Hey there, you're listening to Unlimited Hangout. I'm your host, Whitney Webb. Today, we are going to be

talking about speech and how the concept of free speech is changing rapidly, not just in the United

States, but elsewhere, particularly in the West. Increasingly, in the countries that have long claimed

to champion democracy in the freedom to say what you wish, speech is becoming likened to

terrorism and those that speak the wrong words could soon find themselves labeled as terrorists

for doing so. As I've noted in past articles and also in a more recent speech, the Biden administration's

policy documents for the so-called war on domestic terror call for the censorship of, quote, polarizing

voices, voices that disagree with the state's narrative and thus foment disagreement and allegedly

incite violence. Such speech, if this agenda is allowed to advance further, will label those

polarizing figures terrorists, merely because what they say might persuade people

from distrusting the government. There are precedents for what follows the implementation of such

policies, though not so much in the West in recent history. It's not hard to see what the

criminalization of dissent leads to and what kind of government makes that criminalization

a state policy. To discuss the state of speech in the West today, I am joined by Gareth Ike,

a journalist, activist, and musician who is all too familiar with the themes of censorship and how

this particular agenda has been a steady, if gradual, march over the course of the past several

years and even decades.

Gareth and his family, particularly his father, David Ike, have been on the front lines of the

censorship agenda much longer than most people. Very recently, David Ike was banned from visiting

several European countries after the Dutch government made that decision after consultations

with police and counterterrorism officials.

Has the line between inconvenient speech and terrorism allegations begun to disappear entirely?

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