Angela Merkel just received the European Parliament's first Order of Merit — and used the occasion to call for regulation of "lies" on social media. Without defining what a lie is.

That missing definition is the entire problem. Because in a world where questioning the 1.5°C climate threshold makes you a climate denier, where asking why a quarter of Germans vote AfD makes you an extremist, where complexity about Ukraine makes you Putin-friendly — the regulation of "lies" doesn't protect democracy. It protects whatever ideology is holding the pen when the rules get written.

This episode is about the mechanism behind the label. The way any sufficiently entrenched belief system — political, corporate, social — stops engaging with questions and starts disqualifying the people who ask them. And what it actually means to defend free speech when the war being fought isn't the one anyone declared.

Iconoclast Insights is André Daus — strategic opposition, uncomfortable questions, no comfortable answers.