Politics today is a fight over symbols. The idea is apparently that whoever "wins" the symbols over to their side, also wins the definition of their meaning. Free speech is such a symbol, and it doesn't mean what you think it means:

More than 10,000 protesters blocked a major neo-Nazi march in the former East German city of Dresden, forming a human chain surrounding the center of the city.

Far-rightists have used the Dresden bombing anniversary to push for recognition of German suffering during World War II in a tone that comes close to Holocaust denial, critics say. Neo-Nazis, including leading members of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany, refer to the Dresden "bombing Holocaust" and belittle Nazi crimes against humanity.

Others attacked cars and buses in which the right-wingers had traveled to Dresden and set fire to trash bins, blocking the route of the neo-Nazi march. Police ultimately informed the right-wing marchers that authorities could not guarantee their safety and urged them to call off the march.

Mainstream lobby groups may be correct about the intentions of the neo-Nazis. That's really besides the point; they have a constitutional right to hold that demonstration, and any attempt of blocking it to defend free speech is disguised tyranny. Fascism comes in many forms, one of the most trickiest being anti-Fascism. If we were serious about our constitutional rights, we'd let the natural selection of ideas do its work in the public, instead of nannying the process like closet Fascists. Since we're not, some ideas become socially regulated:

Yet pity is also a strangely useful tool, for it reveals a strange global hierarchy. At the bottom are black people, whom everyone pities. At the top are the Chinese, whom no one pities. Alongside them are the English, the one foreign group that Hollywood may officially reduce to unpleasant racist stereotypes. And the cultural censor that allows this actually has a strange Oedipal streak. For the only US ethnic identity which can be perpetually reduced to a stereotype of grasping, greedy, shallow bigots are WASPs. Not far behind them are the hillbillies of the Appalachians, namely, the Ulster-Scots.

The taboos of this cultural hierarchy cause even simple truths to remain unspoken. Jews have been disproportionately responsible for financial crime in the US, yet even to utter this simple truth is to court shrieks of anti-Semitism. In Europe, on the other hand, the only public criticisms of Jews that are not merely allowed, but are actually encouraged, are of Israel, about which "liberals" may utter the most ludicrously untrue and racist libels, and be applauded.

You can say we have free speech -- but we haven't. Example: I can say Americans are loud, boorish, lazy and insensitive morons, and that's fine. If I say the same about Nigerians, I am in jail.

Here's the dilemma: Europe doesn't want to do good, it wants to avoid doing bad. As a result it believes it should regulate speech to make it less oppressive, which ends up meaning waging a war against the taboos found in the cultural hierarchy Meyers talks about. That's problem number one. The second problem can be formulated as a question: If there's a hierarchy of opinions deciding what's allowed and not allowed to say, what defines it culturally? And the answer to that question is liberalism.

While many graduates of American colleges cannot answer basic civics questions, a higher education does make their opinions more liberal on controversial social issues, according to a new report issued on Friday by an academic think tank.

The institute found that people who had attained at least a bachelor's degree were more likely than Americans whose formal education ended with a high-school diploma to take a liberal stance on certain controversial social issues. For example, 39 percent of people whose highest level of education was a bachelor's degree supported same-sex marriage, compared with 25 percent with a high-school diploma. The trend continued with advanced degrees: About 46 percent of people with master's degrees supported same-sex marriage, as did 43 percent of people with Ph.D.'s.

Do American college students become liberal after or before the start of their education? The answer could be argued either way, but here's a fact it doesn't change. These are the institutions where intellectual agendas and cultural trends are formed. It's safe to assume that they exert a huge influence on media, and thus, the crowd. It's why we find tens of thousands of protesters in Dresden, fighting tyranny with tyranny. A war over symbols, but most importantly, a war over definitions of what those symbols should mean to everyone. But the truth is that we don't need such a war, because we've got our constitutions who spell these rights out for us.

Liberal free speech is an oxymoron; it's either liberal and not free, or free and not liberal. As much as many of us dislike neo-Nazis and their garbage movements, we must think in Conservative terms: you don't nanny public opinion, you let it grow like a plant and ensure there's safe space for all branches. Liberals are afraid of public discussion - that's why they invented a hierarchy of taboos. Right-leaning officials are starting to do the same with global warming and terrorism. Honest Conservatives don't buy into either camp. It's a struggle for our basic constitutional rights, for competition between people and ideas, and a public climate where you're protected to disagree with the crowd.