I have a lot of problems with our current government but you make it sound as if our current government was working towards a dictatorship. That would be a wild take…
Dissent is not outlawed, as long as you voice your opinion in a sane manner, e.g. don’t chant for the death of other people.
Your first sentence is my whole problem with that framing: Germany is not anti free-speech. It just does not subscribe to the US/UK view that you are allowed to say anything. Maybe voice your opinion without threatening or inciting violence? Maybe the US would be better off if some prosecutor could actually charge Musk after showing the Nazi salute?
I disagree with most of your remaining text but this is too far away from the original topic, I will not comment on that.
German here: Due to our own history, for specific cases, speech is much more restricted here compared to the UK (or the US until recently). These are things like inciting violence or “gruppenbezogene Menschenfeindlichkeit” (hostility towards / discrimination of a group of people).
So if someone chants “Death, death to the IDF” they could be charged. It will not necessarily end in a conviction if it is considered an acceptable protest.
So if you are expected to do something that might be a crime in Germany, it does not seem unreasonable to deny entry. However, the decision should be transparent to the impacted people and they should have the option to fight against that decision. This is the actual infuriating part of this story.
But framing this as a “Free Speech Crackdown” is a very British/US take on our laws.
If you want something to really complain about: The German government still considers Israel an ally and still supports them. We learnt a lot from our own history but somehow “Genocide is bad regardless of who is doing it” did not make the list.
How stupid can a company be to give that much access to an LLM?
The typical science fiction doomsday AI scenarios always assume an intelligent AI. If the current trend continues humanity’s last conversation will end something like this:
"You are absolutely right, I should not have used the nuclear launch codes president Trump entrusted me with to bomb every country on earth.
If you want, I can help you come up with a list of fun activities to do in a bunker."
While I agree that the current official stance on Israel is insane, it is not the majority opinion in Germany.
Do we still have a problem with Antisemitism? Sadly yes, especially now since some people project the behaviour of Israel on German Jews which is absolutely crazy. But I would argue that the overwhelming majority has a positive or neutral view on Judaism.
You sound like you have met too many crazy people from my country. But the loudest people are often not the majority. There are regular surveys on issues like these and I would classify your interpretation of German society as a fringe theory.