Free Delivery

A 25-year-old from Lower Bavaria posted on Facebook that he had a gas bottle and a hand grenade waiting for the asylum seekers. Free delivery, he wrote. The court in Passau fined him seven thousand euros for incitement to hatred.

The straightforwardness is jarring. No coded language, no deniability—just the actual thought, as if speaking it was temporary, as if it would vanish once he hit send. The refugee crisis was taking his job, his apartment, his sense that the world owed him something. He needed everyone to know he was thinking about violence, maybe even that he’d do it, the way people talk about things they’ll never actually do.

Maybe he thought nobody would screenshot it. Maybe he thought the internet was like thinking in your car—it evaporates the moment you move on. Maybe he didn’t think at all.

Either way, he got to speak what he believed, and now it costs him seven thousand euros. That’s the equation. You speak and you pay, or you stay quiet. One person chose to pay.