America Doesn't Own Free Speech

The UK is not the US in miniature

You’ll have noticed a wave of haughtiness and disdain crossing the Atlantic lately. Nowhere is this more evident than in the pronouncements of JD Vance, Elon Musk and their various associates. Europe, we’re told, has become implacably hostile to free expression: innocent pensioners are dragged off to jail for posting memes on Facebook; anyone who dares criticise the Prime Minister risks a visit from the police.

A couple of months ago—on Valentine’s Day, no less—Vance launched a puzzling, unlettered broadside against European leaders, arguing that homegrown censorship posed a greater threat than Russian revanchism. It’s often said of Donald Trump that we should take him seriously rather than literally, but Vance’s remarks were neither. His speech was a reminder of how degraded political communication has become—especially on the subject of free speech.

Vance and Musk surely know they’re misleading their audiences when they push these narratives. And if they don’t, that’s hardly a more flattering conclusion.

So: is the British state really betraying the legacies of Milton and Mill? And is the US, under Trump, a bulwark against authoritarianism? Let’s deal in specifics.

Take the case of Jordan Parlour—a young man given a custodial sentence for inciting violence during last summer’s riots in England. This wasn’t a case of edgy humour or plucky satire. Parlour encouraged “every man and his dog” to “smash [the] fuck out of Britannia Hotel,” which at the time housed over two hundred asylum seekers. The hotel was later attacked.

It’s true that the US has the First Amendment and a more relaxed approach to hate speech. But it’s not clear the authorities would have acted any differently had this happened in Pennsylvania rather than Yorkshire.

Meanwhile, in the US, Trump has refused to allow the Associated Press into White House briefings, and Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested and detained in March pending his potential deportation for his involvement in pro-Palestinian activism. His green card, which ought to entitle him to the same free speech protections as any US citizen, may yet be revoked.

The Telegraph’s Zoe Strimpel recently defended these draconian measures, writing that while deporting all non-citizens who protest Israel’s actions in the Palestinian territories “could easily cost a trillion dollars… it would be money well spent.” Oddly, she failed to quote Khalil even once—despite lavishly citing several other sources. Whatever he’s supposed to have said is left to the reader’s imagination. In fact, I still have no idea how he broke any law.

Predictably, certain sections of the British right have relished Vance’s interventions. Not all forms of foreign interference are created equal, apparently.

But what’s really happening here is the hollowing out of language. “Free speech” is no longer a principle but a catch-all for whatever advances the Trump administration’s agenda in 2025. Culture war talking points have infiltrated the halls of power, while internet shitposting and podcast fodder have become Washington’s political vernacular.

The deeper issue is that US officials, journalists and legislators often treat the American conception of free speech as the gold standard, failing to recognise that other countries—including the UK—have their own traditions, which sometimes elevate competing values over untrammelled freedom. That doesn’t make those traditions inferior; they’re merely different.

The US Constitution is admirable in many ways and a guaranteed right to freedom of speech is certainly something to be valued. But American commentators need some perspective: theirs is just one of many plausible visions of what freedom can look like and Vance’s condescension isn’t helping.

Throughout his speech, Vance repeatedly conflated free speech with a much broader—and largely undefined—category: “democratic values.” But these are not the same thing. In the US, free speech has become totemic, untouchable, treated as an unqualified good rather than one of many competing goods. And this simplification skews the debate and obscures what’s at stake.

In 1977, when American Nazis sought permission to hold a demonstration in Skokie, Illinois, they appealed to the First Amendment and enlisted the help of the ACLU. According to a 2020 article on the ACLU website, these racist agitators planned to “appear in Nazi uniforms with swastika armbands, carrying Nazi banners and signs with the words ‘Free Speech for White People.’” At the time, Skokie “was nearly half Jewish and home to hundreds of Holocaust survivors.”

I can understand the instinct to defend even the most extreme expression in order to preserve the First Amendment. But I’m not sure I respect it. It’s certainly one conception of free speech, but almost every country on earth imposes some limits. We all draw lines; the question is where and why?

And that’s what American conservatives (and often, American liberals too) fail to grasp. The rest of the world doesn’t necessarily lack freedom. Often, we just define it differently.

This difference in tradition stems in part from how freedom itself is conceptualised. In Isaiah Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty, it’s framed as either a negative or positive right: “freedom from” versus “freedom to”. The American model hews almost exclusively to the former, but it’s also a perspective that’s hard to disentangle from small-state conservatism. There are other coherent interpretations of what it means to be free.

For example: the right to bear arms is a kind of freedom, but so is the right to an education free from the threat of gun violence. And yet these two competing priorities are clearly in conflict. Declaring yourself “pro-liberty” will get you a round of applause, but it’s ultimately meaningless unless you’re willing to elaborate.

The free speech debate today is swamped in confusion—much of it wilful. Conservatives often claim a monopoly on freedom in all its forms and in recent years, the left has been content, or indifferent, to cede that ground.

But that’s a mistake—both historically and conceptually.