Category Archives: First Amendment

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff: Report From the USA

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Long-time readers are familiar with our Austrian correspondent Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who was prosecuted for “hate speech” in an Austrian court. Her conviction was upheld in all subsequent appeals, all the way up to the failure of the final appeal to the European Court of Human Rights almost ten years later.

Elisabeth recently completed a speaking tour of the USA. The following essay presents an analysis of the reactions of the audiences in the various places she visited. It is followed by the prepared text of her speech.

Three Weeks, Ten Speeches — Observations from the United States

by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

Over the past three weeks, I spoke at ten events across several U.S. states, addressing audiences on freedom of speech, cultural pressure, and developments I have witnessed over many years in Europe. What I wanted to understand was not simply how my message would be received, but how different communities in the United States are currently processing these issues — and, more importantly, whether that understanding is accompanied by a willingness to act.

Northeast: New Hampshire and Massachusetts

The events in New Hampshire and Massachusetts were marked by openness, intellectual curiosity, and a clear willingness to engage. In New Hampshire, where I was invited as keynote speaker at a campaign fundraising event, the audience responded with both warmth and attentiveness, and the invitation to return later in the year reflects a level of interest that extended beyond the moment itself.

In Massachusetts, the setting of a synagogue — together with Jonathan Hausman and Matt Hausman — allowed for a more layered and structured exchange. What followed the keynote was not merely a series of questions, but a sustained and thoughtful discussion in which legal, cultural, and personal dimensions were brought together. Several attendees remarked that while the speech provided the foundation, it was the discussion that elevated the evening, suggesting that this was an audience not only willing to listen, but capable of working through the implications.

Michigan: Engagement, Structure, and Readiness

Michigan stood out as the clearest example of what it looks like when engagement is paired with direction.

The program itself was carefully constructed: I opened with the keynote, followed by Dave Agema, who expanded on the subject with his own expertise, and then a missionary couple who spoke about their work in Nigeria, grounding the discussion in lived reality. The result was not a collection of disconnected contributions, but a coherent progression — from analysis, to elaboration, to experience — that allowed the audience to grasp both the structure of the issue and its real-world consequences.

This coherence was reflected in the audience. Engagement was high, the Q&A was active, and, notably, people did not stop at agreement. They asked what they could do, and the conversation continued beyond the formal setting. There was a clear sense that the information presented carried practical implications.

One example illustrates this particularly well: at each event in Michigan, the issue of halal-certified meat was discussed. Far from treating this as an abstract or distant concern, members of the audience expressed gratitude for the information and indicated that they would take concrete steps, including raising the issue with local grocery stores. Whether or not such efforts succeed is secondary; what matters is that the connection between information and action was understood.

The presence of a respected local leader, Bill Johnson, appeared to play a significant role in this. Leadership, in this context, did not impose direction, but created an environment in which responsibility could be assumed. Michigan did not stand out because people agreed — it stood out because they were prepared to act on what they understood.

Jacksonville: Attentive, but Limited Depth

In Jacksonville, Florida the audience was attentive and respectful, and the event proceeded without friction. At the same time, the level of engagement remained more limited. Questions were fewer, and the overall interaction did not reach the depth observed in Michigan or the Northeast.

This relative passivity is notable in light of developments in the area since my last visit. Jacksonville has seen the establishment of a large-scale halal slaughterhouse, a project that has drawn local attention. Members of the audience reported that, during related hearings, even the use of the term “Islam” in connection with the project was discouraged or disallowed. If accurate, this suggests a level of constraint in public discussion that stands in tension with the principles of open inquiry such issues require.

The difference, therefore, was not one of exposure to the topic, but of how directly it was engaged. The audience listened, but the conversation did not extend much beyond the immediate setting, and the event left a more muted impression overall.

Texas: A Concerning Absence of Engagement

The events in Texas presented a markedly different — and more concerning — picture.

Attendance was lower than expected, and the level of engagement remained minimal throughout. In one of the final events, only a single question was asked, and there were no follow-up conversations afterward. The energy in the room was noticeably flat, creating the impression not of resistance or disagreement, but of distance.

Some of this may be attributed to logistical factors, including scheduling decisions and overlap with similar topics earlier in the week. However, even when these are taken into account, they do not fully explain what was observed.

This is particularly striking, given that Texas is widely regarded as a central arena in current debates surrounding Islamic engagement in the United States. Developments such as the EPIC City Project — even under changing names — indicate long-term, organized initiatives that have already attracted national attention. At the same time, political signals such as Texas Proposition 10 underscore that this issue is not abstract. Proposition 10 explicitly asked whether Sharia law should be prohibited in Texas, and it received overwhelming support among Republican primary voters. While the measure itself is non-binding, it was widely understood as a first step toward more formal legislative action, potentially paving the way for broader efforts to prohibit the application of Sharia law beyond Texas.

Taken together, these developments suggest that the subject is both present and understood — at least in principle.

Yet this was not reflected in the rooms I encountered.

What emerged instead was a form of passive interest — an acknowledgment of the topic without a corresponding willingness to engage with it actively. Particularly notable was the near absence of younger attendees, which raises the question of whether these developments are registering with the next generation at all, or whether they are being displaced by other priorities.

Beyond logistical considerations, this gap between perceived importance and actual engagement is difficult to account for — and, for that reason, worth paying close attention to moving forward.

A Broader Observation

Across all ten events, I did not encounter widespread hostility or rejection of the message. On the contrary, most audiences were receptive and, at least on the surface, in agreement.

What differed — sometimes sharply — was the step that followed.

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Islam: Extinguishing Freedom of Speech

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Michael Copeland reminds us of what is at stake in Islam’s war against the West.

Islam: extinguishing freedom of speech

by Michael Copeland

JD Vance is right: freedom of speech in Europe is “in retreat”. It is being eroded from within. The deliberate campaign of attrition is coming from members of Islam, a recently imported segment of the population.

Islam forbids freedom of speech. It is that simple. No ifs. No buts. Consequently, it employs many ploys and strategies, including scams, to erode and destroy it. The UK population, lacking a First Amendment, and conditioned by decades of comfortable freedom unchallenged, have a poor grasp of the vital importance of freedom of speech. For the functioning of democracy, it is essential that all subjects be available for discussion. There cannot be a whole area that is off-limits. A second disadvantage is the widespread lack of knowledge of and interest in Islam and its rules.

No free speech in Austria

There is no free speech in Austria. Thus concludes Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff. In a private conversation she used, of Mohammed, the scientific term Pedophile. It was overheard, and she was charged with “denigrating an established religion”. Her conviction was upheld all the way to the highest European court.

The “Sensitivity” scam

Ever well practiced at putting on an act, the Islamic lobby adopt sad faces and claim their “sensitivities” are offended by portrayals of Muhammad. The unwary British, polite, helpful, and easily gulled, have bent over backwards to oblige, thereby curtailing their speech. The result? No jokes, no cartoons, no satire of anything Islamic, no demonstrations. In the UK, speech is no longer free.

The sensitivity claim is a pose. In Islamic law criticism of Mohammed or Islam carries the death penalty. Remember this is the ideology which severs heads, cuts off limbs, throws homosexuals off tall buildings, and stones people to death. So sensitive.

The “Hate” scam

The Islamic lobby uses accusations of “hate speech” as a tactic. This has also brought undeserved success. Any criticism of Islam is blackened as “hate” and made the subject of contrived whining. Unbelievably the UK has, at the prompting of the Islamic lobby, instituted the preposterous “non-crime hate incident”. Police time has been fatuously wasted monitoring social media and visiting in person those recorded — without trial — as guilty of a non-crime hate incident, which goes on their criminal record. What is surprising is quite how this self-evident attack on free speech has been allowed to happen, yet it has. Recently, in response to widespread objections its use has been discontinued, but it has not been abolished, nor have all the records been deleted.

The sour irony behind this contrived whining is its arrant hypocrisy. Islam, after all, has the standing instruction “between us and you enmity and hatred forever” (K60:4, part of Islamic law).

Incitement to crime, of course, does not qualify as freedom of speech. It is already a crime. If, however, there is a special category of “hate speech” (everlastingly extendable) then there is no freedom of speech.

The “Islamophobia” scam

Deliberately invented as a weapon, the artificial construct Islamophobia has been undeservedly influential. Parliamentarians have been pressed by the Islamic lobby to agree a definition. To their credit up to now they have not accepted any of the suggestions proffered, and rightly so. The stratagem, after all, is quite transparently a critic-stopper. Its bogus nature is exposed when it is applied to anything else. Is criticism of the Tory party to be stopped because it is Toryphobia? Or of Trump because it is Trumpophobia? And so on, just fill in the blanks. Alas the Labour Government have agreed a definition of Anti-Muslim hostility defined as including violence, harassment, prejudicial stereotyping, and are proposing a “Tsar” to oversee it. This is a retrograde step, leading to blasphemy law by the backdoor.

The -phobia construct is a hollow sham and deserves contempt.

All these stratagems are fraudulent. They are simply silencing devices, designed to erode western laws and make them compliant with Sharia. Everyone who supports democratic values of Western freedoms should dismiss them roundly.

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The Lie Becomes the Truth

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Our Austrian correspondent and long-time associate Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff has published an updated edition of her book, Truth Was My Crime: a Life Fighting for Freedom. Below is the final installment of a four-part preview of the new introduction to the book. Previously: Part One, Part Two, Part Three

The Lie Becomes the Truth

by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

When Truth Becomes a Liability

Once speech is compelled, truth inevitably becomes a problem. In contemporary Western democracies, that problem takes a specific form: systems that demand enforced agreement cannot tolerate facts that disrupt their script. Truth, by its nature, is unpredictable; it resists coordination, produces disagreement, and refuses to align neatly with moral performance.[1] For that reason, truth is no longer evaluated but managed.

When politics becomes a contest of posture rather than accountability, truth ceases to function as a neutral arbiter and instead becomes a liability. Facts that complicate the preferred narrative are no longer debated on their merits but contained, softened, or quietly excluded. In such a system, falsehood does not always arise from ignorance; it often emerges because telling the full truth carries a cost that many are unwilling — or unable — to pay.

At this point, truth is no longer treated as something to be discovered, but as something to be administered. We are told that “truth is complex,” that “experts disagree,” that “context matters.” These statements are not always false — but they are rarely innocent. Their effect is to dissolve the idea that truth is knowable at all. What replaces it is a hierarchy of narratives: approved, discouraged, and forbidden.

Within such a system, facts do not disappear so much as they are reclassified. True statements are relabeled as “misinformation,” inconvenient facts as “malinformation,” and legitimate questions as “conspiracy theories.” None of these designations require refutation because they operate by decree; once applied, discussion does not merely narrow, but ends.

The inversion of truth and power is profound. Historically, power feared truth because truth constrained it. Today, power increasingly claims authority over truth itself, and the consequences follow with unsettling speed. Scientific debate collapses into credentialism, journalism slips into narrative enforcement, and law becomes interpretive rather than principled. Citizens are no longer asked to think their way through competing claims, but to trust — precisely where verification is discouraged or prohibited.

For this reason, modern speech restrictions are almost always framed as protections against confusion, premised on the claim that the public cannot be trusted to evaluate uncertainty on its own and must therefore be shielded from it. Judgment is replaced by supervision, discernment by compliance — this is the logic of infantilization.[2]

What makes this system especially difficult to confront is its liberal façade. European authorities insist — often sincerely — that freedom of speech still exists, and in a narrow, formal sense they are correct: there are no official lists of forbidden words, no visible gag orders, no explicit prohibitions announced by the state. Speech is not banned outright but tolerated conditionally; one may speak — provided one is willing to bear the consequences.

This conditional tolerance defines contemporary censorship. It no longer relies primarily on criminal prosecution but on professional destruction: careers unravel, reputations are dismantled, access is withdrawn, livelihoods disappear — not because a claim has been shown to be false, but because it has been deemed unacceptable. Punishment is rarely acknowledged as punishment at all, instead framed as reputational hygiene, institutional distancing, or moral responsibility. The result is a narrowing corridor of permissible speech that remains officially unnamed. Everyone senses its boundaries. Few dare test them. Those who do are not argued with; they are removed.

This is not hypothetical but unfolding in real time. The professional destruction of individuals such as Jacques Baud is not an aberration but a visible manifestation of a process that has been operating for years. Earlier cases — my own among them — were easier to dismiss as isolated or controversial; what has changed is not the mechanism, but the scale. What was once invisible has become undeniable.

What appears, from the outside, as paralysis driven by fear is in truth a paralysis of truth itself. People do not fall silent because they lack opinions or evidence. They fall silent because they understand the price of being right at the wrong time, in the wrong way, against the wrong narrative.

In this system, truth does not protect you but exposes you; applied at scale, the same logic produces a population protected from uncertainty — and therefore from knowledge. The Covid years made this unmistakable. Data about transmission, treatments, vaccine efficacy, side effects, and risk stratification was not merely debated — it was suppressed. Positions that later proved accurate were banned when they mattered most. What was punished was not falsehood, but premature truth. The lesson was clear: truth is acceptable only when it is no longer disruptive.

Unsurprisingly, more censorship leads to more stagnation in human progress. As Elle Purnell points out, “The perversion of truth is falsehood; misinformation is just the perversion of information. Truth has a moral component; information doesn’t. Years of moral relativism have eroded our cultural understanding of ‘truth’ as a knowable, agreed-upon concept — and in our modern world, all we’re left with is an infinite supply of information.”[3]

At that point, language itself begins to fracture. Words lose stable meaning as definitions shift according to political need, until what was once obvious becomes unsayable and what was once absurd becomes mandatory. When people are told that men can become women, that biological facts are feelings, that disagreement is violence, and that silence is complicity, they are not being persuaded. They are being conditioned.

This is how reality erodes — not through force alone, but through semantic exhaustion. A society that can no longer name reality cannot defend it, and once truth becomes a liability, lies are repurposed as instruments of order. This is not post-truth; it is anti-truth, and it forms the necessary foundation of any system that seeks obedience without accountability.

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Silencing Ourselves

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Our Austrian correspondent and long-time associate Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff has published an updated edition of her book, Truth Was My Crime: a Life Fighting for Freedom. Below is the third installment of a four-part preview of the new introduction to the book. Previously: Part One, Part Two

Silencing Ourselves

by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

From Rationalization to Regime

Once rationalization replaces resistance, censorship no longer advances by persuasion. It advances by procedure.

In 2025, the transatlantic divide ceased to be implicit and became explicit. The divide in question was constitutional: between the American understanding of free speech as a fundamental, pre-political right, and the European approach that increasingly treats speech as a regulated activity subject to administrative limits in the name of social harmony, public order, or safety. Speaking in Munich, U.S. Vice President J. D. Vance stated plainly that European speech laws are incompatible with democratic self-government. This was not said in Washington, but in Europe, to European elites. Shortly thereafter, the United States imposed entry bans on European censorship actors — including figures associated with DSA enforcement and professional “hate” flagging.[1] According to Austrian journalist Andreas Unterberger, Washington has drawn a clear line: there will be no concessions — economic or otherwise — without a rollback of Europe’s censorship regime.[2] For the first time since 1945, freedom of speech has become a point of open constitutional conflict between Europe and the United States.[3]

Meanwhile, in America, the debate has shifted. Under the Biden administration, and particularly after the Twitter Files, Missouri v. Biden, House investigations, and multiple federal injunctions, censorship is no longer denied but openly conceded.[4] The re-election of Donald Trump further accelerated this shift, transforming what had been contested evidence into an explicit political reckoning.

The fight is no longer about whether government interference with speech occurred, but about how permanent and how expansive that interference may be. True but inconvenient speech has been reclassified from a scandal to be endured into a policy problem to be managed.[5]

“Freedom of speech is wonderful, but disinformation has no place in society” is an oft-repeated mantra. The MIT analytics expert Retsev Levi, on Twitter, disagrees:

“The concept of ‘mis/disinformation’ [sic!] is based on the assertion that people can’t apply independent intellectual scrutiny to decide what they believe and make choices. Giving away the right to make independent choices to government, large corporations, and obscenely rich people = Evil dictatorship!”[6]

So, in effect, the government asserts that citizens are incapable of judging truth for themselves and must therefore be told what to believe.

What has changed is not merely enforcement, but the underlying theory of truth.[7] Terms such as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation” have hardened into administrative categories, largely detached from questions of accuracy. “Misinformation” no longer refers simply to error, but to speech deemed misleading, incomplete, or inconvenient. “Disinformation” adds the presumption of intent — often without proof. Most revealing is the emergence of “malinformation”: speech that is factually true, yet treated as harmful because of its timing, framing, or political effect.

This marks a fundamental constitutional problem. Liberal law has traditionally been premised on restraint — the recognition that the state is not a reliable arbiter of truth. As American legal scholar Alan Dershowitz has noted, even false or misleading speech is protected by the First Amendment precisely because “the law is very skeptical of the ultimate truth.”[8] Lies are part and parcel of the right to free speech — not because they are desirable, but because the alternative requires the state to claim an authority it cannot legitimately possess.

In the European context, this shift has been taken further. “Misinformation” no longer functions primarily as a claim about factual inaccuracy, but as a disciplinary category. Once applied, it renders certain analyses illegitimate by definition, regardless of their evidentiary basis. The effect is not correction but exclusion. Arguments are not rebutted; speakers are disqualified. What is sanctioned is not falsehood, but non-alignment with approved narratives. This mechanism is particularly destructive because it targets credibility itself. Careers are damaged, platforms withdrawn, reputations erased — not because a claim has been proven wrong, but because it has been deemed unacceptable. This logic was already visible more than a decade ago, including in my own prosecution in 2010, where factual statements were punished not for being false, but for violating an accepted narrative. In such a system, truth offers no protection; the label alone suffices.[9]

What has changed since then is not the discovery of censorship, but the political will to confront it. Beginning in 2023 with the public disclosures now known as the Twitter Files, and consolidating after the 2024 election, the premise that governments may quietly manage “information ecosystems” through pressure, coordination, or outsourced enforcement is no longer defended in the United States. For the first time, speech repression is treated not as a cultural disagreement, but as a constitutional injury with institutional consequences.[10]

This confirms Hayek’s warning:[11] when truth becomes administrative, freedom becomes impossible. Freedom rarely vanishes; it is traded away. What Edmund Burke observed — that evil triumphs when good people do nothing — is often dismissed as overused precisely because it keeps being confirmed. Silence is not neutral but constitutive: it is consent, and the mechanism by which repression expands without resistance. Censorship does not weaken opposition so much as expose fear, and fear, once visible, radicalizes rather than pacifies. The past few years have shown how fear, once normalized, becomes an instrument of governance.

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The Malleability of Truth

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Our Austrian correspondent and long-time associate Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff has published an updated edition of her book, Truth Was My Crime: a Life Fighting for Freedom. Below is the second installment of a four-part preview of the new introduction to the book. Previously: Part One.

Truth Reclassified as Opinion

by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

What made these developments legally possible was not a change in facts, but a change in classification. In my case, courts avoided engaging with the substance of what I said by redefining it. Statements grounded in historical and doctrinal sources were declared “opinions,” and opinions — once so labeled — were no longer subject to verification. Truth became irrelevant. What mattered was not whether a statement was accurate, but whether it was permissible.

This was not a misunderstanding but a strategy — one that allowed courts to avoid the burden of proof while preserving the appearance of neutrality.

By collapsing the distinction between fact and opinion, courts insulated themselves from any obligation to test truth claims at all. Evidence became beside the point. Once speech is reclassified as opinion, it can be restricted without contradiction, because opinions — unlike facts — enjoy no protection beyond tolerance. And tolerance, unlike rights, can be withdrawn.

The deeper problem has been — and remains — European jurisprudence. In much of Europe, free-speech defendants enter court knowing they are likely to lose, not because evidence is lacking, but because the legal framework itself is hostile to truth adjudication. In the United States, by contrast, free-speech cases are still contested — and oftentimes won. The First Amendment remains a substantive constraint on state power, not a ceremonial relic.

In Europe, this maneuver — avoiding truth adjudication by reclassifying factual claims as opinion and deferring to state discretion — has hardened into doctrine. Courts and administrative bodies no longer ask whether a statement is true. They ask whether it aligns with an approved narrative, whether it threatens “social peace,” or whether it risks discomfort. Truth is not disproved; it is bypassed.

The result is not merely legal distortion, but a reversal of how truth itself is judged. As Elle Purnell, assistant editor at The Federalist, has observed, “Ideas cease to be judged on their merits and are instead judged by the intensity with which a person feels them to be true.”[1]

What we are witnessing here is the first step in a deliberate two-stage process of control: the creation of a vacuum in which the ability of individuals, families, or communities to counter the regime with facts and truth is systematically removed. The second step follows predictably — filling that vacuum with whatever the regime designates as the truth of the day.[2]

This two-step process of compelled speech — first forcing people to deny reality, and then requiring them to affirm the regime’s prescribed falsehood — is itself the point. It does not merely indoctrinate a particular ideology but destroys human reason and the perception of natural law altogether. As physician and author Aaron Kheriaty notes, drawing on the work of the German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin, “the common feature of all totalitarian systems is neither concentration camps, nor secret police, nor mass surveillance […]. The common feature […] is the prohibition of questions.”[3]

This inversion — where questioning is treated as subversion and assertion as authority — has profound consequences. Law depends on shared standards of reality, and when truth is treated as subjective and opinion as dangerous, legal certainty collapses. Decisions no longer rest on what can be shown, but on what may be allowed. The question shifts from Is this true? to Should this be said? — a question that has no legal answer, only political ones.

Once truth is removed from adjudication, power fills the vacuum, speech is no longer evaluated but managed, and a system that manages truth cannot tolerate independent judgment for long.

What began in the 1970s with the introduction of the charge of “Islamophobia” — a deliberately constructed label used to medicalize dissent and disqualify critics of Islam without engaging their arguments — has since evolved into a comprehensive moral taxonomy of permissible and impermissible speech. Over time, this logic expanded from the protection of religious sensibilities to the active persecution of ever-broadening categories of alleged “haters,” “racists,” or “extremists,” labels whose definitions shift according to political need rather than factual content. The significance of this term lay not in its original usage, but in how it functioned once absorbed into legal and administrative frameworks.

Under this regime, “hate speech” no longer denotes incitement to violence, but rather the expression of views deemed emotionally unacceptable to “protected” groups. The effect is not merely legal constraint, but preemptive self-censorship: citizens learn to restrain not only what they say, but what they are willing to think. European Union law now explicitly recognizes favored groups whose criticism is treated as suspect, while other categories remain unprotected. The standard is not coherence, but hierarchy.

The practical consequences are unmistakable. Ordinary statements about biological sex, family structure, migration policy, public safety, or education can carry professional, legal, or social penalties. Expressing an opinion may cost one a career, invite investigation, or provoke institutional intervention. In extreme cases, citizen journalism itself becomes grounds for prosecution. The lesson is internalized quickly: silence is safer than clarity.

This is why I no longer consider our societies — European or American — meaningfully free. A reliable measure of free speech is not what is permitted in theory, but what can be questioned in practice. Raise any of the sanctioned topics of the day — climate policy, the war in Ukraine, electoral integrity — and observe the response. The pattern is consistent even when the legal regimes differ. Debate is replaced by moral accusation; evidence by emotional assertion. Facts do not disappear, but they cease to matter.[4]

There was a time when disagreement was understood as a civic good, a means by which societies corrected error and approached truth. Today, we increasingly inhabit a culture indifferent to truth altogether. “Your truth” and “my truth” replace reality, and common sense is dismissed as aggression. In such a world, facts and opinions collapse into one another, and power fills the vacuum left behind. This collapse of truth into personal feeling does not merely confuse public discourse but quietly demoralizes the young, leaving them without any stable standard by which to judge reality, themselves, or the world.

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The Truth is Fungible

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Our Austrian correspondent and long-time associate Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff has published an updated edition of her book, Truth Was My Crime: a Life Fighting for Freedom. Below is the first installment of a four-part preview of the new introduction to the book.

When Nothing Is True, Everything Is Imaginable

by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

Majority opinion must act as a restraint but not as a guide to individual action — all advance has been due to individual conflict with majority opinion.

— F. A. Hayek

What Freedom Is — and Is Not

Freedom has been defined in many ways. Before examining the newest and most aggressive forms of censorship, it is necessary to clarify what freedom is — and what it is not.

Not all definitions are compatible with ordered liberty. Doing as one pleases is not liberty but anarchy; true freedom presupposes order, law, and moral limits. Friedrich A. Hayek — my fellow countryman, Nobel laureate, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom — defined it succinctly: freedom is order through law. Law, properly understood, does not erase moral agency; it protects it. Economist Steven Horwitz later summarized Hayek’s position clearly: freedom is not absolute license, but the recognition that law and morality are necessary for cooperative and orderly human interaction.[1]

What we are witnessing today is the collapse of precisely that framework: law is no longer applied consistently, morality is no longer shared, and the boundary between what belongs to you and what belongs to the state has dissolved. Under such conditions, cooperation gives way to coercion, and order gives way to managed chaos.

Hayek’s warnings — especially in The Road to Serfdom — were dismissed for decades and remain unfashionable in contemporary academia because they challenge dominant assumptions rather than confirm them; that is why they still matter.

The gravest danger, Hayek argued, is not tyranny announced as tyranny, but planning announced as benevolence. When governments claim superior knowledge and decide which ideas may circulate, they destroy the knowledge free societies depend on. That is the mechanism. Freedom collapses when governments claim the authority to decide what may be said, and what must be suppressed.

When Truth Becomes Opinion

Nearly eight years have passed since I was convicted by Austrian courts for discussing the sexual conduct of the Islamic prophet Mohammed — marrying a six-year-old and “consummating” the marriage when she was nine. The Austrian courts ruled that my statements constituted an “excess of opinion.” That judgment was later upheld by the European Court of Human Rights, which concluded that Austria had acted within its margin of appreciation.[2] [3]

The implication was unmistakable: certain subjects may not be addressed honestly, even in an educational context, even in the absence of incitement, and even where no harm can be demonstrated.

At the time of the judgement, many reassured themselves that this was an exception — a warning shot that could safely be ignored because it involved the wrong speaker, the wrong subject, and the wrong country. Some pointed at me and said I should not have said it. Others shrugged. Most did nothing. That silence, in retrospect, was sufficient for the system to proceed. I decided then that I would no longer speak publicly in Europe and redirected my efforts toward the United States, believing, as many advocates of free speech did, that the First Amendment still represented a reliable bulwark. Europe, I assumed, had failed; America would hold.

It is therefore ironic that the United States, once widely regarded as the most robust free-speech regime in the world, would become, in the words of journalist David Kupelian, “ground zero for a total war on free expression.” The strength of the American project lay in its founding premise that certain truths are “self-evident,” yet those shared truths have increasingly been displaced by subjective and individualized versions of truth — your truth, my truth — which, by definition, cannot all be true. Under the Biden administration, the First Amendment came under sustained assault not through formal repeal but through circumvention: speech was outsourced to platforms, censorship laundered through “fact-checkers,” NGOs, and administrative agencies, and attachment to the First Amendment itself increasingly reframed, particularly on the political left, as a form of psychological pathology.[4]

Europe, meanwhile, did not pause. It accelerated. What followed my case should have dispelled the comforting illusion that it had been an aberration.[5]

From Punishment to Pattern

The comforting illusion of exception collapsed quickly — at least for those willing to look.

In Germany, the writer and satirist C. J. Hopkins was prosecuted not for a seminar, a lecture, or a factual assertion, but for political satire. His work made no claim to truth in the conventional sense; it neither instructed, incited, nor persuaded. It mocked, and that alone proved sufficient. German courts applied Volksverhetzung — incitement of the people — without demonstrating concrete harm, without giving intent any meaningful weight, and without acknowledging irony or artistic context. In doing so, they quietly abandoned the legal fiction that speech must pose a demonstrable danger. “Social peace” was deemed justification enough.[6]

This marked a decisive shift. Speech no longer needed to be false, inflammatory, or dangerous; it merely needed to be disruptive to the sanctioned narrative.

An even clearer illustration is Jacques Baud,[7] a former Swiss military intelligence officer, NATO adviser, and United Nations official. Baud is neither a polemicist nor an activist, but a trained analyst whose professional life has been devoted to assessing armed conflict and intelligence failures. His offense was not falsehood, but interpretation. By publicly questioning the dominant European narrative on the Ukraine war, he crossed an increasingly intolerable line.

For this, the European Union placed Baud on a sanctions list, accusing him — without judicial proceedings, without a hearing, and without evidence — of promoting “conspiracy-theoretical” narratives. The term carries a veneer of technical precision, yet functions in practice as a disciplinary label: it no longer requires falsification, intent, or proof. Once applied, it authorizes dismissal, sanction, or erasure without argument.

What makes Baud’s case unprecedented is not only that a Swiss citizen — a national of a neutral country — was targeted by the European Union, but that punishment was imposed without due process and without the commission of a crime. He was not accused of espionage, sabotage, or incitement. He was punished for contradicting policy.

If the case of Jacques Baud serves as a warning to professionals and insiders, the case of Lucy Connolly demonstrates how far this logic now extends downward. Connolly is not a public figure, nor an analyst, writer, or political activist, but an ordinary British citizen — a housewife — who expressed herself online in the aftermath of a violent crime. Her comments were crude, angry, and tasteless, yet they were unmistakably speech.[8]

For this, she was sentenced to prison. She did not incite violence, organize harm, or instruct anyone to act. She expressed an opinion about the state of her country and its failures — an opinion deemed intolerable by those in authority. Tastelessness has never been a crime in a free society, and yet it proved sufficient. Unlike me, Connolly retracted her remarks and apologized. It made no difference. What mattered was not context or remorse, but deviation. Once speech is judged politically disruptive rather than legally criminal, punishment follows regardless of correction. Nor does the process end there.

When Speech Becomes Violence

Charlie Kirk was a prominent American campus speaker and political educator who built his influence through open debate. He traveled widely to universities, invited critics to challenge him publicly, and insisted that disagreement be met with argument rather than exclusion. His work centered on free speech, constitutional government, and the conviction that asking basic questions is a civic duty rather than a provocation.

In September 2025, Kirk was assassinated while doing precisely what those in power routinely claim to want more of: listening to critics, engaging opponents, and giving them the floor. He was not calling for violence, nor was he attempting to silence anyone. He was debating — calmly, publicly, and openly.[9]

It is at this point that the internal logic of censorship culture reveals its final consequence. In a society where dissent is pathologized, disagreement reframed as harm, and questions treated as threats, the individual who persists in asking them becomes dangerous simply by existing. When speech is reclassified as violence, violence begins to present itself as a legitimate response. History records this sequence often enough to recognize it.

Kirk’s murder did not occur in isolation. It represents the terminal stage of a long process: the dehumanization of dissenters, the moral justification of silencing, and the gradual erosion of the distinction between argument and aggression. When words are criminalized, force follows — not as an anomaly, but as a continuation.

I have warned about this progression for years. When I was prosecuted, many pointed fingers and said I should not have said it. Others shrugged. Most remained silent. Yet a society that punishes questions does not stop at punishment. It escalates. Once debate is no longer permitted, those who continue to insist upon it are no longer merely controversial; they become targets.

With each subsequent case, the threshold was quietly lowered. Less justification was required, less pretense maintained, and less restraint exercised, until what once provoked outrage began to pass as routine, and what once demanded a judicial ruling could be triggered by little more than an accusation. This did not have to happen. My case marked an early line in the sand — one that could have been resisted, but was instead isolated.

What followed was not an excess, but a formalization.

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA),[10] once discussed in largely theoretical terms, is now fully operational. Platforms no longer wait for complaints but preemptively remove content to avoid ruinous fines. Censorship has become administrative, anticipatory, and automated. Governments fund denunciation networks — so-called civil-society organizations — whose primary function is to flag undesirable speech. HateAid, a German government-funded non-governmental organization specializing in the reporting and legal pursuit of alleged online hate speech, has received over €5 million in taxpayer funding in recent years. Rather than protecting democracy through open debate, this system replaces it with managed truth.

The result is now visible: satire criminalized, analysis sanctioned, ordinary citizens imprisoned, and dissent reframed as pathology. Freedom is not lost in a single moment of collapse but surrendered incrementally, each retreat made possible by the silence that preceded it.

Administrative Truth

What unites the cases described here is not ideology, temperament, or intent, but exposure. Each of these individuals said something that collided with an officially protected narrative at a moment when dissent was no longer tolerated. None of them needed to incite violence. None needed to persuade anyone. They merely needed to speak out of turn.

This marks the decisive shift. Speech is no longer judged by what it does, but by what it is said to threaten: consensus, social peace, emotional comfort, political stability. Once such abstractions are elevated to legal interests, every individual becomes conditionally free. Freedom survives only so long as silence — or compliance — is maintained, a logic that is now coordinated across national borders.

We are therefore compelled to remain vigilant against further attempts to erode free speech on the home front — internal attacks carried out by our own governments, as well as by corporate, educational, and media institutions. As I experienced directly through repeated participation in NGO and civil-society events surrounding OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation) human-rights meetings — activities for which no official OSCE archival record exists — this effort is not merely domestic but part of an international censorship coalition that has been steadily consolidating. At these gatherings, NGOs and representatives of both free and not-so-free states solemnly recite prepared scripts about the necessity “to speak freely, but — ,” only to return home to jurisdictions where free speech has already been curtailed or discarded altogether.[11]

It is therefore not surprising — though it remains difficult to believe — that even a country such as Finland, routinely ranked by Freedom House as the world’s “most free,” has moved in this direction. In 2019, a Finnish politician and grandmother publicly criticized her local church for supporting the Helsinki Pride Parade and questioned how that support squared with the Church’s own teachings. This was sufficient to trigger a hate-speech charge, not for the purpose of correction but as an example.

“You can’t say that. And if you do, we’ll prosecute you.”

Although she was acquitted twice, prosecutors persisted. The case was appealed and ultimately reached Finland’s Supreme Court, which heard it on October 30, 2025.[12] Even where exoneration follows — as it did for her in the lower courts, though not for me — the lesson is unmistakable. Those watching will think twice before speaking. “Punish one, teach one hundred,” as Mao Zedong observed, and the method remains as effective as ever.

Next: The Malleability of Truth

For previous posts on the “hate speech” prosecution of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, see Elisabeth’s Voice: The Archives.

Notes:

1.   Hayek and Freedom — FEE
2.   The “margin of appreciation” is a doctrine of the European Court of Human Rights under which member states are afforded discretion in restricting Convention rights, particularly in cases involving religion, morals, or public order. When this doctrine is applied, the Court does not assess the truth or falsity of the statements at issue, but only whether the state was entitled to regulate the expression.
3.   E.S. v. AUSTRIA see also Judgment E.S. v. Austria — conviction for a critic of Islam did not violate Article 10
4.   Documentation of U.S. government involvement in speech moderation includes the Twitter Files disclosures; reporting on coordination between federal agencies and online platforms; and subsequent litigation and injunctions, including Missouri v. Biden. See also Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Foreign Influence Operations and Disinformation; Biden Admin Expanded Efforts To Censor “Malinformation”, The Federalist; and contemporary commentary characterizing First Amendment absolutism as socially or psychologically suspect.
5.   The European Court of Human Rights decision in E.S. v. Austria has been cited in subsequent cases outside Austria, including Tagiyev and Huseynov v. Azerbaijan and ENHRI v. Nigeria, illustrating the broader transnational influence of the Court’s reasoning on speech restrictions concerning religion.
6.   The prosecution of satirist C. J. Hopkins under Germany’s Volksverhetzung statutes is documented in Hopkins’s own accounts and legal materials published at Consent Factory and on his Substack. See also independent reporting and legal analysis in Matt Taibbi, “Madness: American Satirist C. J. Hopkins Convicted in Germany,” Racket News, and Eugyppius, “On the Unjust and Ridiculous Conviction of C. J. Hopkins.”
7.   Jacques Baud, a former Swiss military intelligence officer and NATO adviser, was placed on a European Union sanctions list in connection with his public commentary on the war in Ukraine. See the official EU Sanctions Tracker entry for Jacques Baud (European Union); see also MR Online, “EU sanctions Swiss intelligence expert Jacques Baud” (December 23, 2025), reporting on the sanctions and the absence of judicial proceedings.
8.   The imprisonment of British citizen Lucy Connolly for online speech following a violent crime was reported in mainstream British media. See BBC News, coverage of Connolly’s sentencing and subsequent legal proceedings; and Evening Standard, reporting on the Court of Appeal ruling upholding her sentence. For analysis of the implications for freedom of expression in the United Kingdom, see Spiked, “Why was Lucy Connolly treated so harshly?” (August 26, 2025).
9.   Charlie Kirk, a prominent American campus speaker and political educator, was killed in a shooting in Utah in September 2025 while engaged in public political activity. See CBS News, “Charlie Kirk dies after shooting in Utah,” reporting on the circumstances of his death.
10.   Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council (Digital Services Act), Official Journal of the European Union, establishing due-diligence obligations for online platforms and an administrative enforcement regime, including significant fines for non-compliance.
11.   Because the OSCE does not maintain an official archive documenting dissident or non-aligned NGO and Civil Society participation at its human-rights meetings, contemporaneous documentation of such activity has largely been preserved through independent archival aggregation. A principal public record of these activities — spanning event listings, participant accounts, and contemporaneous reporting across multiple years — is maintained at Gates of Vienna, “OSCE Topical Archive,” gatesofvienna.net/topical/osce/
12.   Finnish Member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen was prosecuted for hate speech after publicly criticizing her church’s support for Helsinki Pride and citing Christian doctrine on marriage. She was acquitted in two lower courts, but prosecutors appealed. The Finnish Supreme Court heard the case on October 30, 2025; no final judgment has been issued as of this writing. See ADF International, “The Päivi Räsänen Case,” documenting the proceedings and current procedural status.
 

We Had to Destroy the Truth in Order to Save It

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“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

― George Orwell, 1984

I posted on Tuesday about my recent encounter with the Australian chapter of the Deep State. It seems the earnest burghers of Oz are insistent that I take down Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto (pdf), to the point that they have levied an exorbitant fine against me for every day I fail to comply.

Vlad has posted a lengthy AI-assisted discussion of the situation that everyone should read. ChatGPT is right: this is a blatant attempt to control the Narrative about Brenton Tarrant and his manifesto. If the general public has no access to the original manifesto, then state agents and the media can exercise full control over what people know about it. The Powers That Be don’t even need to misquote it or make up text — all they have to do is describe it, quote from it selectively, and mischaracterize it in a way that supports and affirms the Narrative.

As long as there are copies of the original floating around out there, the carefully-crafted Narrative will remain shaky, and may even collapse. That’s why the dedicated bureaucrats Down Under are so keen to strong-arm little ol’ Gates of Vienna. Maintenance of the Narrative is of crucial importance.

Our long-time D.C. correspondent Frontinus, who lives up there in the Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy and has extensive familiarity with the doings of the Swamp, emailed me with some observations about the whole business:

My take is the same as yours, that it’s unenforceable on US soil. Worst-case, they could block the IP address for Australian readers, though probably not a 100% block. If you had assets in Oz, they could issue a decision against you and seize them, perhaps, but since you don’t, that’s moot. I would avoid traveling to Australia, if I were you.

That’s assuming US legal precedents hold fast. If we were to get a left-wing government at the national level, and a packed Supreme Court, that could change — but by then we would have other issues then that would take priority.

One probably paranoid thought — they could appeal to the new Virginia Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security Stanley Meador (the former FBI manager who ran the Richmond FBI office from 2021 to 2025, and who wrote the memo warning that “radical-traditionalist Catholics” are linked to “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism”). I suspect the Spanberger administration and Attorney General Jay Jones might be receptive to Australian overtures. But they would need some terrorist act — i.e. linking the publication of the manifesto at GoV to an action — that wouldn’t fit the Brandenburg test (or subsequent case law).

Except, of course, the Left keeps trying — see this 2024 Boston College Law Review article (pdf) on Brandenburg and “coded speech” that constitutes “incitement,” using January 6 as their primary example. But even with this tortured reading of Brandenburg (and the First Amendment), you make it abundantly and repeatedly clear in your posts on Christchurch that you abhor the action.

More broadly, my assumption — based pretty much on the Breivik case — is that there’s always a possibility (50% coin toss probability?) that these are contrived actions and the various manifestos and letters are either made up out of whole cloth or “aided and abetted” — and groomed — by a third party (or parties), which seemed to be the situation with Breivik. Cui bono? is always worth asking.

The FSB or MI6 have the skills to both motivate the terrorist actors and “help” in crafting these manifestos. Or maybe each terrorist really is a lone wolf. One has to entertain both scenarios as possible.

And a follow-up email:

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A Message From the Australian Stasi

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In the 21 years since this blog was founded, I have been harassed at various times by journalists, representatives of NGOs, and officials of foreign governments. Notable instances include emails from the Norwegian police and phone calls from the British press during the Breivik crisis in 2011. The most recent harassment occurred in 2021 and 2023, when the government of New Zealand tried to force me to take down Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto (see posts about what happened here, here, and here). Mr. Tarrant, as you may recall, is the young man who massacred fifty-one people in two different mosques in Christchurch, the largest city on South Island in New Zealand, in March of 2019.

My sins concerning his manifesto have now come to the fore again, but this time the objecting party is the Australian government. Yesterday I received the following email:


(Click to enlarge)

I scrutinized the message carefully, and it seemed legitimate. However, email scammers are often very skilled at spoofing government communications. Both attachments were PDF files, which can contain damaging malware, so I handled the message with an abundance of caution.

This was my reply:

Unfortunately, your two attachments are in PDF format, and may potentially contain malware, so I cannot open them. As a result, I am unable to comment on their content.

If you are willing to send the same material as a plain text file (.txt), or as text in the body of an email, then I would be able to read it and respond. But I will not open any attachments that may contain malicious code. In addition to .pdf, such formats include (but are not limited to) Word documents (.doc, .docx, etc.), Excel spreadsheets (.xls etc.), HTML files (.htm, .html, etc.) and various compressed file formats such as .zip.

Regretfully,

Ned May
a.k.a. “Baron Bodissey”
https://gatesofvienna.net

Late last night I received a response from the Australian Stasi: I was ordered to take down Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto forthwith, or face severe consequences.

This sort of thing brings out the Scot in me: I’ll nae submit to ye! My first and strongest reaction to attempts at unjust state coercion is always defiance.

It seems the Australian government, acting through the eSafety Commissioner, has targeted Gates of Vienna under the Online Safety Act of 2021 and the Online Safety Amendment of 2024. Like similar legislation in Europe, it permits Australia to arrogate unto itself the right to go after foreigners who violate it.

I assume the relevant portions of the Act are the ones described in Wikipedia:

In 2024, the government published the Online Safety (Relevant Electronic Services—Class 1A and Class 1B Material) Industry Standard 2024 which contains criteria relating to which content must be removed. Class 1A material typically refers to content relating to child exploitation and pro-terror content. Class 1B material refers to content including extreme violence, content related to the promotion of crime, and content related to illegal drugs.

The eSafety people in Oz accommodated my desire to avoid opening PDF files by pasting the same material in the body of their email to me. The text taken from the two previously attached documents is an incredible combination of dystopian Orwellian procedure and mind-numbing bureaucratic bumf. After reading the first two paragraphs, my eyes glazed over, and I found it hard to concentrate on the rest. However, since I had to format the whole thing for posting, I eventually took it all in.

The text is very long, so I’ll include it at the end of this post. This is the relevant portion for our purposes:

You are required to comply within 24 hours of being given this notice, or within such longer period as I allow if contacted by you with a request for an extension of time.

Section 111 of the Act provides that a person must comply with a requirement under a removal notice given under section 109 of the Act to the extent the person is capable of doing so.

Failure to comply with a removal notice may result in enforcement action, including the commencement of civil penalty proceedings for a civil penalty order of up to a maximum penalty of $825,000 (AUD) each day for each contravention by a body corporate following the end of the period specified for compliance with the Notice.

[…]

Service on which the material is provided:   Gates of Vienna
Location of material:   https://gatesofvienna.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/tarrant-manifesto.pdf
Description of material:   The Material is a 74-page manifesto titled ‘The Great Replacement’ written by Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack.

On 29 March 2019, the Classification Board classified the 74-page manifesto Refused Classification (RC), pursuant to section 9A of the Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Act 1995 (Cth), as it directly counsels, promotes, encourages and urges the doing of a terrorist act. Further, it directly praises the doing of a terrorist act in circumstances where there is substantial risk that such praise might have the effect of leading a person (regardless of his or her age or any mental impairment that the person might suffer) to engage in a terrorist act.
 

That alarming $825,000 daily fine is in AUD. In USD it would be $577,500. Not so bad, but still, one day’s worth would bankrupt me, making all the subsequent days superfluous.

Based on the actuarial statistics for a geezer my age, I have about 1,800 days left. Therefore, since I have no intention of complying, they might as well fine me US $1,039,500,000 in advance. That way they’ll get exactly the same amount of money from me, and it will save them a lot of paperwork.

This is the kind of thing Vice President JD Vance has decried, so I don’t really have to worry about the current administration helping out the Aussies. However, when the next Progressive regime takes over, things could change. And there’s always the possibility that the OzStasi might do an end run around the feds, and solicit the assistance of the People’s Commonwealth of Virginia under its new Commissar, Comradess Abigail Spanberger. There’s no telling what might happen then…

Nevertheless, I will not comply.

I sent the following reply by email to the office of the eSafety Commissioner in Australia:

Thank you for getting in touch with Gates of Vienna.

I am an American citizen who resides in the United States, and, as such, am not under the jurisdiction of Australian Law. The company that provides web hosting for my site is located in the United States, and therefore lies outside the jurisdiction of Australian Law.

I believe strongly in the free flow of information, whether good or bad. Mr. Tarrant is an abhorrent person who committed an atrocity; nevertheless, it is useful for all interested citizens to understand the way the mind of a homicidal psychopath works. In addition, with the passage of time, his manifesto will gain historical relevance, just as Mein Kampf and the Koran have historical relevance today. Despite their violent, psychopathic content, the last two works may still be legally published in Australia, if I am not mistaken. In any case, the publication of all three is legal in the United States.

I intend to continue to make Mr. Tarrant’s manifesto available to anyone who wishes to download it. My doing so does not mean I support or agree with its sentiments; quite the opposite, in fact.

Cordially,

Ned May
a.k.a. “Baron Bodissey”
https://gatesofvienna.net

Once again, for those who are interested, Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto is available here.

Below is the full text of the email from the eSafety Commissioner.

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All Roads Lead to Dearborn

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If you were following the news last month, you may have noticed the story from Dearborn, Michigan about a Muslim mayor who told a Christian resident that he was not welcome in the city. This report describes the initial incident:

Dearborn’s Muslim mayor tells Christian he’s ‘not welcome’ in debate on honoring pro-terror Arab leader

At a Dearborn City Council meeting last week, Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud told local resident Edward “Ted” Barham, a Christian, that he was “not welcome” in the city after Barham raised concerns about new street signs honoring Arab American News publisher Osama Siblani.

FOX 2 Detroit reported that the signs honoring Siblani were placed at intersections on Warren Avenue by Wayne County, not the City of Dearborn. But the mayor escalated the debate, telling Barham, “Although you live here, you are not welcome here.”

Barham introduced himself as “Ted Barham, Dearborn resident,” and objected to two intersections being renamed after Siblani.

He said, “He’s a promoter of Hezbollah and Hamas” before quoting past remarks from Siblani, including, “He talks about how the blood of the martyrs irrigates the land of Palestine … whether we are in Michigan and whether we are in Yemen. Believe me, everyone should fight within his means. They will fight with stones, others will fight with guns, others fight with planes, drones, and rockets.”

Barham compared the signs to naming a road “Hezbollah Street or Hamas Street,” calling them “provocative” and stressing that as a Christian, he wanted to encourage peace. He closed by quoting Jesus: “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Council members interjected, warning Barham against “personal attacks” and reminding him that the city had no control over the county’s decision…

Mayor Hammoud responded with remarks that shocked many in attendance. “The best suggestion I have for you is to not drive on Warren Avenue or to close your eyes while you’re doing it. His name is up there and I spoke at a ceremony celebrating it because he’s done a lot for this community,” Hammoud said.

He went further, accusing Barham of being “a bigot, and you are racist, and you’re an Islamophobe,” before declaring: “Although you live here, I want you to know as mayor, you are not welcome here. And the day you move out of the city will be the day that I launch a parade celebrating the fact that you moved out of this city.”

Ah, yes: a Christian minister who objects to naming a street for a supporter of Islamic terrorism must be an “Islamophobe”. What other conclusion is possible?

The core issue is that Muslims view terrorism as “legitimate resistance”. Resistance to what? Why, to oppression of course!

In Islam, whenever Muslims are not in positions of political power and can’t implement Sharia law, they are being “oppressed”, and all possible means of combating the oppression, including terrorism, are seen as permissible, and even mandatory.

Therefore anyone who objects to honoring an Islamic terrorist is displaying “hate” against Islam. That’s why Ted Barham was labeled an “Islamophobe”.

However, the incident did not play well in the media, and Mayor Hammoud found it necessary to issue a non-apology expanding on his remarks, saying that Dearborn is “a city that welcomes and embraces everyone.”

Presumably he was feeling the pressure of the upcoming mayoral election. His opponent is a Yemeni named Nagi Almudhegi, who appears to be a “moderate Muslim”, and a Trump supporter. So if you live in Dearborn, your only choice when voting for mayor is between two different types of Muslim, both of them Arabs.

Electing Muslim mayors seems to be a trend in America’s major cities. At the time of writing, it looks fairly certain that New York City will elect a Muslim named Zohran Mamdani as mayor, and a Somali Muslim named Omar Fateh may well become the next mayor of Minneapolis. Incidentally, both of these last two candidates are Democratic Socialists — Islam and Democratic Socialism seem to go well together.

The UK and Europe already have their fair share of Muslim mayors — Sadiq Khan in London and Ahmed Aboutaleb in Rotterdam being notable examples.

As far as I know, Dearborn elected the first Muslim mayor in the USA. I started paying attention to the city when I first became an Islamophobe more than twenty years ago, and have been watching it ever since. Back then Muslims were a large minority in the city, which was still enough to get Muslim mayors elected. Now it appears that Muslims are actually a majority in Dearborn. Wikipedia doesn’t give any breakdown of the population by religion, but it says: “In 2020, 54.5% of the population reported Middle Eastern or North African ancestry.” There are probably a few Lebanese and Palestinian Christians included in that mix, but I think it’s fairly safe to assume that a majority of the residents of Dearborn are Muslims in 2025.

The Dearborn police chief is a Muslim named Issa Shahin (“Issa” is the Islamic version of the name “Jesus”, and refers to the real Jesus, the Muslim Jesus — you know, the righteous dude who didn’t die on the cross, and will return in the End Times to slaughter all the infidels who failed to convert to Islam).

Chief Shahin caused a kerfuffle recently, although I don’t think it has damaged his career:

The city of Dearborn Police Chief Issa Shahin has sparked controversy by saying that his city is better served now that there are more Arab police officers and then reciting a Muslim prayer.

Shahin’s comments were captured in an undated video.

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While preparing this post I ran across the Dearborn city government’s website. Its “About Us” page includes a lot of photos, so I grabbed a selection of them to feature here.

Dearborn prides itself on being the “Home Town of Henry Ford”, which presumably prompted the photo at the top of this post. Notice that four of the five men shown in the photo appear to be Muslims. The older gentleman behind the wheel may well be a “legacy” native of the city, and possibly a retired auto factory worker. The man next to him in the passenger seat is almost certainly Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud (who incidentally resembles a slightly less hirsute version of Zohran Mamdani). The three other burly men look like a security detail, and the one on the right seems to have a police badge. If I were feeling uncharitable, I’d refer to them as “Arab muscle”.

Most of the women in the “About Us” photos are not wearing hijab and don’t look Middle Eastern, meaning that they are not representative of a city in which more than half of the residents are Middle Eastern Muslims. I assume this is deliberate: the PR people in charge of creating the city’s visual aids are trying to make it look like the ethnic mix in the city is the same as it was thirty or forty years ago.

The photo below is an example. Of the eight females shown, only one is definitively Middle Eastern and wearing hijab. The brown-skinned girl (second from the left in the front row) may either be African American or a secular sub-Saharan Muslima; it’s hard to tell. The sole male looks Middle Eastern, or possibly Latin American. The white girls may be secular or Christian. Or maybe there are subtle visual cues that indicate they are Jewish or lesbian — my visual analytical skills are not skilled enough to suss them out.

However, the mural behind them is fully Islamic, a hijabbed mother and her hijabbed little girl:

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ESW: My Thoughts on the Political Assassination of Charlie Kirk

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Our Austrian correspondent Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff sends her thoughts on last week’s momentous events.

My thoughts on the political assassination of Charlie Kirk

by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

I was never fortunate enough to meet Charlie Kirk in person, though I once heard him speak at one of my friend Karen Siegemund’s American Freedom Alliance conferences. This was many years ago, when Charlie was still so young, really just a boy — but even then, his astute mind, his kindness, and his deep love of God, family, and country left a lasting impression. Like countless others, I was struck by his clarity and conviction. So today, when we speak of his legacy, we are not just remembering a man — we are examining the values he embodied and the torch he has left to us to carry.

Charlie’s influence on Gen Z, on today’s youth, cannot be overstated. It may well have been one of the reasons he was targeted. Over the years I followed him closely, especially the short clips from his campus tours that so many of us have seen. If you haven’t, I urge you to do so. His knowledge of everything under God’s sky was breathtaking, far beyond most people I’ve ever known. And remember, he was still only in his early thirties.

One of his arguments left a permanent mark on me. For much of my life, I was indifferent to abortion. I neither advocated for it, nor thought deeply about it. But as I began my own journey of standing for what is right rather than what is comfortable, Charlie’s debates with pro-choice activists transformed my indifference into conviction. He had a gift for making people stop and think, for turning an abstract issue into a moral reality. I came to believe, as he argued so powerfully, that abortion is in almost all cases the taking of a human life, with all of its consequences. I especially appreciated his reasoning when he asked about the exact time a fetus enjoys human rights, including the right to life. It made me think hard, as it did others.

I won’t recount all of Charlie’s arguments here — you can find them online. Instead, let me ask you this: how is Charlie’s murder different from the killing of a child in the womb? Both deaths are senseless. Both cut off lives full of potential. Both leave behind those who loved them and who grieve their loss.

Charlie taught that we must listen to the other side, not necessarily agree, but at least respect opposing views. That is what our side is about: listening, debating, tolerating. The other side, knowing that history and facts are not on their side, often resorts to violence.

So I say: we must remain intellectually curious. Ask questions. Listen. Learn. My mantra for years was “two plus two equals four.” Charlie’s death has added: “What is a woman?” — one of Charlie’s most famous questions. A simple question, but one that in today’s world could cost you your life. Will you stand with me and keep asking it? Because a society that punishes questions is a society already on the path to tyranny. And Charlie reminded us — again and again — that asking the right questions is not only our right, it is our duty.

Remember: asking questions is not provocation. There is nothing controversial about saying capitalism works better than socialism. That men and women are different. That the Constitution is the greatest political document ever written.

Violence begins when humans are dehumanized — when dignity is stripped away, when scapegoats are created. We saw this in the dark years of the Covid era. Some of you may remember it when JFK, RFK, and MLK were assassinated. We have studied it in the horrors of National Socialism and Communism. Whenever people are targeted, silenced, locked away, or even exterminated for what they believe, the result is always disaster: totalitarianism, war, destruction. History warns us. Charlie warned us. And now we must warn each other — before silence takes root where speech once lived.

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Not Through Me

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CPAC Hungary is coming up, and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff will be there. She sends the following message about her new initiative.

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Introducing Not Through Me: A Framework for Mothers Who Refuse to Comply

by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

Many of you have stood with me for nearly two decades — through my legal battle, public advocacy, and writings. You’ve supported me during the most difficult chapter of my life, and for that I remain deeply grateful.

Today, I’m honored to share a project born from conviction and urgency: the launch of my new educational framework for mothers, Not Through Me.

Why I Created It

As someone who has lived through ideological pressure in both Europe and the Middle East, I have come to believe this: the most decisive battle for our future is happening inside the home. And it’s mothers who are now the front line.

Not Through Me is my answer to this moment. It’s a six-part framework that empowers mothers to:

  • Resist ideological manipulation in schools and media
  • Reclaim their moral and parental authority
  • Raise children who are free in mind, spirit, and conscience

The name was inspired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s timeless call to moral clarity: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” It reflects a quiet but powerful form of resistance — the refusal to pass along what we know to be false.

This is not just information — it’s a call to courage, rooted in both principle and practicality.

What’s Inside

The framework consists of:

  • Six video chapters addressing freedom, law, censorship, education, parental rights, and how to model daily resistance
  • A Mother’s Companion — printable PDF containing the full scripts, reflection prompts, and a curated reading list for deeper study
  • The Liberty Briefing — four short bonus videos reintroducing liberty thinkers (Hayek, Burke, Bastiat, Kuehnelt-Leddihn) to mothers, with practical insights

Chapters include personal stories from my time in Iran and Kuwait, my confrontation with speech laws in Europe, and my reflections on how mothers can push back peacefully yet firmly.

Watch the Introduction Video

To understand the heart and urgency behind Not Through Me, I invite you to watch this short video:

It gives a direct look at why I created this framework—and why now is the moment for mothers to rise.

Launch and Payment Details

Not Through Me will officially launch this week at CPAC Hungary.

Full framework available here: payhip.com/b/0wJSo

Launch Price: $349
Special CPAC Offer:
Use code CPAC2025 for $20 off — limited to 25 redemptions.

Why This Matters Now

I created this framework because silence is no longer an option. Mothers are being pushed aside, redefined, and re-educated. But we are the first to show our children what it means to be free. If we don’t hold that line—no one else will.

Not Through Me is for those ready to hold the line.

Thank you again for your continued support. I hope you’ll stand with me in this next chapter—and help share it with the mothers who need it most.

With gratitude,

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff
Creator of Not Through Me

For previous posts on the “hate speech” prosecution of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, see Elisabeth’s Voice: The Archives.

The Flag Is Still There

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I’ve written in the past about the controversy over the huge Confederate battle flag that flies in a prominent place just off the exit from US460 to the east of the Virginia town of Farmville.

The flag was erected on private property by a non-profit called Virginia Flaggers in an arrangement with the landowner. I don’t need to tell you that the flag caused consternation among certain elements of the population as soon as it appeared.

Back in 2022, not long after the flag was first raised, locals who opposed it initiated a legal process at the county level to force its removal. This is from the summary that I wrote at the time:

All the brouhaha about the flag raised outside of Farmville was, of course, based on the fact that it was deeply offensive to all right-minded citizens. However, the flag’s detractors were well aware that lip service had to be paid to the First Amendment, and that opposing the battle flag based on its symbolic meaning could never succeed. The preferred strategy was, as it often is, to use zoning ordinances to force the removal of the offending flag.

In this case, however, the anti-racist bien-pensants had a problem: Prince Edward County didn’t regulate flagpoles with its zoning ordinances. The county hurriedly passed a new one, and then appealed to the zoning board to force the removal of the flag.

The Farmville Herald, which is getting more woke with every issue, was fairly salivating over the prospect of sticking it to the nasty Confederate racists by bringing down the flag. Numerous articles appeared in advance of the June meeting of the Board of Zoning Appeals.

Unfortunately for its opponents, forcing the removal of the flag was not the slam-dunk they had hoped for. Not only had the permit for the flag been issued before the zoning change went into effect, but the flag had already been flying for longer than the statutory 60-day period during which a building permit could be revoked.

The issue was obviously a hot potato that the board was anxious to get out of its hands. The Herald and Longwood University may be modern and progressive, but the surrounding rural areas most certainly aren’t. Country people have a fierce respect for custom and tradition, even the black folks among them. If a referendum had ever been held about the issue, the Confederate Battle Flag would have won by a large margin.

In the end, three members of the board voted to reject the appeal, and two members abstained. The flag stayed up.

Prince Edward County continued to appeal the case to higher levels. The Board of Supervisors could draw on the bottomless pockets of the county’s taxpayers to bankroll the hefty legal costs of doing so, but the Virginia Flaggers had to rely on the generosity of private donors to pay their lawyers. Fortunately, there were a lot of people (myself among them) willing to donate to the cause. Sons of Confederate Veterans camps from all over the region chipped in.

The process has been lengthy and cumbersome, and the various stages have been too tedious to write about in detail. However, a victory has now been achieved, at least a partial one.

Susan Lee of Virginia Flaggers sent out this email today:

Breaking News! Victory in Virginia courts! Virginia Appellate Court rules High Bridge Memorial Battle Flag pole will not be removed — DENIES the appeal of Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors! Thanks be to God!

We are thrilled to have just received news that Prince Edward County’s appeal of the Circuit Court’s Decision in our favor to Virginia’s Court of Appeals has been DENIED. We are waiting for details, but wanted to share this good news as soon as received. This is a huge victory for supporters of Confederate heritage, and all who respect property owners’ rights.

Just days after its dedication in April of 2022, the Prince Edward County Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors began their campaign of harassment and massive spending in an attempt to appease a handful of complainers, and force the removal of the memorial. Although Virginia law protects citizens from this type of action 60 days after a building permit is issued, the landowner was threatened with imprisonment and fines if the flag was not removed, a full four months after the permit was issued. The Prince Edward County Board of Zoning appeals sided with us, citing the above-mentioned law and ruled against the county. The Board of Supervisors then voted to appeal the decision of their own Board of Zoning Appeals and the case was heard in Circuit Court. Once again, the Circuit Court ruled that the memorial was protected by law and denied the County’s appeal.

Despite public sentiment and Virginia State Law being squarely on the side of the landowner, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors voted to instruct their attorneys to yet file another appeal, wasting yet more taxpayer money at a time when most of us are cutting our budgets and pinching pennies. This appeal was heard last year, and the Virginia Court of Appeals issued its ruling yesterday, upholding the earlier courts’ decisions in our favor!

We are beyond thankful to every one of you who made this possible. There is no doubt that the county thought they could outspend us and force us to retreat. thanks to so many of you, we have been able to stay in this fight and win! The county can still appeal this decision to the Virginia Supreme Court, but considering the onslaught of outrage by angry citizens and the staggering legal bills (taxpayer dollars) amassed by the county to date in a losing effort, we don’t expect that to happen, but are prepared if it does.

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Set My People Free

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Hulda Fahmi is the International Directior of Set My People Free, and has been tireless in her efforts at OSCE conferences.

Below is an interview with Ms. Fahmi, followed by the text of one of her interventions at this year’s OSCE conference in Warsaw. Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who conducted the interview, sends this introduction:

Since 2009, a group of organizations from Europe and the United States have been active in promoting and defending Western civilization and its values at OSCE (Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe) human dimension conferences in Warsaw and Vienna. While the history of our successes has been chronicled, there are still far too many baffled faces to be seen following our reports from these conferences, and still far too many question the necessity of joining us in the diplomatic battleground. One of our greatest successes was the debunking of the term “Islamophobia,” no longer used in official print materials of the OSCE. Another victory concerned the dropping of “hate speech” charges against Prof. Armin Geus.

The Swedish NGO “Set My People Free, one of our staunchest and most vocal allies, continuously speaks out in favor of abolishing Islamic and European blasphemy laws. Hulda Fahmi represents Set My People Free, and spoke at the recent Human Dimension Conference in Warsaw, where she addressed the need to be able to change religions as well as real freedom of belief. She referred to a booklet published by the OSCE about countering “anti-Muslim hate crime” in which, in the annex, police officers are introduced to core tenets of Islam as well as key phrases. While Sharia and hudud ordinances are mentioned, there is no mention of the death penalty for apostasy and/or blasphemy.

She adds that ODIHR knows we have been raising these issues for many years and she feels that mention of penalties for leaving Islam should have been included.

In addition, she describes that our presence at OSCE conferences have made an impact. As noted by Baron Bodissey in this blog, private organizations can have a trickle-up effect at HDIM meetings, because official representatives of the participating states are in attendance, and they have to pay attention to the proceedings.

A recently released ODIHR report noted that a reform of anti-blasphemy laws is key. In addition, talking in the hall with people who don’t ostensibly agree with us helps because they know they can’t deny reality when their Afghan neighbors are threatened because they converted to Christianity. Hulda adds that, “When you speak truth, it has as impact.” We have spoken truth since 2009, and we will continue doing so. Perhaps this video will convince you to join us in defending Western values and truth at the OSCE.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for uploading this video:

The text of Ms. Fahmi’s intervention is below the jump.

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Queering the OSCE

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When I was at OSCE Warsaw eleven years ago, sexual perversion was not a major feature of the conference. The trans craze hadn’t become dominant yet, and if I remember correctly, the acronym for the perversion fanatics was still stuck at just four letters — LGBT.

Well, that was then, and this is now. This fall’s conference in Warsaw went full out for deviance, which has now expanded to become LGBTQI+, and must be protected at all costs from anyone who might find fault with it.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was present at one of the LGBTQI+ side events, and noticed a particularly disturbing detail in one of the speakers’ remarks. She sends two videos from the conference, and includes this introduction to the first one:

On Monday, Oct. 7, my colleague Michał Specjalski of Pantarey Foundation and I spoke at Michał’s side event on the topic of “Transgenderism, a threat to children’s, women’s and family rights”.

On Tuesday afternoon, the US envoy for LGBTQ matters, supported by fourteen (!) European governments, hosted a side event, “Canaries in the Coal Mine: Linking the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons in the OSCE Region with Democratic Resilience”. The panel met to “discuss the disturbing and dangerous trends in backsliding on the rights of LGBTQI+ persons across the OSCE region and how they must be considered inextricably linked with democratic resilience.” The listed speakers were Ambassador Anna Olsson Vrang, the Permanent Representative of Sweden to the OSCE, and Eka Tsereteli, from the Women’s Initiatives Supporting Group (WISG), Georgia. The moderator was Jessica Stern, the U.S. Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI+).

I listened carefully and during the Swedish ambassador’s speech I caught a phrase — “non-traditional sexual relations to a minor” — which I then followed up on during the Q&A.

The rest is history, and is described in the following video.

The first half of the second video features Jessica Stern, the U.S. Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons, who was mentioned above. The second half of the video shows Elisabeth’s intervention on the topic of Free Speech vs. the Caliphate in Germany.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for uploading this video:

For links to previous articles about the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, see the OSCE Archives.