“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.”
