Nigel Farage Issues Dire Warning To Congress About Threats To Free Speech In The West

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At today's House Judiciary Committee hearing, UK MP Nigel Farage warned about threats to free speech.

Transcript

00:00Thank you, Mr Price.

00:01The Right Honourable Member of Parliament, Mr Farage, is recognised.

00:05Well thank you very much indeed.

00:06Good morning, everybody.

00:07Thank you, Chairman Jordan, for inviting me here today.

00:10And it turns out, with news in the last 48 hours, to have been really rather timely.

00:16I'm delighted to reacquaint with the charming Mr Raskin, a delightful testimony you gave

00:23me earlier on with your speech.

00:26But hey, that's fine.

00:27You can say what you like.

00:28I don't care, because that's what free speech is, and in a sense, this has all been going

00:33wrong now for a couple of decades.

00:35We've kind of forgotten the Voltairian principles that we'll fight and defend to the death your

00:41right to say something that we fundamentally disagree with.

00:45That is the absolute foundation, if you think about it, of free speech, of democracy, of

00:49living in freedom.

00:50It's kind of why we fought two world wars at massive, massive cost, to defend that very

00:55principle for ourselves and for many, many others around the country.

01:00I first became worried about all this with cancel culture, you know, the idea that we can't

01:05have this speaker go to a university because some people might be offended by what he or

01:10she have to say.

01:12It is important to note that there is not a parent in the United Kingdom, and I would

01:19guess it's the same for America too, that is not concerned about content their children

01:26as minors can find on the internet.

01:29Not a single parent that is not concerned about this.

01:32But at the moment, we're not finding the right solutions.

01:36I do myself begin to think that hardware might be one of the solutions, that laptops, that

01:44handsets could be programmed so that many, many apps and many, many services simply aren't

01:50available from these devices.

01:52But what we've done is to go down the legislative route.

01:57And it's extraordinary that, you know, I come from a land of Magna Carta, or I come from

02:01a land that gave us the mother of parliaments, and it doesn't give me any great joy to be

02:06sitting in America and describing the really awful authoritarian situation that we have now

02:13sunk into.

02:14J.D.

02:15Vance did us all a service at the Munich Security Conference back in February this year.

02:20He really got this debate up and running, and it's a vital one.

02:24We've run on since then.

02:26The Online Safety Act was put in place by the last Conservative government.

02:30I don't doubt for a minute their good intentions, but sometimes the road to hell is paved with

02:35those good intentions.

02:37And we are now where we are.

02:39We have a couple of very famous cases.

02:41We of course have Lucy Connolly, who put out an intemperate tweet after the savage murder

02:47of those three beautiful young girls, she herself, a mother who had lost a child.

02:52It was intemperate.

02:53It was wrong.

02:54But she removed it three and a half hours later, sentenced to 31 months in prison.

03:00She's now out, having served 40% of the time.

03:04I wanted to bring her with me today as living proof of what can go wrong.

03:09Sadly, the restrictions that have been put on her banned her from making the trip, which

03:14is a very, very great shame.

03:17And we of course have the extraordinary events that we understood yesterday of Graham Lyon,

03:23the comedy writer, comedic writer.

03:26And he put out some tweets months ago when he was in Arizona.

03:33And months later, he arrives at Heathrow Airport to be met by five armed police.

03:39Armed police, not a big deal in the USA, a very big deal in the United Kingdom.

03:43Five of them, and he was arrested and taken away for questioning.

03:48He's not even a British citizen.

03:51He's an Irish citizen.

03:53This could happen to any American man or woman that goes to Heathrow that has said things

03:58online that the British government and British police don't like.

04:01It is a potentially big threat to tech bosses, to many, many others.

04:08This legislation we've got will damage trade between our countries, threaten free speech

04:14across the West because of the knock-on roll-out effects of this legislation from us or from

04:20the European Union.

04:21So I've come today as well to be a klaxon to say to you, don't allow, piece by piece,

04:29to happen here in America.

04:32And you would be doing us and yourselves and all freedom-loving people a favour if your politicians

04:40and your businesses said to the British government, you've simply got this wrong.

04:45At what point did we become North Korea?

04:47Well, I think the Irish comedy writer found that out two days ago at Heathrow Airport.

04:53This is a genuinely worrying, concerning, and shocking situation, and I thank you for the

05:00opportunity to come here today.

05:02Thank you, Mr. Wright.

05:03Well said.

05:04Thank you, Mr. Farage.

05:05Professor Kaye, you're recognized for five minutes.

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