Britain, as every American knows, has a free speech problem. As a Brit, though, I am starting to wonder whether the United States might be developing a free speech problem of its own. The question occurred to me in an immigration line as I checked my devices for memes that might be deemed anti-MAGA.

Foreign visitors, including a well-known French scientist on his way to a conference in Houston, have been denied entry to the U.S. for expressing legal but critical opinions of the current administration. Border officials interpret the law as meaning that they can treat your phone the way they treat your luggage — that is, they can look at whatever they want, provided they don’t remove anything. Travelers are now warned that an anti-Trump joke might have them turned back — the kind of warning we used to issue about autocracies.

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True, this is nowhere near as bad as the situation in Britain, where posting the wrong thing might lead to the police feeling your collar. Lacking a First Amendment, Britain has just adopted a monstrously authoritarian law, the Online Safety Act, supposedly to prevent children from accessing sites associated with terrorism, suicide, or extreme pornography. The first time most people knew of it was when X restricted their access to footage of a violent anti-immigration protest.

That is what the loss of free speech looks like. It uses a sledgehammer to miss a nut. Tech-savvy teenagers have no difficulty accessing dodgy websites. There has been a 1,800% increase in virtual private network use since the law came into force. But older users are inconvenienced, innovation is retarded, and liberty is vitiated.

How did such legislation get through? Enter Lovejoy’s Law, named after the clergyman’s wife in The Simpsons who interrupts a political meeting by repeatedly demanding, in support of contradictory positions, “Won’t somebody think of the children?” The Lovejoy framing is almost always the sign of a terrible argument. If your point stands on its merits, you don’t need to preface it with “Speaking as a mother…” Plenty of members of Parliament knew that they were passing an illiberal and ineffective measure, but voting against it meant being howled down as a friend to pedophiles and terrorists.

Is the U.S. immune to Lovejoy’s Law? The First Amendment makes it hard for Congress to pass measures that directly abridge free expression. In all sorts of other ways, though, America’s Helen Lovejoys can shut down opinions of which they disapprove. Let’s look, this being the nation’s premier conservative magazine, at a couple of examples from our own side, the freedom to say objectionable things being the only freedom worth the name.

Consider the students deported after writing legal criticisms of Israel in 2023. As a supporter of Israel, I felt that any equivalence between a democratic state and a terrorist organization was wrong in principle, quite apart from the insensitive timing. Still, throwing somebody out of a university because they have voiced a lawful opinion unconnected to their studies is the very definition of cancel culture.

Or consider President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit — yes, $10 billion — against the Wall Street Journal over his alleged links to Jeffrey Epstein. He is not the first rich man to try to shut down hostile media, though the level of damages being sought is on a different and absurd level. However, he is the first president to do so, heralding a new chapter in U.S. politics where criticism of the ruling family can result, Singapore-like, in a level of persecution that few private media companies can sustain.

These are not technical breaches of the First Amendment. Yet that clause used to sustain a political culture in which censorship was unthinkable. These days, it seems very thinkable indeed.

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Trump’s executive order guaranteeing free speech did not define it purely in First Amendment terms. On the contrary, it held that “the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.” Is that so very different from what his administration is doing now?

Yes, the U.S. still has a healthier approach to free expression than the rest of the Anglosphere, let alone the European Union. For precisely that reason, those of us who have lived through the sudden curtailment of our speech rights are attuned to the early signs. Take it from someone who is living in your future: Once you lose these freedoms, they are hard to recover.