Allah's Willing Executioners

The passing of Jason Arday is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy of his own making.

This is true in both a literal sense, in that his death was apparently a suicide, and figuratively, in that the events that drove the former Cambridge sociology professor to suicide were fabulism and fabrication in the service of a career of academic stardom.

He made a Faustian bargain with the truth to achieve academic stardom — one that was so absurd that anyone who bothered to fact-check it would discover it to be a farrago of lies — and could not bring himself to face the consequences of his prevarications when they were brought to light, quite belatedly.

Now that he has killed himself because someone finally reported on his misdoings, some in the United Kingdom want to change the law so that you can’t tell the truth about someone who isn’t telling the truth, or who is doing other things they shouldn’t be doing.

In other words, your free speech should end where a famous person’s feelings might theoretically begin.

A petition on Change.org to enact something called “Arday’s Law” — which would limit the amount of coverage the media could devote to a person over a certain period of time in the United Kingdom — had garnered over 4,300 verified signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.

This comes amid a similar petition from the Good Law Project, which calls for an inquiry into Arday’s death, albeit without proposing concrete limits on speech. However, it does call his death “the direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment,” which leads to obvious conclusions about what they might want that inquiry to recommend. That petition had 121,649 signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.

For those of you who didn’t keep up on the Arday story, a quick TL;DR: When he was hired in 2023 at 37, Arday was the youngest black professor in the history of the University of Cambridge. This was in spite of the fact that his work was riddled with plagiarism and much of his strange backstory (he said he was nonverbal until the age of 11 and couldn’t read until he was 18; he said he was an elite ultra-marathoner who once ran 600 miles in six days for charity) could easily have been debunked with basic fact-checking.

However, Arday became an academic superstar, appearing on TV both in the U.K. and globally. He was about to have a memoir titled “Great and Unfortunate Things” published when people started noticing all of this publicly.

It turns out that most of this had been noticed privately years before, and had been kept private by Arday’s minatory legal team. Even after virtually unassailable evidence came out that he was a plagiarist and most of his storytelling was false, Cambridge stood by him, calling it a “vile smear campaign to undermine his credibility.”

This didn’t do the job, since the corpus of evidence of academic malpractice and industrial-strength duplicity was too much to ignore, and Arday resigned as the university announced an investigation into his work. On Friday, he was found unresponsive at his apartment in London and pronounced dead of an apparent suicide.

This is all quite tragic, but the thing is that this would have been a one-day story (or not a story at all) if either Cambridge or Arday had dropped the act much earlier. Instead, it snowballed, and the media had to keep covering it because both the university and the professor continued to aggressively deny the allegations and attack those who pursued them.

According to the people who started the petition, the fault lay with those who told the truth about Arday and Cambridge and continued telling the truth while they continued very loudly lying.

From the petition:

249 articles were published across 15 major British news outlets in the period between 24th July and the date of his death (14th August). Worryingly, 188 articles were written in the 9 day period between his resignation and his death (5th-14th August). These articles scrutinised every area of Professor Arday’s life.

The relentless flood of media articles casting unverified allegations on Professor Arday illustrates a pressing issue: the devastating impact of excessive media scrutiny on individuals. In today’s hyper-connected world, the media’s ability to shape narratives can have profound consequences on personal and professional lives—often before full stories emerge. Professor Arday’s case stands as a stark reminder of the urgent need for responsible journalism that respects privacy and prioritizes fact-based reporting.

This petition calls for legislative action to impose limitations on the number of news articles published about a single individual within a defined time frame. By doing so, we can ensure that individuals are not subjected to undue public pressure and potential mental anguish caused by excessive media coverage. The government must hold media outlets accountable for their role in amplifying potentially damaging narratives.

So, to deal with this seriatim: There were only 249 articles between July 24 and Aug. 14 because no one was willing to tell the truth. In fact, this could have been over and done with a long time ago had Arday’s lawyers not hounded publications and academics that looked into his work and record.

The reason “every area of Professor Arday’s life” was scrutinized was because that’s how he came to prominence — as an ultra-marathoning professor who couldn’t read until he was 18. If you can’t report critically on those preposterous claims after they’ve been reported on positively with all sincerity and credulity, what can you report on?

“In today’s hyper-connected world, the media’s ability to shape narratives can have profound consequences on personal and professional lives,” the media says. Yeah, and nobody was complaining when this narrative-shaping was making Arday a prominent and wealthy man.

Also, the idea that this reportage serves “as a stark reminder of the urgent need for responsible journalism” is laughable when you consider that, when responsible journalism was set to expose this in a lower-profile manner, Arday sicced his solicitors on the people who were going to responsibly report that he was a fraud.

As for “legislative action to impose limitations on the number of news articles published about a single individual within a defined time frame” — who decides what that is? The answer presents itself: the same British censors who put people in jail over memes. Arday’s death is being used cynically to limit people who say impolitic things, like the fact that Arday was a totemic DEI hire or that academia is willing to protect its own at all costs, including that of the truth.

Indeed, later in the petition, the authors effectively give the game away by saying that elected officials “must hold media outlets accountable for their role in amplifying potentially damaging narratives” and that “such a regulation would not only serve to protect individuals from undue stress but also encourage more balanced reporting.” (Gosh, wonder what that might include?)

This was always going to be, sadly, the legacy of Jason Arday, one which turned him from a DEI mascot into a left-wing martyr.

The BBC, far from providing critical coverage of Cambridge’s role in enabling Arday’s dissimulations, ran this piece earlier in the week: “Cambridge chancellor criticizes ‘racist feeding frenzy’ around Jason Arday.” In addition to quoting the Cambridge chancellor, they also gave lots of play to Labour MP Diane Abbott, who spoke at a vigil for Arday and criticized the “vicious and bitter media campaign” against him, saying that it was by “people who didn’t believe a black man should be a Cambridge professor.”

“This was a campaign against all of us,” she said.

No. It was honest reporting on a man who lied and plagiarized his way into a prominent role in British society and then demanded British society shut up about it. Now, after his death, people like Abbott and those behind “Arday’s Law” are picking up the torch and trying to ensure that this kind of censorship becomes law.

The Western Journal.

A male prison inmate who claims to be female is suing the Commissioner of the Indiana Department of Corrections (IDOC) in an attempt to overturn a state ban on the use of taxpayer funding for transgender procedures for convicted criminals. The far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has taken up his case. 

Wayne Allison, who now goes by the name “Astrid,” is serving a 27-year prison sentence for raping his 11-year-old sister multiple times in 2013. He was charged with five counts of child molestation and one count of incest. 

According to an affidavit provided to Reduxx, which has extensively covered this and similar cases, Allison assaulted the girl repeatedly between July and November 2013. 

Indiana law currently prohibits the use of state or federal funds to facilitate what the statute defines as “sexual reassignment surgery” for incarcerated offenders, according to Reduxx. 

Allison’s April 2024 legal complaint – which uses female pronouns to describe him – claims that transgender surgery is required to alleviate his alleged mental suffering. 

“Astrid Allison, also known as Wayne Allison, is an adult transgender female prisoner confined in a male institution (New Castle Correctional Facility) within the Indiana Department of Correction (DOC). She is diagnosed with gender dysphoria and has been receiving female hormones and a hormone to suppress her testosterone for more than three years,” the complaint noted. “Although the hormones have helped to lessen the debilitating symptoms of gender dysphoria, surgery is necessary to relieve her continuing symptoms of serious depression and anxiety.”

His legal filing argued that the mutilating surgery is a “medical necessity” and that denying it violates the Eighth Amendment, which protects inmates from “cruel and unusual punishment.”

“Although plaintiff’s birth-assigned sex is male, she has identified as female since she was 10,” the complaint further stated. “The misalignment of her gender identity with her birth-assigned sex has caused her, and continues to cause her, enormous depression, anxiety, and distress.”

“With the hormones she has developed breasts and her body fat has changed to contour her body like a birth-assigned female,” the legal filing noted. “She has attempted to live as a female to the greatest extent possible as she is in a male prison. She wears a bra and women’s underwear. She wears lipstick that she is able to purchase on commissary. She wears makeup … Every morning she gets up and wants to die because of her gender dysphoria.”

Last year, the ACLU moved to consolidate Allison’s “sex discrimination” case with that of another “transgender” convicted pedophile housed in the same prison, Cory Wallace, who brutally abused his four-month-old-son, Jensen, resulting in his death.   

Wallace, who is serving a 72-year sentence, has been working with the ACLU since 2023 to challenge the IDOC’s ban on taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries.

lifesitenews

Sweden’s Migration Agency, Migrationsverket, has granted Swedish citizenship to 98 people in July, the first full month under the country’s stricter eligibility rules, which entered into force on June 6.

Official agency figures show that 2,369 new applications were received in July, 2,825 cases were decided and 98 citizenships were granted. The agency has not disclosed how many of those decisions ended in rejection.

The figure compares with 1,602 citizenships granted in June and 18,332 over the first seven months of 2026 as a whole.

The agency has urged caution in reading the numbers. The first citizenship test was held on August 15 and, while it waits for the results, it says it is deciding mainly cases that end in refusal.

The majority of the 98 people granted citizenship in July were nationals of Finland, Norway or Denmark.

Since June 6 only adult Nordic citizens, stateless children and young adults born in Sweden may still acquire citizenship through the simplified notification route. Everyone else has to apply and to sit the new tests.

Few Syrian nationals received Swedish citizenship, a contrast with earlier periods when Syrians formed one of the largest groups among successful applicants. In 2021 a little over one in three of all new Swedish citizens were Syrian, and between 2015 and 2021 a total of 100,761 Syrian nationals were granted citizenship, according to Statistics Sweden.

The new rules, adopted by the right-wing majority in the Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament, raise the general residency requirement from five to eight years, introduce a self-sufficiency condition, tighten conduct requirements and require knowledge of the Swedish language and society.

The income test is set at three income base amounts a year, about 20,000 Swedish kronor (€1,800) a month before tax, with no more than six months on income support over the previous three years.

Nordic citizens face lighter conditions, including a two-year residency period and exemptions from certain language and knowledge tests.

The rules took effect without transitional provisions, so every case still open on June 6 is judged under them, including applications lodged years earlier.

The agency has noted that the new rules are affecting processing, with many cases requiring additional documentation linked to the citizenship tests.

Some 103,598 citizenship cases were open at the end of July. In about 13,000 of them a court has ordered the agency to rule without further delay, broadcaster SVT reported on May 25.

The agency told Bulletin it issued 4,169 citizenship decisions in May, up by more than 61 per cent on January’s 2,584. Press chief Jesper Tengroth confirmed that staff worked overtime at weekends through the spring. The magazine Fokus has asked why the pace rose in the weeks before a law that tightened the conditions.

Before the Swedish Government took office in October 2022, the number of people granted Swedish citizenship had been rising steadily, reaching 63,818 in 2018, 64,206 in 2019, 80,175 in 2020, 89,354 in 2021 and a peak of 92,225 in 2022, on Statistics Sweden’s count.

Under the present government the figures began to decline, falling to 67,789 in 2023, approximately 65,600 in 2024 and around 38,800 in 2025 on the Migration Agency’s own series. It attributes that drop to tighter checks on identity documents and to a requirement that applicants appear in person.

If the July figure of 98 granted citizenships were sustained across a full year, that would equate to roughly 1,176 citizenships for the entire year. It would be about 1.3 per cent of the 2022 peak of 92,225, around 3 per cent of the 2025 total of approximately 38,800 and well below the levels seen throughout the previous decade.

brusselssignal

An Indian employee of a catering firm in the Val-d’Oise department of France, located near Paris, has been indicted on charges of raping two vulnerable migrant colleagues but will continue to remain free on the street under judicial supervision. The decision stands after the prosecution’s appeal was dismissed for having been filed beyond the statutory deadline, a legal technicality.

According to details reported by French newspaper Le Parisien, the case began on April 17 when an undocumented worker of Sri Lankan origin employed by the same caterer in Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône went to the police to accuse a 34-year-old Indian colleague of rape. She alleged that he had exploited her precarious migration status to rape her, counting on her silence out of fear that she would lose both her job and any chance of being legalized to stay in France.

A short time later, a second female employee of the company lodged a complaint of rape against the same man, describing circumstances that were essentially identical. Both women said the man raped them and then blackmailed them due to their illegal status to win their silence.

In early July, the man was arrested at his home in Pontoise. He had worked for the catering firm since 2015, is the father of three children and had no prior criminal record.

Placed in custody, he firmly denied the allegations during questioning and claimed he was the victim of a plot hatched by the women.

Despite his claims, he was subsequently indicted for the rape of vulnerable persons. However, the judge ordered his release under judicial supervision, requiring him to live in Normandy and forbidding any contact with the two migrant women he allegedly raped.

The public prosecutor’s office, persuaded that pre-trial detention was necessary, lodged an appeal against the release order. A procedural failure inside the services of the Versailles Court of Appeal, however, meant the file could not be examined within the legal fifteen-day period. Consequently the investigating chamber had no option but to record the missed deadline and uphold the judicial supervision already imposed on the indicted man.

The suspect’s employer, which operates sites in both Paris and the Val-d’Oise, quickly terminated the man’s employment.

rmx

Forty-eight police officers from Austria’s federal states are to be deployed to Vienna for up to three months from September, as authorities respond to growing concerns over migrant youth crime and violence in the capital.

The reinforcements will support Vienna’s police, particularly during night-time operations and in areas identified as crime hotspots. Six officers will come from Carinthia, while others will be drawn from Salzburg, Styria, Lower Austria, Upper Austria, and Burgenland.

The deployment follows daily temporary assignments of officers from outside Vienna, which have been taking place since August. The interior ministry said the measure was designed to strengthen police operations during the summer, when more people spend time in public spaces at night.

According to an operational order seen by Austrian media, particular attention will be given to parks in Vienna’s Favoriten district, where police have reported problems involving migrant youth groups, including rivalries, territorial disputes, and knife attacks. The document also refers to increased levels of violence, robbery, property crime, and drug-related offences.

Federal Police Director Michael Takács said the system allowed officers to be moved rapidly to areas experiencing temporary pressure.

The scale of the deployment has prompted criticism from the opposition right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ). The party accused the city and federal government of failing to provide adequate security, and argued that taking officers from other states risked creating security gaps elsewhere.

According to FPÖ MP Reinhold Maier:

Our police officers are being used as stopgaps for the failed open-door policy of the establishment parties. Officers are now being made to pay the price for what the establishment parties have caused through open borders and a completely out-of-touch soft-touch justice system.

The concerns come amid a rise in juvenile suspects. Interior ministry crime statistics show that the number of suspected offenders aged between 10 and 14 increased from around 5,150 in 2015 to 12,049 in 2024. In Vienna, police recorded 5,983 suspects aged 10 to 14 in 2025.

As we recently reported, Vienna’s district leaders have voiced their concerns over repeated fights, robberies, vandalism, and assaults, with children under the age of 14 becoming involved in criminal activity more frequently.

FPÖ politicians have cited around twenty break-ins in recent weeks.

The party has renewed its call for Austria to lower the age of criminal responsibility, while Justice Minister Anna Sporrer of the Social Democrats has continued to favour educational measures.

europeanconservative

The self-inflicted migrant crisis threatens to destroy the European Union, and illegal migrants, their enablers, and political activists will resist deportation efforts so hard it would plunge Germany into “civil war”, a security researcher has warned.

The ongoing migrant crisis is pulling the European political project apart because the Union has no answers to border control problems, this is driving political polarisation, and the crisis has been left to fester so long any attempt to claw the situation back will spiral into violence, a German newspaper has been told.

Former German Federal Police Captain Jan Solwyn, who has published books on his experience on the front line as a forward-deployed European “border police expert” during the European Migrant Crisis, and on the damage mass migration is doing to European society, told Die Welt that “European borders have become a political and social fault line… illegal migration has the potential to destroy the EU.”

Solwyn, who is now a security researcher and author at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, told the paper that enforcing the law and deporting illegal migrants is essential to protect Europe, its people, and even the European Union itself, but warned that to do so would be tough because migrants and their enablers would likely use violence to oppose such measures. In terms of actually deporting the hundreds of thousands of migrants in Germany, alone, who have been ordered to leave but decided to ignore these instructions, the security expert said the police would face fights with illegal migrants themselves, who “would do everything they can to stay in Germany”.

He went on to say the police and security services would also be bogged down in “dealing with very well-organized NGOs and private individuals who would engage in street battles with the riot police. We saw what happened in the US when ICE started arresting illegal immigrants. Then we’d have a civil war in major German cities.”

The former Federal Police officer went on to warn that Europe is vulnerable to a repeat of the 2015 migrant crisis, as little has changed to prevent migrants from remaining in the bloc once they reach EU territory.

“People will want to come to Germany, and the asylum system is as dysfunctional as ever… I have seen on the front lines of the migration crisis – both at the external borders and in Germany’s cities – how the problem is not being solved. The EU cannot exist in the long term under these conditions. The unresolved migration crisis is the sure path back to nation-states. But that is the path to a fragmentation of the continent, which will then inevitably become a pawn of external powers.”

There should be no expectation on asylum seekers to integrate into European society, he added, because the default must be that asylum is a temporary act of charity towards the needy who should eventually return home to rebuild, not simply be transformed into economic migrants who stay in Europe on a long enough timescale.

Former top cop Solwyn is not by far the first security thinker to warn that limitless open borders and their downstream effects could plunge formerly stable European societies into civil-war-like states. Former British Army Colonel Richard Kemp, who fought counter-insurgencies in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and led troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, warned last year that short-sighted European governments are putting off difficult decisions because they believe it is easier to appease and avoid minor conflict today, even if it means bigger trouble tomorrow.

This, he said, is because governments are only really interested in the electoral cycle and keeping a lid on things until they next face the voters. He remarked: “They want to keep a state of equilibrium for that time, they want to do what they can to make sure they win the next election. They don’t want to take the radical sort of action that might be necessary to address these sorts of problems”.

The Colonel said Western nations face a “primary threat” made up of a coalition of “hard left and Islamist extremists who have, together with other causes, come together to threaten the cohesion and the culture, the entire culture and political existence of the West”. In follow-up comments made this year, Kemp said no government “has the guts to stop” these issues and the inevitable end-point of “Islamification” is “civil war”.

Perhaps the highest-profile establishment-adjacent thinker on Europe’s exposure to civil war — something that was well out of the bounds of mainstream discussion until just a year ago — is King’s College London’s Professor David Betz. His research asserts that the preconditions for potential civil war are already present in Western European states such as Ireland, the United Kingdom, and France, and that they may already be past the ‘tipping point’ of a slow-motion descent into Chaos.

As reported, Betz has said:

…it now appears to be too late to actually prevent things getting “very much worse”, and urged decision-makers to act to at least cushion the blow.

In a chilling warning, the academic said, “I would probably avoid big cities. I would suggest you reduce your exposure to big cities if you are able”. The coming violence, he believes, has been made inevitable by decades of government ineptitude and can’t be totally avoided.

… there isn’t anything they can do, it’s baked in. We’re already past the tipping point, is my estimation… we are past the point at which there is a political offramp. We are past the point at which normal politics is able to solve the problem… almost every plausible way forward from here involves some kind of violence in my view.

Anything the government tries to do at this point… you can solve one kind of problem, but it will aggravate another kind of problem in doing so, and you get back to violence. The question really is about mitigating the costs, to my mind, not about preventing the outcome, I’m sorry to say… I have not heard a credible political way forward and I don’t see a single political figure who is credible in the role of national saviour, or even inclined to do so.

… “the bottom line is I don’t think there is now a political solution to this which takes the form of everything just working out OK after some period of difficulty. Things are bad now, but they are going to get very much worse. Hopefully after they will get better, but you will have to go through the period of very much worse before you get there.

breitbart

In a free and democratic society, you may not go around disguised.  You should go around perfectly recognizable, especially in enclosed spaces, where a robber or a terrorist could hide under a mask.  That should be obvious to everybody.  However, some people living in countries not their own are trying to make it less so, with incredible impudence.

A few days ago, a Muslim woman from Bangladesh went to a post office in Northern Italy.  She was wearing a niqab, a Muslim dress that leaves only the eyes visible.  The clerk, after seeing her identity card, asked her to show her face so that he could identify her.  She did so at the clerk’s insistence, but then she wrote a letter to a few Italian newspapers, claiming to have been discriminated against.

The post office answered that there had been no discrimination whatsoever.  They simply enforced the law.  It’s impossible to identify anyone properly if he doesn’t show his face.

Regrettably, such incidents are anything but unusual in the Western world nowadays.  And we Westerners do have to be very clear about that.

The niqab and the burka, which humiliate women and make identification impossible, should not be permitted.  And no concession should be granted, either.  A woman wearing a niqab or a burka may not ask to be identified in a private area only by female clerks.  This would actually be discriminatory toward the other customers, and anyone might ask for a special identification by personal whim.

In the West, to go around perfectly recognizable is not an opinion you may agree or disagree with.  It’s a law — which is the same for everybody.

If you don’t like our laws, you are quite free to go back to your own country.

americanthinker

Housing asylum seekers in a former military base is set to cost the taxpayer at least “£500 a night”, protesters claimed.

Labour announced it would house 1,200 migrants at a former RAF base in Linton-on-Ouse, North Yorkshire, earlier this year as part of the Government’s bid to close all asylum hotels by 2029.

However, a campaign group formed of local Yorkshire residents rallying against the plans have calculated the cost of each guest at the migrant camp, which is far higher than housing the migrants in hotels.

In a hefty 27-page-long appeal, villagers ripped into the “insane” move that risks handing more than £400million to migrants over its three-year runtime.

Olga Matthias, who is the spokesman for the Linton-on-Ouse Action Group, declared it was an ineffective use of Britons’ hard-earned cash.

He said: “The projected costs simply do not match the standard of care required for asylum seekers, nor do they represent an effective use of taxpayer funds with the cost per night being much higher than any other alternative.

“Yes, solutions need to be found, but in areas with existing infrastructure and asylum services where the huge investment for refitting, upgrading water, electric and sewage infrastructure is not required.”

Based on National Audit Office (NAO) costs for a similar abandoned scheme, they totted up the true cost, which they warned could come to more than £500 a night.

As it stands, migrants cost hard-working Britons £145 a night in various hotels up and down the country while they are only meant to be assigned to £23.25 in traditional accommodation.

However, the new RAF base will be 20 times the cost of what they are meant to be enjoyed on the taxpayers’ dime.

The North Yorkshire site — where Prince William trained during his military service in 2008 — also has a primary school, nursery and children’s play area all situated within a mile of the premises.

The proximity of the site to the school has “ramped up the concerns of the community”, local councillor Malcolm Taylor previously said.

The campaign group has also laid their safeguarding concerns bare in the same document as their calculations, echoing the very same worry locals are experiencing in similarly impacted areas.

Linton-on-Ouse is one of three military bases earmarked to house 3,750 migrants, disrupting villagers near Barnham in Suffolk and Piddington, Bicester in Oxfordshire.

Children from Piddington wrote to the Prime Minister to express concerns about the use of MoD Bicester earlier in August.

However, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said disused military bases represent the future of asylum accommodation in Britain – and it would make up Labour’s long-term strategy to house asylum seekers.

“We think that can have a better impact on the ability to crowd in services on a site rather than other models providing accommodation,” the Home Secretary said.

The Home Office insists using military barracks will save taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds after £2.1billion was spent on housing asylum seekers in hotels last year.

Two migrant camps in disused MoD sites have already been established in East Sussex’s Crowborough training camp and RAF Wethersfield in Essex.

Andy Burnham also announced he would look to redistribute asylum seekers more evenly across the country after the Home Office revealed earlier this year that the North East and North West housed a disproportionate number of asylum seekers per capita.

The East of England, South East of England and South West of England sat below the national average, as well as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

gbnews

U.S. Republican Senator Ted Cruz has lamented the loss of liberty in the United Kingdom after a former police officer was convicted of a crime for merely reposting a meme mocking Islam.

The Newton Aycliffe magistrates’ court found retired police officer Stephen Gray guilty this month of violating Section 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003 over a supposedly “grossly offensive” image he shared on his Facebook account.

The meme, which was flagged to the Durham Constabulary by a non-Muslim neighbour, portrayed a man wearing a turban next to a rasher of bacon with the caption: “Fun facts about Bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!”

While Gray acknowledged that some may have found the meme in bad taste, he said he was shocked that it would result in a criminal conviction and a £1,000 fine.

Responding to a report on the case by Breitbart London, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) remarked: “No meme is criminal. The UK has fallen.”

No meme is criminal.

The UK has fallen. 😢 https://t.co/P2Jr63HhxT

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) August 17, 2026

Cruz, a constitutional lawyer and staunch defender of freedom of speech, has been a vocal critic of the growing censorship apparatus in the United Kingdom and has warned that the British state may undermine Americans’ rights by targeting social media platforms like Elon Musk’s X.

Indeed, the Online Safety Act gives London the power to impose fines of up to 10 per cent of a social media company’s global revenue if it fails to comply with the UK’s speech restrictions. Should a firm refuse to comply, the law allows Britain to bring criminal charges against senior management and even ban the platform from the country altogether.

Internationally, the UK has become one of the global leaders in terms of citizens arrested for posts made on social media, with the Times of London estimating that over 12,000 people were arrested for ‘offensive’ online content in 2023, or around 33 people per day.

The censorship regime has become a major focus of the Trump administration in the United States, notably for Vice President JD Vance, who warned in a landmark speech at last year’s Munich Security Conference that in Britain and Europe free speech is “in retreat“.

breitbart

79% of young women in the Netherlands still feel unsafe walking alone at night, a year after the murder of 17-year-old Lisa by an African migrant.

According to a new survey of 1,400 people aged 16 to 34, 78% of young women had also experienced sexual harassment on the street during the past year.

Lisa was fatally stabbed in the early hours of August 20, 2025 as she cycled home from Amsterdam.

A 22-year-old man, known as Chris Jude and believed to be Nigerian, has been charged with her murder, as well as rape and attempted rape in separate incidents.

He has confessed to all three attacks and is awaiting trial.

Her death prompted the “We Reclaim the Night” campaign, which raised more than €500,000 within days, and inspired night-time marches and cycling demonstrations across the Netherlands.

It also triggered a wider political debate over immigration, policing, and the safety of women in public spaces.

Fans at football matches protested against asylum centres and displayed banners rejecting immigration.

The new research suggests that awareness has increased, even if women’s experiences have changed little.

Some 68% of young people said they were more concerned about women’s safety than a year ago.

Nearly half said they were more likely to message friends to check they had arrived home safely, while 39% said they were more careful to ensure nobody travelled home alone at night.

But young women continue to take extensive precautions themselves.

Some 86% said they take measures to increase their safety when going out after dark. These include sharing their live location, staying on the phone with someone, and choosing better-lit routes.

Nearly three-quarters said they carry a bunch of keys in their hand, while 23% carry pepper spray.

A separate survey of more than 21,000 people found that 59% believed unsafe places in their municipality had not been addressed during the past year. Among young women, 54% said they had hoped for action but had seen none.

Respondents most commonly called for greater enforcement and tougher penalties. Young women also favoured practical measures such as better street lighting, cutting back bushes, and CCTV.

While many Dutch commentators have blamed men in general and “misogyny” for the death of Lisa, the number of sexual assaults has risen in conjunction with the arrival of millions of African and Asian migrants to the cities of Western Europe.

europeanconservative