“New Zealand woman … and 6-year-old son detained by U.S. immigration,” blared a recent story in the New Zealand Herald.

So far, so scary.

It seems the woman went to the U.S. based on her marriage to an American. They divorced before she adjusted her status to permanent resident. When she tried to get back into the U.S. from a trip to Canada, she and her son were detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

She reportedly applied to re-open her green-card application on the grounds that she was allegedly a survivor of domestic abuse. She may or may not have a case. But the bottom line is that this is a complicated immigration case that will work itself out in due course, not an innocent tourist mum being blocked by the American jackboots of Leftist imagination.

A few weeks ago, I was invited on a podcast in New Zealand. The other guests were Stephen Young, a professor at Otago University whose “areas of research involve the intersection of Indigenous peoples … drawing from critical and social theories,” and Zane Wedding, “an activist who’s been involved in recent pro-Gaza rallies.”

>>> America Is Scrapping Green Restrictions on Cars. It’ll Leave Europe in the Dust

They appeared to want me as a proxy pinata for President Trump’s highly successful (though controversial) policies to control the southern border and deport aliens here illegally.

The podcast’s premise was that Kiwi academics were being hassled at U.S. airports. “A number of our universities are now advising academics to clean their social media profiles, travel with burner phones, and reconsider attending U.S. conferences altogether,” they said. Their implication was that research would grind to a halt, tourism would dry out, and sundry other disasters would result from the alleged border crackdown.

But when I researched the claims, practically nothing came up.

Yes, a May 2025 article alarmingly said “NZ travellers warned of increased detention risk at U.S. border,” and the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s travel advice for the United States is set at level 2, “exercise increased caution.”

But the Ministry said that in the year to that point, “24 New Zealand passport holders have sought our assistance because they have experienced immigration difficulties in the U.S. … Typically, we would see 14-25 cases per year.” No crisis there. Indeed, a government spokeswoman said that 169,000 New Zealanders had travelled to the U.S. in the year to March 2025—up from 168,000 for the same period a year earlier.

The global Left is panicking about the U.S. president or secretary of state using powers in immigration law to deny visas or entry to foreigners who endorse or espouse terrorism or undermine our national security or foreign policy. They seem to believe that the United States, uniquely among nations, is obliged to admit foreigners who rail against our system of government and capitalism, and advocate for radical foreign political causes.

We don’t. We have rules which visitors are asked to respect, or else they’re not welcome.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Anglosphere is policing speech not just about politics, but about statistical and biological truth. I worry more about free speech there than here.

Armed with facts, I was easily able to counter the narrative that the U.S. was a threat to free speech. In fact, I told the podcast hosts that I was more afraid of speaking in New Zealand—or Australia, Canada, and Great Britain, the rest of the “Five Eyes” of English-speaking countries that share intelligence data.

To promote my new book, The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey), I will be speaking in the U.S. and Europe. In the United States, our First Amendment protects my free speech. I’ll go to the Five Eyes countries if invited, but with trepidation, because several of the woke commandments I urge readers to reject in the book appear to have become state-sanctioned truth in some of these countries. Deviation from that dogma, or adherence to factual truth that threatens some sub-group’s subjective sense of safety, can result in cancellation, ostracization—or, in some cases, legal trouble.

In Australia, the case of Tickle v Giggle grinds on. It boils down to a website for women being sued by a biological male who wants access to the site. Commenting on the case might be risky—“transgender vilification,” defined as “a public act that could incite hatred, serious contempt or severe ridicule towards people who are transgender,” is against the law in New South Wales. Kirralie Smith, head of the Australian group Binary, says she’s had “vilification” complaints against her “for calling male soccer players ‘male.’”

In my book, I discuss gender ideology in two chapters. I state the fact (not opinion) that mankind is a sexually dimorphous species with only two sexes. If one bloke in Scotland finds it offensive, could that be “stirring up hatred”—an offence under their Hate Crime and Public Order Act? I’d hope not, but the fact the question even has to be asked is chilling to free expression.

>>> An America First Human Rights Agenda

In the chapter titled “You Will be ‘Woke’ to Imaginary Oppression,” I use hard data to debunk myths about crime—who are the victims, and who are the perpetrators.

In Britain, a data point in the debate about migration is the rate of crime by foreign compared to UK-born men. Whatever the true statistics are, they might cause someone offence—but that does not make them false. Facts are facts. Their purpose is not to vilify, but to inform policy.

The Free Speech Union is fighting to protect ordinary Britons who state factual truths or express their opinions. The British Government, meanwhile, seems determined to crack down on negative views of mass migration if they are injudiciously expressed.

In Canada, former PM Justin Trudeau’s government suppressed free speech over Covid mandates and advocated an Online Harms Act that would create a new hate-crime offence with a maximum sentence of life in prison. His Liberal Party successor, Mark Carney, seems little better.

And in New Zealand, they have a Human Rights Act under which using “words which are threatening, abusive, or insulting” or “inciting racial disharmony” are offences. Such laws naturally chill free speech, because the definitions and lines are rarely clear, absent court cases of which no one wants to be the guinea pig. The New Zealand Law Commission has been looking at extending the categories protected under the Human Rights Act to “people who are transgender, people who are non-binary and people who have an innate variation of sex characteristics.”

But while people with disorders of sexual development indubitably exist, the concepts of “transgender” or “non-binary” require a belief—that humans have a “gender” which sometimes doesn’t match their biological sex, and that human beings can exist without being of either sex. These are convictions of faith, not facts that can be proven or disproven empirically.

Despite the panic from the Anglophone Left, the home of free speech remains the United States. It’s in the rest of the ex-British Empire where it is in jeopardy.