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  • 5 months ago
British lawmaker and leader of the Reform UK party Nigel Farage testified in front of Congress during a hearing on how the online policies of the U.K. and the European Union pose a threat to “American speech and innovation.”

Claiming that the U.K. has “sunk into” an “awful authoritarian situation,” Farage used examples from his homeland to deliver a cautionary tale about free speech to Washington.

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00:00Do you swear or affirm under penalty or a perjury that the testimony you're about to give is true
00:05and correct to the best of your knowledge, information, and belief? So help you God.
00:09He should go and advance the positions he's taking here in Congress today in Parliament,
00:14which is meeting today, if he's serious about it. To the people of UK who think this Putin-loving
00:20free speech imposter and Trump sycophant will protect freedom in your country, come on over
00:26to America and see what Trump and MAGA are doing to destroy our freedom, kidnap college students
00:34off the street, ban books from our libraries, militarize our police and unleash them against
00:40our communities, take over our universities, wreck our professional civil service, and turn
00:46the government into a money-making machine for Trump and his family. You might think twice
00:51before you let Mr. Farage make Britain great again. He complains that racist threats against
00:57immigrants are not protected free speech while he proposes to strip migrants, tourists, and
01:04perhaps even visiting American congresspeople of any free speech rights at all. You can say
01:09what you like, I don't care, because that's what free speech is. And in a sense, this has
01:14all been going wrong now for a couple of decades. We've kind of forgotten the Voltairian principles
01:19that will fight and defend to the death your right to say something that we fundamentally
01:25disagree with. That is the absolute foundation, if you think about it, of free speech, of democracy,
01:30of living in freedom. We have a couple of very famous cases. We, of course, have Lucy Connolly,
01:36who put out an intemperate tweet after the savage murder of those three beautiful young girls,
01:41she herself, a mother who had lost a child. It was intemperate. It was wrong. But she removed
01:47it three and a half hours later, sentenced to 31 months in prison. She's now out, having
01:54served 40 percent of the time. I wanted to bring her with me today as living proof of
02:00what can go wrong. Sadly, the restrictions that have been put on her banned her from making
02:05the trip, which is a very, very great shame. And we, of course, have the extraordinary events
02:12that we understood yesterday of Graham Lyon, the comedy writer, comedic writer. And he put
02:18out some tweets months ago when he was in Arizona. And months later, he arrives at Heathrow Airport
02:27to be met by five armed police. Armed police, not a big deal in the USA, a very big deal
02:34in the United Kingdom. Five of them. And he was arrested and taken away for questioning.
02:40He's not even a British citizen. He's an Irish citizen. This could happen to any American
02:47man or woman that goes to Heathrow that has said things online that the British government
02:51and British police don't like. It is a potentially big threat to tech bosses, to many, many others.
02:59At what point did we become North Korea? Well, I think the Irish comedy writer found that out
03:05two days ago at Heathrow Airport.
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