Free Speech in Europe Is Over, Even Switzerland Has Sided with the Authoritarians

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Switzerland is famous for its watches, chocolate, and those practical yet faintly absurd pocketknives, and above all for its unshakable neutrality. But in 2025, confronted with the rise of a new authoritarianism, Switzerland is no longer a neutral bystander. It has chosen a side; it has sided with the authoritarians.

In December, Emanuel Brünisholz, a brass-instrument maker from Burgdorf, will begin a ten-day prison term. His crime? Writing on Facebook the scientifically correct statement that skeletons cannot be transgender. In December 2022, replying to a post by National Councillor Andreas Glarner, Brünisholz wrote:

If you dig up the LGBTQI in 200 years, you will find only male and female skeletons. Everything else is a mental illness promoted by the school curriculum.”

In August 2023 the Bern Cantonal Police summoned him to question his intentions. Soon after, he received notice from the public prosecutor that he was being charged with hate speech under the new category of “sexual orientation” in the criminal code. He was fined 500 francs. His appeal failed, and the court added another 600 francs in legal costs.

Because Brünisholz refuses to pay this absurd penalty, he now faces prison time, like Galileo once did. Switzerland, a country that had no qualms about laundering Nazi gold, now draws the line, of all things, at the “misgendering” of skeletons. And let us be clear, Emanuel Brünisholz is right. A skeleton cannot be transgender. Unlike the Swiss Army Knife, women do not have hidden tools between their legs.

“Switzerland, a country that had no qualms about laundering Nazi gold, now draws the line, of all things, at the “misgendering” of skeletons”

Ideologized Science

I feel much the same about men who call themselves women as about those still boasting about their NFTs. I respect their right to do so, but I no longer pretend to take it seriously. Gender dysphoria is real, yet it remains a psychological disorder.

That is not a moral judgment or an act of hate speech; it is a statement of fact. The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) classified gender-identity disorder as a mental illness under “sexual and gender-identity disorders.” The DSM-5, no doubt influenced by ideologues, changed that classification. When reality reasserts itself, and it will, that change will be reversed.

Brünisholz is also right that this nonsense is being spread through school curricula, not only in Switzerland but throughout the developed world.

Facts Become Hate Speech

The dystopian treatment of Brünisholz is no isolated case. Across Europe, people are punished for what they say online. In Germany last year, police raided the home of a 64-year-old retiree, seizing his computer and phone. His crime was calling then Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck a “professional idiot” in a meme on X.

As someone who spent fourteen years as a professional banjo player, I can say that professional idiots perform an important function in society, even if the Vice-Chancellor disagrees.

In 2024, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police searched forty-five homes across eleven states as part of a “Day of Action against Misogyny on the Internet.” AfD politician Marie-Thérèse Kaiser was convicted of incitement in May 2024 for a Facebook post from 2021 in which she criticized the admission of 200 Afghans and cited official statistics showing that Afghans commit gang rape seventy times more often than Germans. The court ruled her post hate speech.

Another German was fined 5 000 euros for calling a judge “obviously mentally disturbed” after she had given a Syrian rapist of a fifteen-year-old girl a lenient sentence; the fine was almost twice as high as the penalty imposed on the offender himself.

North Rhine-Westphalia’s Interior Minister Herbert Reul warned that “digital arsonists must not think they can hide behind their phones or computers. Anyone who believes everything goes on social media is gravely mistaken.”

It seems the Germans have forgotten where opinion ends and hate begins, and, one might add, where hate ends and fact begins.

“It seems the Germans have forgotten where opinion ends and hate
begins, and, one might add, where hate ends and fact begins”

According to the Federal Criminal Police, more than 10 000 offences related to online speech were recorded last year. The French are scarcely better. Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner and chief censor of the Digital Services Act, or more aptly, the Digital Censorship Act, wrote an open letter to Elon Musk before his talk with Donald Trump on Twitter, demanding “effective measures to curb harmful content” and threatening to “use the full toolkit of the EU” if Musk failed to comply.

These censorial instincts are spreading across Europe. Even in my homeland Britain, supposedly the cradle of liberty, comedians are being arrested. In September, Graham Linehan was detained at Heathrow Airport by five armed officers for three jokes about transgender people on X, one of which read, “A photo you can smell.”

He is not alone. In 2017, comedian Count Dankula spent a night in jail after posting a video of his pug giving the Nazi salute as a joke to annoy his girlfriend. Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act now allows plays, podcasts, social-media posts, and even private conversations to be prosecuted.

After the horrific murders in Southport last summer, Prime Minister Keir Starmer had not only street protesters but also social-media users tracked down. One man received eight weeks in prison for sharing three memes; a woman nine months for filming the aftermath of the riots on TikTok. The harshest sentence went to Lucy Connolly, wife of a conservative politician, who received thirty-one months for an angry outburst on X demanding “Mass deportation now.”

A tasteless post, certainly, but does that justify two and a half years in prison? Especially when compared with the lenient sentences given to pedophiles and rapists.

Europe’s Long History of Censorship

More than 12 000 arrests per year for online statements, that is today’s Britain. By comparison, Russia manages about 400. Since 2014, over 250 000 so-called “non-crime hate incidents” have been recorded there, including one involving a child who called a classmate “fishy-smelling,” and another an autistic fourteen-year-old who accidentally dropped a Quran.

De facto blasphemy laws are on the rise. Labour MPs are openly calling for their return. Then there is the case of army veteran Adam Smith-Connor, arrested for silently praying outside an abortion clinic.

Freedom of speech is in retreat throughout Europe and Britain, though perhaps we never possessed it in the absolute form Americans know. Britain, after all, retained blasphemy laws until 2008; even D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was once banned. Europe’s story is one of censorship, from Socrates to Galileo, from the Inquisition to Napoleon.

Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees freedom of expression and undermines it in the next breath with an endless list of exceptions. The subjects have changed; the censorship has not.

“Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees
freedom of expression and undermines it in the next breath with an
endless list of exceptions”

It was precisely Europe’s disastrous history of censorship that inspired James Madison to draft the First Amendment in the United States. Censorship always serves to preserve power, today the power of an elite whose worldview rests on globalism, progressivism, diversity, and sustainability.

But lies as obvious as “men are women” or “skeletons are transgender” require legal protection to escape reality. As the Twitter Files revealed, the establishment is desperate to suppress dissent. Barack Obama once called the internet “the greatest threat to our democracy.”

“But lies as obvious as “men are women” or “skeletons are transgender” require legal protection to escape reality”

The New Age of Digital Control

And yet, worse is to come. Digital identities, facial recognition, and central-bank digital currencies combine to open a new era of control. If states are willing to imprison someone for saying skeletons have no gender, how will they use such tools?

Still, there is hope. Satoshi Nakamoto wrote that cryptography could win an important victory in the arms race and create a new territory of freedom. Such territories are needed now more urgently than ever.

Switzerland may no longer be one of them. Bitcoin is. We do not know what form the authoritarians of the future will take. Who would have thought that in pleasant, neutral Switzerland, one could end up in jail for saying skeletons cannot be transgender? One thing is certain: authoritarians will always exist.

Europe and Britain wrestled for centuries over freedom, but it was here that freedom was born. And if we are now being drawn into a soft dystopia, we must cling to every remnant of freedom still within reach.

This essay is based on a speech that Winston Marshall gave at the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano in October 2025.