I greatly enjoyed attending this fascinating discussion on August 5th, at St John’s Church, Waterloo, where my wife Erica Wagner, US citizen and a writer/editor at the Observer, was one of the speakers. Hosted in conjunction with Index on Censorship, this launch of their latest edition titled Land of the Free? brought together journalists, editors and campaigners to discuss Donald Trump’s attacks on freedom of expression. It was a sobering, invigorating and timely conversation, exposing how the erosion of fundamental freedoms, speech, protest, academic independence, now shapes both American and global political life.
The panel at Land of the Free?, hosted by Index on Censorship at St John’s Waterloo, brought together an extraordinary group of speakers confronting the global threats to free expression. Wall Street Journal journalist Anvee Bhutani shared insights from reporting across the frontlines of repression, from Palestine to India, and spoke passionately about the silencing of student protest and academic freedom. Legal strategist Charlie Holt laid bare the escalating use of lawsuits—particularly in the US and UK—as tools to intimidate climate activists and muzzle dissent. Belarusian poet and former political prisoner Hanna Komar performed a searing poem co-written with Katerina Koulouri that reclaims banned words, a visceral reminder of what censorship costs. Erica contextualised these threats within a broader literary and historical framework, connecting current attacks on liberal values with longer patterns of cultural erasure. Together, they exposed how Donald Trump’s renewed campaign against protest, journalism and academic freedom is part of a wider global pattern—and reminded us that defending freedom of expression is not just a legal battle, but a moral and imaginative one.
Here are seven things I learnt:
1. We may need to talk about American dissidents: just like in the Soviet Union
Martin Bright, Editor-at-Large of Index on Censorship, asked whether we should now be thinking about American protesters in the same way Soviet dissidents were discussed during the Cold War. He had just read Benjamin Nathans’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause (Nathans, 2025), which traces the personal sacrifices and moral clarity of those who resisted the USSR’s authoritarianism. But as Charlie Holt astutely pointed out, the very framing of Bright’s question is problematic. The situation is not a Cold War redux; rather, it’s part of a steady erosion of freedoms: a slow constriction of the right to protest, to publish, to speak out without fear.
2. Trump’s America uses SLAPPs to silence dissent, but the UK may be worse
Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) are being deployed by Trump’s allies to harass environmental groups, journalists and critics—Greenpeace being a high-profile example in 2016–17 (Leman, 2025). But as Holt noted, the situation may be even more concerning here in the UK, where we do not benefit from the First Amendment protections enshrined in the US Constitution. Britain’s increasingly repressive protest laws, coupled with the absence of strong constitutional safeguards, make the UK more vulnerable than the US to state overreach and suppression of dissent (Boyle, 2024).
3. The right to protest is under attack—here and in the US
Both countries are witnessing a chilling trend: the criminalisation of protest. In the US, Trump has deployed the National Guard against demonstrators and threatened universities with funding cuts for ideological non-compliance. In the UK, protest laws have been dramatically tightened in recent years. Liberty’s guidance on the right to protest makes clear how fragile those freedoms now are (Liberty, 2025). What’s unfolding is a bipartisan assault on dissent, cloaked in the rhetoric of national security and order.
4. Collective action is the most effective way to fight bullies
One of the most powerful takeaways from the evening was the simple truth that collective action works. Bullies, whether in government, media or corporations, rely on divide-and-conquer strategies. They isolate critics, smear them, and bury them in legal threats. The best defence is solidarity. When we stand together, support each other, amplify each other’s voices, and share resources, the bullying becomes harder to sustain.
5. The ‘War on Woke’ is a war on liberal values
The Trumpian rhetoric about “wokeism” is more than just media theatre. As several speakers noted, Trump and his allies target anyone with liberal, inclusive or human rights-focused views. In the name of fighting “wokeness,” journalists have been arrested, academics silenced, and activists forced into exile. It is an ideological purge masquerading as patriotism. The same pattern can be seen in the UK, where “culture war” narratives now dominate political discourse, marginalising teachers, artists and campaigners alike.
6. The most dangerous lies were told during the War on Terror
Although not discussed at length during the event, I was struck by how the current moment echoes the War on Terror. That era was built on a series of deliberate falsehoods and authoritarian strategies that reshaped the global political landscape. Most infamously, the UK and US governments justified the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the false claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, a narrative discredited by the Iraq Inquiry (2016), which concluded there was no imminent threat and that intelligence had been exaggerated to support military action. At the same time, counter-terror policies blurred the lines between dissent and extremism. In the UK and elsewhere across the world, this led to the introduction of sweeping legislation including control orders, indefinite detention without charge, and secret evidence trials (Human Rights Watch, 2012).
The Prevent strategy, launched under New Labour and expanded under Conservative governments, cast suspicion on entire communities, often targeting Muslims and people of colour under vague criteria such as “vulnerability to radicalisation” (Ragazzi, 2016). Globally, US-led extraordinary rendition programmes enabled torture and illegal detention, with UK complicity documented in numerous reports (Open Society Foundations, 2013; Curtis, 2018). These were not isolated misjudgements—they were part of a broader ideological effort to redefine security as the suppression of freedom, and to cast protest, critique and even cultural identity as threats (Blakeley and Raphael, 2016).
We are now living with the legacy of these lies. Today’s crackdowns on environmental activists, human rights defenders and so-called “woke” voices rely on the same logic: that liberty must be sacrificed for safety, and that dissent must be policed. The tools are different but the playbook is familiar.
That period marked a high point in the use of state-sponsored misinformation: both the US and UK governments mobilised lies to justify disastrous wars, introduce surveillance laws, and scapegoat entire communities. We are still living with the consequences. Today’s censorship and repression are part of the same continuum: a politics of fear, distraction and control.
7. Freedom of expression is not just a US issue: it’s global, and it’s urgent
Index on Censorship’s new magazine powerfully illustrates how repression of speech spans continents: from journalists imprisoned in Somalia and Palestine, to human rights groups forced out of El Salvador (Associated Press, 2025). This isn’t just Trump’s war. It’s a global pattern of democratic backsliding, often enabled or ignored by liberal democracies. That’s why publications like Index, and gatherings like this event, matter so deeply.
References
Associated Press (2025) The Guardian: Top rights group leaves El Salvador after threats from its government, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/17/human-rights-el-salvador-law-president-threats [Accessed 6 August 2025]
Blakeley, R., & Raphael, S. (2016). British torture in the ‘war on terror’. European Journal of International Relations, 23(2), 243-266. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116653455 (Original work published 2017)
Boyle, S. (2024) Britain’s protest laws are tighter than ever – and Labour may well keep them. Heinrich Böll Stiftung. [online] Available at: https://eu.boell.org/en/2024/06/07/britains-protest-laws-are-tighter-ever-and-labour-may-well-keep-them [Accessed 6 August 2025]
Curtis, H. (2018) Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam. London: Serpent’s Tail.
Human Rights Watch (2012) In the Name of Security Counterterrorism Laws Worldwide since September 11 https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/06/29/name-security/counterterrorism-laws-worldwide-september-11 [Accessed 6 August 2025]
Leman, M.(2025) Battling the giants: How Greenpeace fights back against SLAPP lawsuits https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/69821/battling-the-giants-how-greenpeace-fights-back-against-slapp-lawsuits/ [Accessed 6 August 2025]
Iraq Inquiry (2016) The Report of the Iraq Inquiry: Executive Summary (The Chilcot Report). London: HMSO. [online] Available at: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20171123123237/http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/the-report/ [Accessed 6 August 2025]
Liberty (2025) The right to protest. Liberty Human Rights. [online] Available at: https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/advice_information/right-to-protest/ [Accessed 6 August 2025]
Open Society Foundations (2013) Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition. [online] Available at: https://www.justiceinitiative.org/uploads/655bbd41-082b-4df3-940c-18a3bd9ed956/globalizing-torture-20120205.pdf [Accessed 6 August 2025]
Nathans, B. (2025) To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. Princeton University Press. Available at: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691117034/to-the-success-of-our-hopeless-cause-pulitzer-prize-winner [Accessed 6 August 2025]
Ragazzi, F. (2016). Suspect community or suspect category? The impact of counter-terrorism as ‘policed multiculturalism.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42(5), 724–741. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1121807
Wikipedia (2025) Strategic lawsuit against public participation. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation [Accessed 6 August 2025]