No major country has suffered a greater reversal of speech rights than the United States over the past year. The federal government is using economic coercion and weaponising the legal system to restrict viewpoints in universities, law firms, museums, media and corporations. Critics of the administration are targets of federal investigation. Reactionary activists are banning books from public libraries. So the recent report from the US State Department criticising the UK for “restrictions on freedom of expression” looks, at first glance, like an exercise in hypocrisy and projection.
In fact it’s much worse than that. The Trump administration is exporting its culture wars, and it is using the rhetoric of “free speech” to extend to other countries the very same assault on democracy that is taking place within the United States.
In early 2025, well before the release of the new “report”, Vice President JD Vance made the agenda transparent. He attacked the UK for allegedly suppressing “freedom of speech” and putting the “basic liberties of religious Britons in the crosshairs”. He went on to meet leaders with connections to Reform UK, after having given a shout-out to the hard-right AfD in Germany.
It is important to understand that when Vance and the apparatchiks at the Trump State Department say “free speech” they aren’t referring to a universal right. They are concerned only with the rights of religious, nationalist and racist conservatives. And they are not interested in the rights of conservatives so much as their special privileges. They believe that conservatives are uniquely entitled to have their views platformed – and then imposed – at the expense of the rights of other people.
Exporting US strategies to the UK
Reproductive rights is a key battleground. In their report on alleged restrictions on free speech in the UK, the loyalists at the State Department followed JD Vance in offering the example of anti-abortion activists arrested merely for “praying”. In fact, they are typically referring to situations in which conservative activists stage intentional violations of the law that protects women from harassment as they seek reproductive healthcare – and then claim that they are victims of the suppression of speech.
This dynamic started well before the current Trump administration. In the aftermath of the pandemic, a new wave of America-based activism took aim at the UK. I’ve been tracking these developments, including attending events aimed at training anti-abortion activists.
Back in 2023, I attended ReThink Abortion Day, a day-long conference that took place at a Catholic seminary in Birmingham. I discovered a concerted effort to export US strategies into the UK. In a wood-panelled conference room, 50 or 60 participants settled into their seats to take in the presentations. Much of the training was focused on how to mount demonstrations outside women’s health centres – long a feature of abortion politics in the United States.
The presenters included Ben Thatcher, then co-director of the UK satellite of the US-based March for Life – the organisation behind the annual anti-abortion demonstration that draws tens of thousands of participants to Washington, DC. Another speaker, Dave Brennan, is the director of Brephos, which claims to help “churches respond to abortion” and is a British spinoff of the US-based Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR). Apart from the Catholic groups co-hosting the event, the key speakers were all working with UK affiliates of US-based organisations, representing a broader trend of growing connections between the UK and America’s Christian nationalist movement.
Leading the discussion on demonstrations and anti-abortion messaging were representatives of 40 Days for Life UK, an affiliate of the US-based organisation. Founded in 2004 in Bryan, Texas – a small city that anti-abortion activists have described as “the most anti-choice place in the nation” – 40 Days for Life specialises in training and organising protests in front of abortion clinics and other providers. The stated aim is to dissuade women from going through with an abortion, though the usual effect is simply to bully and shame them for doing so.
40 Days for Life claims to operate in more than a thousand cities in 63 countries. The UK branch kicked off with campaigns in Northern Ireland in 2009 and now boasts at least 15 chapters across the United Kingdom.
Targeting reproductive rights
At the anti-abortion recruitment gatherings that I have attended in the US, there is invariably the moment when speakers treat the audience to a slideshow involving gory images of aborted foetuses. Birmingham did not disappoint. Taking the podium in a navy sweater and jeans and cheery attitude, Dave Brennan of the UK branch of CBR delivered the goods. CBR is known in the US for its use of such graphic images, which are often enlarged and displayed as placards and billboards near playgrounds, schools and other places where children congregate.
But it’s not just abortion that they’re coming after. The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, as its name might suggest, has a much broader and more radical agenda. In line with its sister organisation, Brennan’s UK affiliate opposes the most effective forms of contraception, including birth control pills and mini pills, implants, IUDs and vaginal rings. Any method that prevents a united sperm and egg from implanting into the vaginal wall, Brennan’s group maintains, would “end human life”. We must acknowledge, he told the gathering, that “our enemy is more powerful than we are, factually speaking, and he” – that is, Satan –“is determined”. He sketched a theology according to which saving diploid zygotes, blastocysts and foetuses is the greatest moral issue of our time.
Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, co-director of March for Life UK and the Birmingham chapter of 40 Days for Life, introduced a handout on the “ABC of Abortion”, which amounted to a series of rebuttals of counter-arguments one is likely to hear while harassing patients at health centres. “We need to take back control,” Vaughan-Spruce said, her voice animated with a can-do lilt. “We want them to acknowledge it’s a baby, it’s a human, it’s a child.” She nodded and smiled. “We’re not trying to bring our religious values in at this point. We’re not talking about anything political. We’re just talking about the scientific.”
There was a detailed discussion of “rights” – though, again, it was all about the rights of abortion opponents. In December 2022, police charged Vaughan-Spruce with four counts of breaching an exclusion zone, or buffer zone, at a maternal healthcare centre – these zones are intended to protect patients from interference while accessing clinics. Vaughan-Spruce promptly appeared in a YouTube video in which, wearing a pastel coat, her hair neatly pinned, she softly complained that she had been indicted for nothing more than “silently praying in my head”.
Her case was taken up by the UK branch of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the US-headquartered right-wing legal advocacy juggernaut. In a well-coordinated PR campaign, conservative Christian media outlets joined Vaughan-Spruce in characterising her alleged crime as “standing silently near an abortion clinic” or a “silent prayer crime”. The incident received widespread media coverage in Britain, and the charges were soon dropped. None of the mainstream media outlets covering the story identified Vaughan-Spruce as a leader of 40 Days for Life UK. Several months later she got herself rearrested and repeated the same talking points. (The police later released her without charges.)
When I encountered her, several months later, she seemed defiant, alleging that anti-abortion demonstrations are all about “free speech”. The praying was presumably never silent after all.
'A feigned interest in free speech'
Despite these efforts, the UK remains far behind the United States in the vigour of its culture war over women’s healthcare. Indeed, the growing anti-abortion activity around reproductive health facilities in the UK has sparked a backlash that appears to be limiting the movement’s policy gains for now. In late 2022, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that setting up buffer zones around abortion clinics in Northern Ireland did not “disproportionately interfere” with protesters’ rights. This ruling from the country’s highest court also paved the way for legislation in Scotland, England and Wales. The buffer zones, in force in England from October 2024, are recognised as a means of protecting women from harassment, and therefore protecting their right to healthcare.
Even so, ritualised harassment and humiliation of women seeking medical care is hardly the only American contribution to the budding culture war over reproductive services in the UK. American organisations are also contributing to the establishment of anti-abortion counselling centres. Billed as “crisis pregnancy centres”, these organisations attempt to dissuade women from seeking abortions, often by giving misleading or unethical advice.
It’s important to understand that the motivation behind the feigned interest in free speech is to promote a narrative of grievance. Conservative Christians in the US have convinced themselves that they and they alone are the real victims of discrimination in modern society. The investment in the UK is part of a broader global strategy, with representatives of America’s religious right pushing their ideas and agendas out to other countries around the world.
The Alliance Defending Freedom is crucial to this drive. Greg Scott, vice-president of communications for ADF, confirmed to me that the organisation’s budget exceeded $102 million in the fiscal year 2021-2022. Between 2015 and 2020, according to ADF’s publicly-available tax data, overseas expenditures rose from $3 million to almost $10 million. [According to a recent article in The New York Times, since then it has quadrupled the money it sends to its British arm to more than $1 million.]
“We are dedicated to the promotion of fundamental freedoms for all, and ADF International’s efforts are focused on areas where human rights are under threat,” ADF International’s legal communications director, Elyssa Koren, told me.
But protecting human rights has a particular meaning, according to this mindset. It not only involves taking on defendants like Vaughan-Spruce but also, for example, defending anti-sodomy laws around the world – including a law in Belize that, before it was overturned, made same-sex intimacy punishable by 10 years’ imprisonment.
JD Vance's 'British Sherpa'
In this context, the protection of “human rights” and “free speech” is part of an effort to build a global political movement targeting liberal democracy. These supposed concerns are intended to mobilise a nationalist base to support far-right political parties and politicians who wish to follow the model of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has replaced the country’s democracy with a cronyistic, demagogic oligarchy.
This is the reality detailed in an important report from the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF) titled “The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism is Reclaiming Power”, published in June. The report, the third in a series, follows the money in detail as it moves from private wealth and public sources into reactionary groups, think tanks and strategic litigators masquerading as philanthropies. It covers the impact in 27 European countries as well as funding sources in Europe, Russia and the US. Between 2019 and 2023, the report finds, $1.18 billion flowed into frontline groups in the effort to elevate conservative religion in culture and governance in the UK – an increase from the 2009 to 2018 period, when the amount was just $81.3 million.
But “We can’t just blame Americans,” in the words of Neil Datta, founder and executive director of the EPF and the author of the report. “A lot of money is coming from European sources.”
In the UK, a figure around whom this movement towards religious nationalism is coalescing is James Orr, a professor of divinity at Cambridge University, and now a senior advisor to Nigel Farage. Running through much of Orr’s social media presence is a persecution narrative – specifically, persecution of conservative Christians at the hands of a malignant liberal elite. Orr, whom JD Vance reportedly once called his “British Sherpa”, defended Vance’s fatuous claims about free speech losses in the UK as “brilliant”. Like Vance, Orr has boosted the profile of the nativist, anti-democratic Hungarian regime – a regime that suppresses speech as a matter of routine.
Orr attended last summer’s Matthias Corvinas Collegium (MCC) festival in northern Hungary, where he accused the UK of adopting a “naïve” and “dangerous” approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He also described politicians sympathetic with the struggle for Ukraine’s independence as having a “peculiar psychological condition” called “Ukraine brain”, and instead praised Hungary’s approach, in which it has systematically blocked sanctions of Russian oligarchs and delayed EU military aid packages.
The MCC is a private college and educational network with close ties to Orbán, whose events draw together hard-right thinkers from across the world. These kinds of networks help the movement share ideas and strategies.
The victims of this global political movement will by no means be limited to women seeking reproductive care or same-sex couples who wish to join together in marriage. Religious nationalist countries are often “theocratic” in a certain fake sense – that is, they are regimes that endorse a particular religion and attempt to impose that religion and its values on society. But they are best described as cronyistic kleptocracies with strong militaristic features and absolute suppression of free speech and political opposition.
One of the most insidious things about the current iteration of authoritarianism is that it has coopted and perverted the language of liberal democracy. When it speaks about individual rights, it is really just pushing for ever greater power over individuals. When it speaks about “speech rights”, it aims to suppress those with whom it disagrees. Many in the UK and Europe might not be aware of what’s coming at them from America. If they wish to resist the slide into authoritarianism, they would do well to understand it better.
This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.
