“In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilized five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for three posts”.—-Graham Linehan
Comedian Graham Linehan, best known as the creator or co-creator of The IT Crowd and Father Ted, announced in December that he was leaving London and moving to Arizona.
“One of the reasons I’m leaving is because freedom of speech in the UK is really in bad shape at the moment, and I certainly know I would not be able to get anything on television in the UK. Not only that, but with police coming to people’s houses with tweets…I think that the U.S. is a good place at the moment. It seems to be somewhere that values freedom of speech, whereas the UK gave up on that a few years ago very sadly, and the results I’m afraid are around for us all to see.”
Linehan is now proof of that. He was arrested Monday at London’s Heathrow Airport on suspicion of inciting violence for social media posts that were critical of transgender activists. Linehan says police told him that these April posts on X are why they were waiting for him at the airport:
Linehan is already scheduled go to trial Thursday on a harassment charge related to other social media posts he made last October. He wrote about Monday’s arrest and the followup interrogation on his Substack, The Glinner Update:
“The officer conducting it asked about each of the terrible tweets in turn, with the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like… oh, I dunno—crime? I explained that the ‘punch’ tweet was a serious point made with a joke. Men who enter women’s spaces ARE abusers and they need to be challenged every time. The ‘punch in the bollocks’ bit was about the height difference between men and women, the bollocks being closer to punch level for a woman defending her rights and certainly not a call to violence. (Not one of my best as one of the female officers said “We’re not THAT small”).
He mentioned “trans people”. I asked him what he meant by the phrase. “People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.” I said “Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned.” He called it semantics, I told him he was using activist language.”
He was released on bail on condition that he not go on X. I assume he had someone else send him screenshots of the above tweets he posted on his Substack.
I have never been to the UK, so I’ve resisted saying what evidence clearly shows: We need to stop pretending that the UK is a free, liberal democracy.
It’s not just this incident. Consider what the director of public prosecutions for England and Wales said in August 2024.
“The offense of incitement to racial hatred involves publishing or distributing material, which is insulting or abusive, which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred. So if you retweet that, then you’re republishing that and then potentially you are committing that offense. And we do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media. Their job is to look for this material and then follow up with identification arrests and so forth. So it’s a really, really serious, people might think they’re not doing anything harmful. They are, and the consequences will be visited upon them.”
Does that sound like a free country, where police are “scouring social media” to look for speech offenses, including retweets?
There’s been huge public outcry in response to Linehan’s arrest.
Matt Taibbi is right. He observes that the UK has become a censorship state, commenting: “The arrest of Graham Linehan for his tweets is one of many examples that show the country should not be treated as a free one.” He’s right, of course. The British government has been tightening the screws on free speech for decades, but it’s reached a new level of awful now.
It’s not just tweets. People are being punished for peacefully marching, for petitioning the government, and even for displaying the British flag.
It’s not that much better elsewhere. France prosecuted its leading opposition figure, and Germany is doing its best to outlaw the main opposition party. (And the suspicious deaths of that party’s candidates just before an election aren’t inspiring confidence either.)
These nations are supposed to be democracies. Yet while “democracy” may not mean that the people get an unmediated fulfillment of every wish, it should at least mean that things that are heavily opposed by the populace don’t happen. And yet:
This isn’t new. This is the Pew Global Attitudes Survey from 2007. A recent YouGov poll in Europe shows something stronger.
………One would expect, in light of longstanding public opposition to mass immigration — particularly by low-skilled third worlders — that politicians would eschew such a policy. In fact, they’ve gone pedal to the metal on it. And they’ve basically acknowledged the depth of the opposition by going to such extraordinary lengths to suppress not only the opposition ,but even the expression of opposing views, or even of traditional patriotism.
This is the very sort of thing that democratic institutions are supposed to prevent. But they’ve proven unequal to the task except — just barely — in the United States. But why?
One answer is our ruling class monoculture. The political classes not only of the United States, but of pretty much every Western nation, have been all-in in favor of immigration and have basically colluded to ignore what the “white trash” — to use British Labour politician Dennis Jones’s term for the working-class girls who were victims of the Pakistani rape gangs — thinks about things. Having decided, conveniently, that anyone opposed to their agenda is racist and evil, they’ve found it easy to ignore the public’s reluctance to be robbed and raped.
This instinct toward claiming a progressive mantle in dismissing the opposition isn’t just found in English-speaking countries.
Talking about the yellow-vest movement, French geographer Christophe Guilluy observes: “Immediately, the protesters were denounced as xenophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes. The elites present themselves as anti-fascist and anti-racist, but this is merely a way of defending their class interests. It is the only argument they can muster to defend their status, but it is not working anymore.”
……..There need to be lessons taught — generational ones — that will keep future ruling classes from trying this again any time soon. Those might range from firing squads to Truth And Reconciliation Commissions, but I think it will take more than ordinary electoral defeat, however crushing. I invite suggestions in the comments.
That’s true not only in England and in Europe, but here in the United States. It’s not enough to beat them. The wannabe totalitarian state needs to be extirpated root and branch, with all key infrastructure destroyed and with everyone involved wishing (and probably pretending) that they never had been.
It’s easy (in America) to become complacent, but this isn’t anywhere near over. The attitude among the old ruling class is “wait a couple of years and we’ll be back in charge.” Nope. Make the rubble bounce.
Your videos could get your jailed. The director of public prosecutions of England and Wales warns that ‘sharing online material’ of riots could be an offence.
A Christian quoting bible verses gets arrested while muzzies taking over a street with their prayer to Allah gets a pass.
The UK has become a police state.
The government jackboots bragged about making 30 arrests a day for “offensive” social media posts.
The wife of a conservative councilor was arrested and sent to prison for expressing anger over the murder of three girls by 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana.
This is Axel Rudakubana. His family is from Rwanda.
A Jewish man was arrested and charged for mocking the leader of Hezbollah by holding up a cartoon for three minutes. The placard depicted Lebanese terror chief, Hasan Nasrallah, with a pager and the words “beep, beep, beep”. The imbecile cop thought it would “stir up racial hatred further”.
Let me get this straight. Protesting against a violent, Islamic ideology masquerading as a ‘religion’ is going to ‘stir up racial hatred further’ against the Western society they want dead?
That’s as retarded as their “please don’t attack us” campaign they aired in Pakistan.
Britain is in the throes of suicide. It allows violent terrorist muzzie pigs onto its soil and the ensuing carnage is condoned by gutless law enforcement. They murder, rape, and commit acts of terrorism with impunity while citizens who speak out against it are censored, harassed, and prosecuted.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley threatened to EXTRADITE and imprison American citizens over online posts.
Good luck with that, motherfucker.
Tommy Robinson is right. It’s become an authoritarian Sharia nightmare.
“Hate speech” is what the government overlords say it is. It only applies to an arbitrary protected class: i.e. trannies and violent Middle Eastern religious cults. Mention the fact that there are only two biological human genders, use the wrong ‘pronoun’, or even point out that muslims are part of a brutal extremist sect that kills infidels worldwide, and you could end up in jail. Freedom of speech in the UK, Germany, France, and Canada, have eroded thanks to their idiotic liberal stance on muzzie ‘migrants’. The respective governments have actually made it a crime to criticize the very murderous Islamic ‘culture’ that slaughters their citizens, refuses to assimilate and has established ‘no-go zones’ and enclaves for their Sharia-based oppression. Christians don’t get the same considerations.
There’s a growing contingent of groups/individuals who want everything that makes them feel ‘victimized’, criminalized. Gays, minorities, leftwing moonbats, you name it, try to censor anything that offends them through “lawfare”, and violence.
Autocrats are all too happy to oblige.
Related posts:
https://sfcmac.com/uk-political-prisoner-tommy-robinson-freed-from-jail/
https://sfcmac.com/vice-president-jd-vance-scorches-woke-euro-leaders-in-munich/
Related articles:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/comedian-trolls-court-doubles-down-after-arrest-for-anti-trans-posts
https://twitchy.com/brettt/2025/09/03/jk-rowling-graham-linehan-defense-n2418385