Just days after Vice President J.D. Vance gave a controversial speech to an international audience about the way Europe has been curtailing free speech, CBS News proved him right when it covered German police raiding a citizen's home over posting a supposedly racist cartoon online.

“It’s 6:01 on a Tuesday morning, and we were with state police as they raided this apartment in Northwest Germany. Inside six armed officers searched a suspect’s home, then seized his laptop and cellphone. Prosecutors say those electronics may have been used to commit a crime, the crime; posting a racist cartoon online,” "60 Minutes" anchor Sharyn Alfonsi described.

In contrast to how the U.S. protects free speech, Germany prosecutes around 3,500 cases a year for what it calls "hate speech."

Prosecutor Frank-Michael Laue told "60 Minutes" that it got 750 hate speech convictions in the past four years.

Jailed for insults

According to prosecutors in Germany, people can be jailed for insulting others, including politicians.

Many times, those convicted are fined or get their devices seized.

“The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America,” Vance said at the Munich Security Conference last week.

Vance also criticized Germany's government for refusing to work with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is agaisnt mass migration.

The party is the second-strongest in polling ahead of elections next week, but politicians have called for it to be banned for extremism.

"Won't accept outsiders"

Not surprisingly, leftist politicians in Germany didn't like Vance's speech.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared that Berlin “won’t accept outsiders intervening in our democracy.”

Foreign Affairs Minister Annalena Baerbock called the censorship "resilient democracy," but it is anything but that.

After seeing the "60 Minutes" segment, Vance said on Monday: “Insulting someone is not a crime, and criminalizing speech is going to put real strain on European-US relationships. This is Orwellian, and everyone in Europe and the US must reject this lunacy.”

Criminalizing speech won't work, and the sooner Europe sees that, the better off it will be.