Europe's Free Speech Myth
Unlike America We Never Had Free Speech
The following is the text from my speech at the Plan B Bitcoin and Freedom conference in Lugano, October 25th, 2025.
I have been asked to talk about free speech, which is fitting for a Bitcoin conference because if Bitcoin represents anything it represents freedom, it represents liberty, and if you bought at $125,000 earlier this month, it represents suffering.
And I might note that the last time I spoke at a Bitcoin conference I was mercilessly heckled. I quickly learned that Bitcoin maximalists have no problem exercising their free speech when cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin are discussed.
So there will be no championing of other crypto currencies this time. Especially not PooCoin.
We are in Switzerland, a country famous not just for its abundance of watches, delicious chocolate and useful-if-silly knives, but perhaps most of all, and certainly in the mind of us British, their unerring commitment to neutrality.
For the Swiss, neutrality is a fence to die on.
But In 2025, in the emergence of a new authoritarianism, the Swiss are no longer neutral bystanders. The Swiss have decided to make a stand. And the Swiss have come out on the side of the authoritarians.
In December, Emanuel Brünisholz, a wind-instrument repairman from Burgdorf, just up the road, will begin a 10-day stint in a Swiss prison. His crime? Posting on Facebook the scientific truth that skeletons cannot be transgender.
In December 2022, replying to a Facebook post by Swiss National Council member Andreas Glarner, Brünisholz wrote: ‘If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you’ll only find men and women based on their skeletons. Everything else is a mental illness promoted through the curriculum.’
In August 2023, Brünisholz was interviewed by Burgdorf police, who interrogated him over the ‘intent’ of his comment. Then came a prosecutor’s letter, informing him he’d been charged with ‘hate speech’ against the relatively new category of sexual orientation in the Swiss Criminal Code. He was convicted and fined 500 Swiss Francs. Or, for those of you who have wiped fiat currency completely from your brains, 0.000011BTC.
He appealed, but was unsuccessful. Brünisholz was ordered to pay an extra 600 Francs for court costs. I won’t convert that number into bitcoin as the exchange rate has changed drastically since my last sentence. He has since refused to pay his fines for this absurd assault on his free speech and, as a result, like a modern day Galileo, will face the consequences.
Prison.
Switzerland, a country which had no problem laundering Nazi gold, takes a hard line when it comes to misgendering skeletons.
Now at this point it is worth iterating that Emanuel Brunisholz is correct.
A skeleton cannot be transgender.
Unlike Swiss army knives, women don’t have tools hidden between their legs.
I feel the same way about men claiming to be women as I do about people who still talk about their NFTs. I respect your right to do so, but I’m no longer pretending it’s serious.
Gender dysphoria is serious. It is a mental disorder. That is not a moral judgement. That is not “hate speech”. It is a statement of fact. The DSM 4 classifies Gender Identity Disorder (GID) as a mental disorder under Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders. The DSM 5, no doubt infiltrated by ideologues, cunningly changed this classification. But when reality prevails, and it will, it will be changed back.
Brunisholz is also correct that this nonsense is promoted through the curriculum, not just of schools here in Switzerland but across the developed word.
Now if there is anyone from the Swiss authorities here today, I would like to state my solidarity with Brunisholz for the record.
Je Suis Emanuel.
And given that this is a multi-lingual society, and to make myself abundantly clear:
“Les hommes ne peuvent pas être des femmes,”
“Gli uomini non possono essere donne,”
“Männer können nicht Frauen sein,”
Or as we say in England,
“Blokes can’t be birds”
In 2025, The Swiss regime have finally found a position more contemptible than neutrality.
As you may likely know, the dystopian treatment of Brunisholz is not unique to Switzerland. Punishment for online speech has swept the continent.
In Germany…
Last year, a 64-year-old pensioner had his house raided by police, and his computer and mobile phone confiscated. Fortunately, like most people here, his crypto wallet was on a flash-drive taped to the back of his fridge.
Why was he raided? Because Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck was upset that the pensioner had called him, in a meme posted on X,: “Schwachkopfe Professional” - a “professional imbecile”.
Now let me tell you, as someone who had a 14 year career as professional banjo player, professional imbeciles play a vital role in society. The Vice-Chancellor takes a different view.
In 2024 Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office raided homes and interrogated 45 suspects in 11 states as part of a “combating misogyny on the internet” day of action.
Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, a 27-year-old a German politician and member of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was convicted in May 2024, of “incitement to hatred” under Germany’s hate speech laws for a 2021 Facebook post criticising the decision to resettle 200 Afghans in Germany.
In that post she linked to an article citing Federal Crime Office statistics. Government statistics. Those statistics showed Afghans are 70 times more likely to commit gang rapes than native Germans. The court ruled the Facebook post which referred to the Afghans as “culturally alien masses” violated the “human dignity” of Afghans and incited hatred.
Also last year, a German man was slapped with a €5,000 fine for “insulting” a judge. The perpetrator described a judge as “obviously mentally disturbed” — after the judge issued a light sentence to a Syrian who raped a 15-year-old girl. The fine given to the German man was almost double the fine given to the Syrian rapist.
The German state is not taking hurty memes lightly. One minister, Christian Democrat Herbert Reul, warned: “Digital arsonists must not be able to hide behind their phones or computers. Anyone who thinks anything is allowed on social media is seriously mistaken… people have forgotten the difference between hate and opinion.”
It seems to me that German officials have forgotten the difference between facts and hate.
According to the German Federal Crime Office, there were 10,732 crimes related to online hate speech last year.
The French aren’t much better.
Who could forget European Commissioner Thierry Bretton’s open letter to Elon Musk last year?
Breton, who amongst other responsibilities oversaw the enforcement of the Digital Services Act, published the open letter to Musk as the owner of X, in anticipation of a Twitter Spaces broadcast with Donald Trump. Breton’s words had no other feasible purpose but to try and intimidate Musk and Trump.
He demanded…
“That all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content… My services and I will be extremely vigilant to any evidence that points to breaches of the Digital Service Act and will not hesitate to make full use of our toolbox, including by adopting interim measures, should it be warranted to protect EU citizens from serious harm.”
Breton belongs to an elite class whose instinct is to censor and threaten those whose worldview threatens their own.
But worst of all has been my beloved Britain. Birthplace of Liberty itself.
In September this year, not two months ago, Irish comedy legend Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Books was arrested at Heathrow Airport upon landing from Arizona by five armed police. His crime? Three trans-related jokes on X. One of which was of an image of a pro-trans protest, which he captioned “a photo you can smell”.
He’s not the only comedian to be arrested. In 2017, comedian Count Dankula spent the night in a cell after making a comedy video of his girlfriend’s pug doing a Nazi salute. A video made deliberately to annoy his girlfriend.
Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act which came into full force on April 1st, (of all days) 2024, can be applied to “public performance of a play,” podcasts, social media, or even private discussions, if reported.
Things aren’t much better in England. After the horrific Southport murders last summer, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer led a crackdown on protestors not just on the streets, but in the tweets.
Lee Dunn was sentenced to 8 weeks for *reposting* not posting, re-posting, 3 Facebook memes.
24 year-old Cameron Bell was sentenced to 9 months for live-streaming the aftermath of the Southport riots on TikTok. In case you missed that. She was sentenced, not for participating in the riots, but for live-streaming their aftermath.
Most famous of all was Lucy Connolly, a 41-year-old former childminder and wife of a Conservative councillor. She was sentenced to 31 months in prison for the following X post “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care. If that makes me racist, so be it.”
An ugly post, sure. Not one I would have posted myself. But I will confess, in the heat of the moment, I had some ugly thoughts after the brutal murder of those 3 young girls at the Taylor Swift dance party. But 31 months for a quickly deleted tweet?
The disparity in prison time between Connolly and a range of paedophiles and rapists who have shorter or suspended sentences has rightfully earnt our prime minister the moniker “Two-Tier Keir”.
A nick-name the Prime Minister was not pleased about in the slightest. American Congressman Jim Jordan revelled that a minister from the UK government Department for Science, Innovation and Technology directed American platforms to “come back to us” on “any measures you have taken in response” To “narratives about a two-tier system”.
Thierry Breton’s instincts to censor are shared across the Channel.
And just as the Tory government put into action their Counter-Disinformation Unit during Covid, lest anyone dare suggest Covid leaked from a lab in Wuhan, the current Labour government have ushered in a new Disinformation Unit as part of the Online Safety Act.
But things get a whole lot sillier.
In 2017, 19-year old Chelsea Russell from Liverpool posted rap lyrics on her instagram to pay tribute to a boy who died in a road crash. It being a rap song, I shan’t repeat the lyrics here today. A court deemed them offensive. She was made to pay a fine, obey a government-mandated curfew, and wear an electronic ankle monitor for eight weeks.
More recently, a man in East London was arrested for posting a video on Facebook in October, 2023, complaining about all the Palestine flags that had been draped across his neighbourhood of Bethnal Green. All this in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ attack on Israel.
Journalist Allison Pearson got a visit from the old bill because of a long deleted X post in which she had miss identified protest flags.
It is now well known that the UK is seeing 12,000 arrests a year for online speech crimes. 30 a day. By comparison, Russia makes around 400.
But things are worse still.
Over a quarter of a million Non Crime Hate Incidents have been recorded in the UK since 2014.
These include one school child who was booked for saying her classmate “smelt like fish” and a 14-year-old autistic schoolboy at Kettlethorpe High School in Wakefield who dropped and slightly scuffed a copy of the Quran in a school corridor.
And, de facto Blasphemy laws are set to become official with the impending APPG Islamophobia definition, which will outlaw criticism of Islam. Labour MP Tahir Ali has even been openly arguing for blasphemy laws in parliament.
But, being England, it gets more ludicrous still.
Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old British Army veteran was arrested and convicted for silently praying for approximately three minutes outside an abortion clinic in Bournemouth.
Smith-Connor is but one of many arrested for silent prayer in the UK. But his case was the one referred to by Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference in February this year.
Vance, in that same speech, appealed to the common values of the West. he warned:
“What I worry about is the threat from within—the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values that are shared with the United States of America.”
“In Britain and across Europe,” he said “ free speech, I fear, is in retreat,”
Thrilled as I was by Vance calling this out. I believe he made a mistake.
It might be worth examining whether we have had free speech in the UK and Europe in the same way that the Americans have.
Yes on the one hand Britain gave the world John Milton, John Locke and John Stuart Mill and their works defending free speech remain as relevant today as ever.
But it is worth remembering that Britain had Blasphemy Laws until 2008. The last blasphemy prosecution being Whitehouse v Gay News Ltd in 1977. Mary Whitehouse, a prominent Christian campaigner, brought a private prosecution against Gay News and its editor, Denis Lemon, over a poem titled “The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name”, which depicted a Roman centurion’s sexual fantasies about Jesus Christ after the Crucifixion. Gay News were charged and convicted under the common law offence of blasphemous libel.
In 1960 the publisher of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ by D.H. Lawrence was convicted and sentenced to a fine under the Obscene Publications Act for distributing a novel deemed “obscene”.
British free speech champions continuously refer to our common law system of free speech protection. But when was the golden age of free speech under common law exactly? Surely not under Henry 8th nor Oliver Cromwell and apparently not in the 20th Century.
As for the continent, well…
The Spanish followed 800 years of authoritarian muslim overlordship with 350 years of Inquisition. An Inquisition of course which was not reserved just for the Iberian Peninsula but the Netherlands, until the Dutch Revolt, as well as Spain’s Italian territories.
Napoleon too was a censorial tyrant.
His reign was a masterclass in muzzling the very liberté he claimed to champion. It may have been an improvement on the gory days of the guillotine but Napoleons Press Law of 1810, had journalists and publications heavily censored. France had 73 newspapers in 1799 and by 1814 only 4. Over 2,400 book titles were banned by 1814. Even theatre got the Bonaparte boot, with over 1,200 scripts vetted annually by the Ministry of Police.
Now I’m fairly confident I don’t have to make the case to this audience about the Germans’ less than desirable record on free speech in the last century. Nor for that matter the Italians’.
European history is one long story of censorship. From Galileo’s arrest for the heresy of arguing the Earth may in fact rotate around the sun, as proposed by Copernicus. And there was of course OG free speech martyr Socrates. Socrates drank deadly Hemlock in 399 BC after being charged with “failing to acknowledge the gods the city acknowledges, and introducing new divinities” and “making the younger generation question traditional values and authority.”
Was there ever a golden age of free speech in Europe?
Today the only free speech rights we have are in Article 10 of the European convention of human rights.
In which, Part A proclaims our rights, and Part B lists all the situations Part A does not apply. So much as to make Part A almost entirely redundant.
What issues are being censored might be quite new, but censoring itself is nothing new.
In fact it was precisely our terrible record which inspired James Maddison to draft the First Amendment in 1789.
Why are they censoring today? Not just because Skeleton Trans Lives Matter.
Censorship is wielded to protect power. In this case it is an elite class who have staked their lives on the postwar consensus of globalism, progressivism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, diversity.
Lies as patent as men being women need legal protection, because they will soon enough be mugged by reality.
Just as we saw with the Twitter Files in America, the regime is desperately trying to contain the opinions of ordinary people who disagree.
It was Barrack Obama himself who claimed the internet and social media were “the single biggest threat to our democracy”.
But bad as things are, they are only going to get worse. I’m sure this audience are quite aware of the dangers of Digital IDs combined with facial recognition and CBDCs. Imagine such infrastructure in the hands of governments petty enough to press criminal charges on someone who makes the audacious claim that “skeletons cant be trans”.
And for those that believe Trump, Orban, Meloni and Farage are “literal Nazis”, aren’t you concerned that that infrastructure might be in their hands?
We don’t need to imagine when de-banking for wrongthink might begin. It already has. Most famously in Britain of Reform Party leader Nigel Farage in 2023.
The question really is - what can be done to protect, or reclaim our Liberty?
The answer is in part by the ballot box. But perhaps more reliable still, though only in part, by Bitcoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto wrote that he believed with cryptography we could “win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years”.
By carving out “territories of freedom”, as Satoshi wrote, we can give ourselves footholds to fight for freedom in other domains. Switzerland may no longer be such a “territory of freedom”. But Bitcoin is.
We do not know what the authoritarians of the future will look like. Who could’ve predicted that stating “skeletons cant be transgender” would get you two weeks behind bars in pleasant neutral Switzerland.
But we can safely predict there will be authoritarians in the future. If today the authoritarians are globalists and progressives and trans-ideologues, tomorrow they may be fundamentalist watch-makers, they may be totalitarian chocolatiers or extremist fence-sitters.
Europe and Britain may have had a long battle with liberty. But it was here at least that liberty was born. And as we are subtly dragged into this new dystopian future, we must cling to every little “territory of freedom” we can reach.
WM
Winston you have surpassed yourself. This is a tour de force. As a Scot I am pleased to say that Robert Burns summed up the situation perfectly- ‘Facts are chiels that winna ding'. And from myself I have to add, 'Lang may yer lum reek!'
Stunning. Thank you.
This Substack community, the likes of yourself, Konstantin Kisin and Matt Goodwin are about all that keeps me sane in these troubled times.
(And was there ever a piece of music written, that would not be improved by the addition of the banjo?)