The U.S. State Department doubled down on its decision to sanction UK and Euro-citizen pro-censorship activists, as anti-“hate” NGO boss launches fight against being deported to Britain.
U.S. Undersecretary of State Sarah B Rogers has told The Times of London that America is particularly focussing on European free speech issues because it is culturally important to the U.S. and, unlike other areas of the world that may have hostile environments to expression, the region is backsliding rather than improving.
In a warning to others in Europe and Britain considering attempting to push further censorship bids on the United States, Rogers said “we stand ready and willing to expand our sanctions list. That doesn’t mean we want to.”
Doubling down on the decision to sanction five individuals with bans on entering and residing in the United States, Rogers told the British newspaper, “These are people who in many cases took government money to destroy American businesses for the purpose of suppressing American speech”.
The Undersecretary, who said that that free speech is a priority for the government, noted the sanctions are “laser-targeted at specific, high-profile individuals whose presence in America impairs our foreign policy” and that this is not an attack on Britain, or Britons, but rather on a tiny minority of pro-censorship advocates. She said: “Again, if your purpose in America is to destroy American businesses or curtail American citizens’ free speech, it’s not in our interest to let you benefit from our hospitality, our job markets, or our institutions. But that’s not most Brits.”
The Trump administration is looking for a “sane resolution” where “American speech on American platforms on American soil, about American politics, gets governed by the American First Amendment”. Rogers said that voters “unsurprisingly” object when British or European laws attempt to interfere in their American free speech inside America, and it is “too ridiculous” to suggest the American government protecting Americans in America is “‘interference’ in British affairs”.
Asked by The Times why the U.S. government is so preoccupied with freedom of speech in Europe while other regions or countries worldwide may have more restrictive laws, Rogers noted that Europe is particularly culturally and geostrategically significant to America, and in any case Europe is evidently backsliding on freedom. She said: “If it’s the case that in Britain and in Saudi Arabia you get punished in each country for blaspheming Islam but Saudi Arabia is moving incrementally away from that behaviour and Britain is incrementally intensifying it then we might respond differently in each case.”
The remarks come as one of the targets of the U.S. sanctions, Afghan-heritage UK citizen Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a censorship and deplatforming outfit which had said in internal documents that its mission was to “Kill Musk’s Twitter” and weaponise European internet laws, attempts to fight being deported from America.
Ahmed already succeeded in gaining an emergency Christmas day ruling by a New York judge to place a stay on his being removed from the country. The UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer-linked activist and NGO boss claimed to deport him would be unconstitutional, claiming that far from being a censor, he is in fact the one being censored.
In a flurry of interviews over the weekend stating his case, Ahmed claimed he can’t possibly be behind censorship campaigns, because he’s an NGO boss, stating he was merely working to create “accountability”. Indeed, the CCDH states its mission as “We expose the producers and spreaders of hate and disinformation, and demonstrate the offline consequences”.
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