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. I myself would say: at that point, if you haven’t started questioning your career choice, there’s something wrong upstairs.
Linehan 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.
(If you’d like to see the Tweets that got him arrested, you’ll find them here.)
There are in fact people defending the arrest of a man for tweets.
Green Party leader Zack Polanski, for example, described the posts as “totally unacceptable” and the arrest as “proportionate.”
(Whenever you’re tempted to say, “At least these lefties aren’t Hillary Clintonites who would start a war over a cup of coffee,” remember this incident: these are not our friends.)
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.)
(Here’s another thing that grinds the old man’s gears, by the way. Disagreeing with the left can’t just be a difference of opinion: it has to be a clinical diagnosis with “phobia” in the name. This is how it’s been since at least the Soviets. Hence the absurd neologism “transphobia.”)
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.
Well, that’s about the least one can say about it.
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