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. Eric Zemmour, a candidate for France’s presidential elections in 2022, was found guilty in 2016 for charges related to inciting racial discrimination when he said France had been the victim of an “invasion” of Muslims.
An Austrian woman was convicted in 2018 for calling the prophet Muhammed a pedophile. The woman was convicted for disparaging religion.
In fact, a member of Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was convicted for incitement to hatred for using statistics (that were not disputed) to claim Afghan migrants were responsible for a disproportionate amount of sexual violence against women.
It’s an outcome that conservatives have warned about for decades.
In a 2008 column, Pat Buchanan warned: “Canada’s commitment to multiculturalism and the equality of all religions, races and cultures requires the silencing of those who do not believe all races, creed and cultures are equal. The dogmas of the Diverse Society dictate that the cherished rights of the Free Society be sacrificed on the altar of social tranquility.”
“Today, the true believers in Islam and the true believers in diversity uber alles are making common cause against those who believe in freedom of speech and the press,” Buchanan wrote.
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.
But no multicultural society is worth losing a right to freedom of expression.
For decades the left has increasingly promised that a more diverse society would make Western nations stronger while preserving the same freedoms, rights, and cultural mores that made those nations so attractive to migrants in the first place. But if a multicultural society requires prosecuting citizens for discussing crime, threats, culture, and immigration, then there was a tradeoff and lack of preservation.
And if being a multicultural society requires criminalizing politically inconvenient speech, then a multicultural society is incompatible with free society.
