London Has Fallen

Southport riots, free speech and Islamic subversion

When Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons in June 1940 and declared Britain would not give up the fight, he delivered the greatest speech of his career and one of the most powerful moments in British history.

We shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.

It was no exaggeration to say “alone.” The Nazi scourge was fast engulfing Europe. In two years, Germany had taken Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and by the time Churchill spoke, Norway and France were weeks from surrender. In less than a year, the Luftwaffe would drop incendiary bombs on the chamber where he stood and burn the roof off Westminster Hall itself.

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end.

And so they did. After France fell to Germany that month, Britain stood alone against the Axis powers in Western Europe. Hitler readied to invade Britain, but the Royal Air Force defended her skies, making invasion untenable and marking the first major German defeat. It helps that my mother is part British and my father was an Air Force pilot, but the main reason I became obsessed with the RAF as a boy was because of this glorious last stand, because when the light of life was all but smothered out, and the rest of Europe cloaked in Nazi red, when the Luftwaffe launched its aircraft across the English Channel, and the mouth of hell yawned open, Britain got its lick back.

The Battle of Britain was one of the most dramatic and decisive conflicts of the war. I think I even cheered aloud reading about it for the first time, and one of my most prized toys was a model of the Supermarine Spitfire that helped win the fight, which remains one of the most elegant fighter planes that ever flew.

After the battle, Churchill famously remarked, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Supermarine Spitfire

But my friends, London has fallen. Britain is without the kind of spitfire leadership that guided it through the dark days of the war, and the threats of today are not the kind that you can shoot down. The scourge that is spreading across the map of Europe today is not the Nazi path of conquest by airstrike or tank, but a cultural force, a subversion of Western European values that is intangible, invisible, inimicable. It has taken over so subtly and over so many years that as it was happening, those few who noticed and spoke out were dismissed as paranoids or fools.

But London has fallen. The grand and glorious nation I grew up admiring from afar has been cut down. The reason for the fight in the first place, that proud purpose for which so many British gave their lives, and was carried for decades after the war, seems to have simply washed out with the tide of the last decade.

A few days ago, a British police officer issued a fixed penalty notice to a woman for thinking in the wrong location. The woman was standing outside an abortion clinic. She was not protesting, not holding a sign, not chanting slogans. As she explained to the officer, “I’m not doing any actions. I’m just simply thinking, silently in my head.”

Britain has established “buffer zones” of about 500 feet around abortion clinics in England and Wales in order to prevent harassment, but this has resulted in people like the woman above being fined merely for existing in such areas.

In May, a man was issued a similar notice for silently standing on the sidewalk near an abortion clinic. Also this week, a 55-year-old woman from near Chester was arrested for posting online that the Southport killer was Muslim. The killer, who murdered three toddlers with a knife, was rumored to be Muslim but was actually a Rwandan-British teenager. Nevertheless, anti-immigrant riots have since broken out.

Also this week, a man was arrested for posting on Facebook a gun emoji next to a brown-skinned emoji. The man claimed he didn’t know certain opinions are illegal, but it made no difference. Reading this, I was reminded of a case some years ago when a Muslim man raped a 13-year-old girl in Nottingham but was spared a prison sentence because he said he didn’t know raping children was illegal.

The people of Britain have been surrendering their freedom of speech for years. In 2017, Russian authorities brought criminal charges against 411 people for things they said online. That same year, British police arrested 3,395 citizens for online remarks. Since then, the situation in Britain has only gotten worse.

When Churchill spoke, the impending doom added gravity to his words. His rhythm and gift for argument, his voice, even the space where he stood made the message more ominous. The old darkened chamber, before it was bombed and rebuilt, had a heavy liturgical feel. It was designed with only a few windows to create a formal mood for debate, which resulted in smothering shadows cut by dramatic shafts of light. Members of parliament sat draped in a funeral pall of black tailored wool. Adding to the tenebrous air, the benches and desks were made of fine English oak, all painted in dark veneer, and turned to face each other like choir stalls in a chapel.

Churchill had only taken office the previous month. His predecessor Neville Chamberlain had infamously signed the Munich Agreement, giving the Sudetenland, the German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia, to Hitler in exchange for a fool’s promise of peace from a racist psychopath. Of course, Hitler had no interest in peace and made no attempt to hide it.

In Mein Kampf, he had written of Germany’s need for Lebensraum. He had expressed his hatred of the Versailles Treaty, which forced Germany to cede territory to nearby European states. In the Hossbach Memorandum, a summary of a meeting in 1937, Hitler had detailed his plans for German expansion, starting with Austria and Czechoslovakia, which is exactly what he did. Yet remarkably, returning from Munich, Chamberlain claimed to have established “peace with honor” and uttered the infamous words, “I believe it is peace for our time.”

Less than a year later, Hitler invaded Poland, killing 66,000 Polish soldiers and slaughtering up to 200,000 civilians in bombings, executions, and atrocities. Today, peace for our time refers to appeasing the enemy only to delay an inevitable conflict. The lesson we have learned, and that Britain has clearly forgotten, is that peace for our time is not peace at all.

What Churchill meant to defend was not merely his island home but one of the last great shores of freedom in the Western world. As I have explained elsewhere, freedom of speech began in ancient Athens with the concept of parrhesia. Since then, philosophers such as John Locke in England, Voltaire in France, and Immanuel Kant in Germany have argued for free expression as a fundamental human right. But before America enshrined this principle in the First Amendment to the Constitution, it was the British who developed it as a legal concept.

In 1215, a group of barons who had grown frustrated with King John’s taxes composed the Magna Carta, establishing that the king is not above the law and laying the groundwork for individual rights. In 1689, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, the Bill of Rights was created to ensure monarchs could not infringe upon the legislature, providing parliamentary privilege, or freedom of speech among members of parliament.

In 1695, Britain ended the practice of prior restraint, or censoring material before publication, with the Licensing Act. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, various reforms in libel laws further expanded free speech, such as by introducing truth as a defense and establishing clearer boundaries for what could and couldn’t be published, thereby indirectly promoting a freer press.

By the time of World War II, Britain was one of the freest nations on earth. It had spent untold blood and treasure in the defense of that freedom, waged wars to secure it, passed laws to enshrine it, and erected monuments to honor it—the Reformers’ Memorial in Kensal Green, the Magna Carter Memorial, the Martyrs’ Memorial at Oxford, the Chartist Monument in Kennington Park. Whatever it took, wherever it led, these were a people prepared to keep the flame of liberty burning, at any cost.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.

The incredible fighting spirit of the British people is remembered in such moments as the Battle of Britain or the Miracle of Dunkirk. It is remembered in the Defense of Rorke’s Drift, when in 1879, a garrison of 150 British soldiers defending their position against thousands of Zulu warriors. It is remembered most beautifully in the St. Crispin’s Day Speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, when on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, the king declares they are lucky to be outnumbered. “The fewer men, the greater share of honour,” he says, for “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

But my friends, London has fallen. Last year, Britain passed the Online Safety Act, giving the Secretary of State the power to suppress any speech it deems “harmful.” This is one step further in a direction the country has been sliding for years. The erosion of free speech in the UK has been a collective enterprise, with politicians across the political spectrum taking part. Prime Minister Blair of the center-left Labour Party passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, making it an offense to stir up hatred against a person on the basis of their religion, despite concerns that this would stifle free speech by criminalizing criticism of religious beliefs.

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk

This is exactly what has come to pass. In November, I interviewed Amjad Alrubayan, a Saudi immigrant to Manchester who was arrested after explaining online his reasons for being an atheist, which included criticism of his native Muslim faith.

But PMs Cameron, May, Johnson, and Sunak of the center-right Conservative Party have only made matters worse. Cameron’s Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 contained a measures limiting free speech, especially in academic settings, in the hopes of preventing students from being radicalized. May’s Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019 criminalized the viewing of online content that could be useful to terrorists, even if viewed only once, making it hard for journalists and researchers to do their jobs. Johnson’s Online Safety Bill regulates online hate speech and misinformation. And Sunak’s government has continued to support the bill.

It is no stretch to say that if George Orwell were writing today, he might get a visit from Big Brother and find himself in jail for thoughtcrime. Earlier this week, the UK government wrote on X, “Think before you post.”

Apparently high on its own supply, the British government is even threatening to extradite American citizens from the U.S. to be jailed in the UK for violating their authoritarian online speech codes. London’s Metropolitan Police chief Mark Rowley had the balls to say, “We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you.”

Wilfred Reilly, professor of political science at Kentucky State and a former guest on The Radicalist podcast, commented on X, “Bro, we will literally conquer your country and free it.”

Of course, for British officials to extradite U.S. citizens requires dual criminality, meaning the crime would also have to be illegal in the United States. But just as British culture has been subverted from its once liberal values, the same is happening here at home. I have written about the Marxist subversion of America, but so far we have managed to hold onto our freedom of speech. However, we can easily slip off the path and find ourselves in similar terrain as our British brothers and sisters.

In fact, that may come to pass if Vice President Harris and her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz win in November. In June 2022, Harris announced the launch of a task force to “protect people from online harassment and abuse.”And Walz recently caused a stir because he went on MSNBC and said, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

Except for the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, of course.

Speaking with a friend about Britain, I recently observed the grim fact that Orwellian Newspeak is now in vogue to describe current events there. I see critics using terms such as Ingsoc (English socialism), thinkpol (thought police), and thoughtcrime. My friend scoffed. Things are not so bad, he said. No one’s thoughts are illegal. I told him of the woman recently arrested for thinking to herself. And I reminded him that the Thought Police of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four didn’t literally police thoughts. They policed politically incorrect opinions, whether written down or spoken. In fact, the first mention of thoughtcrime in the novel is when the protagonist Winston Smith writes “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in his secret diary.

All this matters for the same reason it has always mattered, because speaking truth is the best defense against tyranny, because we must be able to call out authoritarian forces, whether foreign or domestic, and push back against lies. In America, such forces take the form of woke ideology, which in various ways tries to push doublethink upon us, telling us that 2 + 2 = 5 and that we are in some way evil if we do not agree. In Europe, the prevailing force of authoritarianism subverting liberal values is not Marxism but radical Islam. Like the Nazis of World War II, Islamic extremists are bent on Europe’s destruction and the subjugation of its people.

“We have five children while you have one or two,” a Pakistani man recently told a Dane. “In 10 years, there will be more Pakistanis than Danes here. There are only 5 million Danes. You will soon be exterminated. This isn’t Denmark anymore. We are taking over your country.”

Another Muslim man recently explained to an interviewer on the street that gay people will be executed under the new Sharia regime that will take over the West. “We are making babies,” he said. “You are not. Your population is going down the slump, right? And by 2060, Muslims will be the biggest religious group the world over. What are you going to do then?” He added, “One day we can have a Muslim majority nation here in Canada.”

One Muslim preacher stated, “Islam will prevail in the UK. The British patriots will fail. Submit yourselves to Allah!”

Another Muslim preacher matter-of-factly explained, “Islam will come into every family whether you like it or not. We have a plan.”

As with Hitler, these extremists are explicit about their goals. They make no attempt to hide it. They openly talk about forcing all foreigners to live under Sharia or die by the sword. Figures in Britain such as the Muslim preachers Anjem Choudary and Omar Bakri Muhammad have been as loud and as clear as humanly possible.

They have praised barbaric acts of violence. They have explained how to achieve the conquest of our nations by changing Western societies from within, using our own democratic systems to influence policy. Choudary has been linked to several extremist groups, including Al-Muhajiroun. Bakri was banned from returning to the UK after leaving for Lebanon in 2005. But there are thousands more. And the laws are changing. In Britain, you can now be jailed for criticizing Islam. This is the bargain Britain has decided to strike. This is peace for a time.

Yet even in this darkest hour, I am inspired by Churchill and the spirit of the British. I have hope thanks to that great man from Oxfordshire who stood in that hallow, church-like chamber, making his dramatic call to the defense not merely of a nation but of a noble principle, a principle more precious than their lives or their land. In that darkness, Churchill spoke frankly about the possibility of defeat, but believed firmly that even if London fell, what mattered most was that the principle of freedom should live on. He believed it would do so here in the New World, and that we might turn the tide and free the fallen British. I happen to share in that belief.

And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.