Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old Briton who died in police custody in December, got a death sentence for a thoughtcrime he never committed.
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Newly released bodycam footage of Nowak’s arrest shows police arriving at a residential driveway to find Nowak bleeding on the ground. A Sikh man named Vickrum Digwa, who would eventually be convicted of fatally stabbing Nowak with a blade that only Sikhs are allowed to carry in Britain, falsely claimed to police that Nowak had treated him with racial animus. Evidently believing Digwa’s accusations but not Nowak’s cries for help, the police rolled Nowak’s limp body over and placed handcuffs on his wrists. In response to his repeated pleas for treatment of his stab wounds, police can be heard telling him, “I don’t think you have [been stabbed], mate.” He died moments after police read him his rights as an accused criminal.
Digwa was convicted of murder and was sentenced on Monday. He can be eligible for parole in as few as 21 years. During the trial, the judge concluded “that Nowak had not said anything racist to the Sikh man who killed him,” according to the BBC.
The finding came too late to help Nowak, of course. In his final moments, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced in the minds of the state actors who refused him aid. For years, the British police state has been more concerned with restraining the speech of its citizens than with restraining the disproportionate number of new arrivals who murder and rape them. In December, the officers who responded to Nowak’s slaying made the same calculus.
While British law enforcement turned a blind eye to imported scandals like the now-infamous rape gangs, in which predominantly Pakistani Muslim men abused young British girls for decades with protection from local officials, they cracked down on native Britons for beliefs expressed on the internet, and even those held silently.
The U.K. censorship regime is deadly, and not just because it leaves police with fewer resources to prosecute actual crimes. It’s deadly because it indulges the idea that people who hold certain beliefs do not deserve to live freely — or at all. As an accused racist, Henry Nowak was deemed unworthy of timely and potentially life-saving care, and he was sentenced to bleed out in handcuffs on the street.
It’s the same dogma that got civil liberties advocate Charlie Kirk martyred for his speech last year. Known for being one of the most effective and far-reaching communicators on the right, Kirk’s hallmark was authentic, civil discourse with college students and others who disagreed with him. Leftists enraged by his speech smeared him as a racist and celebrated his assassination publicly because they believed he deserved to die.
Kirk’s assassination was part of a recent explosion of political violence on the American left, ranging from similar assassination attempts to mass riots. President Donald Trump has been the target of multiple assassination attempts; after one recent attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, bystanders fleeing the scene were greeted by protesters holding signs that urged death on their political opponents. Assassins from coordinated cells of leftist radicals have targeted immigration law enforcement officers in sniper attacks.
Nor is the disposition toward violence limited to members of Antifa cells. Before Virginians elected him attorney general last fall, Democrat Jay Jones was revealed to have fantasized about executing one of his Republican colleagues.
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“Gilbert gets two bullets to the head,” Jones wrote of former Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert, imagining a hypothetical where he had two bullets and the opportunity to kill Gilbert, Adolf Hitler, or Cambodian dictator Pol Pot. To justify his murderous fantasies, Jones explained why he wished death on Gilbert and his family: “I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer [Gilbert’s wife] are evil? And that they’re breeding little fascists? Yes.”
This idea that some people deserve death for their beliefs is the central premise that motivates left-wing violence. When a Columbia University student gained notoriety for saying his political opponents “don’t deserve to live,” he explained how central that premise is to leftist rhetoric.
“The same way we’re very comfortable accepting that Nazis don’t deserve to live, fascists don’t deserve to live, racists don’t deserve to live, Zionists, they shouldn’t live in this world,” he said in a video that went viral in 2024. Leftists often smear their opponents as fascists and racists for believing in things like the enforcement of criminal laws and national borders. Notably, a courtroom spectator reportedly reacted to Digwa’s sentencing with an outburst that appeared to accuse the British judicial system of racism for returning such an outcome.
As The Federalist’s CEO Sean Davis told members of the Senate Commerce Committee last fall, “It begins with censorship. It moves to the destruction of statues and monuments. And it ends with the murder of people.”
Allegations of racism, real or imagined, are one of the primary grounds cited by the British government when it jails citizens for their speech. Similar allegations against national heroes led to the violent destruction of monuments during the 2020 race riots, in Britain and in the United States, all raucously cheered by the corporate press. And an allegation of racism left a murdered Henry Nowak to die in shackles.
“The drive to silence speech … always advances toward the violent elimination of speakers,” Davis told the Commerce Committee. “That is because the authoritarian impulse to silence speech is driven by a totalitarian desire to seize total power by any means necessary, up to and including the murder of one’s political opponents.”
It was only a matter of time before Britain’s war on wrongthink left someone dead. As the U.K.’s preferential treatment of foreigners has become increasingly deadly to native Britons, the government has relied more heavily on censorship to shut down its citizens’ objections. If Britain continues down its current path of criminalizing opposition to the regime, Nowak won’t be its last casualty.
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