Posted on 09/03/2025 12:56:34 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Many will remember celebrity outlaw Ronnie Biggs landing at Gatwick Airport in May 2001 and being immediately arrested. Having participated in the Great Train Robbery of 1963, in which £2.6 million was stolen and the driver badly beaten, he subsequently escaped prison and lived for decades as an international fugitive. Most would agree that this arrest, however dramatic, was more than justified.
But you might struggle to make the same case for Graham Linehan, the comedy writer most famous for Father Ted. Yet there he was, apprehended by five armed police officers after landing at Heathrow Airport on Tuesday, as though he were a gangster of the most feral kind. His crime? Posting a handful of tweets that caused some offence.
As for those tweets: on 19 April, he posted an image of a transactivist protest in London along with the caption “a photo you can smell”. When challenged by a user for the “unnecessary comment”, he replied: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.” The third was posted on 20 April, and in it Graham wrote: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
“This is only the latest act in an ongoing circus of persecution.”
Those of us accustomed to the churn and clatter of social media have become adept at explaining the obvious to the congenitally literal-minded. And so, with infinite patience, Graham outlined the thinking behind this comment on his Substack, saying that it “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...”
(Excerpt) Read more at unherd.com ...
I would never travel to UK because their leftists have transformed their government to NAZIs.
Germany just had its re-showing of the night of the long knives, in political assasinations.
There are limits to free speech. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “You can’t yell “nixxer” in a crowded theater unless you are black.”
I believe “on life support” is the wrong imagery.
Free speech is being smothered with a pillow by the government.
Should the State Department issue a travel advisory for US citizens to the UK?
Does UK customs or police ask to see US citizens cell phones? Does UK have a list of US persons of interest? Shouldn’t State department demand any such list?
You’re free to say whatever they want you to say. IOW when we want your opinion we will beat it out of you.
This is what happens when you give up your guns.
“Life support” by the National Health means pulling the plug to make room for an illegal immigrant.
The UK did the same for free speech. It is dead.
Shhhhhh! Putin is the real villain here.
A U.S. citizen’s cellphone/smartphone is subject to searching by customs upon their return to the U.S.
If he spoke as a radical Islamist and added “Kill Jews too”, he would have been fine in Londonistan.
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