Kemi Badenoch — Conservative Party leader, survivor of the 2024 electoral rout, and arguably the sharpest political mind left in British conservatism — is considering a ban on the burqa as part of a broader review of Islamist extremism.

She should stop considering and start legislating.

‘Freedom’ that produces permanent public anonymity for one group, in spaces where no one else enjoys it, is not freedom’s finest hour.

The case does not begin with Badenoch, and it does not end in Westminster. Across six European democracies — Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland — full or partial bans are already law.

Their constitutions survive. Their Muslim populations remain. The predicted social cataclysm never arrived.

What arrived instead was policy — enforced and producing measurable outcomes.

Facing facts

The deeper question is why the rest of the Western world has been so slow, so squeamish, to reckon with what the burqa actually does in public space.

Full facial concealment — not the hijab, not the headscarf, but the garment that renders a woman’s face entirely invisible — removes her from the basic grammar of human interaction. Faces carry trust, intention, fear, and consent. Humans have read them for a hundred thousand years, and no amount of progressive goodwill has updated the firmware.

When you cannot see someone’s face, you cannot treat the person as a fully present participant in civic life. You can only treat the person as a shape moving through it.

Free societies depend on legibility among their members. Not total transparency — nobody is proposing to ban sunglasses or launch inquiries into wide-brimmed hats — but the basic mutual visibility that public life requires.

Courts require faces. Banks require faces. Polling stations, airports, and schools all require faces. Nobody marches on these institutions screaming tyranny.

Anonymity in shared space has always carried costs, and open societies have never been shy about saying so.

The burqa asks for a permanent exemption from an obligation everyone else accepts without drama.

Enforced invisibility

That exemption makes a certain grim sense in Afghanistan, where the Taliban reinstated the burqa as compulsory law in 2022 — a country where female faces are treated as a political problem requiring a legislative solution. In that context, the garment is a uniform of erasure, imposed top-down by men who find women’s faces inconvenient.

Which makes its romantic defense in the West, as an expression of individual freedom, not just ironic but absurd. The symbol of enforced invisibility does not become an emblem of liberation simply by crossing a border.

The First Amendment crowd — loudest in America, with philosophical cousins across the Atlantic — will say that mandating what a woman removes from her face differs not at all from mandating what she puts on it.

The argument does not survive contact with consistency.

Masks off

Masks at protests are already banned in multiple jurisdictions. Religious exemptions from generally applicable laws have limits even under the most robust free-exercise jurisprudence. The Supreme Court has never held that faith confers a blanket right to opt out of civic norms that apply to everyone else.

Employment Division v. Smith settled that much in 1990, and the decades since have not reversed the principle that neutral, generally applicable laws can coexist with religious freedom without apology.

A ban on full facial concealment in public spaces would likely qualify.

“Freedom” that produces permanent public anonymity for one group, in spaces where no one else enjoys it, is not freedom’s finest hour.

Female agency is the argument’s most seductive register. She chooses this. She owns it. Perhaps. But agency exercised under doctrinal pressure, familial expectation, or community sanction has a habit of resembling choice from a distance.

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Mike Mercury

Feminist exception

Western feminism spent decades insisting that personal preference does not close the conversation when that preference is shaped by systems that constrain what preference can look like. That reasoning dismantled arguments about beauty standards and industries far less coercive than religious orthodoxy.

Applied here — to a garment entire governments have made compulsory — the same movement suddenly finds the question too delicate to pursue.

None of this requires hostility to Islam, to faith, or to religious expression broadly understood.

The headscarf is not the burqa. Private devotion is not public concealment.

People are entitled to their beliefs, entitled to wear almost anything behind their own doors, entitled to worship as conscience directs.

But public space is shared space, and shared space carries shared obligations.

Turning your face away from those obligations — permanently, behind fabric, as a matter of principle — is less religious liberty than a form of civic withdrawal.

There is a meaningful distance between religious expression and civic withdrawal. The burqa travels the full length of it.

Open society? Closed case

British polling puts support for a ban at 56%. For once, democratic instinct and reasoned argument are pulling in the same direction — not always a luxury policymakers enjoy.

In America, a federal ban would face genuine First Amendment scrutiny. The constitutional architecture differs, the judicial culture differs, the politics differ enormously.

But “legally complicated” and “morally unclear” are not synonyms.

Many Americans who correctly distrust government overreach have no difficulty concluding that facial concealment in courtrooms, classrooms, and government offices warrants regulation.

The legal pathway varies by country. The underlying social logic does not.

The burqa is not compatible with open societies. The only remaining question is how long open societies intend to pretend otherwise.

​Letter from the uk, Islam, Burqa ban, Burqa, Afghanistan, Taliban, First amendment, Lifestyle, Culture, Faith 

On the latest episode of “The Drive with Lauren and Karl,” Karl Brauer and I talked about something every driver notices before almost anything else: the number on the pump.

And lately, those numbers have been going the wrong direction.

Sitting in a drive-through line for coffee, food, or dry cleaning may not feel like a big deal, but zero miles per gallon is still zero miles per gallon.

I was reminded of that the hard way when I filled my diesel SUV and saw the price climb past $5 a gallon. Karl had it even worse in California, where he paid more than $6 a gallon and described a friend filling a heavy-duty Ram for $167.

That’s not a small nuisance. For many drivers, it’s a direct hit to the household budget.

Fleeting relief

The frustrating part is that gas prices had started to moderate. As domestic production improved, prices eased. Diesel came down. Regular gas came down. Drivers finally got a little breathing room.

Now that relief is fading.

The reason is simple: Fuel prices do not respond only to what is happening at your local gas station. They respond to what is happening around the world. Global instability, supply concerns, and broader energy-market pressure push prices up quickly. And when that happens, drivers feel it immediately.

That is especially true in places like California, where prices are already higher than the rest of the country. When fuel rises nationally, it rises even more there.

For consumers, that means the practical question is no longer why it’s happening. It’s what to do about it.

Shop around

There is no magic fix, and no one is suggesting drivers can “budget” their way out of a price spike. But there are a few ways to reduce the damage.

The first is obvious: Shop around.

Apps like GasBuddy, AAA, and other fuel price trackers can help drivers compare prices before they fill up. The information is not always perfect, but it’s often good enough to spot the worst stations and find better options nearby. Membership clubs like Costco or BJ’s can also make a meaningful difference if you already belong and can tolerate the wait.

And that is the catch. When gas prices spike, everyone has the same idea. Those discount stations get crowded fast.

Fuel for thought

That makes another point more important than people realize: Avoid wasting fuel when you do not need to.

That means thinking harder about the little convenience habits most drivers don’t notice when gas is cheap. Sitting in a drive-through line for coffee, food, or dry cleaning may not feel like a big deal, but zero miles per gallon is still zero miles per gallon. If you can park, go inside, and get out faster, that saves fuel and time.

The same goes for trip planning.

If prices stay high, it makes sense to consolidate errands, reduce unnecessary driving, and stop making multiple short trips when one will do. It sounds simple because it is simple. But simple matters when every fill-up costs more than it should.

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Heritage Images/Getty Images

No safe haven

Vehicle condition matters too.

Checking tire pressure once a month can make a real difference in fuel economy. Underinflated tires increase rolling resistance and cost you money over time. It’s not glamorous, but it’s one of the easiest ways to improve efficiency without changing vehicles or spending money.

The same logic applies across power trains.

If you drive a hybrid, you still use fuel. If you drive an EV, electricity has gotten more expensive too. There is no completely insulated category of driver anymore. Energy costs hit everyone one way or another.

That reality matters because it resets the conversation. This is not just about gas stations. It is about transportation costs broadly rising again.

Domino effect

And once that happens, everything else gets more expensive too.

Delivery fees go up. Services cost more. Operating a truck or SUV becomes harder to justify for some families, even if they need the capability. People start changing habits not because they want to, but because they have to.

That is why fuel prices always matter politically and economically. They are not just one more cost. They touch almost everything.

For now, the best drivers can do is limit waste, shop smart, and be realistic. Prices may come down again eventually, but they are not likely to stabilize until the broader global picture does.

Until then, drivers are back where they’ve been too many times before: staring at the pump and doing the math.

​The drive, Gas prices, Auto industry, Lifestyle, Consumer news, Evs, Align cars 

Last month, American rapper Afroman (real name Joseph Edgar Foreman) won a defamation lawsuit against Ohio sheriff’s deputies who raided his home in 2022. Acting on a tip about drugs and kidnapping, the deputies kicked down his door with guns drawn, ransacked the house, and seized some cash — all captured on his home security cameras.

No drugs or evidence was found, and no charges were filed. Afroman then turned the raid footage into viral parody videos, including the hit “Lemon Pound Cake,” which prompted the deputies to sue him for defamation. On March 18, an Ohio jury ruled in his favor on the grounds of free speech.

Now he joins Matt Kibbe, BlazeTV host of “Kibbe on Liberty” to discuss the raid, the lawsuit, and what the victory means for free speech in America.

Afroman, who’s currently on tour, says that the incident with the Ohio deputies has turned out to be “a blessing in disguise,” as people have been showing their support like never before.

“We got way more people than I usually have, and man, you can feel it. I’’s something new in the air. Man, I’m back like Tina Turner after ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It,’” he laughed.

But before the victory, life was feeling dark, he admits.

“You start questioning your manhood when people come to where your family live and they kick the place in. … It’s outrageous for people to come to your house and tear it up — especially when they got all their information wrong,” he tells Kibbe.

Even after the cops found nothing in Afroman’s home, the arrogance and ill will they carried into the raid lingered throughout the lawsuit, he recounted. “They were unapologetic and sarcastic and kind of delighting in the fact that they did vandalize my property.”

The trial, he says, was “set up in the police officers’ favor.”

“They dismissed my claims before I even went to court, so I was just in court to discuss how much money I was going to pay, you know, the vandals and thieves,” he recounts, adding that the warrant used to access his home had many “flaws,” but the court refused to address it.

However, Afroman nonetheless won the case. The jury ruled that his videos, which he says he made to help “pay for the damages” caused by the deputies, were protected under his free speech rights.

“Ultimately, in a nutshell, the police officers lost the case, and freedom of speech prevails in America,” he says triumphantly.

But freedom of speech wasn’t the end of Afroman’s victory. The lawsuit ended up drawing unprecedented attention to his album and music videos.

“[Those cops] did more for my social media in three days than I could do for myself in 15 years,” he says, noting that he gained “800,000 followers” in a matter of days because of the lawsuit.

But the biggest victory remains the protection of the First Amendment.

“Some countries, you can’t say nothing. You got to shut up. You can’t speak out against the government. … But one of the beautiful things about America is, you know, you can speak,” he says.

“So, thank God I have it, and it’s the one thing that brought me justice.”

To hear the full interview, watch the video above.

Want more from Matt Kibbe?

To enjoy more of Matt’s liberty-defending stance as he gets in the face of the fake news establishment, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Kibbe on liberty, Matt kibbe, Afroman, Blazetv, Blaze media, Free speech, First amendment, Lemon pound cake