Farage the Failed Distraction from Trump’s All-Out Assault on Free Speech
Washington, D.C. (September 3, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the full committee hearing examining how Republicans are obsessing about a so-called free speech crisis in Europe to distract from President Trump’s unprecedented assault on the First Amendment rights of all Americans.Hearing on “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation”September 3, 2025"I imagine that in a hearing about threats to freedom of speech abroad we might hear from a Russian dissident about Putin’s massive violations of political freedom. Or the death of Alexei Navalny in prison. Or perhaps from a Chinese pro-democracy activist about President Xi’s attacks on free speech in Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang or the persecution and trial of Jimmy Lai. Or maybe from a journalist about the Saudi Crown Prince’s brutal assassination of Jamal Kashoggi, the Washington Post writer who demanded freedom from the reign of religious repression and persecution in Saudi Arabia. But no, the dictators of the world have nothing to fear from this hearing. The Republicans called it to attack our democratic allies in Europe. The star witness is not a human rights leader like Navalny, but a far-right, pro-Putin politician who leads the UK Reform Party, a party that is 4 members out of 650 members in the Parliament. He calls England an “authoritarian regime” while saying that Vladimir Putin is the world leader he admires the most. Well, this hearing mimics Vice President JD Vance, who went to the Munich Security Conference in February and in the first two minutes of his speech, whitewashed the world’s leading autocratic regimes proclaiming that the threat that worries him is “Not Russia, it’s not China,” but rather it’s our European allies. Amazing. Republicans are promoting far-right and neo-fascist parties in Europe like Alternative für Deutschland, Reform UK and Rassemblement National Français, and ignoring massive repression in Russia, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and among all the autocrats of the world. The Republicans are vilifying robust European liberal democracies simply for engaging in the kind of line-drawing exercises that we engage in under our First Amendment with respect to the epidemic of child pornography, protecting children from other harmful content, defamatory speech, online scams and false advertising, and speech inciting riots and imminent lawless action—all forms of speech that the First Amendment does not protect and whose tricky contours must still be drawn by law.We could have a meaningful hearing on this complicated subject, but this hearing is just a drive-by hit against a strong democratic ally to benefit a Donald Trump sycophant and wannabe.But it’s even worse than this. Not only are our Republican colleagues ignoring intensifying repression in the world’s dictatorships, but they are also trying to distract the world from the attack on freedom taking place right here in America every day.Americans are not worried about the European Union or the Online Safety Act in the UK. We’re not worried about white nationalists and not having enough license to incite lynch mobs to set immigrants on fire in their bedrooms.Americans are worried that Donald Trump is working to rewrite and whitewash our history in our museums, our textbooks and our national parks, to destroy PBS, NPR, and public broadcasting, to ban books in our libraries, and to censor news stories critical of him by installing political henchmen in private broadcast rooms.We fear that academic freedom at colleges and universities is in danger when the Administration cancels and withholds billions of dollars in scientific and medical research funding from American universities, even for urgent and life-saving studies about breast cancer or heart attacks, as a way to force schools to impose a government orthodoxy on curriculum, hiring, admissions, and any student and faculty speech that MAGA considers politically incorrect.Americans see Trump trying to harass, intimidate, control or shut down the press, like ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR and PBS. The Republican-controlled FCC essentially blackmailed media companies Skydance and Paramount into agreeing to install a spy, a monitor, a “minder,” I think the Brits might say, to police CBS news programs—to make sure they are being sufficiently “Trumpy” in giving us the news—in order to get approval of a merger from FCC. Meanwhile, Trump sued 60 Minutes and CBS personally for $20 billion for the frivolous cause of action that he thought an interview with Kamala Harris was edited—in Trump’s view—too favorably, and walked away with a cool $16 million in a shakedown settlement for his library, all part of now a familiar pattern. When Trump doesn’t like the news, he sues the broadcaster and unleashes the FCC on them until they pay up and agree to a government spy stationed in their office. Free speech is so much in danger in the U.S. that if the government tries to violate our rights, we might not even be able to find a lawyer to defend ourselves because Trump is systematically exacting retribution against law firms that represent anyone on the other side of the case against him. Our country loves free speech—we fight for free speech, we fought for free speech—and we know it’s in danger when students who are lawfully in the United States are taken off the street and arrested without warrants by masked federal agents in unmarked cars for writing an article or attending a rally that Stephen Miller doesn’t like. Free speech is in danger when visitors to our country have their social media accounts screened at the border for criticism of Donald Trump. Free speech is in danger when To Kill a Mockingbird, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984 and The Kite Runner are banned from our schools and libraries across the country, and even families defending our freedom abroad have to fight for their kids’ right to read freely in public schools run by the Department of Defense.Freedom is in danger when the administration tramples the Civil Service rights of hundreds of thousands of nonpartisan, expert civil servants. Civil servants who have been protected from political discrimination for more than a century to maintain the excellence and independence of our federal workforce, but are now being fired simply for doing their jobs, like prosecuting violent criminals and insurrectionists who tried to overthrow our government and attack our police officers, or because they honestly gave honest economic information and labor statistics to the public. These honorable civil servants are being fired because they won’t be the political hacks Trump demands them to be.When private comments made by federal employees are scrutinized for “anti-Trump bias,” and they can lose their jobs because of it, then we have entered the realm not just of Vladimir Putin but of Joseph Stalin.Mr. Trump and Mr. Farage both claim they are protectors of free speech, but they only want to protect speech they agree with. In the UK, Mr. Farage is promoting the abolition of the Human Rights Act of 1998, to be replaced with a “British Bill of Rights” that limits the right of free speech to British citizens and legally sanctioned residents. He complains that racist threats against immigrants are not protected free speech, while he proposes to strip migrants, tourists and perhaps even visiting American Congresspeople of any free-speech rights at all. I had my own close encounter with that when Mr. Farage and his team presented for more than an hour in a conversation we had about free speech, and after three minutes of talking, he cut me off and terminated the meeting because he didn’t like what I was saying. That’s the kind of free speech he’s committed to.There is a free speech crisis in America, but there is no free speech crisis in Britain. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has not shut down GB News, where Mr. Farage has his own show, just because Mr. Farage has used his airtime to call for banning peaceful protests he disagrees with. No one has stopped him from going on Russian TV 17 times and saying also and repeating that the one world political leader he most admired was Vladimir Putin, even though Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, and a dictator who has regularly interfered in other countries’ democratic elections.No one has stopped Mr. Farage from parroting Putin’s absurd talking points, like when Farage claimed that NATO, the United States and Britain “provoked this war” in Ukraine.For a man who fashions himself as some kind of free speech martyr, Mr. Farage seems most at home with all the autocrats and dictators of the world who are crushing freedom on earth.Mr. Farage wants to get rid of the Online Safety Act in his country, a law shepherded by the Conservative Party and implemented by the Labour Party, which bans child pornography online, protects children from harmful content, forbids nonconsensual pornography and other unlawful content. He should go and advance that position in Parliament, which is meeting today, if he’s serious about it. To the people of UK who think this Putin-loving free speech impostor and Trump sycophant will protect freedom in your country, come on over to America and see what Trump and MAGA are doing to destroy our freedom, kidnap college students off the street, ban books from our libraries, militarize our police and unleash them against our communities, take over our universities, wreck our professional civil service and turn the government into a money-making machine for Trump and his family. You might think twice before you let Mr. Farage “Make Britain Great Again.”" https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/ranking-member-raskin-s-opening-statement-at-hearing-on-republicans-failed-distraction-from-trump-s-all-out-assault-on-free-speech
David Ainsworth ● 128d7 Comments ● 127d