Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a foreign affairs columnist at POLITICO Europe.
The five stone-faced police officers that detained Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow airport for three trans critical posts this week didn’t unholster their sidearms, but they nevertheless managed to shoot themselves in the foot.
Or, to be more accurate, they shot British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the foot, with a rankling arrest that unsurprisingly sparked a political firestorm — and the free speech debacle couldn’t have come at a better time for far-right ReformUK party leader Nigel Farage.
“Politics is downstream from culture,” the late American conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart once famously argued. This is the maxim now guiding MAGA ideologues as well as the likes of Farage, who is now posing as a free-speech defender and stirring the pot for the benefit of populists.
Never one to mute his hyperbole, Farage was touring Washington this week, stirring up trouble as only he knows how. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee — a panel chaired by Republican Representative Jim Jordan, who’s been examining the impact British and European online safety rules are having on U.S. tech giants — the U.K.’s roister-in-chief was in his provocative element, reveling in clashes with irate Democratic lawmakers.
Gleefully raising Linehan’s arrest as another example of the “war on freedom” being waged in Britain — and even Europe for that matter — he compared the U.K. to the likes of North Korea, calling it an “illiberal and authoritarian censorship regime.” He also highlighted the case of Lucy Connolly, a local politician’s wife who was jailed for 31 months for inciting violence, after calling for asylum seekers’ hotels to be set alight. Her goading posts came at the height of the Islamophobic anti-migrant riots that broke out in Britain in 2024.
Now released, Connolly has grandiosely dubbed herself Starmer’s “political prisoner,” and her case has became a cause célèbre in MAGA world — despite the fact that in a more orderly era in the U.S., her incendiary remarks may well have been construed as posing a direct threat to public safety and, therefore, not protected under the First Amendment.
But for Farage and his MAGA friends, Connolly is a political martyr, and His Majesty’s Prison at Peterborough, where she served her sentence, is no different than a Stalin-era Siberian Gulag.
During a visit to the White House this winter, Starmer had rebutted rising MAGA criticism over the Labour government’s handling of freedom of expression and online rules, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance told him that Britain’s “infringements on free speech” also “affect American technology companies and by extension American citizens.”
“We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom – and it will last for a very, very long time,” Starmer chided gently in response. But according to Farage this week, Starmer had “talked about our proud history of free speech but what people say, what they do, are two very different things.”
And isn’t that the truth.
Of course, increasingly open-ended and vaguely drafted online safety regulations, as well as some undeniably heavy-handed policing of speech in Britain and elsewhere should be cause for some alarm. And it has prompted many across the political spectrum — not just populists — to rightly to question whether there’s a drift toward “unfreedom” in Western democracies. In Britain, police are now making around 12,000 arrests a year for offensive speech and social media posts that cause anxiety.
For many, the balance between freedom of expression and protection has gone askew and cancel culture has run amok — Linehan’s arrest certainly highlights that something’s amiss. And this has given Farage an opening.
But what is it that really troubles the ReformUK leader and MAGA-style populists in the U.S. and Europe? Are they genuine advocates of the classic liberal virtue of free speech, or are they provocateurs using it to foment resentment in a culture war they hope to win?
“You can say what you like, I don’t care because that is what free speech is,” Farage told a Democratic lawmaker during the midweek hearing. But despite his righteous rhetoric, much like his MAGA allies, Farage seems more intent on simply replacing the “woke language” of liberals with the anti-woke language of the populist right, on silencing and brow-beating opponents, and on intimidating media outlets as best he can on the way to establish public cultural dominance.
For example, just days before he set off for Washington, a county council led by Farage’s ReformUK party banned the main local newspaper and its website from attending events, and told the outlet’s reporters that elected officials wouldn’t respond to their queries. The ban imposed by Nottinghamshire County Council came after the newspaper had published a series of stories the municipal authority leader claimed “consistently misrepresented” the party.
So much for free speech.
Now lifted after Farage had a “little chat” with the council amid mounting public criticism, this ban is part and parcel of how Reform often tries to intimidate reporters — or “thuggish bullying” as it’s been described by the Independent’s David Maddox.
But bans and bullying are part of the tactics used by every far-right populist. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was the sherpa on this, shaping what he likes to call an “illiberal democracy.” U.S.-based think tank Freedom House labels Hungary as only partly free as its government “moved to institute policies that hamper the operations of opposition groups, journalists, universities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) whose perspectives it finds unfavorable.”
MAGA ideologues in the U.S. have now enlarged the Orbán playbook, targeting NGOs and universities and so-called mainstream media with gusto. They see themselves not just as warriors fighting a national battle but as combatants in a civilizational, politico-cultural crusade that’s to be carried out well beyond America’s shores. As far as they see it, they need save Western civilization — from itself, if necessary. Which means that for them, domestic and foreign policy are one and the same, and that liberal Europe also has to be remade in the MAGA image.
“Trump and his MAGA camp believe a dominant liberal establishment has skewed U.S. culture towards a weak progressive ideology that does a disservice to America. This ideology is being fed by a ‘globalist elite,’ chief among them Europeans. The new administration is therefore going after all the liberal holdouts, at home and abroad,” argued Célia Belin of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“MAGA’s solidarity with conservative, nationalist and populist movements in Europe has an objective: finding partners for Trump’s effort to transform global culture.”
The post The populist battle for cultural dominance appeared first on Politico.
