One of the most telltale giveaways of totalitarianism is the active suppression of free speech rights. That’s because people who are free to speak their minds are also free to influence others’ viewpoints and challenge the official state dogma.

There is not a dictatorial regime that hasn’t sought to control its subjects’ speech. Be it Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, or Kim Jong-un, despots target a population’s speech first and foremost. That’s why it was so alarming to see Joe Biden’s administration coercing social media companies into censoring Americans’ speech about COVID. Now, it’s also happening in the UK and Europe more generally.

This week, Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform UK party, testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee to warn of the growing threat from Europe to America’s freedom of speech. Farage asked, “At what point did we become North Korea?” He then answered, “I think the Irish comedy writer found that out two days ago at Heathrow Airport. This is a genuinely worrying, concerning, and shocking situation.”

That was a reference to British police arresting Irish comedian Graham Linehan upon his arrival in London because he made a number of social media posts in which he mocked transgenderism.

As our own Sophie Starkova observed, “If stating the fact that a man cannot be a woman is understood to be violence or terrorism, then your country is not living in reality, is not free, and is on the path to destruction. The UK seems to have gone through the Lewis Carol looking glass and is following the same path of confusion and backwards ‘logic’ into which Alice stumbled.”

While Democrats on the committee dismissed Farage’s warnings — like they have brushed off the notion that crime is a problem in many of America’s largest cities — the facts don’t support their claims.

These speech suppression issues may originate in the UK and the European Union, but they are indeed a threat to Americans’ free speech rights despite our First Amendment protections due to globalist tactics.

The EU has been using its Digital Services Act to regulate speech globally. It does this by demanding that social media platforms censor speech on their platforms that the EU deems problematic. Since many of these companies have a presence and do business in Europe, they are threatened with legal action if they fail to adhere to the relevant restrictions.

Under the guise of opposing so-called “hate speech,” the EU, as well as the UK, via the Human Rights Act of 1998, classifies undesired speech as threatening in order to suppress it. As Farage warned, these speech suppression laws could “damage trade between our countries.”

Regarding the Linehan incident, Farage stated, “He’s not even a British citizen. He’s an Irish citizen. This could happen to any American man or woman that goes to Heathrow, that has said things online that the British government and British police don’t like.” He added, “It is a potentially big threat to tech bosses, to many, many others.”

What the UK and EU have done is taken a non-winning and deservedly criticized position of policing speech. It is ironically one of the most historically anti-liberal positions for Western nations to take. Indeed, it’s a repudiation of the West’s long history of promoting liberty and human rights.

Furthermore, the UK’s action against Linehan is actually in opposition to science, reason, and truth. The notion that men can become women is absurd on its face, and yet, because influential people in cultural institutions desire for this lie to be promulgated as truth, increasing efforts have been taken to punish those who refuse to accept the lie.

If the EU and the UK attempt to use trade deals to infringe upon Americans’ First Amendment rights, then the Trump administration must stop such efforts in their tracks and even work to reverse these perverse actions to silence speech.