Europeans mistakenly think they’re for free speech
A lot of Europeans will tell you, very sincerely, that they support free speech every bit as much as Americans do. And they mean it. They support open discussion, they support debate — as long as it stays within the bounds of what their community considers “responsible.”
But here’s the catch: the moment you step outside those boundaries, you discover they don’t actually support free speech itself. They support a curated, pre-approved subset of speech. The polite part. The consensus part. The part that doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable.
And this gets to the deeper issue.
It’s not about the “freedom to be offensive.” That’s the superficial misunderstanding.
The real problem is that whole categories of ideas get defined as offensive by their very content. Not because of tone, not because you said them harshly, but because the community — and in Europe, increasingly the law — declares those ideas immoral, dangerous, or harmful.
Once an idea gets classified that way, any expression of it is treated as harm. You can whisper it gently, with charts and citations, and it’s still considered dangerous speech.
That’s why the line “we have the same freedoms, you just want to be rude” is so naive. It ignores how sociopolitical communities weaponize offense. They label the other side’s views as inherently illegitimate. And once you redefine disagreement as harm, censorship stops being a violation of free speech — it becomes a moral duty.
That’s the danger. Not rudeness. Not tone.
The danger is when a society decides that disagreement = offense = evil … and uses that equation to justify silencing dissent.
Find my Science Moment Censorship Playlist at YouTube, more than 132 videos on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHmody2xNMCvOcQyhMtXfnS9PiUMUryHk