Rock band placebo frontman Brian Morco was charged with a loss of honor after calling Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni a “fascist Nazi” from the Turin stage.
The locker's provocation dates back to the 2023 Italian Sonic Park Festival when a verbal onslaught was during a band's show. A police complaint was filed at the time, and a government investigation into “institutional light emptying” was launched. Metro.
The country's Justice Department accepted a request from the state prosecutor to formally request Meloni on February 17th. Italian criminal law prosecutes anyone who appears to “publicly disavow the Republic.”
The maximum penalty for a loss in Italy is a three-year sentence. However, government sources say Meloni will probably only face a $5,200 fine.
Italian law is typical of the serious restrictions on freedom of speech found in many European countries.
Just this week, CBS News took Heat as it was embedded in a German police raid party dispatched to arrest German citizens to criticize the government.
US Vice President JD Vance has abandoned the “shared valley” of free speech and took Europe on a mission to call German censorship law “shocking.”
Vance blows up Europe:
For years, we have been told that our funding and support lies in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from Ukrainian policies to digital censorship is billed as a defence of democracy. But when we see European courts cancel elections and senior officials and threaten to cancel others, we have to ask whether they are holding themselves to a reasonable high standard. And I say myself, because I basically think we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values, we must live them.
Now, in the living memories of many of you in this room, the Cold War has placed defenders of democracy against the much more tyrannical powers on this continent. And think of the censored opposition, the side of that fight that canceled elections that closed the church. Were they good guys? Certainly not. And thank God for their loss of the Cold War.
Yet most European countries always had strict speech rules, and as seen in the First Amendment, the American concept of free speech was not in fact unstable to citizens.
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