Merz on Free Speech

 

A few days ago Chancellor Friedrich Merz made a point of ridiculing the notion of free speech as a wrongheaded American libertarian quirk. He is an easy person to ignore, but his comment does deserve an answer. I thought of this one:

Herr Merz:

A little over eighty years ago men of my father’s generation did some serious business in Europe to guarantee, among other things, that we did not have to care what Germans thought about free speech. We still don’t.