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Immigration ‘powder keg’, violence, and the suppression of free expression: Just what is going on in the UK?

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Douglas Murray at the Theatre Antoine in Paris on June 3, 2024.  (Geoffroy Van Dew Hasselt via Getty Images)

News release from The Free Press

Our Friend Douglas Murray

We know that nothing will stop our columnist from truth-telling. The more they try to intimidate him, the more they prove him right.

Douglas Murray is not just a Free Press columnist with a love of poetry and rhetoric. He has also emerged over the past decade as one of the most important and articulate defenders of the West—and, especially since the massacres of October 7, one of the most fearless.

If you haven’t read his best-selling books—including The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam—now would be a good time to purchase hard copies. Because if certain authorities in Britain have their way, we suspect they’ll be titles that might be harder to find.

To understand why this is the case, we need to go back two weeks. The story begins in Southport, a small town in the northwest of the country, when, on July 29, a 17-year-old named Axel Rudakubana allegedly murdered three girls—ages 6, 7, and 9—in a Taylor Swift–themed dance class. Many others were critically injured.

The alleged perpetrator was neither Muslim nor an immigrant; his parents immigrated from Rwanda. But none of that mattered to the thugs who attacked the local mosque based on the rumor that he was both. In Belfast and Bristol and in towns across the UK, mobs gathered to variously harass migrant centers, attack mosques, and burn police vehicles.

These working-class rioters catalyzed others. The counter mobs were composed of Muslim men, some wielding hammers and knives, who were spoiling for a fight.

It’s very clear who started this: the brutes who went hunting for migrants and Muslims. But the violent breakdown is not a two-week-old story, but a tragedy years in the making and one with many authors. Namely, it is the story of a governing class that offered few answers as immigration took off and ignored a population that, at every turn, voted against it.

Almost everyone ignored that powder keg primed to explode because the price of noticing it was to be called a racist and a xenophobe.

Don’t take our word for it. Listen to what Nadhim Zahawi—who fled Saddam’s death squads as a boy only to become Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer—wrote last week in our pages.

The warning signs have been present for years, but for every person who tried to tip-toe through the minefield of topics pertinent to this disorder—society, culture, religion, disenfranchisement, racism, the speed of change, feelings of powerlessness—there were ten more who wanted to bury their heads in the sand. Even I, a brown man born in a Muslim country, feel the need to caveat what I say, and hide behind facets of my identity such as the color of my skin (facets that I largely consider unimportant) just to pass comment on things of importance to my country.

Almost everyone buried their heads in the sand. Almost everyone, that is, except Douglas Murray.

For years now, Murray has been one of the voices warning of what might happen in Britain with poorly controlled, exploding immigration; an obvious lack of assimilation; and a police force that appears more worried about violating multicultural pieties than enforcing the law. He has also warned about the cost of suppressing, rather than debating, difficult subjects.

You would think that now would be a good time to heed his advice. To look carefully at how this happened. To impose law and order. To assure those citizens who are convinced that their country has adopted a two-tiered justice system that justice remains blind—meted out equally, irrespective of the religion or ethnicity of the perpetrator. That is how things are meant to go in liberal democracies.

But the United Kingdom, which lacks a First Amendment equivalent, has opted for a different strategy: a campaign of suppression that includes criminal charges for speech.

On Thursday, a 55-year-old woman named Bernadette Spofforth was arrested “on suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred” and “false communications” after she spread the false rumor that the man who killed three girls in Southport was an asylum seeker.

Spofforth is just one example of how the United Kingdom is prioritizing jailing its people for social media posts rather than addressing the causes of the violence. The director of public prosecutions of England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson, said this week that even retweeting a post “which is insulting or abusive, which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred” makes one liable for arrest.

Worse yet, in the same interview, Parkinson spoke about “dedicated police officers who are scouring social media. Their job is to look for this material and then follow up with identification, arrests, and so forth.”

Police officers are authorized to show up at your door for comments on a Facebook page based on a law prohibiting “incitement of racial hatred.” The chief of London’s Metropolitan Police has even suggested that the UK might try to extradite American citizens suspected of violating UK’s hate speech legislation. This is the same police, mind you, that prevented a Jewish Londoner from crossing the street during a Gaza protest, and threatened him with arrest, because his “openly Jewish” appearance was deemed a provocation to the violent mob. The police, in other words, incapable of keeping the peace during an anti-Israel protest, turned looking Jewish into “incitement.”

Last week, the British government issued a warning on X: “Think before you post.” The embedded post reminds Britons that “content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful—it can be illegal.”

Which brings us back to Douglas Murray. It’s not just that his past warnings have gone unheeded. It’s that they are being viewed as incitement to violence rather than as prophecy.

On Friday, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spokesman and former director of communications for the Labour Party, posted a clip of Murray with the following caption:

“Think @metpoliceuk might want to take a look at this book plug.”

Read that twice.

That is a powerful journalist and former spin doctor with more than a million followers on X calling for Murray to be investigated by the police for discussing the ways in which his 2017 book foretold the current violence in the UK. Campbell, the flack that he is, knew just what he was doing, and has succeeded in stirring up others.

You need not agree with Murray on this subject or any other to be alarmed by this turn. But that point seems to be lost on Britain’s commentariat, who are all too relaxed about their country’s speech crackdown. One senior Guardian journalist egged the authorities on, arguing that Elon Musk should face criminal prosecution for tweeting about the disorder in the UK.

As for us? We’re honored to publish Murray’s fabulously popular “Things Worth Remembering” column, which celebrates freedom as well as the beauty of the English literary tradition. Nobody we know embodies the credo articulated almost 400 years ago by John Milton: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

Our columnist—who has reported from Ukraine and Gaza and Israel in the past year—understands that the fight over free speech is, as much as any literal battlefield, at the core not only of Britain’s future but that of the West.

We know that nothing will stop Douglas Murray from truth-telling. The more they try to silence and intimidate him, the more they prove him right.

To read all of Douglas’s columns click here.

And to support our mission of independent journalism, become a Free Press subscriber today:

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Crime

Eyebrows Raise as Karoline Leavitt Answers Tough Questions About Epstein

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The Vigilant Fox

Peter Doocy asked directly, “What happened to the Epstein client list that the Attorney General said she had on her desk?” Here’s how Leavitt tried to explain it.

The Epstein client list was supposed to be SITTING on Pam Bondi’s desk for review.

But months later, the DOJ says no such list even exists.

Karoline Leavitt was just asked why there was such a reversal in so little time.

Her responses today are raising eyebrows.

On February 21st, Pam Bondi told the world the Epstein client list was “sitting on [her] desk right now to review,” explaining it was part of a directive ordered by President Trump.

Shortly afterward, she and Kash Patel pledged to end the Epstein cover-up, promising to fully disclose the Epstein files to the public, hold accountable any government officials who withheld key evidence, and investigate why critical documents had been hidden in the first place.

But ever since late February, it seems the cover-up wasn’t exposed but buried even deeper by those who promised transparency.

First, they handed out the so-called “Epstein files” to influencers like golden Willy Wanka tickets, only for everyone to discover that almost all of the contents inside were already public and contained no new revelations.

Image

Fast-forward to May, and suddenly Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are declaring firmly that Epstein killed himself.

“I’ve seen the whole file. He killed himself,” Bongino stated bluntly to Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo.

Today, the Trump-appointed DOJ and FBI released a new report that’s turning heads and raising plenty of questions.

They concluded that Epstein had no clients, didn’t blackmail anyone, and definitely killed himself.

FBI Concludes Epstein Had No Clients, Didn’t Blackmail Anyone, and Definitely Killed Himself

FBI Concludes Epstein Had No Clients, Didn't Blackmail Anyone, and Definitely Killed Himself

This article originally appeared on Infowars and was republished with permission.

They also released surveillance footage and claimed it showed no one entered Epstein’s cell area, supporting the suicide ruling.

But people aren’t convinced. Some allege the video cuts off, with a minute of footage missing between 11:59 PM and midnight.

Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to questions about the Epstein client list in light of these new DOJ and FBI statements.

A reporter asked, “Karoline, the DOJ and FBI have now concluded there was no Jeffrey Epstein client list. What do you tell MAGA supporters who say they want anyone involved in Epstein’s alleged crimes held accountable?”

Leavitt replied, “This administration wants anyone who has ever committed a crime to be accountable, and I would argue this administration has done more to lock up bad guys than certainly the previous administration.”

She continued, “The Trump administration is committed to truth and transparency. That’s why the Attorney General and the FBI Director pledged, at the president’s direction, to do an exhaustive review of all the files related to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and his death. They put out a memo in conclusion of that review.”

“There was material they did not release because frankly it was incredibly graphic and contained child pornography, which is not something that is appropriate for public consumption,” she added.

“But they committed to an exhaustive investigation. That’s what they did and they provided the results of that.”

That’s transparency,” Leavitt said.

Leavitt was also pressed about Attorney General Pam Bondi’s comments in February when she claimed she had the Epstein list “on [her] desk.”

Peter Doocy asked, “Okay, so the FBI looks at the circumstances surrounding the death of Jeffrey Epstein. According to the report, this systematic review revealed no incriminating client list. So what happened to the Epstein client list that the Attorney General said she had on her desk?”

Leavitt responded, “I think if you go back and look at what the Attorney General said in that interview, which was on your network, on Fox News—”

Doocy pushed back, “I have the quote. John Roberts said: ‘DOJ may release the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients, will that really happen?’ And she said, ‘It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.’”

Leavitt explained, “Yes. She was saying the entirety of all of the paperwork, all of the paper in relation to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, that’s what the Attorney General was referring to. And I will let her speak for that.”

“But when it comes to the FBI and the Department of Justice, they are more than committed to ensuring that bad people are put behind bars.”

So, after months of patiently waiting, the American people get a nothing burger that simply repeats the same old claims we heard under Bill Barr.

Even worse, it’s purported that this is what “transparency” and “accountability” look like.

The story went from saying the Epstein client list was “on my desk” to “actually, there is no client list.

And the newly released video footage raises questions and, in the age of AI, proves nothing.

If there’s really nothing to hide, why does it still feel like they’re hiding everything?

And most importantly—who’s still being protected?

Thanks for reading to the end. I hope you found this timeline of events and recap helpful.

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COVID-19

FDA requires new warning on mRNA COVID shots due to heart damage in young men

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA COVID shots must now include warnings that they cause ‘extremely high risk’ of heart inflammation and irreversible damage in males up to age 24.

The Trump administration’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it will now require updated safety warnings on mRNA COVID-19 shots to include the “extremely high risk” of myocarditis/pericarditis and the likelihood of  long-term, irreversible heart damage for teen boys and young men up to age 24.

The required safety updates apply to Comirnaty, the mRNA COVID shot manufactured by Pfizer Inc., and Spikevax, the mRNA COVID shot manufactured ModernaTX, Inc.

According to a press release, the FDA now requires each of those manufacturers to update the warning about the risks of myocarditis and pericarditis to include information about:

  1. the estimated unadjusted incidence of myocarditis and/or pericarditis following administration of the 2023-2024 Formula of mRNA COVID-19 shots and
  2. the results of a study that collected information on cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (cardiac MRI) in people who developed myocarditis after receiving an mRNA COVID-19 injection.

The FDA has also required the manufacturers to describe the new safety information in the adverse reactions section of the prescribing information and in the information for recipients and caregivers.

Additionally, the fact sheets for healthcare providers and for recipients and caregivers for Moderna COVID-19 shot and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 shot, which are authorized for emergency use in individuals 6 months through 11 years of age, have also been updated to include the new safety information in alignment with the Comirnaty and Spikevax prescribing information and information for recipients and caregivers.

In a video published on social media, Dr. Vinay Prasad, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research Chief Medical and Scientific Officer, explained the alarming reasons for the warning updates.

While heart problems arose in approximately 8 out of 1 million persons ages 6 months to 64 years following reception of the cited shots, that number more than triples to 27 per million for males ages 12 to 24.

Prasad noted that multiple studies have arrived at similar findings.

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