US professor warns that America can go in the same anti free speech direction as Europe that imprisons people for “thought crimes”

Published December 28, 2022 | By NewsJive.com

An American professor warns that the free speech in the US might be threatened by the direction the European countries has taken, where he claims that people are being jailed for simply having the wrong thoughts, so called “thought crimes”.

In an opinion column published in the New York Post, that was written by Jonathan Turley, an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School, he states that the free speech in America, in accordance with the First Amendment, could be under attack and go in the same direction as many European countries have done, were people go to prison just by having the wrong thoughts, Turley writes.

Turley writes that “there is a growing movement in the United States to replicate such European laws”, a movement containing politicians like Hillary Clinton, he claims, that “want to force Twitter to censor fellow citizens” and push for “a new law that could be used to crackdown specifically on right-wing groups based on their ideology”, just as what is happening in the European Union and in other European countries, according to Turley.

Jonathan Turley is especially critical to the United Kingdom, a country that for arrests people just because they pray outside abortion clinics and by just having the wrong thoughts, like in the case with Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a director of an anti-abortion group . “That was it. She was arrested for praying ‘in her head’ near an abortion clinic.”, Turley wrote.

Turley also brings up other similar “thought crime” cases, one that regards a neo-Nazi named Nicholas Brock, who apparently recieved a four-year sentence for what the court called, his “toxic ideology”, based on the content he had at his home.

“While most of us find Brock’s views repellent and hateful, they were confined to his head and his room”, Turley wrote and went on; “Yet, Judge Peter Lodder QC dismissed free speech or free thought concerns with a truly Orwellian statement: ‘I do not sentence you for your political views, but the extremity of those views informs the assessment of dangerousness.'”

Turley ends his statement with a warning to all US citizens and free speech advocates: “The United Kingdom is an example of the slippery slope of speech criminalization that inevitably took them to ‘thought crimes,’ even criminal prayers. These cases should be a wake-up for all who value free speech. If such prosecutions stand, free speech literally does not have a prayer in the Western world.”

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