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Great Britain Cracks Down on “Non-Crime Hate” Speech, Including Playground Taunts

By: Jonathan Turley | November 22, 2024

In my book, The Indispensable Right, I discuss how free speech is in a free fall in Great Britain, where officials continue to crack down on an ever-widening array of viewpoints. Some of these actions are designated as “non-crime hate” but are still the subject of law enforcement actions. According to the Daily Mail, they now include children who have been pulled in for calling other children schoolyard names like “retard” or saying that other children smell “like fish.”

According to the Daily Mail:

“A nine-year-old child is among the youngsters being probed by police over hate incidents… Officers recorded incidents against the child, who called a fellow primary school pupil a ‘retard’, and against two schoolgirls who said another student smelled ‘like fish.’ The youngsters were among multiple cases of children being recorded as having committed non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs), The Times discovered through freedom of information requests to police forces.”

“Non-crime hate” was introduced in 2014 as part of the Hate Crime Operational Guidelines. It is chilling in its ambiguity and scope. It only requires the perception of either a victim or a third party that a statement is motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, or transgender identity.

The HCOG stresses, “The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of the hostility is not required.”

That guarantees the maximal level of investigation and documentation of speech incidents. The chilling effect on free speech is glacial.

For years, I have been writing about the decline of free speech in the United Kingdom and the steady stream of arrests:

A man was convicted for sending a tweet while drunk referring to dead soldiers.
Another was arrested for an anti-police t-shirt.
Another was arrested for calling the Irish boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend a “leprechaun.”
Yet another was arrested for singing “Kung Fu Fighting.”
A teenager was arrested for protesting outside of a Scientology center with a sign calling the religion a “cult.”
Last year, Nicholas Brock, 52, was convicted of a thought crime in Maidenhead, Berkshire. The neo-Nazi was given a four-year sentence for what the court called his “toxic ideology” based on the contents of the home he shared with his mother in Maidenhead, Berkshire.

While most of us find Brock’s views repellent and hateful, they were confined to his head and his room. Yet, Judge Peter Lodder QC dismissed free speech or free thought concerns with a truly Orwellian statement: “I do not sentence you for your political views, but the extremity of those views informs the assessment of dangerousness.”

Lodder lambasted Brock for holding Nazi and other hateful values:

“[i]t is clear that you are a right-wing extremist, your enthusiasm for this repulsive and toxic ideology is demonstrated by the graphic and racist iconography which you have studied and appeared to share with others…”

Even though Lodder agreed that the defendant was older, had limited mobility, and “there was no evidence of disseminating to others,” he still sent him to prison for holding extremist views. After the sentencing, Detective Chief Superintendent Kath Barnes, Head of Counter Terrorism Policing Southeast (CTPSE), warned others that he was going to prison because he “showed a clear right-wing ideology with the evidence seized from his possessions during the investigation….We are committed to tackling all forms of toxic ideology which has the potential to threaten public safety and security.”

Great Britain is now turning, it appears, to their children in speech crackdowns. Schoolyard taunts can be investigated by officers. The impact on both parents and children will obviously be immense. It adds a coercive element to speech laws. Given the subjective and vague standard, the response is to self-censor to avoid any such accusations. Raising children in such an environment will only erode free speech values. Indeed, it fosters the type of speech-phobic generation that many activists may welcome. Speech is viewed as dangerous and subject to continual monitoring by the state.

Stopping some kid from using a playground taunt will do little to instill mutual respect, but it will instill fear over how the state may respond to your words. It is a lesson that many in the free speech community may relish but one that most citizens should reject. “Non-crime hate” investigations are meant to maintain a constant sense of oversight and monitoring of speech, even with our children.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

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Free Speech, International Politics

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The U.K. Just Banned Chemical Castration for Kids. America Should Do The Same and More

BY: JORDAN BOYD | JUNE 12, 2023

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The United Kingdom’s primary government health system will no longer hand out castration drugs to children like candy because “there is not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness as a routinely available treatment.”

The National Health Service announced on Friday that only kids in the United Kingdom who are enrolled in clinical trials or get approved for an exception would have access to prescriptions that suppress and wreak havoc on humans’ natural growing pattern.

The decision to halt the universal prescription of life-altering drugs is long overdue considering there was never any evidence that permanently manipulating a child’s body would remedy his or her mental struggles.

In recent years, pharmaceutical companies and bureaucracies began marketing a sterilizing chemical regime as a way to “pause” puberty for the growing number of kids who claim to struggle with gender dysphoria. On the contrary, the increasing body of evidence shows that pumping kids full of neutering drugs causes irreversible harm, including sexual dysfunction and permanent infertility, a higher risk of cancer and cardiac events, impaired vocal cords, bone density issues, and transition regret.

NHS still allows doctors to “socially transition” children, a nonsense concept since “transitioning” sexes is physically impossible. But the agency is not afraid to warn medical professionals that transgender interventions like wrong-sex hormones — which studies show lead to sickening regret — will “cause some irreversible changes.”

NHS also rightfully acknowledges that “in many cases gender variant behavior or feelings disappear as children reach puberty.” In the U.S., schools, hospitals, corporations, and the White House claim that refusing to perform dangerous gender experiments on children via drugs or surgery will banish victims to turmoil, discrimination, and suicide.

Similarly, while someone can be remotely approved to mutilate functional body parts in just 22 minutes in the U.S., the British taxpayer-funded agency still requires a “detailed assessment, usually over 3 to 6 appointments over a period of several months.” Even if someone was approved for a so-called “transition,” the socialized health care system’s “waiting times for referral and treatment are currently long.”

The NHS’s recent actions aren’t perfect but they are better than the status quo in the United States, where the federal government and president repeatedly force the sterilization of kids on Americans.

No matter what the current institutional complex claims, children aren’t lab rats to be pumped full of dangerous drugs. They are the most vulnerable in our society and their innocence deserves protection from the left’s radical sexual agenda.

More than a dozen Republican-led states recognize this, which is why they have effectively restricted or banned physical transgender interventions. Countries like Sweden, Finland, France, and now the U.K. are coming to terms with this reality and scaling back their participation in the mutilation racket.

Unfortunately, banning the mass dissemination of disfiguring drugs in only some areas of the world is not enough. Especially because states like California, Washington, and Minnesota have set themselves apart as sanctuaries for mangling children, with cities like Madison, Wisconsin working to follow suit.

We need to not just ban the demonic act of chopping off healthy body parts or rendering them useless with castrating drugs, but also punish the people promoting and executing the left’s shop of horrors behind parents’ backs. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton classified it as child abuse. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis barred people seeking mutilation from using taxpayer-funded programs to pay for it. If reelected in 2024, former President Donald Trump promised to kick medical professionals who meddle unnecessarily with children’s bodies off of Medicaid and Medicare.

The radical gender ideology movement is mentally, physically, and spiritually hurting adults and children. Until it is quelled, corporations and governments will continue to push the transgender industry’s profits over people.