
go through that? And if the answer is still yes,
then I'd say, okay, then then we'll I'll take the case.

(33:27):
That's what I mean about here, where they rely on
the law of the bureaucracy and just the discomfort of
being investigated, that is the punishment. And the Chancellor's conduct
is really meaningful here because it demonstrates how a modern
politician can take a system like this and whether it's

(33:48):
for evil purposes or they really think they're doing something right,
they can navigate and they can exploit that system to
their own advantage. If you're skeptical of all of this,
you might ask whether the solution is complete deregulation a speech. Well,
that's not the argument that I'm trying to make here.
The claim is this that Europe's current trajectory privileges the

(34:12):
power and it disciplines the powerless. So by enhancing the
protections for the politicians and expanding the definition of extremism,
and then on top of that erecting bureaucratic reporting channels,
the system undermines the foundational democratic principle that citizens have
a right and a responsibility to criticize those that we elect.

(34:36):
A democracy. A republic can only endure rude comments, or
can endure rude comments. It cannot endure a culture of
fear around political expression or fear of being investigated. The
whole Chancellor Mertz episode really should prompt some reflection across

(34:59):
the entire content, and I think it should cause us
to reflect here about hate speech, about extremism, about what
we determine its hateful or not hateful, and whether we
really want to criminalize that or not, Because if a
prominent public figure can marshall vote law enforcement resources against

(35:22):
thousands of critics with very little scrutiny, then that kind
of system is not protecting democratic principles. It is protecting
the ruling political class. It is protecting the cabal. A
legal framework that encourages self censorship, that's a framework that
weakens public deliberation, and then the long term consequences is

(35:46):
a body politic in which important questions get left unasked
because the cost of asking becomes too high. Europe's defenders
argue that these laws promote civility social peace. Reply civility
cannot be enforced or commanded by cops, and that social
peace cannot rest on silence. I think the truth lies

(36:09):
in understanding the trade offs, and those four ninety nine
complaints eliminate the trade offs. It shows a system that
has drifted from its liberal foundations toward a model that
makes dissent a liability. The danger is not hypothetical, it's
actually visible. If you read about the raids, the seizures,
and the prosecutorial zeal in Germany, you'll see that that

(36:32):
danger is very real, which means that Europe has reached
a moment where that when the structure of its speech
regime deserves really careful scrutiny. Our task maybe is not
to condemn it, but to insist that political leaders accept
the scrutiny that a democratic office entails. We need to

(36:52):
understand this, that what is happening there could happen here.
And what I'm trying to do is just sound the
law that look across the pond, look toward the east
and see what's happening in Europe, and then think about
what's happening in this country. Where you start with, oh,
you can't say that because that's going to offend somebody,

(37:14):
well sucks to be you if you get offended. It's
the weekend with Michael Brown. Text lines always open three
three one zero three, keyword Micha or Michael. I'll be
right back.