International
Immigration ‘powder keg’, violence, and the suppression of free expression: Just what is going on in the UK?
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.
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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.
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To read all of Douglas’s columns click here.
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Celebrations broke out across South Florida Saturday as news spread that Venezuela’s longtime socialist strongman Nicolás Maduro had been captured and removed from power, a moment many Venezuelan exiles said they had waited their entire lives to see. In Doral, hundreds gathered outside the El Arepazo restaurant before sunrise, waving flags, embracing strangers, and reacting emotionally to what they described as a turning point for their homeland. Local television footage captured chants, tears, and spontaneous celebrations as word filtered through the community that Maduro and his wife had been “captured and flown out of the country” following U.S. military action announced by Donald Trump earlier that morning.
Venezuelans gathered early this morning in Doral to celebrate after news broke that the U.S. had captured Nicolás Maduro🇻🇪| #ONLYinDADE pic.twitter.com/mSNaF3IhR3
— ONLY in DADE (@ONLYinDADE) January 3, 2026
One young man, Edgar, spoke directly to reporters as the crowd surged behind him, calling the moment “history in the making.” He said his family had spent decades telling him stories about a Venezuela that once had real elections and basic freedoms. “My chest feels like it’s going to explode with joy,” he said, explaining that the struggle against the regime began long before he was born. Edgar thanked President Trump for allowing Venezuelans to work and rebuild their lives in the United States, adding that now, for the first time, he believed they could take those skills back home.
Similar scenes played out beyond Florida. Video circulating online showed Venezuelans celebrating in Chile and other parts of Latin America, reflecting the regional impact of Maduro’s fall. The dictator had clung to power through what U.S. officials and international observers have long described as sham elections, while presiding over economic collapse, mass emigration, and deepening ties to transnational criminal networks. U.S. authorities have pursued him for years, placing a $50 million bounty on information leading to his arrest or conviction. Federal prosecutors accused Maduro in 2020 of being a central figure in the so-called Cartel of the Suns, an international cocaine trafficking operation allegedly run by senior members of the Venezuelan regime and aimed, in prosecutors’ words, at flooding the United States with drugs.
After the overnight strikes, Venezuela’s remaining regime figures declared a state of emergency, even as images of celebration dominated social media abroad. In Washington, reaction from Florida lawmakers was swift. Rep. Carlos Gimenez, who represents a district with large Venezuelan, Cuban, and Nicaraguan exile communities, compared Maduro’s capture to one of the defining moments of the 20th century. “President Trump has changed the course of history in our hemisphere,” Gimenez wrote, calling the operation “this hemisphere’s equivalent to the Fall of the Berlin Wall.” He added that South Florida’s exile communities were “overwhelmed with emotion and hope,” and thanked U.S. service members for what he described as a decisive and successful mission.
For many gathered in Doral, the reaction was deeply personal. A CBS Miami reporter relayed comments from attendees who said they now felt safer about the possibility of returning to Venezuela to see family members they had not hugged in years. One man described it as the end of “26 years of waiting” for a free country, saying the moment felt less like politics and more like the closing of a long, painful chapter.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed Saturday that Maduro and his wife have been formally indicted in the Southern District of New York. Bondi said the charges include narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, and weapons offenses involving machine guns and destructive devices. For Venezuelan Americans packed into South Florida streets, those legal details mattered less than the symbolism. After years of watching their country unravel from afar, many said they finally felt something unfamiliar when they looked south — relief, and the cautious hope that Venezuela’s future might no longer be written by a dictator.
Daily Caller
Scathing Indictment Claims Nicolás Maduro Orchestrated Drug-Fueled ‘Culture Of Corruption’ Which Plagued Entire Region
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Ousted socialist Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was the mastermind of a pervasive drug-fueled “culture of corruption” which extended all the way to the U.S.’s backyard, according to the scathing indictment against him, his wife, his son, and others, released Saturday.
Hours after President Donald Trump announced Maduro’s capture and removal from power, Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed the deposed despot and his wife, Cilia Flores, were indicted in the Southern District of New York on four charges, including narco-terrorism conspiracy, and “will soon face the full wrath of American justice” on U.S. soil. A grand jury found Maduro “and corrupt members of his regime enabled corruption fueled by drug trafficking throughout” the Latin American region, including in Mexico and Central America, and empowered notorious crime syndicates such as Tren de Aragua (TdA), according to the unsealed indictment.
Signed by Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, the 25-page indictment names six defendants, including the deposed Maduro, Flores, and Maduro’s 35-year-old son from his first marriage, Nicolás “Nicolasito” Maduro Guerra. It also names as defendants TdA leader Niño Guerrero and two high-profile members of Maduro’s United Socialist Party, Diosdado Cabello Rondón and Ramón Rodríguez Chacín.
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Maduro, “like former President [Hugo] Chávez before him[,] participates in, perpetuates, and protects a culture of corruption in which powerful Venezuelan elites enrich themselves through drug trafficking and the protection of their partner drug traffickers,” the indictment alleges. “The profits of that illegal activity flow to corrupt rank-and-file civilian, military, and intelligence officials, who operate in a patronage system run by those at the top-referred to as the Cartel de Los Soles or Cartel of the Suns, a reference to the sun insignia affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials.”
The Trump administration’s State Department announced it was designating the Cartel de Los Soles as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in November 2025. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a statement at the time the cartel “is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”
The indictment also notes the South American nation “sits in a geographically valuable location for drug traffickers” and that, around the time Chávez came to power in 1999, “Venezuela became a safe haven” for them.
“In that environment, cocaine trafficking flourished,” the indictment continues, citing State Department estimates from arund 2020, with between 200 and 250 tons of the drug being trafficked through the country each year.
The charging document goes on to allege Maduro, his wife, son, and political allies had “partnered with narcotics traffickers and narco-terrorist groups, who dispatched processed cocaine from Venezuela to the United States via transshipment points in the Caribbean and Central America, such as Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico.”
“Through this drug trafficking, [Maduro] and corrupt members of his regime enabled corruption fueled by drug trafficking throughout the region,” the indictment continues. “The transshipment points in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico similarly relied on a culture of corruption, in which cocaine traffickers operating in those countries paid a portion of their own profits to politicians who protected and aided them. In turn, these politicians used the cocaine-fueled payments to maintain and augment their political power.”
Maduro and his regime also “facilitated the empowerment and growth of violent narco-terrorist groups fueling their organizations with cocaine profits,” according to the indictment.
The charging document notably identifies organizations which collaborated with the Maduro regime: Colombian communist militant groups Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN); Mexican syndicates the Sinaloa Cartel and Los Zetas; and Guerrero’s TdA.
The indictment also alleges Maduro Guerra, the captured dictator’s son, personally “worked to ship hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Venezuela to Miami, Florida” around the year 2017. Maduro Guerra is a member of his father’s political party and served as a Deputy to the Venezuelan National Assembly since 2021.
“During this time, MADURO GUERRA spoke with his drug trafficking partners about, among other things, shipping low-quality cocaine to New York because it could not be sold in Miami, arranging a 500-kilogram shipment of cocaine to be unloaded from a cargo container near Miami, and using scrap metal containers to smuggle cocaine into the ports of New York,” the document reads.
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