Free speech

There are scenes in blockbuster teen movies from the 1980s and 1990s that wouldn’t fly today. I think of Revenge of the Nerds, that classic raunchy coming-of-age tale about pocket protector-wearing geeks no woman would ever touch with a three-foot slide rule. You might recall the heroes of the story install hidden cameras in a sorority house in order to spy on naked, skinny, blonde cheerleaders. In triumph, the Byronic dirtbag yells, “We’ve got bush!” In our purportedly more enlightened age, Hollywood has forsaken making risqué teen comedies for vulgar imps; instead the vulgar imps have taken their raunch to the lawless internet. The powers of AI have multiplied their mischief. Their latest prank is to tell Grok, an AI chatbot on X.

Britain’s Online Safety Act is part of an escalating censorship war between Europe and the United States. It was sold to the British public as legislation that would protect children; in practice, it is a far-reaching internet censorship statute with explicit extraterritorial reach. The OSA purports to grant the UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, the power to do what no one on Earth has the lawful power to do: compel US websites to censor themselves and their users. This affects everyone, not just tech firms. If the UK can impose British speech rules on US companies, then the First Amendment stops being law and becomes a suggestion. At least 29 nations, mostly America’s allies, have enacted similar laws.

New York’s new mayor is woke. The Ugandan-born Muslim leftist Zohran Mamdani imperils the city as we know it, some people grumble. In a recent letter to supporters, Republican Representative Nancy Mace warned that Mamdani was “a man who’s bringing SHARIA LAW to America.” Of course, Sharia and woke are not the same thing. Mamdani’s program, brimming with paeans to trans and gay rights, might not thrill a Wahhabi cleric. Still, he has brought a Middle Eastern flavor, and not in the good sense. During the campaign Mamdani promised to arrest Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu should he decide to visit the United Nations. That hair-raising prospect would expose Mamdani to federal kidnapping charges. He has already done his share of scolding about the Middle East.

President Trump is waging war on the great British disinformation complex. The White House is gearing up to revoke the visa of British citizen and chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Imran Ahmed, amid the Trump administration's greater battle against the BBC. By “countering digital hate,” the CCDH means censoring speech it disagrees with. The British campaign group, which has an office in Washington, has pushed for the deplatforming of Trump officials from social media and for greater restrictions on speech online generally. The CCDH advocated that Twitter/X remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

I’m writing this from Washington, DC, where I’ve spent the best part of a week talking to politicos and think-tankers about the state of free speech in the mother country. Don’t believe our Prime Minister when he says it’s in rude health, I’ve been telling them. It’s on life support and any pressure that can be brought to bear on His Majesty’s Government to protect it would be hugely appreciated. Once again, it’s time for the new world to come to the rescue of the old. Not that they need much convincing. The view of Britain among Washington’s political class isn’t informed by diplomatic cables or articles in the Economist, but by viral videos on X.

Kaley Chiles is a Christian therapist who places the Bible at the center of her practice. To many of her patients, religious faith is often more important than Freud. They see Bible readings, prayer and a focus on spirituality along with traditional principles of psychotherapy as essential elements of any treatment plan.  While outside the mainstream of psychoanalytic practice, Chiles’s technique combining traditional psychotherapy with Biblical precepts for years had been deemed non-controversial, if confined to more conservative regions of the country. But that all began to change in 2019 when the state of Colorado enacted legislation banning so-called conversion therapy for minors, a technique that aims to help gays change their sexual orientation.

In the United States, despite an attorney general who appears unclear on the concept, we enjoy the freest speech laws of anywhere in the world. Not so in the UK, where police casually drop by to harass citizens about their Internet activity. They visited the wrong cottage this summer, as we see in a video released this week by the UK’s “Free Speech Union”. The Thames Valley Police paid a visit to the home of “an American cancer patient and Trump supporter,” who wasn’t having it. “You can come in,” she said, “but you’d better have a damn good reason for being here.”They did not. “I’ll have Elon Musk on you so quick your feet won’t touch,” she said, in a statement that may have carried more weight in June than it does today.

Good morning Britain. Donald Trump is flying to the United Kingdom today for his big state visit. Yet his Attorney General Pam Bondi seems to be going one step further. She appears to think that America, like Britain, ought to now be a country where you can go to jail for posting memes on Facebook.  Katie Miller, hosting Bondi on the Katie Miller Pod, said that Kirk’s murder last week was what happened when college campuses don’t take action against or expel students who harass conservative speakers. Using anti-Semitism as an example of left-wing campus “hate speech,” Bondi claimed in reply: “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society.