Ten Observations on Right-Wing Activist Bans in the UK
On March 9, American activist Brittany Pettibone and Austrian activist Martin Sellner were detained while attempting to enter the United Kingdom through Luton Airport. The UK Home Office said in a statement that “Border Force has the power to refuse entry to an individual if it is considered that his or her presence in the UK is not conducive to the public good.” They were kept in a prison until being released and deported back to Austria on March 11. On March 12, Canadian journalist Lauren Southern was denied entry at Coquelles, France, where the English Channel Tunnel joins the European mainland with the UK. Ten observations on these events follow.
1. The British government clearly mistreated Pettibone, Sellner, and Southern. In a video uploaded to Youtube on March 12, Pettibone and Sellner gave their account of their experiences. After being detained separately due to having different passports (US and EU), they were not allowed to speak to each other or use their phones and were guided everywhere by guards. They were interrogated separately concerning their intentions for entering the UK, then were kept in separate holding cells for several hours. Sellner was denied entry due to being the co-founder of Generation Identity and the possibility of Antifa violence. Once Pettibone admitted her intention to interview Tommy Robinson, founder of the English Defence League, she was asked if she also interviews Ku Klux Klan members, as though they are somehow equivalent. After being denied entry, Pettibone and Sellner were not allowed to leave to a destination other than Austria or from a port other than Luton, which violates English law. They were then held in a prison building at Heathrow in which security officials repeatedly misinformed each about the other’s whereabouts. While there, they were told not to discuss any political issues for fear that an incident may occur. During their ordeal, each was perp-walked through the airport in handcuffs on two occasions.
In an interview with Stefan Molyneux on March 13, Southern discussed her experiences. She took a bus that was traveling from France through the Channel Tunnel to England, which usually has lax border enforcement that is exploited by migrants. She said that officials ‘did a double take’ upon seeing her and said that they needed to ‘check some things’. They then had Southern get off the bus, searched her luggage, and took her to a detention center. After questioning by the border guards, she was turned over to the UK police, who detained her under the Terrorism Act 2006. During questioning, she was asked about her friends, a speech she recently gave to a Belgian nationalist group, and her religious views. Upon saying she was Christian, Southern was asked if she was an extremist and how she felt about running over Muslims with a vehicle. (Note that such terrorism has historically occurred in the reverse.) The police responded to her incredulousness by saying that they “have problems with right-wing terrorism too,” as though Islamic extremists are not right-wing in their social values. They demanded access to Southern’s phone and laptop, which she refused despite ominous threats. In response, she demanded legal counsel. This stopped the interrogation, then the UK Border Force brought her a form saying that she was banned from the UK for “racism” based on a social experiment in which she displayed posters that said “Allah Is A Gay God” in Luton on February 24.
2. The establishment does not understand technology or its rivals, which leads it to make itself look ridiculous. Recent advances in technology have created novel spaces and methods of communication which have weakened traditional gatekeepers to the point of irrelevance. But pulled along by the inertia of their own Overton bubble as they are, establishment bureaucrats continue to act as if denying people the ability to meet in a particular physical location can keep them from discussing ideas and working together. Sellner was unable to appear at Speakers’ Corner, but Robinson plans to go there in his stead to read the speech Sellner had prepared. Pettibone was unable to meet Robinson in the UK, but Robinson flew to Austria to meet Pettibone and Sellner when they arrived there after being deported. The Pettibone–Robinson interview was then filmed there. Southern was unable to meet her friends in the UK, but she was able to meet them elsewhere. The UK Home Office has thus accomplished nothing aside from making itself an easy target for mockery and, due to the previous point, a potential target for legal action.
3. Right-wing public figures must choose between keeping their audiences informed and carrying out their events securely. In a video uploaded to Youtube on March 6, Pettibone and Sellner announced their intentions to enter the UK so that Sellner could deliver a speech at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park and Pettibone could interview Robinson. Sellner had previously had speaking engagements in the UK canceled on account of violent threats from communists. Although such personalities frequently depend on donations from like-minded people for their livelihood and those people would like to know what they are paying for, there must arise an understanding between both sides of this dynamic that some delay is necessary for security in the current political environment. Leftists can watch right-wing videos just as well as rightists can, so detailing one’s future activities in public is tantamount to a general handing his battle plans to the enemy. This is especially true when dealing with political rivals who wield enough institutional power to stymie one’s efforts. Had they never announced their intentions and simply engaged in their activism and journalism, they may have been deported afterward, but they probably would have been able to speak and conduct interviews in the UK. All right-wing activists would do well to be more spontaneous in future to keep leftists from having the intelligence necessary to attack and shut down activities.
4. Anti-discrimination laws, hate speech bans, and other such measures are inherently bigoted against historically dominant groups. These measures, like most other leftist instruments, are written in nice universalist language without reference to any specific groups of people, mentioning only broad categories against which one must not speak or act ill. But if these behaviors occurred (or were at least thought to occur) randomly, no one would find such laws to be necessary. Those who support such laws must therefore build them on foundational beliefs in white supremacy, institutionalized misogyny, etc. Words such as ‘racism’ and ‘sexism,’ which once had clearly defined meanings, become corrupted to associate a present political opponent with a hated enemy from the past and weaponized to identify targets to punish with enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. More skillful linguistic warriors have invented new words such as ‘homophobia’ and ‘transphobia’ to further demonize majorities and non-deviants. Over time, leftist activists come to believe their own nonsense and fall into a holiness spiral that results in the social justice warriors that plague college campuses today.
5. Free speech activism is misguided. According to Sellner, his speech was about freedom of speech, and the response of the British government shows that the UK does not have freedom of speech. But this was already known to anyone who cared to research the matter. At some point, opponents of the progressive agenda must recognize that information campaigns and complaining about censorship can only go so far, and that free speech for everyone succumbs to the Popperian paradox. The real battle must be for control of territory.
It must be noted that in the abstract, freedom of communication is a corollary of self-ownership. Each person has the right to exclusive control over one’s physical body, which cannot be disputed without exercising that right. Likewise, one cannot argue against freedom to communicate without exercising it. But humans do not live in the abstract; we inhabit physical and digital spaces, and another corollary of self-ownership is the ability to acquire private property rights in these spaces. Part and parcel of private property rights is the ability to regulate activity within one’s territory and exclude unwanted people from one’s territory, and speech that one wishes not to be spoken within one’s territory is a proper motive for excluding someone. States, technology companies, and others who have made commitments to freedom of speech have confused people with their free speech guarantees, as the common spaces they control are actually properties governed with lax restrictions, except when their controllers decide to ban someone.
The proper path for right-wing and libertarian activism, then, is to build the means to take control over physical and digital spaces for the purpose of censoring and excluding authoritarian leftists. Rather than simply repealing hate speech laws, an equal and opposite ban on communist propaganda and promoting multiculturalism should be instituted. Such a ban should be as vague and fear-provoking as the hate speech laws which currently muzzle rightists in order to produce a chilling effect on radical leftism. Of course, any advocacy of the concept of hate speech would count as communist propaganda, while any denigration of traditional European cultural elements would count as promoting multiculturalism. The end goals of such measures would be to show leftists that any institutional power they wish to have can and will be used against them when they are not in power.
6. The treatment of Pettibone, Sellner, and Southern versus the treatment of rape gangs and returning ISIS fighters is an example of anarcho-tyranny. Samuel Francis introduced the term ‘anarcho-tyranny’ to describe a society in which crime is permitted and criminals are not apprehended or punished (anarchy), but innocent people are punished (tyranny), especially if they object to the tolerated criminals. Pettibone, Sellner, and Southern voiced no intention to engage in any activity that would cause harm to people or property, yet they were detained and refused entry. Meanwhile, more than 400 Islamic State jihadis from the UK have returned there, and a massive child sex abuse scandal in Telford that is even larger than the Rotherham scandal was recently revealed. Indigenous Europeans are banned, while foreigners who enter the UK illegally are welcomed. It is therefore clear that the British authorities are acting exactly as Francis described.
7. The state is interested in power, not truth. Islam is a religion, not a race, so criticizing it cannot be racist. Seeking to preserve and protect one’s own racial and cultural identity does not mean that one hates people of other races and cultures. For leftists to claim that people should not be banned for their beliefs while cheering the ban of people who disagree with them is partisan hackery. But these facts are of little political relevance in the real world when those who wield state power have an anti-factual agenda.
8. Antifa is the paramilitary wing of the Cathedral. Sellner’s speaking engagements were canceled and his deportation was caused by threats of violence made by Antifa. By kowtowing to violent leftists, the British government has made itself the high to their low against the middle of rightfully concerned native Europeans. Antifa, meanwhile, serves as foot soldiers of the status quo by doing what the establishment wants done but cannot be seen directly doing for political reasons.
9. Ignoring the legitimate grievances of right-wing activists will not make them go away. Despite the lies of the establishment press, many people involved with nativist causes in Europe are not Nazi sympathizers, terrorists, or anything of the sort. They are simply common people of European descent who have legitimate grievances about being demographically replaced by their own governments without their consent, losing parts of their homelands to hostile immigrants, the silencing of European women victimized by Muslim men, an economic system which threw them overboard decades ago, and the rise of identity politics among non-whites following decades of leftist agitation. Ignoring the concerns of European right-wing nationalists will be ineffective in the long-term. Instead, the repressed political movements will manifest in a manner that is less open and more violent.
10. This will get worse before it gets better. Because the problems outlined in the above observations are unlikely to be addressed and resolved by the appropriate parties, incidents like these will become more frequent. Unfortunately, humans tend not to do what is necessary to solve difficult problems until they run out of other options, so we can expect more right-wing activists to be banned from the UK, hate speech laws to become more strict, and migrant crimes to become more frequent until the British people decide to stop suffering in silence and revolt against the elites who are ruining their society.
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