With Friends Like These...

It wasn't all that long ago that I blogged about Old Europe's abandonment of any pretense to freedom of speech. This nasty bit of illiberalism was illuminated by Vice President JD Vance, who had the temerity (at least in the eyes of the Best-and-Brightest) to scold our Continental pals at a conference in Munich this past February. Shocked, shocked, they were, but their gleefulness at the notion of fining or imprisoning people for saying, or tweeting, or even re-tweeting, Bad Stuff was and remains blatant. Beyond glee, those fines and prison sentences are actually happening.

A novel idea recently emerged at a White House press conference. Winston Marshall, a former member of the band Mumford & Sons, asked Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt if the Administration would consider offering political asylum to Brits who faced "extensive prison sentences for tweets, social media posts and general free speech issues."

Marshall has a history in this matter. Per Google AI, he:

left the band in 2021 after receiving backlash for a tweet in support of a book by conservative journalist Andy Ngo, Billboard reported. The book, Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, was critical of the far-left, and Marshall's tweet was misconstrued as an endorsement of the far-right. Marshall himself stated that he left the band to avoid "self-censorship" and to be able to speak freely about political matters without his bandmates being affected.

Marshall also has a history of criticizing the COVID lockdowns.

I recently responded to a question about my views on immigration by quoting Charles Koch:

I would let anybody in who will make the country better, and no one who will make it worse.

Back when China was cracking down on Hong Kong, the idea was floated to offer asylum to every Hong Kong citizen. An influx of capitalistic and freedom-minded Hong Kongers would in all likelihood "make the country better." I'd argue the same would be true for free-speech-minded Britons and Germans, and even if we got some “undesirables” (in the eyes of the Left, of course), the message to the world that America isn't going to play along with the Europeans' censorious ways.

So, I wait with hopeful breath (to mix a metaphor) that Marshall's seed of an idea germinates, and Trump/Vance decide to thumb the Euro-censors' eyes by offering asylum to people facing prison for wrong-speak. I'd also love to see how the Left reacts to that vigorous endorsement of our First Amendment.