America’s right attacks ‘woke policing’ in the UK after death of Henry Nowak

Even before Vickrum Digwa was convicted and jailed for the murder of Henry Nowak, conservative media in the US had seized upon the killing as further evidence of Britain’s decline. But the sentencing of Digwa to life in prison last week has opened the floodgates.

Even the White House has joined in with the barrage of attacks on the UK from America’s political right.

“When the left wing is in charge, you’re not safe. Well, unless you’re a member of the protected class du jour,” Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham said of the police response to Nowak’s fatal stabbing.

“The entire system of policing [in the UK] is infected by the woke edicts of their overlords,” Ingraham added, condemning Britain’s “coddling of criminals” and the “targeting… of native-born Brits” by the justice system.

Led by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, conservative culture warriors in the US have demanded a revolution against endemic “anti-white racism” in the UK.

“The Great Empire, the cradle of western civilisation, will no longer be colonised by the 3rd world,” Maga influencer Benny Johnson tweeted after the police bodycam footage emerged showing officers handcuffing Nowak as he pleaded that he had been stabbed.

“All of the West will follow. We are done being polite. Enough is enough,” Johnson added, urging the UK to lead the revolt against “mass migration” and “woke tyranny”. In a separate, lengthy video, he called for the police officers involved to face the death penalty.

With Digwa’s conviction and the anti-police protests in Southampton, US newspapers, including the New York Times and Washington Post, have picked up on the case and the charged debate around race and justice in the UK. The Wall Street Journal went further, explicitly condemning the “woke progressive politics [that] has corrupted institutions, including law enforcement, in Western democracies”.

But Maga pundits have pounced on a perceived contrast in the media’s reaction to the 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed. “Imagine if the races were reversed. There would be riots in the street,” conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly said of Nowak’s killing.

“Why is it that every single other group is able to have an identity other than white people?” right-wing activist Jack Posobiec said on Real America’s Voice.

Musk has posted scores of times about the case on X, the social media platform he owns, reviving his attacks on the UK government. Blaming the murder on decades of unchecked immigration in western Europe, the Tesla and SpaceX boss eagerly reposted calls for protests in Southampton by far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson).

“The West has created an utterly evil state religion where an accusation of ‘racism’ is the gravest offence that can be committed, even worse than rape or murder!” Musk declared last week.

When Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe posted last week that if he were prime minister, Digwa would be executed and his family deported, Musk added: “It is this or death.”

Sensing an opportunity as he plots a run for the White House in 2028, the vice-president, JD Vance leapt aboard the bandwagon on Friday. “Henry Nowak died the same way a civilisation dies,” Vance said in an incendiary post on X, blaming “the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants” among “European elites” for the murder.

Underscoring the simmering animosity between the Trump administration and Keir Starmer’s government, the US State Department weighed in on its official X account, saying: “Ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilisational decline.” It went on to offer its condolences to Nowak’s family and the British people “at this troubling time”.

Photograph by Alex Brandon/AP