The UK has joined in with the rest of the European Union to suppress free speech. In a world where pedophiles escape jail time, where violent crime is out of control despite some of the strictest gun control laws, where women are assaulted every day by Muslim immigrants, the UK government sent five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for his tweets that were made while he was in the United States.
Dr. Tom Woods has the story.
You may have heard about the recent arrest of comedian Graham Linehan at Heathrow airport for three tweets he wrote while in the United States.
Linehan created or co-created the sitcoms Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd (that last one is a favorite of my wife’s).
Linehan describes the scene:
The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two—five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets….
When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists.”
Linehan reports that the officers themselves were generally kind, and in general seemed sympathetic. Commentators have been saying that crazy, open-ended UK laws have put officers in crazy situations, in which they are expected to arrest people like Linehan.
These open-ended laws are intentional. They are used to make people afraid to speak out. If they say something “out of line,” the next knock on their door may be the gendarmes because someone may be offended.
Here are the tweets in question.
Graham states the obvious. That being that women should defend themselves if a male invades their private spaces.
Followed by this:
This is insane. This is a direct result of the EU Digital Services Act. One will only communicate approved words and sentences from the great God in Brussels.
Lineham continues:
The civility of individual officers doesn’t alter the fundamental reality of what happened. I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online — all because I made jokes that upset some psychotic crossdressers.
To me, this proves one thing beyond doubt: the UK has become a country that is hostile to freedom of speech, hostile to women, and far too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled, abusive men who have turned the police into their personal goon squad.
Believe it or not but there are people singing the praises for this man’s arrest.
Woods notes:
Green Party leader Zack Polanski, for example, described the posts as “totally unacceptable” and the arrest as “proportionate.”
…
Another Twitterite, a “Richard Angwin” with over 200,000 followers, unbosomed this gem: “Linehan’s arrest for hate-mongering tweets is a fitting cap to his obsessive transphobia, proving that even ‘free speech’ warriors can’t escape accountability for their toxic rants.”
So he boasts about wanting to live in a country in which a monopoly enforcement institution will decide what constitutes “hate” (he’s sure “hate” will be defined so as to target his enemies), and then arrest people for statements that he dislikes. (We can dismiss the idea that anyone was “threatened” by these three silly tweets.)
…
On Twitter I likewise came across a British lawyer, Stephanie Hayden, who insisted there was nothing amiss in what had happened to Linehan.
I looked more closely and discovered that this very same woman had posted just days before that she’d run into Iraq war supporter John Kerry at the airport and had excitedly gotten a selfie with him.
Linehan harmed no one. Kerry shares responsibility for pointless and catastrophic misery and loss of life. Iraqis, however, do not matter to progressives, who squeal with delight to get selfies with murderers.
In the UK the arrest has even mainstream outlets discussing the absurdity of the free-speech situation over there and calling for change.
This is just incredible. This is happening in Great Britain that was in many ways the birthplace of liberty and freedom. Before you know it, they will be arresting people for praying. Oh, that’s right. They have already done that.
A while back, a woman was praying silently outside an abortion clinic. When an officer asked her what she was doing, she told him and was promptly arrested. Apparently entreaties to God are now the basis for arrests.
How long will it be before they try this in this country? What happens over there is exported to this country eventually. And let’s be reminded, Graham was arrested for acts he committed while in this country.