Scribere Est Agere: When a Government Turns Your Writing Into an Act

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.

Three forms follow. The punishment of non-violent political writing, including a case where two parents were arrested in front of their crying three-year-old over messages nobody would show them, and where the force has since conceded the arrests were unlawful and paid damages. The permanence of the record in third-party hands, from a man in Taiyuan who deleted a forwarded video and found the police holding screenshots that never came from his phone, to a July 2026 Fourth Circuit ruling that a manual search of your phone at the border is routine and requires no warrant and no suspicion at all. And the state acting on a writing without having to prove anything else happened — a Tufts doctoral student detained and moved a thousand miles over an op-ed, where the government’s own memoranda record that it had nothing else, and where a judge later found it had introduced no evidence beyond the piece she wrote.

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