Our Austrian correspondent and long-time associate Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff has published an updated edition of her book, Truth Was My Crime: a Life Fighting for Freedom. Below is the first installment of a four-part preview of the new introduction to the book.

When Nothing Is True, Everything Is Imaginable

by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

Majority opinion must act as a restraint but not as a guide to individual action — all advance has been due to individual conflict with majority opinion.

— F. A. Hayek

What Freedom Is — and Is Not

Freedom has been defined in many ways. Before examining the newest and most aggressive forms of censorship, it is necessary to clarify what freedom is — and what it is not.

Not all definitions are compatible with ordered liberty. Doing as one pleases is not liberty but anarchy; true freedom presupposes order, law, and moral limits. Friedrich A. Hayek — my fellow countryman, Nobel laureate, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom — defined it succinctly: freedom is order through law. Law, properly understood, does not erase moral agency; it protects it. Economist Steven Horwitz later summarized Hayek’s position clearly: freedom is not absolute license, but the recognition that law and morality are necessary for cooperative and orderly human interaction.^[1]

What we are witnessing today is the collapse of precisely that framework: law is no longer applied consistently, morality is no longer shared, and the boundary between what belongs to you and what belongs to the state has dissolved. Under such conditions, cooperation gives way to coercion, and order gives way to managed chaos.

Hayek’s warnings — especially in The Road to Serfdom — were dismissed for decades and remain unfashionable in contemporary academia because they challenge dominant assumptions rather than confirm them; that is why they still matter.

The gravest danger, Hayek argued, is not tyranny announced as tyranny, but planning announced as benevolence. When governments claim superior knowledge and decide which ideas may circulate, they destroy the knowledge free societies depend on. That is the mechanism. Freedom collapses when governments claim the authority to decide what may be said, and what must be suppressed.

When Truth Becomes Opinion

Nearly eight years have passed since I was convicted by Austrian courts for discussing the sexual conduct of the Islamic prophet Mohammed — marrying a six-year-old and “consummating” the marriage when she was nine. The Austrian courts ruled that my statements constituted an “excess of opinion.” That judgment was later upheld by the European Court of Human Rights, which concluded that Austria had acted within its margin of appreciation.^{[2] [3]}

The implication was unmistakable: certain subjects may not be addressed honestly, even in an educational context, even in the absence of incitement, and even where no harm can be demonstrated.

At the time of the judgement, many reassured themselves that this was an exception — a warning shot that could safely be ignored because it involved the wrong speaker, the wrong subject, and the wrong country. Some pointed at me and said I should not have said it. Others shrugged. Most did nothing. That silence, in retrospect, was sufficient for the system to proceed. I decided then that I would no longer speak publicly in Europe and redirected my efforts toward the United States, believing, as many advocates of free speech did, that the First Amendment still represented a reliable bulwark. Europe, I assumed, had failed; America would hold.

It is therefore ironic that the United States, once widely regarded as the most robust free-speech regime in the world, would become, in the words of journalist David Kupelian, “ground zero for a total war on free expression.” The strength of the American project lay in its founding premise that certain truths are “self-evident,” yet those shared truths have increasingly been displaced by subjective and individualized versions of truth — your truth, my truth — which, by definition, cannot all be true. Under the Biden administration, the First Amendment came under sustained assault not through formal repeal but through circumvention: speech was outsourced to platforms, censorship laundered through “fact-checkers,” NGOs, and administrative agencies, and attachment to the First Amendment itself increasingly reframed, particularly on the political left, as a form of psychological pathology.^[4]

Europe, meanwhile, did not pause. It accelerated. What followed my case should have dispelled the comforting illusion that it had been an aberration.^[5]

From Punishment to Pattern

The comforting illusion of exception collapsed quickly — at least for those willing to look.

In Germany, the writer and satirist C. J. Hopkins was prosecuted not for a seminar, a lecture, or a factual assertion, but for political satire. His work made no claim to truth in the conventional sense; it neither instructed, incited, nor persuaded. It mocked, and that alone proved sufficient. German courts applied Volksverhetzung — incitement of the people — without demonstrating concrete harm, without giving intent any meaningful weight, and without acknowledging irony or artistic context. In doing so, they quietly abandoned the legal fiction that speech must pose a demonstrable danger. “Social peace” was deemed justification enough.^[6]

This marked a decisive shift. Speech no longer needed to be false, inflammatory, or dangerous; it merely needed to be disruptive to the sanctioned narrative.

An even clearer illustration is Jacques Baud,^[7] a former Swiss military intelligence officer, NATO adviser, and United Nations official. Baud is neither a polemicist nor an activist, but a trained analyst whose professional life has been devoted to assessing armed conflict and intelligence failures. His offense was not falsehood, but interpretation. By publicly questioning the dominant European narrative on the Ukraine war, he crossed an increasingly intolerable line.

For this, the European Union placed Baud on a sanctions list, accusing him — without judicial proceedings, without a hearing, and without evidence — of promoting “conspiracy-theoretical” narratives. The term carries a veneer of technical precision, yet functions in practice as a disciplinary label: it no longer requires falsification, intent, or proof. Once applied, it authorizes dismissal, sanction, or erasure without argument.

What makes Baud’s case unprecedented is not only that a Swiss citizen — a national of a neutral country — was targeted by the European Union, but that punishment was imposed without due process and without the commission of a crime. He was not accused of espionage, sabotage, or incitement. He was punished for contradicting policy.

If the case of Jacques Baud serves as a warning to professionals and insiders, the case of Lucy Connolly demonstrates how far this logic now extends downward. Connolly is not a public figure, nor an analyst, writer, or political activist, but an ordinary British citizen — a housewife — who expressed herself online in the aftermath of a violent crime. Her comments were crude, angry, and tasteless, yet they were unmistakably speech.^[8]

For this, she was sentenced to prison. She did not incite violence, organize harm, or instruct anyone to act. She expressed an opinion about the state of her country and its failures — an opinion deemed intolerable by those in authority. Tastelessness has never been a crime in a free society, and yet it proved sufficient. Unlike me, Connolly retracted her remarks and apologized. It made no difference. What mattered was not context or remorse, but deviation. Once speech is judged politically disruptive rather than legally criminal, punishment follows regardless of correction. Nor does the process end there.

When Speech Becomes Violence

Charlie Kirk was a prominent American campus speaker and political educator who built his influence through open debate. He traveled widely to universities, invited critics to challenge him publicly, and insisted that disagreement be met with argument rather than exclusion. His work centered on free speech, constitutional government, and the conviction that asking basic questions is a civic duty rather than a provocation.

In September 2025, Kirk was assassinated while doing precisely what those in power routinely claim to want more of: listening to critics, engaging opponents, and giving them the floor. He was not calling for violence, nor was he attempting to silence anyone. He was debating — calmly, publicly, and openly.^[9]

It is at this point that the internal logic of censorship culture reveals its final consequence. In a society where dissent is pathologized, disagreement reframed as harm, and questions treated as threats, the individual who persists in asking them becomes dangerous simply by existing. When speech is reclassified as violence, violence begins to present itself as a legitimate response. History records this sequence often enough to recognize it.

Kirk’s murder did not occur in isolation. It represents the terminal stage of a long process: the dehumanization of dissenters, the moral justification of silencing, and the gradual erosion of the distinction between argument and aggression. When words are criminalized, force follows — not as an anomaly, but as a continuation.

I have warned about this progression for years. When I was prosecuted, many pointed fingers and said I should not have said it. Others shrugged. Most remained silent. Yet a society that punishes questions does not stop at punishment. It escalates. Once debate is no longer permitted, those who continue to insist upon it are no longer merely controversial; they become targets.

With each subsequent case, the threshold was quietly lowered. Less justification was required, less pretense maintained, and less restraint exercised, until what once provoked outrage began to pass as routine, and what once demanded a judicial ruling could be triggered by little more than an accusation. This did not have to happen. My case marked an early line in the sand — one that could have been resisted, but was instead isolated.

What followed was not an excess, but a formalization.

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA),^[10] once discussed in largely theoretical terms, is now fully operational. Platforms no longer wait for complaints but preemptively remove content to avoid ruinous fines. Censorship has become administrative, anticipatory, and automated. Governments fund denunciation networks — so-called civil-society organizations — whose primary function is to flag undesirable speech. HateAid, a German government-funded non-governmental organization specializing in the reporting and legal pursuit of alleged online hate speech, has received over €5 million in taxpayer funding in recent years. Rather than protecting democracy through open debate, this system replaces it with managed truth.

The result is now visible: satire criminalized, analysis sanctioned, ordinary citizens imprisoned, and dissent reframed as pathology. Freedom is not lost in a single moment of collapse but surrendered incrementally, each retreat made possible by the silence that preceded it.

Administrative Truth

What unites the cases described here is not ideology, temperament, or intent, but exposure. Each of these individuals said something that collided with an officially protected narrative at a moment when dissent was no longer tolerated. None of them needed to incite violence. None needed to persuade anyone. They merely needed to speak out of turn.

This marks the decisive shift. Speech is no longer judged by what it does, but by what it is said to threaten: consensus, social peace, emotional comfort, political stability. Once such abstractions are elevated to legal interests, every individual becomes conditionally free. Freedom survives only so long as silence — or compliance — is maintained, a logic that is now coordinated across national borders.

We are therefore compelled to remain vigilant against further attempts to erode free speech on the home front — internal attacks carried out by our own governments, as well as by corporate, educational, and media institutions. As I experienced directly through repeated participation in NGO and civil-society events surrounding OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation) human-rights meetings — activities for which no official OSCE archival record exists — this effort is not merely domestic but part of an international censorship coalition that has been steadily consolidating. At these gatherings, NGOs and representatives of both free and not-so-free states solemnly recite prepared scripts about the necessity “to speak freely, but — ,” only to return home to jurisdictions where free speech has already been curtailed or discarded altogether.^[11]

It is therefore not surprising — though it remains difficult to believe — that even a country such as Finland, routinely ranked by Freedom House as the world’s “most free,” has moved in this direction. In 2019, a Finnish politician and grandmother publicly criticized her local church for supporting the Helsinki Pride Parade and questioned how that support squared with the Church’s own teachings. This was sufficient to trigger a hate-speech charge, not for the purpose of correction but as an example.

“You can’t say that. And if you do, we’ll prosecute you.”

Although she was acquitted twice, prosecutors persisted. The case was appealed and ultimately reached Finland’s Supreme Court, which heard it on October 30, 2025.^[12] Even where exoneration follows — as it did for her in the lower courts, though not for me — the lesson is unmistakable. Those watching will think twice before speaking. “Punish one, teach one hundred,” as Mao Zedong observed, and the method remains as effective as ever.

Next: The Malleability of Truth

For previous posts on the “hate speech” prosecution of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, see Elisabeth’s Voice: The Archives.

Notes: