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A Comedian Was Jailed In The UK For Jokes. Is Britain Now North Korea?
It’s too early to write any kind of definitive assessment about the “America First” movement. But one observation that we can make — and it’s a very welcome change — is that foreign affairs don’t matter as much to Americans as they once did. The internal dysfunction of other nations, thousands of miles away from our borders, simply isn’t that relevant to most people anymore. It was never relevant, but now millions of people realize that.
Take the recent attacks on the right to freedom of speech, for example. We’ve discussed how Australia outlawed certain forms of prayer, saying it’s akin to “conversion therapy.” Meanwhile, the UK sentenced a mother named Lucy Connolly to 30 months in prison because of a mean tweet that she wrote about so-called “asylum seekers,” which she deleted after three hours. Connolly’s arrest, according to British journalists, was one of about 30 arrests concerning online speech that take place every day — yes, every day — in the UK.
We talked about all of these cases when they were in the news. These are important stories because they illustrate the decline of Western nations, which we share some history with. But at the same time, it’s hard for most Americans to get too worked up over any of these incidents because our own country has similar problems. And simply by virtue of the fact that these problems are taking place within our borders, these problems are vastly more important. Just a few days ago, a mother in Minnesota was charged for saying a racial slur — something that isn’t a crime, and was never a crime, under our Constitution. But the Constitution isn’t operative anymore in the state of Minnesota. And that’s an infinitely bigger issue than anything that’s happening in Australia, or the UK, or Canada, or anywhere else outside of our borders.
However, there are some stories that, although they originate overseas, do implicate the free speech rights of Americans in a very direct and unprecedented way. And the recent arrest of a comedy writer named Graham Linehan is one of them. This is a case that’s so egregious, and so obviously threatening to American interests and our constitutional rights, that it should result in immediate sanctions against every senior official in the UK government, as well as the elimination of diplomatic relations between our two nations. The United States should treat the UK no differently than, say, Iran or North Korea, for the indefinite future. And the State Department should make it very clear that American citizens should avoid traveling to the UK, for their own safety.
Here’s the basic factual background, before we get into the broader implications for Americans. 57-year-old Graham Linehan is an Irish citizen. He’s best known for his work on the 1990s comedy series “Father Ted.” On Monday, he was in Arizona, preparing to board a flight to London’s Heathrow airport. The reason he was going back to London is that, on Thursday, he was supposed to stand trial on charges of “harassing an 18-year-old campaigner for transgender rights,” whatever that means exactly.
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At the gate, he was told that, for some unknown reason, he needed to be re-ticketed and assigned a new seat. That was a potential sign that his reservation had been flagged in the ticketing system by the authorities. And indeed, upon landing at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting for Graham Linehan the moment he got off the plane. The officers escorted Linehan to a private room at the airport, at which point they informed him that he was being arrested for posting 3 inflammatory tweets on X.
And then, by his account, Linehan openly began laughing at the officers, because the whole thing was just too absurd. But it wasn’t a joke. The officers explained that, indeed, they were arresting this man because of 3 tweets he had posted. And they only released him from jail, on bail, on the condition that he doesn’t post any more messages on X, for any reason. So he’s barred from communicating on this particular social media platform, for the foreseeable future.
To restate: On his way to stand trial for offending trans activists in the UK, the police in the UK arrested Graham Linehan on a separate charge, for offending trans activists once again, through his online posts. They’re now silencing him completely, because these 3 tweets are just so awful and intolerable.
At the risk of being arrested the next time I travel to the UK — a country that’s already promised to punish people who “retweet” offensive content — I’m going to show you each of these three offending tweets right now. So batten down the hatches. Grab onto something stable. Here’s the first offending post.
Credit: Graham Linehan/X. Substack.
It reads: “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.”
Yes, that’s the first offending tweet, which led to the arrest of the comedian who wrote it, after he landed following a 10-hour flight. This shouldn’t need to be explained, but yes it’s true that, if you take this comedian literally, he tweeted about an act of violence against a certain subset of people. He said that those people should be “punched in the balls.”
But his post was not intended to produce any imminent criminal action. And his post wasn’t likely to produce any imminent criminal action, either. Therefore, it’s not criminal. He didn’t say, “at 8 o’clock tonight, everyone should go out and punch this particular trans-identifying male in the balls,” and then post the home address of the target. That kind of conduct would be unlawful.
What Graham did, by contrast, was to assert that men who invade the private spaces of women — as a general matter — are a physical threat and should get punched in the balls. It’s a general comment that, in context, is intended to be somewhat humorous. The writer is, after all, a comedian. He was not inciting any lawless action. He wasn’t targeting any particular individual. He was pointing out, to comedic effect, that so-called “trans women” have testicles.
This is a distinction that might require some nuance to understand, but it’s a very, very important distinction. If you erase this distinction, as the Left is intent on doing, then free speech disappears as well. That’s because, as we all know, it’s extremely, extremely easy for activists to claim that certain speech is supposedly “threatening.” If you remove the requirement that unlawful speech must contain an imminent threat, and that this threat must be likely to produce imminent unlawful action, then pretty much all Right-wing speech will become illegal overnight. They’ll be able to label every Right-wing policy as a “threat” to commit “trans genocide” and so on. And of course, that’s their goal. They want to imprison every single conservative for hate speech, as soon as they possibly can.
For what it’s worth, not many people saw this particular tweet from this comedian — at least, not before the UK government blew it up. It had something like 100,000 views in total. But even if 50 million people saw it, everything that he wrote would be completely reasonable. In a free society, you’re allowed to make comments like this. But the UK isn’t a free society. And it hasn’t been one, for quite some time.
To be fair to the government in the UK, there were two other allegedly offending tweets that this comedian wrote.
Here’s one of them. It shows a photo of some kind of trans-rights rally.
Credit: Graham Linehan/X. Substack.
As a caption to the photo, the comedian wrote: “A photo you can smell.”
I’ve thought about this for some time, and admittedly, I can’t come up with any argument for why this would be illegal, or even remotely controversial. It’s a straightforward observation, like the kind you might hear from David Attenborough, if he ever had the misfortune of narrating a rally full of trans activists. The rally obviously smelled terrible. None of these people demonstrate any interest in personal hygiene. Everyone knows it. He’s pointing that out. So what’s the big deal?
As best I can tell, the real issue here is the follow-up tweet. Again, this one refers to the trans activists in the photo.
Credit: Graham Linehan/X. Substack.
Here’s what the comedian wrote: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F— em.”
So apparently this is the issue. He wrote some more nasty words, I suppose. Your guess is as good as mine on this one. Apparently, it’s illegal in the UK to refer to trans activists as misogynists and homophobes, and to direct swear words at them. Or maybe you can’t say that you “hate” these people. It’s fine for them to say “f— terfs,” and to call you Nazis, and to get you fired from your job, and to celebrate the deaths of Catholic children who are praying in Church. But the one thing you can’t do, under any circumstance, is say you hate them.
At the moment, the UK government does seem to realize how terrible all of this looks. The “Health Secretary” has just come out and suggested that the UK’s “hate speech laws” need to be “addressed” to make sure they’re applied in a legitimate way. The Met Police Commissioner has said that the government needs to “clarify” its hate speech laws.
Of course, the only actual solution is to abolish hate speech laws entirely. There is no middle-ground here. As long as you have “hate speech” laws on the books, political dissidents will be rounded up and imprisoned for offending the regime. But the “middle ground approach” is what they’re going with in the UK at the moment. Here’s how a Green Party leader addressed the arrest, for example:
“These are totally unacceptable tweets… I think it was proportionate to arrest him”
Zack Polanski, Green Party Leader, on the arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow airport on Monday.#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/wzN2lkqxLx
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) September 2, 2025
So he’s fine with the fact that this man was arrested for his tweets. His only quibble, apparently, is that there were five armed officers. It would’ve been totally fine if they had sent, say, two unarmed non-binary officers, plus a social worker, in order to haul this comedian to prison. In that case, justice would’ve been served.
This is where, to bring things back to the beginning of this segment, the arrest of Graham Linehan becomes an international incident that’s relevant to all Americans. Everyone in authority in the UK, from the prime minister on down, is ignoring one of the central issues in this case, which is this: Graham Linehan published these offending tweets when he was in America. And because of his lawful actions on American soil, he’s being imprisoned in a foreign country — a country that’s supposedly our ally. In essence, the UK is exerting sovereignty over America. They are directly threatening the freedoms of every American who might, for one reason or another, end up in the UK.
This cannot stand. It was just a few weeks ago that the prime minister of the UK sat in the Oval Office and lied to the president and the vice president about the right of freedom of speech in his country. Watch:
UK: Starmer falsely claimed Britain has free speech earlier this year. This week a comedian was arrested for posting three tweets critical of trans people. pic.twitter.com/gXDCjEYu9W
— @amuse (@amuse) September 3, 2025
None of this was true. The right of free speech does not exist in the UK. Every American — along with everyone else who’s considering traveling to the UK — needs to realize that. And our government should respond accordingly. Less than a year ago, in response to free speech abuses in the country of Georgia, the State Department took punitive measures against the political figures who were responsible. The same exact punishments should be handed out to leaders in the UK, starting with their prime minister. He shouldn’t be allowed to travel here. If he sets foot in this country, he should be arrested. All of his assets should be frozen, to the extent we have any access to them. And his country should be isolated from the civilized world.
If that seems harsh, here’s what the prime minister of the UK has been posting about, as all of this has been going on. This is something he wrote on Wednesday:
I won’t shy away from decisions to protect kids, even if there are the predictable cries of nanny state. We’re stopping shops from selling high-caffeine energy drinks to under 16s, so they can turn up to school ready to learn.
That’s what the prime minister of the UK is focused on, at the moment. As their country is overrun with migrant rapists, and as comedians are thrown in prison for a couple of tweets that offend trans activists, the prime minister is deeply concerned about high-caffeine energy drinks. Meanwhile, his government is cooking up fake justifications to arrest people based on their speech in America.
The more you look into this arrest, the worse it gets. This is a report from the Telegraph the other day:
After being arrested by five armed police, Linehan was held by the police for over 16 hours, during which time his blood pressure became so high that he was rushed to the hospital. According to him, police used trans activist language when interviewing him.
Now, before we continue with this Telegraph article, this part needs to be explained. This is a quote from Linehan’s substack article describing his arrest:
“[The police interrogator] 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. … Eventually, a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200—stroke territory.”
Already, this is kind of extraordinary, at least by American standards. How many police interrogators in this country would use the phrase “gender assigned at birth,” if you had to guess? It’s the kind of thing that, if you know any police officers, doesn’t seem like something they’d say. But in the UK, it’s not exactly unheard of. They have hard-boiled detectives raging about “cis men” and gender fluidity, as part of their standard interrogation practices. Pathetic does not begin to describe this.
But let’s continue with the Telegraph article, because again, things get worse from here:
The Metropolitan Police initially claimed Linehan had been arrested ‘on suspicion of inciting violence’, before clarifying that he had actually been arrested for the offence of ‘intentionally stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation.’ It is hard to understand how Graham’s tweets could possibly meet this definition. Male trans activists are normally quick to reject suggestions that their desire to present as women is ‘autogynephilia’, a sexual preference. But the 2010 law under which he was arrested makes no mention of trans identities.
In other words, the authorities went out of their way to twist an existing law — a law which has nothing to do with transgenderism — into a pretext to arrest a comedian for his tweets.
Every aspect of this case is a betrayal of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of the rule of law, and of the commitments that the British have made to the United States, as our alleged allies. No one in this country — whether they’re American citizens or not — can rely on the British government to defend the freedom of speech, or to honor the legal traditions that laid the groundwork for our Constitution.
With the arrest of Graham Linehan, the UK has made it abundantly clear that the U.S. cannot ignore the broader eradication of free-speech rights in the West. Yes, it’s happening outside of our borders, in many cases. But increasingly, foreign governments are making it clear that, in their view, they can bring criminal cases against individuals based on their lawful conduct in the United States. That is a massive escalation in the war against freedom of speech. It’s very close to a declaration of war, in fact. And until the UK can demonstrate some daylight between their legal system and North Korea’s, no one in this country — including our elected officials — has any reason to trust these people, or to take them seriously, ever again.
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