Brianna Lyman writes for the Federalist about a conflict between competing principles.
For years conservatives warned that multiculturalism and free speech are on a collision course. If a society starts treating every culture as equal and beyond criticism, then eventually you have to police speech — and apparently, Europe has decided to do just that.
French influencer Thaïs d’Escufon was allegedly assaulted in 2021 by a North African migrant who — according to d’Escufon — “present[ed] himself as Tunisian.” Two years after the alleged assault, d’Escufon said the main danger to women in France are “Black African and Arab men.” She said Tuesday that she is “facing an unsuspended prison sentence for my comments about the danger posed by immigrant men in France.”
It matters naught whether you agree with her argument (though it should be noted that migrant rape gangs in particular have been victimizing Europeans for years now). What’s important is whether people are allowed to criticize other cultures and immigration policy without potentially being tossed into the slammer.
This wouldn’t be the first time that Europe has punished people for free speech because they condemned the impact of multiculturalism. …
… It’s an outcome that conservatives have warned about for decades. …
… Mark Steyn wrote in National Review on multiculturalism: “It was precisely at the moment when no axes were being ground that the West decided it could afford to forgo free speech … advanced social democracies were heading inevitably down a one-way sunlit avenue into the peaceable kingdom of multiculturalism — and so it seemed … reasonable to introduce speech codes.”
A free society allows people to say things that some may find offensive. But in a society determined to be multicultural, eventually speech that is deemed to be offensive, insensitive, or (as is the case in the UK), “racially charged” toward the multiple cultures is deemed unlawful.
