Nigel Farage Testifies to Congress About the End of Free Speech in the UK

Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal

NIGEL FARAGE: UK FREE SPEECH IS UNDER ATTACK

"We have this thing now called a non-crime hate incident.

Let's say I post that I object to illegal immigrants moving into my area -- you might get a knock at the door from police warning you not to say it again.

You've committed no crime, yet the state tells you not to speak freely.

Free speech is being impinged upon in every way. Satire is almost banned.

The Online Safety Act, which even impacts Americans, says we could cause psychological harm through speech.

Isn't that what humans do -- challenge each other?

This is really bad news."

Keir Starmer called him "unpatriotic" for complaining about the UK's lurch towards left-wing fascism.

Farage testified about the end of free speech in the UK before the US Congress.

A House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday pumped fresh oxygen into the transatlantic argument over tech regulation, giving right-wing United Kingdom leader Nigel Farage a platform to attack his own country's laws.

Online safety rules have created an "awful, authoritarian situation" in the European Union and the U.K., said Farage, leader of his country's Reform Party.

Farage was invited by House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), marking an escalation in Jordan's war on Europe's tech regulations -- part of a yearslong effort to pressure Europe into loosening laws that have led to investigations and fines against American tech companies.

In organizing the hearing, Jordan is attempting to put an international spin on the conservative argument against online speech restrictions in the U.S., a complaint stemming from the arguments over Covid-19 and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, when numerous far-right figures were deplatformed for promoting potentially dangerous misinformation.

"In addition to attacking American tech companies, Europe is attacking free speech around the world, including here in America," Jordan said.

He has an ally in Farage, a populist leader who has taken up the same cause against his own country's rules.

As the U.K.'s Online Safety Act went into effect this summer, it became a point of international tension between tech companies and governments. At the same time, Europe's laws governing antitrust and online content have begun leading to large fines on American companies.

Although the U.S. does not have direct influence on overseas laws, Farage's presence in Washington has stoked anxiety in both the U.K. and EU that a sympathetic White House might use American trade muscle to push back on foreign rules.

Let's hope so!

Nigel Farage says that now he intends to deport all "migrants" from the UK.

"Young men come into our country on small dinghies across the English Channel. They throw their passports and iPhones into the sea when they reach the 12 mile line, they come in. They get put in four star hotels. They get three meals a day. And you know what? We don't know who they are. They pose a threat to our national security. I will deport every single one of them, and that'll win me the election, oh yes."

Unfortunately, the current UK government just won its court appeal to allow a horde of asylum seekers -- that is, unvetted illegal aliens -- to remain in an infamous Epping hotel at taxpayer expense. The hotel became a focal point of protests after one of the supposed "asylum seekers" faced accusations of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. Slogans at the protest, which drew thousands of people, included "save our kids" and "send them home."

Hot story from gonzo communist UK rag The Guardian. This author opines that calling right-wingers and immigration-restrictionists "fascist" doesn't work any longer because they've just used the slur too many times.

So he argues that the left should instead honestly engage with immigration restrictionists and admit the ways in which unvetted mass immigration is causing problems.

Just kidding, he says the left just needs to smear its enemies with a new, improved slur.

Earlier this month, I helped organise a protest to defend the refugees holed up at the Thistle City Barbican hotel in London. We mobilised 800 people to support the asylum seekers, who waved back at us from the hotel to show their gratitude. On the other side of the road, about 250 people had gathered to demand the hotel be closed. Speakers there called refugees "illegal", "invaders" and "parasites".

Seeing and hearing our opponents, the anti-racists responded with a spontaneous chant of "Nazi scum, off our streets", which our side was able to sustain for more than an hour. I understand why people wanted to express their contempt for the people who tell lies about refugees, but the chant didn't strike me as effective when I heard it, and the more I have thought about it since, the more convinced I am that it was the wrong strategy.

...

The strategy of labelling our enemies fascist depends on a context where the mainstream is willing to isolate and shame Nazis. Those are not the times we are living in. So a smarter, more tailored message is necessary.

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In the weeks since the Barbican protest, the anti-refugee movement has kept up its momentum. Calling them Nazis -- even when there were fascists present at the edges of their event -- has done little to undermine them. They don't believe they are fascists; they don't have organised fascists in their leading circles. The term seems to them exaggerated, laughable.

Instead, he says, we should call the people demonstrating against mass unvetted immigration wife-beaters.

And the simplest, one-line refutation of it is to look at the men who were arrested for offences in the various race riots that followed events at Southport last year. Of those men, a staggering 40% had been reported to the police for domestic violence. There is, in other words, probably no single group of people -- not in Britain or anywhere else -- who are more prone to violence against women than the people now standing outside the hotels denouncing refugees.

This, rather than shouting Nazi, is the argument most likely to undermine the anti-refugee protests. We need to be using it in our leaflets, when we talk to people, and on our protests.

This guy is arguing for the continued mass rape of British girls, but sure, you're the ones concerned about women's safety.

Don't worry, though: Keir Starmer is protecting young British girls from the real threat, which turns out to be 1 comedy writers writing tweets and 2 high-caffeine energy drinks.

The UK political class will face a reckoning to rival that inflicted on the communist governments of Eastern Europe.

Beneath the surface, the United Kingdom is rapidly heading towards a grand and brutal reckoning. The political class in Westminster (and particularly the administerial bureaucrats in Whitehall) have run the country into the ground. Political incentives all align against any real fixes being made. The bizarre ideologues of mass immigration keep the endless inflows coming, all while the social welfare budget becomes bloats like a corpse in water. All the while, on the horizon, the specter of something even more dangerous hovers - with protests, riots, and terrorism carried out by both the anti-immigration right and the pro-Palestine/Islamic left now a weekly, if not daily, occurrence.

At numerous levels, the United Kingdom is undergoing severe stress-testing that now threatens to sink the entire enterprise entirely. Fiscally, the state is broke and the economy has been thrown into chaos by a series of insane court-mandated rules. Socially, the nation's understanding of itself has been shattered through a combination of immigration and extreme bifurcation of opportunity between the general area surrounding the City of London and the rest of the nation. Politically, the people now search for a solution that does not appear to be coming as the political class grows more sclerotic, not less, in the face of all these challenges.

The government is broke with crippling debt, yet they continue to spend billions to put up third-world murder hobos in four star restaurants and offer people free cars if they just claim they have some kind of "disability," which can be as minor as "anxiety" or "depression."

I do not know what is going to happen in the United Kingdom in the next few years, but I am very confident that the present system will not last. Something will surely give, and when it does each piece of the situation I have just laid out for you will metastasize in rapid fashion, throwing one of the most clownish and intolerable political castes that presently exist anywhere on the planet into a nightmarish situation that far more competent men would barely be able to navigate successfully.

posted by Ace at 04:20 PM

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