So you agree that the US has more free speech because people can deviate from your completely arbitrarily defined "normal" form of critique.
As for examples, the German criminal code has literally criminalized insulting people (section 185), and insulting politicians has even harsher penalties (section 188). There are hundreds of articles covering cases, just ask any AI for a summary.
> So they were not arrested for criticizing politicians, they were arrested for acting like idiots.
In your opinion, acting like an idiot is a criminal offense, even if it does not harm anyone, in the tort sense?
> Well, first, it cuts both way: left-leaning scientists have a left-leaning bias, and right-leaning scientists have a right-leaning bias. So it cancels out.
And what are the political demographics of academia right now? This is a big reason for the replication crisis in the social sciences.
> politicians who have no idea of the subject who ruin a scientist career because they saw the term "Enola Gay" or "financial equity"".
That isn't really happening. No one's career is being ruined by having to rewrite grant proposals to remove DEI language, because previous policy required DEI language. The restructuring of academic funding and incentives is frankly long overdue. Everyone, including scientists, has been complaining about grant funding and the skewed incentives in academia, like publish or perish. You often have to break a system before it can be fixed.