spiked
Published 19 Nov 2025Our new documentary, Think Before You Post, about the rise of the British speech police, was due to have its premiere in London next week. Last night, the venue got in contact to say it would be cancelling our booking, because the event does not align with its “values”.
Here, spiked‘s Tom Slater tells all.
We are working flat-out to find a new venue for the same night. So if you bought tickets, do bear with us. But if we can’t find somewhere else in time, we’ll refund everyone and postpone it for a later date. If you’d like a refund now anyway, get in touch and we’ll process it.
At least they’re proving our point …
About spiked:
Founded in 2000, spiked was a pioneer of 21st-century journalism – the first online-only political magazine in the UK.
Now edited by Tom Slater, spiked reaches millions around the world with hard-hitting articles, incisive essays and a growing roster of podcasts and videos.
November 20, 2025
Our free-speech documentary has been cancelled! | A London cinema has banned Think Before You Post
November 8, 2025
October 18, 2025
Remembering GamerGate
We’ve lived through such a tumultuous decade that it’s sometimes difficult to remember what things were like in the “before times”. On Substack chat, John Carter linked to this essay by Billionaire Psycho which helps refresh memories about one of the seminal events that kicked off the political and social chaos of the last decade:
GamerGate is maybe the most important event of the past 20 years which never receives mainstream media coverage. Lomez will be publishing an in-depth history of GamerGate, to serve as an official record going forward, and that’s crucial as part of building a foundation for a new culture — fighting the narrative war over how history is remembered, how history is interpreted, what events are recognized as significant and influential moments in culture, and how Western identity is defined.
GamerGate was only possible because a generation of incompetent Leftists inherited an empire built on propaganda that came without a legible instruction manual. Leftists forgot how to run their imperial machine. Video games sedated young white men, funneling their energy into a simulation of achievement, an illusory power fantasy of digital significance. Leftists forgot that porn, video games, movies, junk food, and other passive consumption activities primarily existed to prevent young white men from doing anything useful with their lives. And this zone of sedation was viewed as another industry to conquer so that DEI activists could bully the video game industry into providing overproduced elites with fake jobs.
This event was important for several reasons.
GamerGate exposed American Sharia laws. It unveiled the shibboleths, religious taboos, and blasphemy codes which were considered more important than Constitutional protections on “free speech”. A gulf emerged between written laws, and selective enforcement.
GamerGate was maybe the first time in 50 years that Leftists suffered a real, measurable defeat.
It functioned as a generational awakening: a catalyst that activated a decentralized army of shytpoasters, bloggers, podcasters, streamers, journalists, and RW activists.
It mapped out in real-time the architecture and OODA loop of the Leftist hivemind, providing empirical data on how the swarm intelligence perceives, coordinates, reacts, propagates … and suffers damage.
It educated critics of the hegemonic monoculture that rules the Global American Empire.
But I think the most important aspect of GamerGate was that it disproved the narrative illusion that everyone more or less accepted as conventional wisdom, the bedrock of the uniparty worldview. Before GamerGate, it was taken as a self-evident fact that America was a capitalist country, and that all of the evil in the world was caused by Wall Street corporations chasing “shareholder value” and advancing “the profit-motive”. Capitalism and racism were the invisible demons which could be used as scapegoats for anything bad that ever happened at any point and at any place in American society.
Leftism could do anything it wanted, no matter how dumb, destructive, intrusive, or evil — and then blame capitalism and racism for the consequences.
This illusion was shattered by GamerGate.
[…]
There’s one important thing that’s been lost since GamerGate (GG) and the Meme War of 2016, which is the adolescent fun, transgressive irreverence, and juvenile sense of humor which once characterized the RW youth. There was a brief window when video game enthusiasts believed they could meme their way to victory (they did), win a landslide election (they did), and reverse imperial decline (they didn’t). Ten years have passed since then. Countless accounts have been banned, doxxed, deplatformed, debanked. Dissidents have been prosecuted and imprisoned. The presidency of 2016 was stalled out and subverted, the election of 2020 was stolen, the election of 2024 almost ended in an assassination on live television. Covid lockdowns crashed the economy and trapped everyone in their homes, while Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioted outside in the name of George Floyd.
At some point, it stopped being fun, and the contest turned into a forever war.
Comedy turned serious.
But it should be remembered that in the aftermath of GamerGate, humor and a playful, childish energy fueled the engine of RW victories. That’s the secret ingredient.
Samizdat is the key to winning.
Always remember to keep having fun, and keep laughing, because our enemies are ridiculous.
October 9, 2025
Britain is only a few steps further than Canada in the war on free speech
In The Line, Peter Menzies looks at the worsening situation for freedom of speech and freedom of expression in Britain, noting that what’s happening over in Blighty is our immediate future with current Liberal bills before Parliament to give government bureaucrats more power to silence us:
Everyone may know, for instance, that Kimmel got suspended by ABC for a week following statements made in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But not a lot of people consuming Canadian media know that in the U.K., comedians weren’t just getting one-week suspensions. Nope. Last month they were getting arrested.
Right-wing icon Katie Hopkins, best known for her Batshit Bonkers Britain clips and Silly Cow tour, hadn’t been charged at the time of writing, but was arrested and, as they say in Blighty, “interviewed under caution”. Previously, Graham Linehan was arrested upon his return from the United States by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport. At issue were posts he had made on X in April.
“If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space,” one Linehan post declared, “he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
Currently on bail, Linehan returns to court on Oct. 29. The charges are harassment, criminal damage and suspicion of inciting hatred.
The merits of the cases can be debated, but my point today is that when it comes to digital policy and policing you, and the internet, Canadians and their media should be paying a lot more attention to the U.K.
Because it is there that the true illiberalism of modern Western so-called liberalism is most menacingly embraced. Even prior to the U.K.’s Online Safety Act coming into effect, pre-existing British legislation had been used to, for instance, convict six retired police officers for making comments “deemed to be offensive” within their private WhatsApp chat group. Following the Southport mass stabbing murders of little girls, at least two women with no prior history with police were given prison sentences — one for 15 months for a Facebook post calling for a mosque to be blown up, another 31 months for a tweet calling for hotels full of migrants to be burned. While their comments were certainly worthy of vigorous condemnation, the intervention of the state into private, closed conversations and the involvement of police, courts and the penal system has taken matters in the U.K. to a level inconsistent with liberal traditions.
Now that the Online Safety Act has supplemented those laws, hundreds of people have been arrested and dozens so far convicted for social media posts. The government calls the act a “new set of laws that protect children and adults online” in much the same way Justin Trudeau explained Canada’s own Online Harms Act. It’s all about “safety”.
Online Harms may have died when Parliament was prorogued last winter, but a successor is anticipated and, given Prime Minister Mark Carney’s obvious Anglophilia, it’s easy to speculate — fear is a better word — that he is taking inspiration from the Brits. After all, up until a few months ago, he was one of them.
Fighting back in the U.K. is, among others, Lord Toby Young, the Conservative peer, associate editor of The Spectator and founder of the Free Speech Union, which now has a Canadian branch featuring, among others, journalist Jonathan Kay. Young has protested that criminalizing disinformation hands governments the power to determine truth. Nevertheless, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has muttered that maybe the police have more important things to do, he shows — despite the meteoric rise in the polls of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party — no inclination to order a digital retreat.
In fact, Starmer just doubled down with the introduction of legislation imposing mandatory digital IDs. A petition opposing it and the potential to enable mass surveillance and state control has already gathered close to three million signatures.
There’s a good chance the Canadian Free Speech Union will be similarly engaged in the years ahead. The Trudeau government’s instincts when it came to digital legislation were not as extreme as Britain’s. And there are very real differences in the legal structure of free-speech rights in Canada and the U.K. — we have the Charter, and the British don’t. So our laws would be enacted and enforced differently here than they can be the the U.K.
October 6, 2025
“Hate speech” bans work perfectly to eliminate mean words and mean thoughts … and the rivers will run uphill
I have to assume that the headline captures the mentality of the people who call for more “hate speech” legislation, because the real world evidence clearly fails to support the notion. Many well-meaning people want the government to have the power to suppress speech they don’t like, never thinking that a different government could use the same laws to quash opinions they support. In the National Post, Chris Selley argues that the last way to achieve reconciliation with First Nations would be to ban “residential school denial”:
Two years ago, I ruefully predicted that Canada’s new law purporting to outlaw Holocaust denial would likely lead to a law purporting to outlaw “denying” the impact of the residential school system. That hasn’t happened yet, but we are well on our way.
The Liberals recently announced plans to table legislation that would purportedly outlaw displaying the Nazi or Hamas flags or symbols of other hate movements, and that has only intensified calls for that law outlawing “residential school denialism”, or indeed denying Canada’s “genocide” against Indigenous peoples.
“What is the difference between Holocaust Denialism and Residential School Denialism? I suggest there is no difference at all,” author Michelle Good wrote in the Toronto Star Tuesday on the occasion of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. “The inclusion of Holocaust Denialism in the criminal code is obviously to prevent the denial of the Jewish genocide of World War II. Therefore, after clearly illustrating that the residential school system was genocidal in nature and intent, it is difficult to find any reason whatever that Residential School Denialism should not be criminalized as well.”
I say these two new and proposed new laws would “purportedly outlaw” atrocity-denialism and hate symbols because they aren’t outright bans on the speech in question. Rather, to fall foul of them, you have to use your argument, flag or symbol to “wilfully promote hatred” against the group in question. It was and is already illegal to wilfully promote hatred against a religious or ethnic group — albeit with some huge caveats, more on which in a moment.
At some point in the future, should the Liberals remain in power — and perhaps even if they don’t — the government is likely to knuckle under to the calls for censorship of certain residential-school opinions. It’s just not worth the political blowback to object, or so one can imagine a backroom strategist reasoning. They would probably introduce the new law just in time for the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. If police are willing to enforce these laws, there’s little reason to believe Crown prosecutors would be interested in pursuing the cases. That, in turn, would only frustrate the people who see value in this censorship, and would likely lead to ever-stronger laws … that themselves likely wouldn’t be enforced.
This is not good lawmaking, and it’s a chilling argument when the simple act of pointing out how many bodies have actually been discovered on former residential school sites is widely considered a form of “denialism”.
September 26, 2025
John Carter revisits the cancellation debate
As part of a much longer essay, covering a lot more ground, John Carter considers the pro and con arguments for the much-cancelled right to fully indulge in cancelling figures on the left in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination and the widespread celebration of the murder by leftists:
Talking heads on network television are whining that it’s getting out of hand, while abruptly unemployed leftists take to GoFundMe to beg for support.
The purge has started, and yes, thank you, I’m feeling quite vindicated right now.
Repeating myself is boring, so I’m not going to rehash the arguments in favour of turning cancellation against the left. Suffice to say, they have it coming. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s an important distinction to be made between getting a labourer fired because he made the OK sign, and removing a medical professional who openly celebrates the death of a man for having opinions shared by half the country. Can a bloody-minded leftist doctor be trusted to give medical care to a Trump voter, when he’s on the record as advocating the execution of Trump voters? The doctor should certainly be allowed to say what he pleases, and he should have the same right to use a social media account as anyone else, but he probably shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine.
But I don’t want to rehash that. Instead, I want to focus back in on human water fountain women as an exemplar of that choir of liars suddenly singing hymns to the sacred practice of freedom of speech. People would be shocked by this self-serving mendacity if long experience had not accustomed them to it.
We aren’t shocked because we’ve seen this before, repeatedly. The left screamed about the spontaneous unguided tour of the capitol on J6 as an insurrection and an unforgivable attack on our democracy, conveniently forgetting that the Weather Underground were bombing federal facilities, including the Capitol, back in the 70s, or that the state capitol of Wisconsin was occupied by protesters in 2011 … or that they’d attacked the White House in 2020 … to say nothing of the nation-wide Burning Looting and Murdering they committed in the wake of Floyd’s fentanyl overdose.
The curious phenomenon of leftist narrative blindness was repeatedly demonstrated during the COVID years, in which the entire professional-managerial caste would switch from one narrative to its opposite like a school of fish, confidently proclaiming on one day what they had denounced as anti-scientific misinformation just the day before.
Sure enough, in the wake of Kirk’s murder, with his blood still on the ground and their gleeful cries ringing in the world’s ears, the left went on an immediate disinformation counter-offensive. They adopted the narrative that Tyler Robinson was a right-wing groyper – an online follower of Nick Fuentes – who had assassinated Kirk for not being based enough, or for supporting Israel, or something. It was for lying about this that Kimmel was pulled off the air. The evidence for Robinson’s right-wing sympathies were that he’d been raised in a conservative Mormon household by a police officer father, and that he’d dressed up as a gopnik once or something. Robinson’s live-in relationship with a troon, the Antifa slogans he’d carved into the bullet casings, and his friends and family attesting to his left-wing radicalization were waved away. This is what abusive narcissists do: “I didn’t do the thing you just saw me do to you, and anyhow you deserved it”. Sure enough, as I wrote this, another leftist sniper attacked an ICE facility in Dallas; sure enough, leftists immediately began insisting that he couldn’t possibly have been a leftist, this time on the grounds that the shooter inscribed “Anti-ICE” rather than “Fuck ICE” on his bullets.
The left also tried to change the conversation to the supposed problem of right-wing violence. Professional-looking infographics flooded onto social media, pushed by Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, Ilhan Omar, and the Economist.
Ilhan Omar (note that the data are from the ADL).
The infographics make it look like there’s an epidemic of right-wing political violence being waged against a peaceful, tolerant, and defenceless left. This is of course nonsense. Every time someone dug into their data, it turned out that they were basically doing this:
It isn’t even necessary to subject the datasets to close scrutiny. Look at the Economist graphic. See that little black rectangle in 2020? The Economist would have you believe that there was practically no left-wing political violence at all in 2020, which as everyone remembers was a fiery but mostly peaceful year. The Economist dataset turns out to have been curated by an Antifa activist, by the way, which I suppose makes the Economist an affiliate of an international terrorist organization, now.
Now, you can say “they’re just lying”, and yes, quite a few of them know exactly what they’re doing.
[…]
In a lot of cases, however, calling them “liars” isn’t quite accurate. Lying implies conscious deception. If you’ve talked to these people, which I know you have to the point where you have post-traumatic stress disorder, you know that they seem to really believe the things they say. It does not matter in the slightest if they contradict the thing they said yesterday. They apparently have no memory of their previous statements. Their present belief is always entirely sincere. It does not matter if observable reality is in stark contradiction to their belief. They have lost the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, with the result that they routinely mistake their own pop culture propaganda for reality.
That they do not even seem to notice when they contradict themselves suggests a void of self-awareness. This is the origin of the NPC meme, which depicts leftists as Non-Player Characters, effectively no more than computer programs that emulate human behaviour. When the meme first began to spread a few years ago, there was a purge of Twitter accounts that posted it. The NPC meme cut leftists to the quick because they instinctively recognized – as everyone did – the truth in it. Leftists complained that the NPC meme was dehumanizing, which is actually perfectly correct. An NPC is not really human.
We see evidence for this NPC absence of self-awareness everywhere. A self-aware person who had spent a decade viciously persecuting anyone who publicly contradicted leftist orthodoxy would understand that an appeal to freedom of speech once they themselves were persecuted for their words would garner mockery rather than sympathy. A clever Machiavellian would therefore preface their entreaties with expressions of contrition for their past behaviour, however insincere. Not one of them has done this, which makes it less likely that their attempt to appeal to freedom of speech is mere calculated cynicism. It is instead as though they themselves are not aware of their own previous actions.
September 24, 2025
QotD: The political divisions of humanity
… the various divisions between human beings — communists vs. fascists vs. loyal American patriots — we have lived with all our lives are less important, less fundamental, than the basic one that Heinlein identified: “The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire”. Call the first group authoritarians or feudalists and the second, generic libertarians.
The first time, in the history of Western Civilization, that this became an issue, was the Renaissance/Reformation. Information suddenly came flooding, unbidden, into Europe, from North Africa, through Galileo’s telescope, out of Gutenberg’s printing press, and a dozen other undesirable, unlicensed, and deplorable sources. It must have been a nightmare for the aristocrats who considered themselves to be in charge, the kings and barons and bishops and bullies. They struggled in vain to get it back under control. They got the Church to condemn it. They intimidated and tortured its emissaries when they could. They invented universities to get a handle on it, a collar around its neck, but it was a lost cause. In just a couple of centuries (compared to the previous 500 generations), people — ordinary people; who the hell did they think they were? — came to know too much for the good of Authority.
And they soon proved it, in the American Revolution, which told 10,000 years of kings to go to hell, and the French Revolution, which cut to the chase and removed their overly-pampered heads. I have actually seen the blade. Many other revolutions followed, worldwide, and people began to learn, slowly and awkwardly, to live their own lives. The one good thing to come out of the brutal and deceitful Russian Revolution was the ultimately individualistic philosophy of refugee Ayn Rand.
Otherwise, it was a naked attempt by the authoritarians, the feudalists, to regain control of the masses that the Czar had clumsily let slip through his overly-manicured fingers. Whenever human beings have clashed over whether their lives should be controlled by others or not, it has almost certainly been a matter of who gets to be the next king, baron, bishop, commissar, etc., a battle between liberated entities and those who would restore feudalism.
L. Neil Smith, “The Deep State”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-04-14.
September 8, 2025
“Down with this sort of thing!”
In the free-to-cheapskates part of Ed West’s post on the Graham Linehan case in Britain, he identifies one of the reasons that Linehan’s Father Ted became so popular in the country it was situated in:
I don’t think I’d seen a “down with this sort of thing” placard in the flesh since I watched the Protest the Pope march back in September 2010. Those were the heady days of New Atheism, before the movement evolved into something more explicitly progressive.
The sign references an episode of the 1990s comedy Father Ted, in which the protagonist and his dim-witted sidekick Fr Dougal are forced to protest the screening of a blasphemous new film called The Passion of Saint Tibulus. Among the many catchphrases popularised by the comedy, back in 2010 this one suggested an ironic and gently mocking attitude to religion; that it was ridiculous, rather than evil.
This week, outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court in Marylebone Road, the sign appeared in a rather different context, carried by supporters of Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan as he faced charges of harassment and criminal damage in an ongoing trial, following an incident at last year’s Battle of Ideas involving a young transgender activist.
Linehan had been bailed before trial, allowing him to travel to the United States to work on a new comedy project. When he arrived back at Heathrow on Monday, however, he was arrested by five armed police officers over three tweets he had posted back in April. The situation was as absurd and surreal as anything that had emerged from the writer’s fertile imagination.
As Linehan described it on his substack: “When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. ‘Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists’. The officers gave no reaction and this was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank-and-file, there was a sort of polite bafflement. Entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.”
The incident is embarrassing to Britain as it faces increasing scrutiny in the US for its poor record on free speech, especially over the Lucy Connolly case. It was unfortunate timing that this arrest happened just as Nigel Farage was heading in the other direction to talk about this very issue in Washington. But Linehan’s ordeal is also part of a much longer and sadder story about the perils of the political meeting the personal.
Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan had worked on The Fast Show before renowned comedy producer Geoffrey Perkins had taken to one of their ideas, about a group of priests stuck on a remote Irish island, proposing that it be written as a six-part sitcom. It was brilliant, and hugely loved, and in its timing was significant.
Conor Fitzgerald wrote of Father Ted that, while well-loved in Britain, in Ireland it is more like “the national sitcom, a piece of light entertainment that nevertheless Says Something Meaningful About Us”. It also appeared at a crucial time in history.
Not only was Father Ted one of the few successful TV representations of Ireland, it was made during Ireland’s version of the Swinging Sixties, our flux decade of the Nineties. The accelerating collapse of the Church and the exposure of longstanding political corruption coincided with the dawn of the Celtic Tiger years, lending peripheral Ireland a sense of self-conscious modernity. It was a unique national turning point, where our 19th-century past seemed to co-exist with our 21st-century future. In reflecting this upheaval, Father Ted has become not just a social historical document, but a portent of where Ireland stands today.
When Ted was broadcast, the Church was formally still one of the central pillars of Irish life, but its authority rang hollow. Priests often felt like administrators of a vanished country. And on remote Craggy, Ted, Dougal and Jack mirror this directly. All good sitcoms feature characters who are trapped, but Ted is doubly so: first on his island; and second in an institution people are coming to see as irrelevant. He is still an essential member of the community, more than just a ceremonial functionary for weddings and funerals. But it’s just not clear what the essential thing he does is anymore, beyond being a common reference point that deserves token respect.
Ted and Ted therefore stand at a crossroads, and capture the more fundamental social change in Ireland at this time: the collapse in respect for older establishment hierarchies generally.
Those establishment hierarchies collapsed across the West in the late 20th century, first in more secularised nations such as Britain and France and later, and more quickly, in places like Ireland and Spain where the Catholic Church still held on.
The Church lost its power to patrol its taboos, without which it became a sitting duck for satirists; the Passion of St Tibulus was influenced by the protest against Life of Brian, successfully banned in Ireland until 1987. As a teenager, Linehan had to join a film club to watch it, but such censorship was disappearing everywhere.
Father Ted was a work of genius, employing a surreal style of humour that has often been characteristic of Linehan and Mathews, and later seen in their under-appreciated sketch show Big Train – including the brilliantly bizarre sketch in which Beatles producer George Martin is kidnapped by Hezbollah.
The clerical comedy bequeathed numerous catchphrases. “I hear you’re a racist now, Father”, which features in an episode where Fr Ted is wrongly accused of anti-Chinese prejudice, is still a popular meme. Likewise, “These are small, but the ones out there are far away“, Ted’s explanation of perspective to his idiotic housemate, is still used to mock the gormless.
The show was also charming, and its treatment of religion was far from vicious. Rather than being a vitriolic attack on Church authority, Father Ted poked gentle fun at the absurdity of the old order, a kind of mockery which is perhaps a more dangerous threat to a belief system that relies on awe and fear. It was innocent, and many years later Linehan said he would find writing Father Ted much harder in light of the abuse scandal.
September 4, 2025
They can’t catch actual criminals, but they are quite capable of arresting social media users
Andrew Doyle hopes that the farcical performance by British police in sending five armed officers to arrest Graham Linehan as he stepped off the plane will be a tipping point:
How many more controversies will it take? The arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan by five armed police officers as he landed at Heathrow Airport has become an international news story because it so self-evidently tyrannical. The stress of the ordeal raised his blood pressure to an alarming degree and he was rushed to hospital. With the help of the Free Speech Union, Graham is now suing the Metropolitan Police. You can donate to his crowdfunder here.
It is reassuring to see that some action is being taken against such chilling state overreach, but when will our politicians follow suit? Many of us have been warning about this ongoing assault on liberty for many years, and at every watershed moment we’ve been led to believe that something will be done. Then, inevitably, the “blob” is activated and swallows up any potential for progress in its viscous and undulating folds.
So when Sir Mark Rowley, head of the Metropolitan Police, complains that the police are acting on unclear laws, and that the responsibility for the maltreatment of the likes of Graham lies with those in power, he’s overlooking the impact of the activist middlemen. Let’s not forget that the Home Office has twice instructed the College of Policing to stop the recording of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs) and has been ignored. Or that the chairman of the College of Policing, Lord Herbert, said the solution to the complaints about NCHIs might be to rename them. As though the public’s concerns about this brazen authoritarianism might be assuaged with a touch of rebranding.
Rowley’s buck-passing is likewise inadequate. He claimed that Graham’s arrest was necessary because officers “had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed”, which is palpably untrue. He said: “I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position”. He also made clear that police would continue to behave in this way “unless the law and guidance is changed or clarified”.
But this is precisely the problem. At present, a quango called the College of Policing trains officers in England and Wales. In my article for UnHerd about Graham’s arrest (which you can read here) I make the case that the College of Policing has become woefully unfit for purpose due to activist capture. For a long time, agitators within the system have reinterpreted and fudged the actual law in favour of what they would like it to be. This has led to some police acting in potentially criminal ways. Most egregiously, there is clear evidence of systemic bias against gender-critical individuals within the police force, and a reluctance to apply identical standards to trans activists who routinely post threats of death and rape and are rarely investigated for it.
In the wake of the Linehan arrest, Tom Knighton wonders why the US isn’t treating the UK as it would any other tyranny where free speech and other civil liberties are denied to the people on a whim or a suspicion:
The United States has a history of dealing with tyrannical governments, who oppose tyrannical governments we like even less. We worked with Saddam Hussein, for example, because he was at war with Iran.
But we never stopped pretending these weren’t tyrants.
So, it’s time we start treating the UK just the same.
The latest incident was a well-known comedian from the UK being arrested over a couple of jokes.
Something odd happened before I even boarded the flight in Arizona. When I handed over my passport at the gate, the official told me I didn’t have a seat and had to be re-ticketed. At the time, I thought it was just the sort of innocent snafu that makes air travel such a joy. But in hindsight, it was clear I’d been flagged. Someone, somewhere, probably wearing unconvincing make-up and his sister/wife’s/mum’s underwear, had made a phone call.
The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two—five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets. In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for this tweet (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up.
… and then, a follow up to that one.
When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists” The officers gave no reaction and this was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank-and-file, there was a sort of polite bafflement. Entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.
While the officers were kind, they still arrested him. They arrested him because he made some jokes. He spent time in a jail cell, was interviewed by detectives, and was treated like a criminal because he made some jokes.
They waited for him at the airport with five officers, something that would be a clear indication to others that he was truly dangerous, over some jokes.
The first one wasn’t a great joke, really, but that wasn’t the issue. This wasn’t that it wasn’t as funny as it should have been, but that it was made at all.
August 16, 2025
Britain slides further down the free speech rankings
At The Conservative Woman, Bruce Newsome reports on the parlous state of free speech in the United Kingdom:
SINCE 2021, the Index on Censorship has ranked Britain as “partially open” (the third tier). Britain ranks 20th for press freedom (worse than Trinidad and Tobago).
Just released: The US State Department concludes that in 2024, Britain’s human rights “worsened” and the British government is partial in protecting rights and freedoms: “Significant human rights issues included credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression, including enforcement of or threat of criminal or civil laws in order to limit expression; and crimes, violence, or threats of violence motivated by antisemitism. The government sometimes took credible steps to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses, but prosecution and punishment for such abuses was inconsistent.”
There are three main categorical freedoms being routinely violated in Britain. In US Constitutional law, they are known as speech, assembly and press. British authorities need a reminder.
Let’s fully understand how this started, more than 25 years ago. In 1999, the Macpherson inquiry into the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence recommended that police should record hateful incidents as a matter of intelligence, even if the incidents were not criminal. Quangos led by the College of Policing encouraged police forces to record non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs). Police took it upon themselves to visit the supposed haters, to “correct your thinking“, to intimidate them with warnings of escalation, and even to strong-arm them into taking thought-correction classes with the police, at cost.
The 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act criminalises hatred of protected characteristics. It was once sold as a protection against violence, but was soon wielded to criminalise speech.
Police make more than 30 arrests a day (more than 10,000 per year) for online speech and record 66 non-crime hate incidents per day.
Despite several administrations claiming to review and restrict the definitions of hate speech and NCHIs, the definitions remain too vague to prevent police from repressing speech they don’t like. In 2024, the Free Speech Union submitted freedom of information (FoI) requests to all 43 police forces in England and Wales to see if recording went down since a new code of practice of June 2023. The number has actually increased. This year the current government sneakily signalled its appreciation of NCHIs in response to a petition to abolish them.
The latest statute aimed at free speech came into force on July 25: the Online Safety Act. The Bill was marketed as a necessary legislation to protect minors from harmful material such as pornography, self-harm forums, and bullying towards suicide. Like the Hatred Act, the Online Safety Act is being used to suppress politically inconvenient content.
British public authorities (and social media) are suppressing speech and the press selectively with political, religious and ethnic prejudice.
August 3, 2025
QotD: Undermining cultural taboos
One side of the debate argues that the only way to break a taboo is to break a taboo, so the only way forward to is to talk frankly about these things. In the case of crime, for example, the dissident must always interject the demographic facts about crime into the debate, even if it makes the beautiful people shriek. Since most people know the facts, the shrieking by the beautiful people actually advances the cause. This line of reasoning is extended to all taboo subjects universally.
The other side of the debate points out that the taboo breakers always end up in exile or condemned to some ghetto. In fact, their deliberate breaking of taboos ends up reinforcing the taboo, as no one wants to end up like the heretics. Instead, this camp argues the dissident must come up with clever language that subtly mocks the taboos, but narrowly adheres to the rules. The recent use of the word “jogger” is an example of complying with the taboo, while undermining it.
The taboo breakers counter that this just results in an endless search for approved language to hint at unapproved things. It is just a form of self-deception, where the clever think they are in revolt when in reality they are just asking permission. The optics guys counter this by pointing out the obvious. The taboo breakers are removed from the process, so in reality their tactic is just quitting the game. Rather than take on the system in a meaningful way, they mutter epithets in their ghetto.
The Z Man, “Strategy, Tactics & Discipline”, The Z Blog, 2020-05-19.
July 31, 2025
The intent of Britain’s Online Safety Act … and the actual implementation
In The Conservative Woman, Dr. Frederick Attenborough discusses the gap between what the Online Safety Act was intended to do and how it’s actually being enforced now that it’s the law of the land:
X posts like this may not be visible to uses in the UK under the age verification rules of the Online Safety Act.
At the heart of the regime is a requirement to implement “highly effective” age checks. If a platform cannot establish with high confidence that a user is over 18, it must restrict access to a wide category of “sensitive” content, even when that content is entirely lawful. This has major implications for platforms where news footage and political commentary appear in real time.
Ofcom’s guidance makes clear that simple box-ticking exercises, such as declaring your age or agreeing to terms of service, will no longer suffice. Instead, platforms are expected to use tools such as facial age estimation, ID scans, open banking credentials and digital identity wallets.
The Act also pushes companies to filter harmful material before it appears in users’ feeds. Ofcom’s broader regulatory guidance warns that recommender systems can steer young users toward material they didn’t ask for. In response, platforms may now be expected to reconfigure their algorithms to filter out entire categories of lawful expression before it reaches underage or unverified users.
One platform already moving in this direction is X. Its approach offers a revealing – and potentially sobering – glimpse of where things may be heading. The company uses internal signals, including when an account was created, any prior verification, and behavioural data, to estimate a user’s age. If that process fails to confirm the user is over 18, he or she is automatically placed into a sensitive content filtering mode. As the platform’s Help Center explains: “Until we are able to determine if a user is 18 or over, they may be defaulted into sensitive media settings, and may not be able to access sensitive media”.
This system runs without user opt-in and applies at scale. Depending on how X classifies it, filtered material may include adult humour, graphic imagery, political commentary or footage of violence. Already there are signs that lawful content is quietly being screened out.
One example came on July 25, the day the Act’s age-verification duties took effect, during a protest outside the Britannia Hotel in Seacroft, Leeds, where asylum seekers are being housed. A video showing police officers restraining and arresting a protester was posted on X, but quickly became inaccessible to many UK-based users. Instead, viewers saw the message: “Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X estimates your age”.
West Yorkshire Police denied any involvement in blocking the footage. X declined to comment, but its AI chatbot, Grok, indicated that the clip had been restricted under the Online Safety Act due to violent content. Though lawful and clearly newsworthy, the footage was likely flagged by automated systems intended to shield children from real-world violence.
In The Critic, Christopher Snowdon explains the breakdown of trust between the British public and their government that the implementation of the Online Safety Act only exacerbates:
People are right to be concerned about this slippery slope and yet it cannot be denied that it is pornography enthusiasts who have been hardest hit by the Online Safety Act in the short term. They must now verify themselves in one of three ways, each less appealing than the last. They can submit their credit card details, they can scan in proof of ID, such as a passport, or they can take a photo of their face and allow AI to judge how old they are. If they want to maximise their chances of being the victim of blackmail and identity theft, they could do all three.
While we might not think twice about submitting our credit card details to Amazon or posting our photos on Instagram, there is an understandable reluctance to hand over private data in order to access dubious websites for the purposes of sordid acts of self-pollution. The government assures us that the data will be kept confidential but it is only two weeks since we learned about a data breach that led to the names of 19,000 Afghans who wanted to flee the Taliban being given to the Taliban and it is less than two months since the names and addresses of 6.5 million Co-op customers were stolen in a cyber-attack. Rightly or wrongly, millions of British plank-spankers and rug-tuggers do not wish to identify themselves to anybody.
The result is a surge in interest in Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) which allow internet users to access websites as if they were in a less censorious country. Half of the top ten free apps in Apple’s app download charts yesterday were for VPNs. Google Trends data show that searches for “VPN” have gone through the roof since Friday. Readers can draw their own conclusions from the fact that these searches have been peaking between midnight and 2am.
Downloading random VPNs comes with risks of its own and opens up a whole new world of illicit online activity from free Premier League football to the Dark Web. But there is a deeper reason to feel uneasy about this unintended, albeit predictable, consequence of paternalistic regulation. By driving another wedge between the state and the individual, it further normalises rule-breaking in a country where casual lawlessness is becoming part of daily life. A law-abiding society cannot long endure if the median citizen thinks that the law is an ass.
The breakdown of trust can be seen most clearly when the ordinary man or woman does not share the moral certainties of the governing class. Among smokers, a collapse in tax morale — the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes — has led to a huge rise in the consumption of illegal tobacco in recent years. Smokers no longer feel any obligation to pay taxes that are designed to impoverish them to a government that vilifies them. Cannabis smokers learn from an early age to be suspicious of a police force that they might otherwise respect. Motorists who are faced with 20mph speed limits that were introduced by people who hate private transport have no scruples about flouting the law.
July 29, 2025
“The free and open internet has now ceased to exist in the UK”
Britain, like Canada, has been moving toward a less free internet experience for ordinary users, the key bit of legislation in the UK being the Online Safety Act, which like Canada’s proposed Online Harms Act, provides tools to the government to clamp down on online activities they deem “unsafe”:
The free and open internet has now ceased to exist in the UK. Since Friday, anyone in Britain logging on to social media will have been presented with a censored, restricted version – a “safe” internet, to borrow the UK government’s language. Vast swathes of even anodyne posts are now blocked for the overwhelming majority of users.
The Online Safety Act was passed by the last Conservative government and backed enthusiastically by Labour. Both parties insisted it is necessary to protect children. Supposedly, its aim is to shield them from pornography, violence, terrorist material and content promoting self-harm. Age-verification checks, we were assured, would ensure that children would not be exposed to inappropriate content, but adults could continue using the internet as they please. Yet as we have seen over the past few days, on many major tech platforms, UK-based adults are being treated as children by default, with supposedly “sensitive” content filtered from everyone’s view.
Predictably, what is deemed “sensitive” and therefore censored goes well beyond pornography and obviously illegal or adult material. Already UK users of X have been blocked from viewing footage of an anti-asylum protest, a tweet calling for single-sex spaces and a video of a speech in parliament on the grooming-gangs scandal. Historical trivia, such as a thread on Richard the Lionheart, and classic artworks like Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son have been shielded by the tech censors. A thread on X of examples of what has been censored under the Online Safety Act, collated by Benjamin Jones of the Free Speech Union, has itself been partially censored due to the Online Safety Act. Open, political debate online is now a thing of the past.
When the Online Safety Act was first put before parliament, supporters from all parties insisted that fears about its impact on free speech were overblown. “The worst misrepresentation I’ve heard is that the [Online Safety Act] will force tech companies to censor legal social-media posts”, insisted Chris Philp, the then minister for tech and digital economy, now the shadow home secretary, back in 2022. Anyone who warned that this vast new architecture of online speech regulation was obviously going to curtail free speech was presented as a friend of paedophiles, terrorists or the far right. This gaslighting was kept up right until the point the age filters were implemented. “The UK’s online safety regime is here. Will anybody notice?”, asked Politico the day before much of the internet disappeared. The Guardian, on the same day, pondered whether the new rules would be censorious enough.
Despite my financial plight, I’d been considering getting a VPN subscription in advance of the Canadian government getting some version of the Online Harms Act onto the books. Clearly many Brits had already gone that route, and the British government reacts with the care and subtlety one would expect:
June 26, 2025
German police raid homes to counteract online “hate speech” by “digital arsonists”
Things are getting worse for free speech in Germany, as eugyppius reports:
Apollo News reports on the newest, most irregular German holiday, which consists of the police conducting coordinated raids on and interrogations of ordinary people who are alleged to have said rude things on the internet:
On Tuesday morning police across Germany conducted raids targeting “hate speech and incitement” on the internet. According to the news agency dpa, there are currently 170 operations underway, including house searches and other measures. Those accused are charged with insulting politicians and inciting hatred …
The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) is in charge of the operation … In North Rhine-Westphalia, several police authorities struck simultaneously at 6 a.m. Police from Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne, Bielefeld, Münster, Hagen, and Bonn are among those involved. Fourteen suspects are to be questioned and two search warrants executed.1 The individuals in question frequently express themselves on social media, such as on X.
… The Action Day against alleged hate posts has been taking place regularly for years. On June 18, the BKA joined forces with the reporting center “REspect!” to participate in the “International Day Against Hate and Incitement”. People were called upon to report posts that allegedly spread hate.
Today was the twelfth such “Action Day against Hate and Incitement on the Internet”. That is only an approximate title; it varies slightly across press sources. This dubious ritual began in 2016, after Merkel opened the German borders to the entirety of the developing world and our politicians grew tired of people calling them imbeciles online. Police are very open that the goal of these coordinated Action Days is intimidation – or, as they put it, “deterrence”.
Our federal police love this holiday so much they often celebrate it twice a year, which is why are already on the twelfth such day, even though we have only had nine years since the establishment of this custom. Sometimes our betters even throw in bonus action days that for some reason don’t count, as during Covid when they conducted a special “Action Day against Political Hate Postings” after the seventh “Nationwide Action Day against Hate Postings” but before the eighth “Nationwide Action Day against Hate Postings”. Who knows how many such action days we have really had, especially considering that since 2020 the broader EU has adopted this sporadic holiday and occasionally coordinates its own Continent-wide “Action Day against Hatred and Incitement on the Internet”.
[…]
By calling these Action Days idiotic, I don’t mean to minimise them. They are borderline illegal, for they exploit what should be purely investigative tactics (interrogations, house searches) to scare and punish people in advance of any criminal conviction. The emphasis is not only on right-leaning posters, but invariably and most disgracefully on ordinary people with relatively little social media reach, whose posts in many cases have been seen a mere handful of times. The message is clear: They can get you, whoever you are; they can get anybody. Living in a country whose authorities amuse themselves by periodically harassing their own citizens in this way is disturbing. It’s an absolute scandal that all the major political parties support this, save for Alternative für Deutschland. It’s a reason to vote AfD all by itself.
June 14, 2025
Mere disagreement on a political point does not rise to the level of “causing harm” … even in Canada
In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya reports on a Canadian school board’s attempt to paint a parent’s (valid) objection to the forced speech of modern-day “land acknowledgements” as causing “harm” and not acceptable:
Late last month, a Canadian school board informed Catherine Kronas, a parent serving on her child’s local school council in Ontario, that her role was being “paused” for allegedly causing “harm” and violating board policy.
Her offense? “Respectfully” requesting during an April 9 council meeting that her objection to the land acknowledgment be recorded in the meeting minutes. Kronas argued that the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board lacks an official mandate to require land acknowledgments at school council meetings and that such statements “undermine the democratic process”, amount to “compelled speech”, and are “divisive” and “inappropriate”.
Kronas, who has served on the board for the past year and like all board members is a volunteer, has since been barred from attending upcoming meetings, including virtual ones, while the board reviews the allegations.
“They’ve ostracized me and painted me as someone who harms others,” Kronos told me, pointing to the letter she received in May.
Parents who once expressed similar concerns about land acknowledgments privately have all “slunk away” and “gone silent”, she said. She is convinced that if even one other parent had publicly backed her objection, she wouldn’t have been suspended.
“I have no support,” Kronas says.
But Kronas is far from alone in her views. A new poll shows that a majority of Canadians — 52 percent — reject the idea that they live on “stolen” indigenous land. In Kronas’s own region, Hamilton-Niagara, a suburb just outside Toronto, 50 percent said “no” to the concept.
There’s also a political shift underway that reflects this: New legislation from Ontario premier Doug Ford that is widely viewed as effectively anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) aims to roll back some of the ideological activism that has spread through school boards. The bill will, among other things, ban the renaming of schools based on the belief that historical figures are linked to “systems of oppression” and mandate the return of school resource officers, a form of law enforcement, in jurisdictions where police services provide them. In recent years, many Ontario school boards have removed police from schools on the grounds that their presence causes harm to “racialized” groups — a peculiarly Canadian euphemism for non-white people that casts them as perpetual victims in need of saving — and makes at least this brown Canadian feel like something is inherently wrong with us.
