Free Speech In The European Union

And: Jews & Liberalism; Midwestuary & Wonder; Irritating Triumphalists

That’s a screenshot from the video message that Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, sent to Hungarian LGBTs, who are set to march this weekend in Budapest. The government has banned the demonstration. Madame von der Leyen, a stern and authoritarian liberal, expressed her undying support for LGBTs and their demonstration.

Meanwhile, in Von der Leyen’s home country of Germany this week:

On Wednesday, June 25th, the German federal police carried out a major operation throughout the country, searching the homes and confiscating the electronics of 170 people over social media comments that either fall in the general ‘hate speech’ category or just insult sitting politicians.

While individuals can be targeted by the authorities at any time, these coordinated country-wide raids are organized once every year since the 2017 adoption of Article 188 of the Criminal Code, which makes insulting politicians punishable to the same degree as online hate speech—with up to three years in prison—while defamation and slander can get you locked up for up to five years.

These so-called ‘action days’ are also supported by several ‘hate crime’ reporting centers throughout the country, often run by left-wing NGOs who file the charges on behalf of offended people and politicians. Thanks to these organizations, the number of registered online hate crimes reached a record level of over ten thousand last year, meaning the number has quadrupled since 2021.

According to officials from the ruling center-right CDU, all this is perfectly normal in a democracy. “Digital arsonists must not be able to hide behind their cell phones or computers,” commented North Rhine-Westphalia’s Interior Minister, Herbert Reul.

… In many cases, the ‘crimes’ involved merely entail legitimate criticism of government policies—saying Berlin fails to control migration could be considered Islamophobia or racism, for example—or just the opinions of everyday people of their elected officials.

The most prominent abuser of the law is former vice-chancellor and Green party leader Robert Habeck, who personally reported over 800 citizens for insulting him online. Recently, a 64-year-old pensioner was convicted for calling Habeck “a complete idiot” following a similar house search, while another man was fined €6000 for calling him ‘dirty’ and former Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock ‘stupid.’

That’s right: in Germany, if you say mean things about a politician, the police might raid your house. About this, Madame von der Leyen says not a word.

Look, I’m an American living in Europe. The First Amendment means a lot to me. If I were running the Hungarian government, I would let the LGBTs march. I wouldn’t like it, but I would do it.

To be clear, I fully support the Hungarians’ 2021 law forbidding the distribution of LGBT material to minors — something that caused a massive uproar in the corridors of European power, leading people like then-Dutch PM Mark Rutte to call on Hungary to be expelled from the EU — because this involves children. There is almost nothing the European ruling class loves more than queering kids, except possibly queering the Donbass. But to let adults march for gay rights — sure, I’d allow that, on grounds that free speech for adults is a principle worth defending, even when it’s speech I don’t like.

But that’s me, as an American. I also believe that countries should broadly have the right to set their own policies on such matters, according to their own values. If Hungarians, through their democratically elected representatives, have chosen to take a hard line on LGBT, then that’s their right. If the Germans choose to take a hard line on limiting or punishing speech in other ways, well, that’s what democracy and sovereignty means. We don’t have to like it, but we should respect it.

That does not mean that a country, in exercising that right, should be free from criticism. If Madame von der Leyen wishes to spite Hungary for its values, fine lady, knock yourself out. But the EU bureaucracy goes further than that. While it has not imposed sanctions on Hungary directly tied to its LGBT laws, the EU has cited them as part of its refusal to release funds owed to Hungary, as a “rule of law” concern. The EU bureaucracy is pursuing other punishments of Hungary over these laws.

You might recall my mentioning to you a conversation I had earlier this year with a Muslim cab driver in Brussels. He was a Belgian citizen, but said he and his wife were thinking of returning to Morocco to raise their daughters, because of what they (correctly) considered to be perverse values being foisted on their young children by mandatory sexual education there. For example, he said his kids, at a very young age, were being taught in school that they can change their gender. He also said that school authorities meet with parents to determine if the parents are supportive of this ideology. The cabbie told me he and his wife lied when asked about it, because they know people from their community (Muslims, presumably) who have had their children removed from their families by the state over the issue.

I found these quotes from the EVRAS guide — that is, the official guide to sex education in French-speaking Belgian schools — on the website of an organization that objects to them, on grounds that EVRAS inappropriately sexualizes children. The quotes are from the EVRAS guide:

- From age 5:

"The pleasure and satisfaction of touching one's own body, the discovery of one's own body, one's genitals, and one's erogenous zones" (p. 202);

- From age 9:

"Positive and negative influence of peer pressure, the media, and pornography" (p. 137);

"Love, being in love, pleasure, masturbation, orgasm" (p. 187);

"Being able to apply basic rules regarding sending intimate (nude) photos" (p. 285)

Naturally the EU is just fine with teaching five year olds in school about the pleasure of touching one’s own genitals, and instructing nine year olds on the rules of sending dick pics. But if the Hungarians won’t allow this in their country, well, Brussels says to hell with those Magyar fascists!

Below is an image from Brussels Pride 2025 (click this link to see the video). In case you are unaware, these men are part of a sadomasochistic fetish community in which their sexual activity involves them pretending to be dogs. This is enough to make me reconsider my tolerant attitude towards Pride marches. If the Hungarian police saw this on the street here in Budapest, I’d be perfectly fine with them arresting these shameful pervs. Marching for LGBT rights is one thing; parading your sexual desire to cosplay as dogs humping each other is another. But see, this is exactly what Ursula von der Leyen and the European ruling class defend under the rubric of (to quote her message to Budapest Pride), “You have the right to love who you want to love, and to be exactly who you are.”

Even “dogs” sodomizing other “dogs.” Don’t like it? You must therefore be a Nazi.

Ask yourself: what kind of society will result from children being socialized into thinking this kind of thing is normal and good, and prohibiting it, or even objecting to it, is a sign of vice?

As you regular readers will remember, I attended as a journalist the big 1993 LGBT march on Washington, demanding gay marriage rights. There were hundreds of thousands of people there, many of them normal, middle-class gays and lesbians. But there were also many, many fetishists and weirdos. You haven’t lived until you have seen a group of Radical Faeries march by, one with a tree branch sticking out of his butthole. I saw that and so much more. But the mass media coverage of the march sanitized it. You would have thought that basically all the gay brunch crowd in America showed up on the Mall; the kinds of things asserted as a manifestation of LGBT pride, but that would have hurt the cause of normalizing LGBT, were left out of media accounts of the day’s events.

This is wrong — and it would have been wrong only to have focused on the weirdos, and left the normies out (and most of those present were normie types). My gay and lesbian friends are all bougie normies who would find the humping dog cosplayers disgusting, and don’t want to be associated with them. The thing is, LGBT activists and groups will not marginalize the weirdos among themselves, nor allow anybody else to. “Love is love” they say — even if what you love, and who you love, is profoundly shocking (arf! arf!). There is nothing like this in the heterosexual community. Are there fetishists and sexual weirdos? Of course. But the idea that normalizing it is a matter of basic human rights, because it is part of one’s identity, is just not a thing. Nor should it be, ever.

This is a big reason why the LGBT movement in America has been knocked back a bit by public reaction — including the recent SCOTUS ruling in the Skrmetti case — to the attempt to trans children. For the LGBT movement and its allies (like Von der Leyen), there are no enemies to the Left. You must approve, or stand accused of being a fascist bigot.

You can see, then, why many Hungarians don’t want to open the door to any of it. They see where it leads. And they see that there is zero resistance to the ever more radical demands of the LGBT activists. The line seems to have been drawn at demanding rights to sex with children and minors. For now. Give it time. Take a look at what faithful Flemish Catholic mum Alexandra Colen found in a catechism textbook approved by then-Cardinal Danneels back in 1997, and what happened when she spoke out. This stuff is very, very close.