Cologne prosecutors charge Twitter user for the crime of assembling a list of Covid-era insults that politicians and celebrities directed against the unvaccinated

Almost two years ago, on 26 July 2022, a German Twitter user known only as MicLiberal posted a thread that culminated in his criminal trial this week. His is but the latest in a long line of such prosecutions, which are our rulers increasingly use to intimidate and harass those who use their freedom of expression in inconvenient ways.

MicLiberal committed his alleged offence as Germany was still awaking from months of hypervaccination insanity. Science authorities and politicians had spent the winter decrying the “tyranny of the unvaccinated,” demanding that “we have to take care of the unvaccinated, and … make vaccination compulsory,” firing people who protested institutional vaccine mandates on social media and denouncing the unvaccinated for ongoing virus restrictions and Covid deaths. Our neighbour, Austria, even went so far as to impose a specific lockdown on those who refused the Covid vaccines. Culturally and politically, those were the darkest months I have ever lived through; they changed my life forever and I will never forget them.

MicLiberal’s thread aimed only to memorialise some the crazy things the vaccinators had said. It opened with this tweet:

We were complicit!

We marginalised, defamed, discredited, insulted and cancelled people. On behalf of science!

By popular demand, this brief thread with statements that should not be forgotten:

There ensued nothing but a series of citations, most of them wholly typical samples of vintage 2021/22 vaccinator rhetoric, much of it not even that remarkable. For example, MicLiberal included this statement from Andreas Berholz, deputy editor-in-chief of the widely read blog Der Volksverpetzer:

“Fact-check: The unvaccinated remained the main drivers of the pandemic.”

And he included this statement from former President of Germany Wilhelm Gauck:

“Opponents of vaccination are idiots.”

And he posted this old ad from the city of Erkelenz (Nordrhein-Westfalen).

“Your party is your grandmother’s death. Stay home!”

And near the end of his thread he added this citation, from the the health economist Willy Oggier:

“Corona sceptics forfeit their right to a place in intensive care in the event of overcrowding.”

You might be wondering what crime MicLiberal can possibly have committed by drawing attention to these already-public statements. The most honest answer is that his thread achieved millions of views in a matter of days, and at a very awkward moment – precisely when everyone was beginning to regret all the illiberal and wildly intemperate things they had said in the depths of the virus craze. He had embarrassed some very vain and powerful people with their own incredibly stupid words, and today many are of the opinion that that ought to be a crime in and of itself.

Alas, things have not yet deteriorated that far. Thus the police and prosecutors were left to scour our dense thicket of laws for a more plausible offence. They decided that their best chance lay with a novel provision of the German Criminal Code (Paragraph 126a). This provision makes it a crime to “disseminate the personal data of another person in a matter that is … intended to expose this person … to the risk of a criminal offence directed against them.” On 28 July, two days after MicLiberal posted his 25 tweets, Cologne police filed a criminal complaint against him, and afterwards the Cologne prosecutor’s office brought charges, arguing that MicLiberal had suggested that the people he cited were “perpetrators” and therefore associated them with “fascism.” The district court declined to approve the charges, but the prosecutors appealed to the regional court, where the judges saw things differently. They believed that a prosecution was warranted because of the “heated social debate” surrounding Covid measures, and because MicLiberal’s audience was composed of “homogeneous” like-minded people, who (in the summary of the Berliner Zeitung) “could either form groups or encourage individual members to commit acts of violence.” MicLiberal had furthermore assembled his citations from a website that the judges deemed guilty of an “anti-government orientation.”

We must take a moment to ponder this truly amazing argumentation, which would seem to criminalise such things as participating in the wrong arguments before the wrong kind of audience and assembling one’s data from the wrong kind of website. In each of these cases, of course, it is the prosecutors and the judges eager to apply Paragraph 126a to their political opponents who get to decide what is “wrong.”

I’m happy to say MicLiberal was acquitted yesterday at the Cologne district court, after his lawyer – the excellent Jessica Hamed – drew attention to the absurdity of the prosecution:

It is not only legitimate, but even ethically required, to strongly object to transgressive statements by people who occupy a prominent position in society, such as politicians or doctors. This is because these statements were discriminatory and threatened social peace.

Should it be legal [for] the former Federal President Gauck … to say: “Opponents of vaccination are idiots,” but illegal for my client to say that others have been insulted, defamed and marginalised by these statements? …

Anyone who makes public statements … must expect that their statements will be commented on, evaluated, socially condemned, and so on. This is because there is no entitlement to be free from criticism. There is no right to be able to communicate one’s views to the public without contradiction or criticism …

Although this is specifically about my client, it is also being decided today whether people are being pushed further and further into the private sphere by threats of punishment. It is obvious that if my client were convicted today, this conviction would send out a devastating signal.

It is a measure of how far the Federal Republic has deteriorated, that arguments like these have to be made at criminal trials. Fortunately, the authoritarian turn in German politics has penetrated the judiciary least of all, and so there is still some protection for those caught speaking in inconvenient ways. Emphasis, of course, belongs on some, because frivolous prosecutions like that of MicLiberal alone suffice as punishment and signal.

Friends often advise me to take a different tone here at the plague chronicle. Calling prominent politicians and scientists stupid idiots is an unnecessary risk, they argue, and could open me to prosecution for insult; some of my posts about mass migration might be interpreted as running afoul of criminal provisions against incitement; comparing the Federal Republic to the DDR may draw the attention of the constitutional protectors. What we learn from MicLiberal’s case is that it doesn’t matter at all what you say. All the caution in the world is not protection enough; if you embarrass and humiliate the right people, they’ll come for you. And I have to admit that it would be quite an honour to be prosecuted by these flaming fucking egregious retards, I would wear it as a badge of honour for the rest of my life. As I hope MicLiberal will.