Trump more popular in UK than leftist British prime minister — but censorship is king



Vice President JD Vance put Britain on blast in February over its suppression of speech and routine attacks on religious liberties. Citing a British Army veteran's conviction and fining last year for silent prayer as an example, Vance stressed that free speech in the U.K. "is in retreat."

Just in case leftist Prime Minister Keir Starmer missed his critique the first time around, Vance blasted Britain's "infringements on free speech" weeks later while seated next to the British leader during a meeting at the White House.

When asked what was the 'single most important issue facing the UK,' a plurality answered 'reducing immigration.'

Despite such constructive criticism from the Trump administration, the censorship regime in London has worsened in recent months thanks in part to the enactment of the so-called "Online Safety Act."

The OSA, which came into force in July, not only requires Britons to prove with ID verification and credit-card checks that they are who they claim to be, but has already resulted in the suppression of speech and in the suppression of legal content, including footage of a protest and a video of a conservative member of Parliament's speech about the sexual crimes committed by grooming gangs.

The Spectator's John Power recently noted that the OSA serves to control "the channels through which dissent, especially the kind that makes the government deeply uncomfortable, is organized. It is as much a crisis-management tool for a flailing political class as it is a piece of digital regulation."

While fast losing their freedoms, Britons are still able to express their frustrations at the ballot box and to pollsters.

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A City AM/Freshwater Strategy poll released on Tuesday revealed that 71% of Britons think their country is headed in the wrong direction. With the exception of respondents ages 25-34 who majoritively think the U.K. is on the right track, a supermajority in every other age cohort took the opposite view.

When asked what was the "single most important issue facing the U.K.," a plurality answered "reducing immigration."

Just as most of the British aren't keen on the direction their country is heading, they're not pleased with the man at the helm.

Sixty percent of respondents said they held an unfavorable view of Keir Starmer; only 23% signaled approval.

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, had a favorability rating of 26%, beating Starmer by three percentage points and British Secretary of State David Lammy by 12 points. According to the latest Economist polling data, Trump's approval rating in the U.S. is 41%.

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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

In addition to revealing that Starmer is less popular in his own country than the American president, the poll revealed that Trump ally Nigel Farage's Reform U.K. party is a relative favorite among would-be voters.

Whereas only 20% of respondents said they would vote for Starmer's Labour Party, a plurality of 31% said they would vote Reform, the favorability rating for which was 39%. When asked to choose in a matchup between Farage and Starmer, the former enjoys a 2% lead.

It appears that Starmer's unpopularity is not the result of his support for the OSA, which Vance criticized and Farage has promised to repeal. The poll found that 64% of respondents supported the new censorship law. Only 20% of respondents signaled disagreement.

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Smug Obama speechwriter provides damning reminder of Democrats' intolerance for conservatives, vax-refusers



There is an editorial genre kept alive at liberal publications around the country that is focused on questions about what to do with conservative kin and how best to prevent family members from similarly adopting viewpoints at odds with leftist values.

The HuffPost, for instance, published a long-winded essay from a stereotypical Bluesky progressive about whether she should cut her "right-wing, Trump-loving in-laws out of [her] kids' lives."

New York magazine ran an essay last year from a mother of white boys expressing terror over their potential slide to the right and over "having a flesh-and-blood oppressor-in-training eating [her] spaghetti and meatballs."

The Delaware News Journal published an open letter in December in which the former president of the Delaware teachers' union defended the decision to ditch Trump-supporting family members, claiming that "it comes from a deep sense of betrayal, a need to preserve our mental and emotional well-being, and the refusal to stay silent in the face of harm."

Obama speechwriter David Litt recently contributed to the genre with a piece in the New York Times titled "Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?"

Litt ultimately answered yes, that "keeping the door open to unlikely friendship isn't a betrayal of principles — it's an affirmation of them."

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However, prior to signaling his beneficence, Litt provided Times readers with a reminder both of the elitism that has helped the Democratic Party alienate much of the electorate and of Democrats' chronic abuse of those who failed to fall in line during the pandemic.

At the outset, Obama's former speechwriter noted that he "felt a civic duty to be rude" to his wife's younger brother.

"He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Sondheim. I was one of President Barack Obama's speechwriters and had an Ivy League degree; he was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician's license," wrote Litt.

Although the speechwriter did not dwell on these differences, they appear to fit thematically with voters' understanding reflected in a poll recently conducted by the Democratic super PAC Unite the Country — namely that the Democratic Party is "out of touch," "woke," and "weak."

According to Litt, the imagined chasm between him and his conservative brother-in-law grew during the pandemic, particularly when the in-law refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine — a decision that various studies and recent warnings from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have vindicated, especially when it comes to healthy men.

'It felt like he was tearing up the social contract that, until that point, I'd imagined we shared.'

The Ivy League Democrat admitted that had the man "been a friend rather than a family member, I probably would have cut off contact completely."

Although Litt did not end up cutting off his brother-in-law, he indicated that he was for a period of time strategically unfriendly, claiming that such treatment of the unvaccinated "felt like the right thing to do" — a tactic then advocated in the pages of USA Today.

Democrats at the time were apparently willing to go far beyond unfriendliness in their efforts to bring the unvaccinated to heel.

In a Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey of 1,016 likely voters conducted in January 2022, pollsters asked, "Would you strongly favor, somewhat favor, somewhat oppose, or strongly oppose a proposal to limit the spread of the coronavirus by having federal or state governments require that citizens temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine?"

Whereas 71% of all voters — and 84% of Republicans — signaled opposition to throwing the unvaccinated in quarantine camps, 45% of Democrats said they strongly or somewhat favored the proposal.

According to the same poll, 48% of Democrats supported federal or state governments fining or imprisoning Americans who questioned the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines on social media, TV, radio, or in digital publications.

The same month that nearly half of polled Democrats expressed a desire to see their fellow citizens locked up for wrongthink or tossed into camps for avoiding an experimental vaccine, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece suggesting it was "not necessarily the wrong reaction" to "celebrate or exult in the deaths of vaccine opponents."

"Turning down a vaccine during a pandemic seemed like a rejection of science and self-preservation," wrote Litt. "It felt like he was tearing up the social contract that, until that point, I'd imagined we shared."

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Photo by Jim Vondruska/Getty Images

While certain that conservatives will continue to be shunned over the MAGA agenda — in particular over President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown and over Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s reform of the medical establishment — Litt questioned the efficacy of Democrat cancel culture, suggesting that "it's counterproductive."

In what might be the most telling sentence in the piece, Obama's Democratic speechwriter characterized as "radical" the notion that individuals can like each other despite disapproving of each other's political choices.

More in Common, a research outfit that studies social division, noted in a 2019 study concerning the root causes of political polarization that "Americans have a deeply distorted understanding of each other. We call this America's 'Perception Gap.'"

According to More in Common, Democrats have a much wider perception gap, "likely because they have fewer Republican friends." The likelihood of Democrats reporting most of their friends sharing the same political beliefs increases depending on their level of educational attainment, whereas the likelihood remains flat for Republicans.

Although he claimed shunning family with opposing views wasn't worthwhile, Litt made sure to indicate that ostracizing strangers was still okay, claiming he'd avoid White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller on account of his supposed "odiousness."

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Polling reveals: Whatever Democrats are doing, it ain't working



A Marquette Law School poll published in May revealed that 63% of Americans hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. Polling by the Economist and YouGov indicated that the disapproval rating for the party as a whole was 58.3% as of May 25.

It's clear that whatever Democrats tried last month didn't improve their public image.

An NBC News Decision Desk Poll released in mid-June revealed that 57% of voters held an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. The party's radical messaging on illegal aliens and deportations certainly didn't help its cause, given the majority of Americans support President Donald Trump's handling of immigration and border security.

According to a new poll conducted by the Democratic super PAC Unite the Country and obtained by The Hill, enthusiasm within the party continues to fade — and disenchantment is spreading.

The poll, conducted in 21 battleground counties across 10 battleground states, found that Democrats' emphasis on fighting for democracy — empty signaling that clearly did not help them in November — is not doing the trick, and their ruinous immigration policies are further alienating voters.

Voters reportedly regard the Democratic Party as "out of touch," "woke," and "weak."

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Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

"This is the reality of the perception of us as a party, and until we accept that, it’s going to be hard to move forward," Democratic strategist Rodell Mollineau, senior adviser at the PAC, told The Hill. "There's a perception out there, outside of Democratic elites, and it's taken hold in not just the MAGA crowd but people that should be with us."

Mollineau added, "It's not about abandoning who we are. It's not about leaving people behind. We are a big tent party. But it is about prioritizing the messages and starting where the majority of the people are."

'The majority of Americans believe that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor.'

Rather than defending anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement rioters, flying to foreign nations to sip cocktails with MS-13 associates, and championing genital mutilations for children, Democrats may want to focus on matters that Americans actually care about.

“We do better when we first meet voters where they are and then bring them along on other issues," said Mollineau. "And nine times out of 10, what they really care about is whether or not they're going to be able to afford health care, whether or not their kids are going to be able to go to a good school … housing, living paycheck to paycheck."

Mollineau suggested that the party should start with "good economic appeal."

Months before he became the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin acknowledged in a New York Times interview last year that "the majority of Americans believe that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor. And that the Democratic Party represents the interests of the wealthy and the elite."

The party's continued focus on pet progressive issues that only the wealthy can afford to care about does not appear to have moved the needle on this perception.

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Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In addition to desiring a fresh perspective and different priorities, the Democratic super PAC found that voters simply want to see different leaders running the party.

A national Cygnal poll revealed last month that only 30% of voters held a favorable view of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.). While abysmal, that's still better than Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), whose favorability rating was 26%, according to a June 11-12 Harvard-Harris poll.

A Quinnipiac University survey released in June indicated that just 21% of all voters approved of the way Democrats in Congress were handling their jobs, and 70% signaled disapproval. When it came to Democratic voters in particular, 53% gave their party's congressional members a bad review.

An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released last week similarly indicated Democrats' congressional approval ratings were under water with 27% approving and 58% disapproving of the jobs they are doing.

Steve Schale, CEO of Unite the Country, told The Hill, "They want us to have different leaders."

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