Scribere Est Agere: When a Government Turns Your Writing Into an Act
- Jeff Kellick
- Aug 18
- 3 min read
Contemporary Application to Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 10B
Six Officers Searched His Home Over a Tweet 26 People Saw
In November of 2023, six police officers arrived at the door of a seventy-one-year-old retired special constable in Gillingham, Kent, and handcuffed him in his own home. They searched the house for an hour. Body-worn camera footage later obtained by a newspaper records them going through his belongings and remarking on his bookcase — Douglas Murray, The Spectator, very Brexity things — and examining a shopping list for bleach, tin foil, and gloves that had been written by his wife, who is a hairdresser. They held Julian Foulkes in a cell for eight hours and interviewed him under the Malicious Communications Act. He accepted a caution because he was afraid a continuing investigation would stop him travelling to Australia to see his surviving daughter. He had replied to a stranger on X, warning that Britain was one step away from people storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals. The reply had been seen twenty-six times.
Three hundred and forty years earlier, other officers went through another Englishman’s study and carried away his papers. Saturday’s episode covered what happened to Algernon Sidney and the three words of Latin that made it possible. Scribere est agere. To write is to act. This episode traces that rule into the present, and the mechanics matter more than the outrage. The framers knew the Sidney case. Article III of the Constitution defines treason and then makes it hard to prove — two witnesses to the same overt act, and confession only in open court. They wrote a specific rule against a specific abuse, and the rule was real, and it covered exactly one crime.
This hour names a British government, a Chinese government, and an American administration, and applies the same standard to each. It also declines the easy version of its own argument. The British non-crime hate incident regime was found unlawful by Britain’s own Court of Appeal in 2021, abandoned for investigation by the Metropolitan Police in October 2025, and the statutory basis for it was repealed by an Act of Parliament that received Royal Assent this April. The reform is real, and it happened because British citizens argued in public for years. The celebrated Missouri consent decree, read line by line, protects a list of named plaintiffs on five named websites — not you. And the Honest Reckoning starts with the host, who has felt satisfaction watching people he dislikes lose their platforms, and says so.
Did this leave people more free, or more governed? Fancy hats and larger mobs: take the thing being done, put it in your own hands, and ask whether you could do it — and if not, whether a thousand of you could.
⏱️ CHAPTERS
00:00 The Arrest of Julian Folkes Over a Tweet
03:13 Introduction: Episode 10, Part B — To Write is to Act
06:25 The Trial of Algernon Sidney and the Two-Witness Rule
09:55 How Sidney's Case Shaped the U.S. Treason Clause
11:19 Supreme Court Interpretations: Cramer and Haupt
13:53 The Arrest of Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine
17:15 Non-Crime Hate Incidents and the Police Bookshelf Search
20:13 Britain Scraps the Non-Crime Hate Incident Framework
23:02 Speech Policing and "Picking Quarrels" in China
26:25 U.S. Border Searches of Electronic Devices
29:20 Stanley v. Georgia vs. Records in the Cloud
30:14 The Twitter Files, Murphy v. Missouri, and NRA v. Vullo
33:07 The Truth About the Missouri Consent Decree
35:23 Rumesa Ozturk: Visa Revocation for an Op-Ed
38:53 The Reckoning: Schadenfreude and Asymmetrical Outrage
41:22 Objection 1: The Hard Cases and Incitement (Lucy Connolly)
44:03 Objection 2: Judging Britain by the First Amendment
45:16 Objection 3: Writings as Evidence and Visa Discretion
47:25 The Liberty Test: Can Lawful Opinion Be Treated as an Act?
52:17 Preview of Thursday's Interview with Dr. Thomas Lane
53:46 Conclusion and Outro
� Read the companion article, “The Martyr and the Philosopher — Algernon Sidney and John Locke”: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-martyr-and-the-philosopher-algernon-sidney-and-john-locke
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 10B, the contemporary application companion to Episode 10. On Thursday, Dr. Thomas Laehn joins me — County Attorney in Greene County, Iowa, the first Libertarian elected to partisan office in that state, a former professor of constitutional law and political philosophy, and a candidate this November for the United States Senate. He has an answer to the umpire question involving a jury’s power to refuse, which is a startling thing to hear from a prosecutor.
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