(LifeSiteNews) — The Trump administration is doubling down on its commitment to stand up for freedom of speech in Europe with an extraordinary move. According to GB News, Trump “sent a team of U.S. officials to the U.K. to investigate concerns over freedom of speech restrictions, particularly regarding pro-life activists who have been arrested for silent protests outside abortion clinics.”
Vice President JD Vance made international waves in February when he confronted European leaders at the Munich Security Conference on their free speech record, singling out the U.K.’s persecution of pro-life protestors. Vance noted that veteran Adam Smith-Connor had been convicted and sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs simply for praying silently outside an abortion clinic, and cited Scotland’s draconian buffer zone that could apply to people praying inside their own homes.
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U.K. and Scottish politicians rushed to condemn Vance’s accusations; in the course of one media interview in which a Scottish MSP called Vance’s speech “absolute nonsense,” Gillian Mackay – the parliamentarian who championed the buffer zone bill – was forced to admit that the law could apply in precisely the way that Vance had described.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer attempted to defend his government’s free speech record, but Trump has doubled down, most recently noting that the U.S. is “monitoring” the case of Lucy Connolly, a mother and wife of a Conservative ex-councilor jailed for 31 months for an angry and ill-advised X post after a terrorist butchered three little girls with a knife at a dance class in Southport. Many have noted that the mother received more jail time for a swiftly deleted social media post than others have received for genuine crimes.
“Lucy Connolly is effectively a political prisoner and should be freed immediately,” Suella Braverman, the former Tory home secretary, stated. “She made an ill-judged tweet, soon deleted. That the U.S. is investigating this case is a sad indictment of the dire state of free speech … under Labour.”
It appears that the Trump administration’s commitment to free speech is more than just virtue-signaling. The U.S. state department sent a five-person team to the U.K. for several days to interview U.K. government targets and then report back to the White House on their findings. According to GB News:
The diplomats from the U.S. bureau of democracy, human rights and labor travelled to London in March to “affirm the importance of freedom of expression in the U.K. and across Europe.” The delegation was led by Samuel Samson, a senior adviser in the state department. During their visit, the U.S. team met with five British activists who had been arrested for silently praying outside abortion clinics across the country, the Telegraph reports.
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The delegation met with pro-life activists Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, Rose Docherty, Adam Smith-Connor, Livia Tossici-Bolt, and Father Sean Gough, a Catholic priest, who shared their experiences of being detained while silently praying. Docherty, who is a 74-year-old grandmother, was the first to be arrested under Scotland’s new buffer zone law in February outside Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow. GB News reported that the “meetings took place at what was described as a ‘nondescript’ office block, away from public attention.”
According to The Independent, a source in Washington with ties to the administration stated that Vance is the driving force behind the focus on freedom of speech, stating that Vance is “obsessed by the fall of Western civilization,” and that the collapse of freedom of speech in the U.K. is a key indicator of that fall.
Progressive politicians have long leveraged their power on behalf of the LGBT movement, abortion activists, and other ideological allies. JD Vance is illustrating what it looks like for a conservative politician to do the same.