Belgian Draughts are reliable workers
but are we allowed to say that?
When we drive north, we’ve gotten accustomed to an unusual sighting, at least for these parts of the world. The road takes us past the Saved Hooves horse sanctuary. There always were all sorts of rescued horses over there, from abandoned draft horses to mustangs to quarter horses. All of them have found a better life in the sanctuary. Since recently, though, there was a group of around ten Belgian Draughts there.
We have supported the sanctuary for a while, so we gave them a call. We really wanted to know how those horses had ended up thousands of miles away from their home. What the sanctuary told us, ended up being a pretty sad story. The horses had been taken care of very well for most of their lives in a stable in their native Belgium. That is, until the stable’s owner was sent to prison and the horses needed to be auctioned off. As the saying goes, it is not too easy to teach these Draughts to do jumping tricks, so there weren’t any buyers, until eventually Saved Hooves got wind of the situation. A fundraiser paid for their distant rehoming.
We were most of all shocked to learn why their former owner had been sent to prison, though. We needed to ask twice. We thought we had misunderstood what they had said the first time around. Yet we hadn’t. The owner had been sent to prison for posting online that “Belgian Draughts pull more weight than Arabs and are, therefore, the ultimate Belgian horse.” We didn’t know what was wrong with that statement, nor how one could land in jail for posting it. But then, the Ranch is not in Belgium. Apparently, we have to thank God it isn’t.
Before all of this happened, most over here weren’t really able to locate Belgium on a world map. It didn’t turn out to be easy either. We could only locate it on our largest world map when using a magnifying glass. It is a member country of the European Union, located in Western Europe near the Channel. In North American terms, its surface roughly compares to Maryland’s, or to Guanajuato’s (the most similar state in Mexico) and is about half the size of Nova Scotia’s. In Oceania, no state is really small enough to make for a fair comparison.
In spite of the limited power it wields, Belgium does succeed to generate news headlines on the global stage. To be fair, most often those are not strictly earned by the country itself, but are rather due to its capital city Brussels also being the administrative centre of the European Union. The EU reminds us on a quotidian basis that centralizing power in the hands of unelected, supranational bureaucratic structures is a straight path to dissolution of reason, rule of law and morals, which eventually leads to societal self-annihilation. Yet as of recently, the country of Belgium has taken it upon itself to compete with its parent in terms of infamy.
Just a little while ago, Belgian politician and former Member of Parliament Dries Van Langenhove was convicted for “incitement of hatred” based on the country’s “anti-racism” law. What had Van Langenhove done to merit that conviction? Well, nothing more than presenting an academic lecture back in 2024 at KU Leuven, the country’s best-ranked university, in which he cited scientific research and official crime statistics to support his statement that mass immigration is associated with increased crime rates.
Neither prosecutor nor judge were able to come up with any real plaintiff Van Langenhove would have incited hatred against by citing statistics. In their verdict, the judges openly admitted to sentencing Van Langenhove for speaking truthful facts:
“Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law.”
Excerpt from Verdict against Van Langenhove, Correctional Court of Leuven, 2026.
If the trial had been in the United States, of course all of Van Langenhove’s lecture would be speech protected by the First Amendment. Belgium does have a Constitution too, though. Its nineteenth Article stipulates:
“Freedom of worship, its public practice and freedom to demonstrate one’s opinions on all matters are guaranteed, but offences committed when this freedom is used may be punished.”
Belgian Constitution, Article 19.
While modeled after the US Constitution, the Belgian Constitution’s speech protections are much less strong. Most of all the second sentence in Article 19, which may have been written with the royal family in mind, allows for speech restrictions to be implemented whenever deemed necessary. In fact, it was first used as a justification to carve out holocaust denial from free speech protections. The existence of one exception, however, usually paves the way for more. Many call that a “slippery slope.”
In hindsight, one may wonder if the holocaust denial exception wasn’t created with further abolition of free speech in mind. Of course, the holocaust happened. Those who don’t believe that should be sent to Auschwitz or Dachau on an educational trip, where its horrors can still be felt today. Belgium is no exception. For instance, there is holocaust memorial at Fort Breendonk, a fortress used by the Nazis to detain Jews and dissidents locally, in many cases prior to deportation. The evidence that the holocaust happened is overwhelming and omnipresent throughout Europe. Given its prevalence, why exactly should the ludicrous opposite position be illegal to say? It can be laughed away or repudiated at every turn.
In Belgium, restrictions on freedom of speech did not stop at holocaust denial. In fact, Van Langenhove was convicted based on Belgium’s “Anti-Racism Act” for inciting hatred against a “protected group.” At this point, it needs to be stated that Wild Horse Wisdom does not agree with, nor condone all of Van Langenhove’s statements. Even in the lecture considered in the lawsuit, he made claims that denigrated the Congolese people and he seemed to be blissfully ignorant of Belgium’s quite cruel colonial heritage. At the same time, the conclusion that such statements “incite hatred” seems far-fetched.
There are several problems with Van Langenhove’s conviction. His lecture mainly focused on sharing crime statistics that showed increased crime rates among immigrants with certain types of ethnicity compared to native Belgians. These facts are true, as Belgium is no exception to the EU’s disastrous immigration policies. Due to the EU’s “immigration pact,” the doors of the entire union have been wide open for about a decade now. Member states like Belgium have no other option but to absorb their quota of immigrants. Due to the sheer amount of applicants, immigrants are often allowed to stay and are even naturalized without proper vetting procedures. The result is that Western European societies are now gradually being destroyed by an influx of overseas criminals and jihadis.
We have reported on the massive immigration problems in the European Union before. We reported on the situation in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal. In Europe, problems resulting from immigration are meanwhile as massive as the immigration itself. That need not mean that the European continent is lost, since no problem exists that cannot be solved. The first step to any solution though, is to have a debate about the situation. Exactly that is why Van Langenhove’s conviction is so problematic. If mentioning the existence of an issue is “incitement to violence,” then the issue can no longer be discussed. How exactly can European society advance if discussing the present status quo’s shortcomings is a criminal offence?
Unfortunately, Belgium is not the only country that would rather criminalize any discussion of current issues than to try and tackle them. South Wales police recently implemented guidelines that instruct agents to log any discussion of Islam that goes beyond “legitimate.” Too bad that no law defines what is legitimate, so this policy would inevitably end up recording moderate discussions of Islam as “anti-social behaviour.” In the United Kingdom, a conviction of the latter can exclude one from the job market. Only when threatened with a lawsuit by the Free Speech Union did the South Wales Police rescind these guidelines, which underscores the necessity for access to viewpoint neutral legal representation.
Let us put into plain words what the new policy by the South Wales Police would have led to: if a native Welsh girl were violated by a jihadi rape gang, parents and friends alike would think twice to report it, lest their report be interpreted as a “beyond legitimate” discussion of Islam and labeled an “anti-social behaviour incident.” Even if they reported it, the police officer too might have hesitated to take any action, so as not to be seen as “islamophobic.” In fact, it has been extensively reported that jihadi rape gangs have often not been prosecuted by police officers for fear of being labeled “racist.” Such attitudes would only have been amplified by the guidance. The result would have been that the native Welsh, who live in England’s oldest colony and have been subjected to foreign rule for over a thousand years, now need to be “decolonized” by showing unlimited “tolerance” to jihadis up to the point where their own daughters are raped. Obviously, tolerance for failed desert death cults, such as jihad, has become more important than reverence for life.
A second problematic issue with Van Langenhove’s conviction is the absence of any demonstrable harms. In the US, even if less inspired speech protections were in place, the lawsuit against Van Langenhove might still not survive a motion to dismiss for that reason. Yet the latter did not stop the Belgian judges, who interpreted that Van Langenhove’s lecture created a “hostile atmosphere of us versus them” and therefore passed the test for criminal “hate speech.” Unfortunately, the possibility of conviction in the absence of harm is also becoming more common. Recently introduced hate speech legislation in several jurisdictions seems to criminalize imaginary offenses carried out against equally imaginary subjects. The sufficient condition to be convicted of “hate” seems to be that there are a prosecutor and a judge who think it is. In Brazil, the latter have recently often been two hats worn interchangeably by “justice” de Moraes, who ignores all legal standards, yet whose orders are somehow being carried out by law enforcement.
Apart from the aforementioned flaws in the legal doctrine applied, it is time the West recognize that it has been on the wrong track for a long time now. The law needs to protect persons, not “characteristics” and certainly not “groups.” We must stay far astray from institutionalized two-tiered (in)justice, by criminalizing discrimination against certain groups, but encouraging it against other groups, as was attempted in Colorado’s AI Act and has been codified in Brazil’s Racism Act.
Australia was recently shaken by the heinous Bondi beach attacks. On December 14, 2025, a jihadi assassinated fifteen attendants of a Hanukkah festival in cold blood, including a ten-year-old girl. When society started to recover from the horrors in the quaint Sidney area beach town, discussion took place on how such horrors could be avoided in the future. One of the answers was toughen the country and the state’s Hate Crime Acts. What exactly are those?
Well, Australia’s Hate Crime Act “makes it a crime to advocate or threaten physical force or violence against people because of who they are” and then proceeds by stipulating “characteristics” that define the phrase “who they are:” race or ethnic background, religion, sex or sexual orientation, gender identity or intersex status, disability, nationality, political opinion. It may be unclear why the imaginary noncept of “gender identity” is listed here, but that is besides the point. Since Australia already has laws that criminalize incitement to illicit behaviour, why exactly does it also need laws that criminalize “threats of physical violence against people for who they are?” Incitement laws in Australia are pretty strict. They go way further than the American standard set in Brandenburg v. Ohio and have resulted in, for instance, a young mother being arrested for “incitement” for encouraging people to participate in protests against COVID restrictions. Shouldn’t it therefore be sufficient that threats to violence in general are a criminal offence? What is the added value of specifying characteristics? The Bondi attacks were a gruesome and despicable attack on a local Jewish community, but would the event have been acceptable if the shooting happened at an event of another stripe? Of course not.
Australia’s Hate Crime Laws are still reasonable in the sense that the characteristics defined are viewpoint neutral. Even political opinion ---not further specified--- is listed as a protected characteristic. Laws of this type become truly problematic, though, when judges start interpreting them with bias, as is obviously becoming the norm in Europe. Younger judges have graduated from law schools that have impregnated them with the necessity for “social justice,” “decolonization,” “trans rights,” and the need for speech never to hurt others’ feelings, except if the others happen to have common sense. The result is that such “justices” will apply protection for characteristics selectively with respect to a silent hierarchy. White Christian males are the lowest ranking characteristic. Whatever they say about all others is “criminal speech.” Black Christian males are not much better off, though. They can scold white Christian males, but they better think twice before they say that gay sex is a sin, in which case they will be labeled “the black faces of white supremacy.” Black lesbian Jewish women may be much higher up the reporting line, although that is no longer true should they decide that biological males are not welcome at their events. In the latter case, white males may very well end up at the top of the pyramid after all. All they have to do to get there, is to pretend being women.
The silent hierarchy implied by the anti-religion of “wokeness” does not make the least sense. Therefore, we must do exactly the opposite of what the European Union plans to implement in its “Union of Equality” and “Anti-Racism” strategies: we need to remove all mentions of “characteristics” from the law, since they can be selectively interpreted at any time and thereby, are in se an invitation to inequality in the justice system in the name of “equality” and “justice.” With both incitement to violence and actual violence already illegal, it really doesn’t matter at all which “characteristics” the perpetrator or the victim have. Criminalizing acts is sufficient.
Last Friday, a trailer from Saved Hooves pulled up our driveway. We watched with excitement when two of the Belgian Draughts walked out. Bob had agreed to onboard them. We’ve been getting along very well since: American quarter horses, pintos, white Arabs and now Belgian Draughts. Hay seems to taste the same anywhere on the planet.
Thanks for sharing this story. I wish the people would get more involved in stopping this illegitimate lawfare. How wonderful someone was kind enough to help get them to a safe place.
Congrats on your new "kids".
I went to high school in Belgium in the early 1970s. One day our family dog got loose. We later learned that he was killed on the highway — when the police showed up at our house in Bierges with his collar - and a bill for the damage to the car that hit him. Weird country.