Dear John,
Nigel Farage considers himself a champion of free speech. So do Donald Trump and JD Vance.
But in Washington yesterday, US Congressman Jamie Raskin and others in Congress called Farage out to his face: he only wants to protect speech that he agrees with.
Farage abandoned his post in Parliament to testify at a House Judiciary Committee hearing concerning “Europe’s threat to American speech and innovation.” He spent his time degrading Britain, before fleeing early to the safety of a sympathetic GB News interview.
He told US representatives that Britain had become a dystopian autocracy, likening the United Kingdom to North Korea. The case of Lucy Conolly - who pleaded guilty to inciting violence against migrants - proves we are being censored and punished for speaking up, he said. Farage lamented the fact that he couldn’t bring Connolly along.
While there are concerning threats to free speech in Britain - primarily draconian laws against protestors and the right to assembly - Farage doesn’t care about those. He supports crackdowns on protests, so long as they’re not anti-migrant hate parades.
If anything, he’d go even further. Farage has pledged to scrap the Human Rights Act and introduce a new ‘British Bill of Rights’ that cuts international oversight of human rights cases and threatens to further empower the government to violate civil liberties.
Perhaps worst of all, Farage completely ignores Trump’s egregious infringements of free expression. Jamie Raskin, who called Farage a “Trump sycophant”, laid it bare: Trump and MAGA are banning books, militarising the police, kidnapping college students, taking over universities and turning the government into a cash machine for Trump and his family.
But Farage can’t acknowledge any of this - because, as Lord Heseltine recently put it, he’s “Mr. Trump’s vicar in England.” It will be on full display at the upcoming Reform conference, set to feature American alternative-medicine cranks, US-aligned fossil fuel lobbyists, and think-tank strategists looking to important Trumpism into Britain.
For Trump and Farage, free speech is a tool, a means to an end rather than a sincerely held belief. It’s a slogan designed to obscure their darker, less popular agendas. Mass deportations. More executive power. Cronyism and oligarchy.
We already knew it. But it bears repeating:
Farage and his far-right friends around the world believe in nothing but power. Don’t be fooled by this philosophical grandstanding.
Finally, if you’d like to hear what my OB colleague James Patrick has to say about it all, head on over to our Ugly Politix Substack.
