{"id":22238,"date":"2026-01-13T15:15:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T20:15:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=22238"},"modified":"2026-01-17T08:34:21","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T13:34:21","slug":"germanys-latest-war-on-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/13\/germanys-latest-war-on-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"Germany’s Latest War on Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Also posted on Zero Hedge<\/strong><\/a>, Counterpunch<\/strong><\/a>, Brownstone Institut<\/strong><\/a>e, Eurasia Review<\/strong><\/a>, BeforeItsNews<\/strong><\/a>, One News Page<\/strong><\/a>, USSA News<\/strong><\/a>, Era of Light<\/strong><\/a>,\u00a0 etc.<\/p>\n

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Liber-net<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Germany\u2019s Latest War on Freedom<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard, January 13, 2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThere is no censorship here<\/span><\/a> in Germany,\u201d according to Steffen Meyer, a top spokesman for the German government. In reality, Germans have freedom of speech except for ideas that politicians and government contractors and nonprofit activists don\u2019t like. Germany is providing a road map for freedom can be squashed throughout the western world.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Germany was the scene of some of the twentieth century\u2019s worst tyranny but today\u2019s German leaders have only noble intentions for oppression. Berlin\u2019s Best and Brightest\u2122 \u201cimproved\u201d democracy by turning politicians into a privileged caste.<\/strong> After a conservative editor mocked a top German law enforcement official by posting a meme showing her holding a sign, \u201cI hate freedom of opinion,\u201d<\/span><\/a> he was convicted and sentenced to a seven months in jail for \u201cabuse, slander or defamation against persons in political life.\u201d The editor is on probation while the sentence is suspended but many other Germans have been locked up for similar offenses. The U.S. State Department Human Rights Report stated that German police \u201croutinely raided homes<\/span><\/a>, confiscated electronic devices, interrogated suspects and prosecuted individuals for the exercise of freedom of speech, including online.\u201d German Chancellor Friedrich Merz personally filed almost 5,000 complaints<\/span><\/a> against his online critics, sometimes resulting in police raids against people he accused.<\/p>\n

The German media are gung-ho for government censorship of average Germans<\/strong>. The New York Times<\/em> noted, \u201cAuthorities in Lower Saxony raid homes up to multiple times per month, sometimes with a local television crew<\/span><\/a> in tow.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>The Times<\/em> reported that in 2022, \u201cChristian Endt, a journalist in Berlin whose coverage of Covid drew a steady stream of insults online, reached a breaking point. After an anonymous Twitter user had called him \u2018stupid\u2019 and mentally ill, he embarked on a mission to see if he could get the person prosecuted.\u201d The Twitter account didn\u2019t have a real name but Endt used an image search of his picture and tracked it down to a small-business owner. Local prosecutors fined that guy more than a thousand dollars. Endt told The New York Times<\/em>, \u201cI was not even sure if what<\/span><\/a> this guy wrote was a crime or not. In the end, I\u2019m happy they did something about it and this person got a signal that there are some limits on free speech.\u201d But is there no limit to the cowardliness of some German journalists? Publicly admitting that you ran crying to the authorities after some dweeb called you stupid and crazy makes a journalist unfit for writing about anything that offends anyone.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Journalist J.D. Tuccille, writing in Reason<\/em>, notes:<\/p>\n

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\u201cLast November, a Bavarian man was investigated for referring online to then-Deputy Chancellor Robert Habeck with a pun that roughly translates as \u2018idiot.\u2019 Police raided the home of a Hamburg man for calling a local politician a \u2018pimmel\u2019 (dick). Berlin banned the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel slogan \u2018from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.\u2019 And Irish protesters in Germany were forbidden to speak in Gaelic because police wouldn\u2019t be able to tell if they were saying verboten things.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Going back almost a decade, Germany was the most aggressive online censor among advanced nations. I noted in USA Today<\/span><\/a> in 2017:<\/p>\n

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\u201cIn June, German police raided dozens of homes across the nation suspected of offensive social media postings<\/span><\/a> and \u201cconducted home searches and interrogations,\u201d according to The New York Times<\/i>.\u00a0Facebook is\u00a0deleting 15,000 posts a month<\/span><\/a> in Germany<\/span><\/a> but the government is threatening a $50-million-plus fine unless Facebook suppresses far more comments. Judith Bergman of the Gatestone Institute commented on the German mandate: \u2018When employees of social media companies are appointed as the state\u2019s private thought police<\/span><\/a>\u2026free speech becomes nothing more than a fairy tale. Or is that perhaps the point?’\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Writing in The Hill<\/span><\/a>, I warned in late 2017 that American politicians sought the \u201cGermanification of Facebook her<\/strong>e,\u201d with pervasive censorship on political command. That vision was fulfilled during the Covid pandemic. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg later publicly complained that the Joe Biden administration had forced his company to suppress even true information during the pandemic.<\/p>\n

The plight of freedom in Germany continues to worsen. The Future of Free Speech, a think tank at Vanderbilt University, did a massive study examining the nature of deleted comments in Germany, France, and Sweden in 2023. That study found that 99.7% of the deleted comments<\/span><\/a> by Germans on Facebook and 98.9% of the deleted comments on YouTube were actually legally permissible. The social media companies, intimidated by the German Network Enforcement Act, were far more censorious than the law demanded. The Vanderbilt study found that most censored comments were simply \u201c\u2019general expressions of opinion\u2019\u2026that did not contain linguistic attacks, hate speech or illegal content, such as expressing the support for a controversial candidate in the abstract.\u201d<\/p>\n

Germany is destroying free speech in part to forcibly suppress anger over brutal crimes committed by immigrants<\/strong>. Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, recently noted in The Washington Post<\/i><\/span><\/a>: \u201c<\/i>A woman, furious at the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl in a Hamburg park, called one of the perpetrators a \u2018disgraceful rapist pig\u2019 in a WhatsApp message. She was prosecuted<\/span><\/a> for insult and defamation, and ordered to spend the weekend in jail\u2014while the rapist, because of youth sentencing rules, served no time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Censorship defines down self-government to \u201cone person, one vote, one time.\u201d<\/strong> Whoever wins a national election will exploit the censorship regime to perpetuate their own power. German politicians are conniving to outlaw the second largest political party, the Alliance for Deutschland (AfD) and its ideas because elitists disapprove of its positions. But it is not the AfD\u2019s fault that Germans\u2019 trust in politicians and<\/span><\/a> government has plunged in recent years.<\/p>\n

German government funding for censorship increased five-fold<\/span><\/a> since 2020. Andrew Lowenthal, the founder and CEO of Liber-net<\/strong>, commented, \u201cIn Germany large swathes of civil society have abandoned their traditional role as watch-dogs of power. Instead, they have joined forces with the State to suppress popular discontent.\u201d There are 330 different organizations now part of the German censorship machine. (See the excellent graphic produced by Liber-net.) As journalist Mario Nawfal wrote, \u201cWhen your \u201cfact-checkers\u201d are on government payroll, they\u2019re not checking facts\u2014they\u2019re enforcing narratives. The objectivity claim is window dressing. The real damage? Public trust is collapsing faster than the censorship can contain it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Aspen Institute Germany, founded in Berlin in 1974, is massively subsidized by the German\u00a0 <\/span>Foreign Office (the equivalent of the U.S. State Department) to proselytize for the destruction of free speech across Europe. In December, the institute published a report<\/span><\/a>: Hybrid Realities: Disinformation, Influencers, and the Defense of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe<\/i>. Here\u2019s the painfully portentous first paragraph of the Executive Summary:<\/p>\n

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\u201cDemocracy depends on the integrity and credibility of public discourse. It functions most effectively, when citizens can exchange ideas freely, engage in respectful disagreement, and make collective choices informed by reliable information. Transparent and inclusive dialogue fosters trust between individuals and institutions, which in turn underpins the legitimacy of democratic decision-making and helps ensure that differences of opinion do not lead to societal division. Sustaining this foundation requires an information environment that upholds transparency, enables verification, and encourages responsibility in maintaining fact-based public communication.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That pious prattle sounds like \u201cgood government\u201d gobbledy-gook but the reality is that those goals create endless penalty flags for government-subsidized referees to throw at private citizens and social media. As a New York Times<\/em> article on German censorship explained in 2022, \u201cThe authorities in Germany argue that they are encouraging and defending free speech by providing a space where people can share opinions without fear of being attacked or abused.\u201d So to have the space for free speech, government officials must have unlimited power to assure that nothing improper or insulting is said.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The new German report echoes the same themes and goals as a 2022 Aspen Institute report championing censorship for the United States. That report called for the Biden administration to \u201cestablish a comprehensive strategic approach to countering disinformation and the spread of misinformation, including a centralized national response strategy, defining roles and responsibilities across the Executive Branch.\u201d It portrayed objectivity as an enemy of truth. Aspen Institute commissioners \u201cdiscussed the need to adjust journalistic norms to avoid false equivalencies between lies and empirical fact in the pursuit of \u2018both sides\u2019 and \u2018objectivity,\u2019 particularly in areas of public health, civil rights, or election outcomes.\u201d The report called for creation of a \u201cPublic Restoration Fund\u2026with a mandate to develop systemic misinformation countermeasures through education, research, and investment in local institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Aspen Institute also urged government officials to impose \u201cSuperspreader Accountability,\u201d to \u201chold superspreaders of mis- and disinformation to account with clear, transparent, and consistently applied policies.\u201d The Aspen Institute neglected to condemn President Joe Biden as the Supreme Superspreader for his false promise that the COVID vaccine would prevent COVID infections. \u201cDisinformation\u201d is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The new censors in Germany and beyond want to protect government against alleged private falsehoods but offer no remedy for government lies that deceive the citizenry. I<\/strong>nstead, Germany\u2019s censorship champions promise to protect \u201cthe integrity and credibility of public discourse\u201d based on the notion that government is morally and intellectually superior to private citizens.<\/strong> As German journalist Jasmin Kosubek observed, \u201cGermany\u2019s censorship machine creates digital \u2018priests\u2019<\/span><\/a> who claim the truth\u2014and silence those who challenge them.\u201d Today\u2019s Germans are haunted by the intellectual ghost of a philosopher bootlicker from two hundred years ago. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel declared, \u201cMen are as foolish as to forget, in their enthusiasm for liberty of conscience and political freedom, the truth which lies in power.\u201d Hegel bluntly equated government and truth:\u00a0\u00a0\u201cFor Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hegel probably did more to propel modern totalitarianism than perhaps any other philosopher. German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who fled the Third Reich, commented, \u201cThese words, written in 1801, contain the clearest and most ruthless program of fascism that has ever been propounded by any political or philosophy writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Actually, maybe another Hegel doctrine explains why the ruling class continues to proclaim that Germans are free. Hegel asserted that \u201cthe State is that in which Freedom obtains objectivity, and lives in the enjoyment of this objectivity.\u201d So, objectively, Germans have free speech because the government attaches so many muzzles and blindfolds to the citizen<\/strong>ry.<\/p>\n

And the government will always be there to protect the \u201cfreedom\u201d of oversensitive journalists by harshly punishing anyone who calls them a dummkoff.<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Also posted on Zero Hedge, Counterpunch, Brownstone Institute, Eurasia Review, BeforeItsNews, One News Page, USSA News, Era of Light,\u00a0 etc. Germany\u2019s Latest War on Freedom by James Bovard, January 13, 2026 \u201cThere is no censorship here in Germany,\u201d according to Steffen Meyer, a top spokesman for the German government. In reality, Germans have freedom of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3147,391,2349,2101,3214,45,118,1885,516,4732,1256,1071,1097],"class_list":["post-22238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aspen-institute","tag-censorship","tag-covid","tag-cowards","tag-disinformation","tag-freedom","tag-germany","tag-hegel","tag-journalism-2","tag-merz","tag-new-york-times","tag-usa-today","tag-weasels"],"yoast_head":"\nGermany's Latest War on Freedom - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Germany is destroying free speech by criminalizing criticism of politicians and cowardly journalists\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/13\/germanys-latest-war-on-freedom\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Germany's Latest War on Freedom - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22238"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22248,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22238\/revisions\/22248"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}