Keir Starmer’s suppression of free speech in the UK is expansive in its scope.  Doomberg reports:

According to the BBC, a 40-year-old man was recently charged for social media posts that “were alleged to contain anti-Muslim and anti-establishment rhetoric.” The characterization of the latter as offensive has raised more than a few eyebrows, including ours (and now, probably yours). Warnings have been sent across British airwaves to avoid posting or retweeting anything that could be interpreted to cause harm, “regardless of their intent.”

One particularly concerning trend is the manifest effort to include so-called “climate denialism” under the umbrella of hate speech, exposing those with alternative views on energy policy to potential legal jeopardy. In a piece we wrote in March titled “Climate Newspeak,” we chronicled how the self-appointed internet watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) was agitating to include opposition to wind and solar projects as “New Denial,” which they helpfully defined as “rhetoric seeking to undermine confidence in solutions to climate change.” At the time, the CCDH—led by founder and CEO Imran Ahmed, who was previously a political strategist for the Labour Party—was demanding censorship of a wide range of popular YouTube channels.

These channels include the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heritage Action for America, the Hudson Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the National Center for Public Policy Research, the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute, and the Heartland Institute.

When attacks on free speech include the suppression of supposedly harmful thoughts having to do with science and physical reality…and speech suppressors are most unlikely to consider this sphere out of bounds to their activities… then there will soon be a palpable and harmful impact on that society’s well-being and on its overall economic and military capacity.  In my post Starvation and Centralization, I cited a passage in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, set in a country that was never explicitly named—though is clearly Stalin’s Soviet Union:

A short time ago, our leading agriculturalist, B., was shot with thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash. No. 1 is all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be liquidated as saboteurs. In a nationally centralized agriculture, the alternative of nitrate or potash is of enormous importance : it can decide the issue of the next war. If No. 1 was in the right, history will absolve him.  If he was wrong…

Note that phrase in a nationally centralized agriculture.  When things are centralized, decisions become overwhelmingly important. There will be strong pressure against allowing dissidents to “interfere with” what has been determined to be the One Best Way. A society’s feedback loop is broken, mistaken decisions will be unrecoverable.  In the real-life Soviet Union, the official enforcement of the crackpot theories of Trofim Lysenko did great harm to the country’s agricultural output.  In today’s UK, the “hate speech” designation of energy wrongthink increases the odds that that country will follow Germany’s disastrous energy policies, with baneful consequences in the form of further deindustrialization, widespread impoverishment, and harm to UK and European security.

No one should think that the US is immune from this phenomenon.  If the Democrats win the presidency… and especially if they also maintain or increase their grasp on Congress, you can expect a similar broadening of the concepts of “hate speech” and “denialism”… with penalties attached… on this side of the Atlantic.