A pint of Vance Hopium please

The enemy within

I permitted myself some fist pumping as I was listening to J.D. Vance’s Munich Security Conference speech on 14^th Feb 2025. I temporarily forgot about the unhealthy interest that many of Don Trumpo’s clan have in technocracy and savoured the moment when J.D. Vance decided to correctly identify progressive authoritarianism as a major threat to liberty.

I’ve spilt quite of bit of ink explaining how quickly tyranny is being implemented by stealth in the United Kingdom. But J.D. Vance was able to raise more awareness about this threat in less than twenty minutes than any number of hard working dissidents could over decades. In this sense, J.D. Vance’s speech was a major win.

Many people took notice of state tyranny during the COVID debacle because the tyranny affected everyone and had a number of obvious physical manifestations. Unfortunately, the ongoing destruction of ancient freedoms is much less visible, but equally dangerous.

Once the political class decided they could get away with removing informed consent rights from half a million care home workers in July 2021 it was really open season on personal liberty from there on. The table below highlights just a few recent cases where the Political Class has used new legislation to is shut down generally harmless citizens simply for the “crime” of disagreeing with Westminster.

When you see this legislation in the form of a table, it should be easier to see a clear trend which is probably not obvious from a series of unconnected press articles. The main technique for advancing state tyranny is the creation of what George Orwell described in 1984 as “Wrongthink” and “Wrongspeak” being thought and speech which does not align with the State’s official party line. Today these really are criminal offenses in the United Kingdom and I wanted to illustrate that with a few real-world examples. Each case is somewhat involved and so a summary requires editing out some context. I have already written about some of these cases and an interested reader can click through to the relevant article to get further context.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce charged with Wrongthink in the form of silent prayer.

I carried out a long interview with Isabel which can be found on Rumble¹. Her case is the same as the case referred to by J.D. Vance of Adam Smith-Connor. Isabel was arrested for silently praying near an abortion clinic, the initial arrest was made under an alleged breach of Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPO). These were designed to give police powers to move drunks on from public spaces in specific areas and resolve similar anti-social problems. Those provisions went national with the introduction of Section 9 of the Public Order Act at the end of 2024. This section creates an “offense” of “influencing any person’s decision” to access abortion facilities. Like all Wrongthink legislation the “crime” being committed is nebulous and open to interpretation, rather than something that causes tangible harm².

The government went on to list silent prayer as one of the activities that would be a breach of this legislation.

J.D. Vance was correct that oppressive Scottish authorities wrote to residents living inside a 200 meter Safe Zone around an abortion clinic to explain that things they do even in their own homes could constitute a breach of Scottish regulations under certain circumstances.

Bernie Spofforth arrested for Wrongspeak under Online Safety Act – Sec 179

I wrote a Substack article about the reported arrest by Cheshire police of a “55-year-old woman from near Chester” who was identified in subsequent media reports as Bernie Spofforth³. She was charged in connection with the Online Safety Act (Section 179) and the Public Order Act 1986 (Section 19). Her “crime” was posting a silly tweet suggesting that the alleged Southport attacker was Ali-Al-Shakati who was an asylum seeker and arrived on a boat last year. The contents of the tweet turned out to be completely untrue.

Section 179 creates an “offense” of posting a message which is knowingly false and the person intends “to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm”. This definition again creates a wide-open goal for any oppressive state to censor citizens, you could easily see a scenario where something is “false” because it contradicts the State’s current position and the nebulous concept of “psychological harm” can then be certified by an “expert”.

The police eventually dropped the case. It is also worth noting that organised media are de facto exempt from this section, meaning this section is designed only to harass individuals and small operations. According to Free Speech Union, around 300 people have now been charged under the Online Safety Act⁴.

Graham Phillips, sanctioned for Wrongspeak via YouTube vidoes

Graham Phillips is a blogger who has for some time been posting pro-Russian videos from areas of Eastern Ukraine which have now been annexed into Russia. He was included in a sanctions list in July 2022 and is the only mono-British citizen (as opposed to dual national) to have been sanctioned by the U.K. Graham Phillips applied for a judicial review of this decision based on the fact that his human rights had been effectively withdrawn. The Judge acknowledged that “His entire income stream was eliminated. His UK bank account has less that £500 in it. He now has debts of thousands of pounds (misspelt as points in the original). A summons has been issued for unpaid council tax on his property in London.” His removal from the banking system has left him unable to actually make any payments to anyone.

The key thing about the Phillips case is that he has not committed any crime in the U.K. and has not had any kind of trial in the U.K.⁵ The decision to include him on the sanctions list was determined by officials mainly from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. His “crime” was pushing a strongly pro-Russian line over the Ukraine conflict. There are several complications in his case, including his interviewing a British national Aiden Aslin who was fighting with Ukrainian forces and was captured by the Russian military. The whole judicial review judgement is available at this link⁶. The judge stated that fundamental rights are “subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society.” I personally believe that many rights are inalienable and cannot generally be removed by bureaucrats. The judge denied the judicial review application and concluded that preventing Graham Phillips having access to banking facilities as punishment for the content of his videos was an acceptable outcome.

Many parts of this decision mirror the review of the Canadian trucker’s protest where the Government there also withdrew access to protestors banking facilities. This is not creeping authoritarianism but open authoritarianism which is being supported by the judiciary. I’ve stayed clear of the issue of two-tier justice, but comparing the Phillips case with any number of immigration related cases where serious criminals have avoided punishment under various human rights grounds indicates glaring double standards.

Richard Medhurst, suspected Wrongspeak in connection with Citizen journalism

A number of journalists are being harassed in Heathrow under terrorism related legislation. One of the more visible cases has been the detention of Richard Medhurst, who is a freelance journalist, who was held under section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 which prohibits “express[ing] an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation.” There is little evidence that there is any truth to this claim based on a search of Richard Medhurst’s tweet history.

This is not an isolated incident, as blogger Callum Darragh was also recently detained in Heathrow under Section 3 of Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019 (which updated the 2000 Act). It is an offense to “collect[s] or make[s] a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism..”. Based on a recent interview, Callum Darragh maintains that he was stopped as part of general harassment and that the security services were carrying out a “fishing trip” to see if they could find anything of interest on his devices. He travels to some dangerous parts of the world, including Afghanistan, El Salvador and Zimbabwe. His electronic devices were taken from him and he was required to hand over his PINs, an inventory of devices is shown in the photo below.

Summary

Politicians and particularly Leftist politicians seem to be coercive by nature and therefore willing to oppress citizens by withdrawing or curtailing fundamental liberties. When looking back through Starmer’s policy positions, it was clear that his government would be more coercive than most give he specifically identified “conspiracy theories, crankery, misinformation and hatred” as being challenges that should be taken on. It doesn’t matter for the political class that almost all of the so-called “conspiracy theories” during COVID turned out to be true, correspondingly almost all of the government propaganda turned out to be false.

The short sample of cases above indicates that the State is perfectly willing to harass law-abiding citizens, please note that I don’t agree with all of the people in the cases above. Citizens are harassed when they dare to contradict a prevailing Westminster article of faith including that abortions should be encouraged, multi-culturalism cannot be questioned and that Ukraine is a country which the U.K. must support militarily.

The State invests time and effort in harassing regular citizens by inventing “crimes” of Wrongthink and Wrongspeak at the same time as failing in many of its core functions including protecting the border, incarcerating criminals and providing healthcare.

J.D. Vance was absolutely right to call out the enemy within when he said “I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most sure-fire way to destroy democracy.” He has certainly annoyed all the right people and that alone is worth savouring!

Let me have your thoughts below and please don’t forget to circulate our material and support our work, I hope you appreciate that it requires a lot of analysis to presents important facts which are not to be found in the mainstream media, or in the bulk of the controlled alternative media. If more people don’t take the time to convert to paid subscription and/or fund us via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/c/ThinkingSlow) then we must close down, which would be a loss for all of us.

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID mode, he is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about Government overreach (www.thinkingcoalition.com)

1. https://rumble.com/v5y6un2-u.k.-state-oppresses-christians.html

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4. https://freespeechunion.org/hundreds-charged-with-online-speech-crimes-under-online-safety-act-amid-us-free-expression-concerns/

5. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14232135/PETER-HITCHENS-British-blogger-lost-human-rights-Ukraine.html

6. https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/phillips-v-secretary-of-state-for-foreign-commonwealth-and-development-affairs/