The US ultra-right should leave the UK alone!!!

[StandFirm]

I was going to use a rude expletive in the thread title to truly reflect my thoughts on this. I've known about this insidious creeping influence for a little while but reading the article in the link below has made me livid. We are not going to be censored by foreign actors who understand nothing about our culture. I have often observed a false sense of familiarity among Brits regarding American culture but it goes both ways, and this attempt at dragging us along into the dark pit of ignorance should stay the fuck away from here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/14/librarians-in-uk-increasingly-asked-to-remove-books-as-influence-of-us-pressure-groups-spreads

I read that and was appalled. These extreme US groups are driving anti choice for women campaigning particularly. Modern day missionaries with nasty tactics.

Wow thanks for sharing this article. I had no idea this was going on here too. A lot of my friends are authors in the US and the UK too and I know many of the ones published in the U.S. have been affected by the book bans. Some have even seen a decrease in how often they are being invited to schools to talk. It’s funny how the self named “free speech” champions change their mind when it comes to speech against their views. I don’t agree with everything in all books but I disagree with the book bans. If they want to supervise what their kids read they should do that but not impose on others.

Indeed, what is a democracy without free speech? Censorship is a terribly slippery slope and cannot be tolerated from anyone of whatever religion. We don't need bigots. Those pressure groups should be regulated and reined in.
I've always thought that culture and education tend to be the canaries in the coal mine. There's a pretty eye-opening Sundance documentary just released in the US about that topic: https://thelibrariansfilm.com/

Exactly - and guess which party will throw the doors wide open for them if we let them...

With respect to the many reasonable American posters on MN, I do wish the US far right would just fuck off back to Bumsville AZ or wherever.

I'm sorry for the reasonable people living there, too, but I do not want this shitshow in the UK.

As an American friend of mine once said, never forget that the USA was a country founded on the back of religious extremism.

The US is fucking terrifying right now, a true force for evil.

I think we may need to consider allowing asylum seekers from the US before long.

I certainly want their influence on the UK marginalized (including a ban of X/Twitter).

The irony of calling for a ban on twitter on a thread that was started to defend people’s right to read.

if you believe in free speech, it has to be free for everyone. Even those you disagree with.

The obsession the USA ultra right have with Europe, how we do things, how they think we should doings is just baffling to me.

Baffling. Like Vance’s lecture, speech to the EU. Baffling.

YANBU @StandFirm.

The UK should not be capitulating to the idiotic, tyrannical, Rapist in Chief of the USA. No one should!

I haven't read the article, and I don't approve of censorship of any kind. But I find it a bit rich that the left are now so concerned about their freedom to hear certain ideas being curtailed. I really do.

Banning X in the UK would not be inconsistent with any free speech laws.

For one, the UK's laws on free speech apply to people within the UK, not those outside of it.

Second, even the US itself (a country that has greater protections around free speech) approved the banning of TikTok, on the basis that any impact on free speech was justified by national security concerns.

Well, I should say that the US has traditionally had greater protections around free speech. Obviously it's clamping down, now, and dispensing with ideas like due process, too.

The United States has gone from respected global player to laughing stock of a shitshow in a matter of months. It's a toxic place with some truly awful people in it, who now have the confidence to come out from under their slimy little rocks. I never imagined I would witness this in my lifetime yet here we are.

That's presumably because you've swallowed the right-wing narrative that attempts to suppress free-speech are a left-wing phenomenon, which was always dubious, culture-war bullshit.

Of late - they have been the left, I haven't swallowed any narrative, I have seen with my own my eyes what happens to women who say they should be allowed to advocate for their rights, many many cases, shut down ferociously, by the left. The left did that. So forgive me if I'm not gracious enough to not feel a twinge of schadenfreude that some are getting a taste of their own medicine, I wish I were a better person.

Free speech means the right to speak freely without legal consequences or government censorship. What instances of women advocating for their rights have been "shut down ferociously" by the UK government?

(And was the government "left wing"?)

This is the problem. The US deserves what it's getting for voting in the current clown show but it's having a detrimental effect on those who don't deserve it.

I read the article but as it was in the Guardian, I took it with a pinch of salt.

It talks about the main group of books being complained about as being those with LGBTQ+ content but doesn't give examples.
I would have liked a link to a proper breakdown of what books have been complained about, how many complaints were made by individuals, how many by organisations and naming those organisations.

I suspect a minority of complaints were made by homophobes who were unhappy about positive depictions of same sex relationships.

I think it's more likely to be people pushing back at the promotion of gender ideology. Members of a number of Women's Rights Network groups, for example, have asked their local libraries if they hold certain titles and have sometimes asked for inappropriate books to be moved from the children's section to the teenage or the adult section.

The left? What, like the Morning Star readership? Remind me, what PM first put Self ID on the table? What PM reduced the cost of a UK GRC to a fiver? What back bench MP reported Twitter users to the police and tried to do all sorts of shady shit to silence other MPs?

They don't want to hear that. They've gone very quiet about Badenoch as well.

Whose Cabinet Minister stood at the Despatch Box and declared TWAW and TMAM in response to a Maternity Bill returned from the Lords seeking clear language? A fucking MATERNITY Bill.🤯

The US ultra-right is destroying America. We should all resist their attempts to do the same here.😡

What right has any group from any other country got to tell another country how to function?!

The US is its own country. The UK is another, on a different continent and has a different culture. Just because we both speak English (generally) doesn't mean that we're one homogenous group with the same belief system.

Also... surely if we start banning books, then it is going to encourage more people to want to read them?

I think, if they actually provided evidence of specific books, you might find that some of the books that people have asked to be banned are children’s book with explicit/ inappropriate adult sexual themes, and books that suggest to children that they can change sex, and e.g. that it’s normal and cool to get your breasts removed if you believe you can change sex.

@parietal

The deliberate spread of propaganda is implicated in a number of genocides. I'm going to guess you would defend the right of the Nazi party to spread grotesque anti-semitic lies and distortions in the German media in 1930 under the banner of 'free speech absolutism'.

Elon Musk is deliberately amplifying far right voices and disinformation on X and it's putting people at risk.

Why would you defend that?