❓WHAT HAPPENED: A House Judiciary Committee hearing transformed into a debate over online content rules and their impact on Western values after Reform Party leader Nigel Farage testified on the erosion of free speech rights in the United Kingdom.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: Nigel Farage, Jim Jordan (R-OH), Jamie Raskin (D-MD), and others.
📍WHEN & WHERE: September 3, 2025, at a House Judiciary Committee hearing.
💬KEY QUOTE: “We’ve kind of forgotten the Voltairian principles that we will fight and defend to the death your right to say something that we fundamentally disagree with. That is the absolute foundation, if you think about it, of free speech, of democracy, of living in freedom.” – Nigel Farage
🎯IMPACT: The hearing intensified the debate on censorship in the United Kingdom and online speech regulations.
Testimony to the House Judiciary Committee by Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s populist Reform Party, on the state of free speech in his country on Wednesday quickly turned into a debate over online content rules and their impact on Western freedoms. Farage raised cases like those of Graham Linehan, an Irish comedy writer arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport for social media posts about transgenderism that he sent while in the United States, and Lucy Connolly, a mother of young children imprisoned for making unflattering comments about asylum seekers in the wake of a mass stabbing in Southport, England.
“We’ve kind of forgotten the Voltairian principles that we will fight and defend to the death your right to say something that we fundamentally disagree with. That is the absolute foundation, if you think about it, of free speech, of democracy, of living in freedom,” Farage told the committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).
Of Linehan’s case in particular, he stressed, “He’s not even a British citizen. He’s an Irish citizen. This could happen to any American man or woman that goes to Heathrow that has said things online that the British government and British police don’t like,” adding: “At what point did we become North Korea? Well, I think [Linehan] found that out two days ago.”
Farage criticized Britain’s new Online Safety Act and similar censorship regulations in the European Union (EU), warning Europe was falling into an “awful, authoritarian situation” and cautioning America not to go down the same path.
Committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who has clashed with Farage before, attempted to undermine the Brexit champion, suggesting he did not really believe in free speech because he once opposed allowing pro-Palestinian protesters to demonstrate practically on top of a Remembrance Sunday service honoring Britain’s war dead. Raskin also interrogated Farage over his party supposedly not giving interviews or press credentials to certain media outlets and journalists, although the Democrat failed to explain how this would be comparable to law enforcement arresting social media users for “grossly offensive” posts.
The hearing is ongoing…
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