Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald slammed Scotland’s new hate speech law Tuesday on Fox News, warning that the “mentality” driving this legislation is already in the United States.
Greenwald appeared on “The Ingraham Angle” to discuss the country’s recent Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which penalizes people for stirring “up hatred against a group of persons” of certain characteristics that include age, disability, religion and social or cultural groups such as religious affiliation, sexual orientation and transgender identity.
The law went into effect Monday but was passed by Scotland’s parliament in 2021. Author and Scotland resident J.K. Rowling called out the portion of the legislation pertaining to transgender males in a Twitter thread in response to the newly effective law. Following the social media post, Rowling said if her comments qualified “as an offense under the terms of the new act” she looked forward to being arrested.
Fox host Laura Ingraham asked Greenwald his thoughts on Rowling’s post and her pushback on the new law. (RELATED: ‘There Is Something Dangerous About This Movement’: JK Rowling Pushes Back Against Pro-Trans Activists)
“I think what it illustrates is the danger of this law which is, okay the Scottish government doesn’t want to prosecute someone like J.K. Rowling because of her prominence, her resources, and they don’t want to give credence to this idea that they are trying to criminalize standard political debate, but of course that’s exactly what they’re doing,” Greenwald stated.
“The fact that they actually could prosecute her — that her statements would fit into the parameters of the law — and that she is just not being prosecuted because of the arbitrary decisions of the people in power, illustrates why this law is so dangerous,” he said. “Precisely because it depends upon the willingness of the government to allow free speech or to shut it down by prosecuting people at any moment, including people who were involved in important political debates about some of our most crucial social and political questions.”
Ingraham continued to press Greenwald on the impact the law could have on America, to which the independent journalist stated that the issue has already begun within the United States, emphasizing the overreach he has seen within the Biden administration.
“I think it is a crucial issue, Laura,” Greenwald said. “We cover a lot of free speech infringements in Western democratic countries outside of the United States because so often they’re harbingers of what comes to the United States. It might be a little bit more difficult to enact a law like this because of the First Amendment, but the mentality that’s driving it — which is that there’s a group of people who are elites, political elites or people who call themselves disinformation experts — whose judgment about politics is so superior to everybody else’s that they have the right to enforce their judgments not by persuading people, but by force of law.”
“To punish people who think differently, by criminalizing them, or censoring them from the internet, or abandoning them all together is something that we’re seeing increasingly throughout the Democratic world, including in the United States, where the Biden Administration constantly picks up the phone and demands that they tax/silence American citizens in a way that has been found unconstitutional. But laws like this can also mean that, if say, Facebook or Google has to comply with Scotland and the EU and the U.K. and Canada, eventually just through default, that’s going to be our internet as well, even if those laws couldn’t exist in the United States because of the First Amendment. It has a big impact on American citizens.”
Scottish authorities confirmed Tuesday that the popular author would not be prosecuted under the law, as Rowling responded by stating that she hoped the announcement would reassure every “woman in Scotland who wishes to speak up for the reality and importance of biological sex.”