In April 2025, German journalist David Bendels was sentenced to seven months on parole for "defamation" after photoshopping a chalkboard held by Interior Minister Nancy Faeser to read "I hate freedom of speech." The irony is stark: a state punishing criticism of censorship validates the very critique it seeks to silence. This case isn't isolated, it's part of a broader defection from classical liberal principles like free speech across the West. Once the bedrock of enlightened governance, free speech is now an inconvenience to elites pushing a globalist agenda of supranational control, open borders, and technocratic uniformity.

Classical liberalism, shaped by thinkers like John Locke and John Stuart Mill, holds free speech as sacred. Mill's On Liberty (1859) argued that silencing any opinion robs society of potential truth or sharper understanding. This principle fuelled Western constitutions: the US First Amendment, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and similar protections in Canada and Australia. Free speech wasn't just a right, it was a tool for truth-seeking, individual freedom, and holding power accountable.

Yet, by 2025, a "free speech recession" grips 22 democracies, with expression declining in 44 countries, the worst on record. This isn't a natural drift; it's a deliberate shift. Digital media's rise, enabling decentralised voices and market-driven narratives, threatens traditional power structures, state media, global institutions, and their corporate allies. Free speech empowers dissent against globalist priorities, making its restriction a weapon for narrative control.

Germany's §186 StGB criminalises statements that "degrade" someone unless "demonstrably true," with the state deciding truth. Bendels' parole for a satirical image contrasts with the acquittal of comedian El Hotzo for wishing death on Donald Trump, revealing selective enforcement. Startups like "So Done," co-founded by a liberal party youth leader, amplify this, using AI to scour social media for "hate speech" and file lawsuits for profit. It's a censorship business, blending surveillance, legal intimidation, and moral posturing.

The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) takes this further, forcing platforms to remove "harmful" content or face massive fines. In 2025, US Republicans and the State Department slammed the DSA for censoring American speech, including satire, calling it a "foreign censorship threat." The UK's Online Safety Act mirrors this, chilling expression while drawing US criticism for worsening human rights. These laws don't protect free speech, they weaponise vague terms like "hate" to silence critiques of globalist policies, from migration to EU integration.

The US, despite its First Amendment, isn't immune. In 2025, experts report attacks on free speech rivalling Nixon's era, targeting critics of the administration's agenda. The FTC warns that complying with EU data laws could violate US regulations, exposing a transatlantic clash. Canada's Bill C-63 proposes $20,000 fines for "hate speech," with retroactive enforcement, sparking fears of pre-emptive censorship.

These policies disproportionately hit populist voices challenging globalism, sceptics of open borders, trade deals, or climate mandates. While the US State Department imposes visa bans on foreign censors, domestic pressures like social media deplatforming align with globalist efforts to streamline discourse. The pattern is clear: free speech is fine, as long as it fits the approved narrative.

The globalist agenda, UN sustainable development goals, EU expansion, WEF-style technocracy, demands consensus. Free speech disrupts this by amplifying dissent: questioning mass migration gets labelled "xenophobic," challenging climate policies is "denialism," and critiquing digital surveillance is "conspiracy." As populism rises, globalists see unrestricted expression as a threat to their vision of a managed, borderless world.

Digital media fuels this tension. Pre-internet, state-controlled outlets like Germany's Öffentlich-Rechtlicher Rundfunk dominated. Now, platforms like X enable spontaneous order, where consumers choose their sources, eroding trust in legacy media. To counter, globalists push "hate speech" laws favouring protected groups while stifling dissent. The EU's approach, criminalising incitement based on vague criteria, creates a chilling effect, ensuring only sanctioned views thrive.

The West's retreat from free speech isn't progress, it's a slide toward control, sacrificing liberty for a globalist vision. With reports confirming a global decline in expression, we must see this as a deliberate strategy to protect elite priorities. Citizens should demand reform: repeal ambiguous "hate speech" laws, protect digital anonymity, and restore absolute free speech, as the US model strives for (flaws and all). Only by reclaiming classical liberalism can we honour the ideals that built the West, rather than twisting them to serve a technocratic agenda.

https://jihadwatch.org/2025/08/the-uk-goes-full-orwell

"The Online Safety Act was sold to the British public as a way to protect children from adult content, but fighting porn proved to be a trojan horse over fighting what the regime cared about.

Any Britons trying to read the Act probably never made it to Chapter 7 at which point the wooden horse legislation listed a 'Committee on Disinformation and Misinformation' and began handing out matching orders on how internet services are supposed to deal with the bogeys of unfettered speech. What does disinformation have to do with keeping kids from accessing porn?

Recent court hearings revealed that officials had stated that the real purpose was "not primarily aimed at … the protection of children", but regulating "services that have a significant influence over public discourse". There's only one kind of censorship the British government is really into.

Rather than blocking pornography, the Online Safety Act was used to block videos of parliamentary debates about the Muslim sex grooming gang crisis in the UK. Not only wasn't the Online Safety Act protecting children from being exposed to sexual content, it was being used to censor revelations about the complicity of the authorities in the sexual abuse of children.

The OSA is one of a series of pieces of legislation that seem designed to replicate Orwell's nightmarish 1984 dystopia under the guise of reforming and protecting people from things.

Orwell's inspiration for 1984 came from his time working for the BBC under the Ministry of Information which he sarcastically rebranded in the book as the Ministry of Truth. Today's Ministry of Truth is OFCOM, the UK's monstrous speech regulator, which, in a fitting tribute to 1984, is forcing Big Brother onto 'Smart' TVs. In an echo of 1984's TVs playing government propaganda that can't be turned off, the Media Act forces BBC and other government content to have a "privileged" role on internet connected TV's. Whether or not anyone wants them to.

While "1984 was not an instruction manual" is a longstanding meme, it is very much an instructional manual for government officials who brag that the purpose of the Media Act is to "make sure public service broadcast content is always carried."

Furthermore, since viewers insist on not watching government propaganda and instead watching cat videos, the next OFCOM proposal is to also force YouTube and popular video streaming sites to promote government propaganda into your algorithm whether you want it or not. If viewers still choose not to click, 1984 includes a helpful guide for having a gent with a mustache stare at them through their screen to make sure that they are watching the BBC.

And this is much easier in 2024, the year of the Media Act, than it was in either 1948 or 1984.

The Orwellianism is only getting underway and it has disturbing implications for America.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate is a British leftist group run by Imran Ahmed, a former adviser to future London Mayor Sadiq Khan, now operating out of Washington D.C, has been lobbying Congress for censorship, had also proposed giving OFCOM "emergency powers" to immediately force social media platforms to censor political content from the opposition.

The proposal came in the wake of the Starmer regime's mass censorship and arrests of anyone who correctly identified the Southport mass murderer of little girls as a Muslim terrorist.

The massive censorship powers being vested in the OFCOM 'Ministry of Truth' are all the more remarkable considering that even Tony Blair had warned about the dangers of OFCOM being used to censor the media, but these days OFCOM tells media outlets that they must broadcast false claims that men are really women and targeted any dissent on COVID.

The various pieces of legislation granting OFCOM even more power are billed as "reforms", but reforms are supposed to be aimed at government, instead the government is wielding more power over speech and calling it reform. The government monopoly over speech is being conducted under false flags, such as the Online Safety Act, through outright lies, like the false claims by the government that the Southport stabber of little girls wasn't Muslim, and consists of both 'negative' censorship which suppresses free speech, and 'positive' censorship which rams government propaganda down the throats of the masses while suppressing competing views.

Underlying both the negative and positive censorship campaign is the silent recognition that government authoritarianism and policies like enabling Muslim mass migration have become so unpopular that the only way to perpetuate them is through mass censorship, propaganda and criminalization of speech. All the alarmism about "disinformation" and "right-wing violence" is the rhetoric of a political machine that has lost the argument and has nothing to resort to but force.

The Starmer regime can't even begin to win the argument in the marketplace of ideas and so a phalanx of police forces is obsessively monitoring social media to suppress opposing views. No one wants to watch the BBC and the rest of the government propaganda machine, and so the regime has resorted to mandating that Smart TVs and later social media promote them.

It is no coincidence that OFCOM and Muslim mass migration have a common origin in the Blair government. Or that both have grown in conjoined proportion and that legislation like the Online Safety Act are being rapidly deployed to silence the revelation of Muslim sex grooming gangs and other consequences of the mass migration that is destroying the United Kingdom.

79 years ago, Winston Churchill warned that "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." The new iron curtain is descending in an entirely different direction, no longer dividing Western and Eastern Europe, the free and the unfree world, in that familiar direction, but in the new and unfamiliar direction in which London, Paris and Brussels are the ones cut off and falling into the blackest and bleakest darkness.

If Churchill were alive today, he would be the first to warn of an icon curtain descending along Brighton, London, and Newcastle, in whose shadow freedom is lost, where speech is silent and the political system exists to enable Islamofascists and to silence the few remaining patriots resisting them. The United Kingdom has chosen to use 1984 as an instruction manual.

America is next."