French President Emmanuel Macron just let loose with his real opinion: Free speech is “bulls**t.”
Macron ranted at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi about American social media and artificial intelligence companies challenging dictatorial European regulations on the grounds of the American constitutional understanding of free speech. According to the authoritarian French president, free speech is BS unless there are all kinds of arbitrary restrictions on what he considers to be racist or hateful language. In other words, free speech is acceptable only when it is not free.
French President Macron:
— Clash Report (@clashreport) February 18, 2026
Free speech is a pure bullshit if nobody knows how you are guided through this so-called free speech—especially when it is to be guided from one hated speech to another hated speech.
I just want to have a transparent road through these different… pic.twitter.com/pFAQ62SsxU
Earlier this month, the Paris prosecutor’s office and Europol raided X’s Paris office in a move that many, including Telegram CEO Pavel Durov (himself a previous target of the French government), framed as a blatantly political move to pressure the American company into increased censorship and privacy violations. X Global Government Affairs argued the raid undermined “X’s fundamental right to due process and threatens our users’ rights to privacy and free speech.” This is the backdrop of Macron’s outrageous comments.
The French petty tyrant preposterously asserted in New Delhi, “Free speech is a pure bullsh*t if nobody knows how you are guided through this so-called free speech—especially when it is to be guided from one hated speech to another hated speech.” Based on his subsequent comments, it seems that he meant “hate speech,” which is a common leftist term for anything they personally consider offensive. That could include such basic truths as “there are only two sexes” or “mass Muslim immigration fuels crime.” Notice how elitist and paternalistic Macron’s tone is — most citizens cannot be trusted to make their own choices, thus, they must be “guided”.
Related: ‘Words Mean Things’: Rush Limbaugh’s Lesson on the Importance of Definitions
Macron then smugly pontificated, “I just want to have a transparent road through these different speeches, and I want, by the way, to have a sort of public order. I want to avoid racist speech, hated speech, and so on.”
Whereas the American Founding Fathers distinguished free speech from explicit calls for murder or violence, modern globalists try to distinguish free speech from anything with which they disagree, in the process completely neutering free speech altogether. Dictators of all sorts through the centuries, from monarchs to Communist tyrants to pseudo-democratic oligarchs, have all demanded that their citizens or subjects be “free” within very narrow limits, which makes one wonder why they bother to use the word freedom at all, given their obvious hatred for it.
If you tell a man that he is free to go anywhere so long as he stays within a specific enclosure, it is obvious that the individual in question is actually a prisoner. But that is exactly how leftists, whether in America, in France, or anywhere else around the world, use the word “freedom” when they apply it to speech, the press, gun rights, travel, and many other areas. When free speech means only what the government allows you to say, it is not free.
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