Most Americans don’t know who Graham Linehan is, but to put it into perspective, he’s the Jerry Seinfeld of the British/Irish sitcom world. Back in the 1990s, Linehan starred in Father Ted, which is now regarded as one of the greatest sitcoms in U.K. television history.

On September 1, Linehan’s real life merged with sitcom-level absurdity when he landed at London’s Heathrow Airport and was immediately arrested by five members of the Metropolitan Police. His crime? Three posts on X.

At The Spectator, Linehan commented on the bizarre and ominous episode:

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 mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer…(and no, I promise you, I am not making this up).

Linehan’s first post featured an aerial view of a large, presumably pro-migrant, demonstration. His caption: “A photo you can smell.” His second offensive tweet said simply, “I hate them. Mysoginists and homophobes. F**k em.” Here he ironically came to the defense of two identity groups that are typically protected by woke ideology. But he went after a third group, transgender people. Apparently, not all protected classes on the Left are equal. In his third offending post, Linehan jokingly commented, “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.”

The Metropolitan Police said, without specifically identifying Linehan, that it did indeed arrest a man of his age at Heathrow on suspicion of inciting violence related to posts on X. They did not specify the exact statute under which the arrest was made beyond the description of “inciting violence.” In the U.K., “incitement to violence” doesn’t typically fall under an incitement statute. Instead, it is related to offenses such as public disorder or breaking hate-related laws.

The lack of specificity in this case leaves one to speculate that it is most likely Linehan’s social media posts that led to his arrest, which are alleged to violate the Public Order Act of 1986 (POA) and, more specifically, the Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006.

Part III of the POA makes it illegal to use threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behavior intended to trigger hatred based on race, sexual orientation, or religion. Of course, these regulations have not protected the rights of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce to pray silently to herself outside of an abortion clinic. Some religions matter more than others, including the ones dedicated to the killing of unborn children.

Any American who would take the time to read either of these statutes could not be blamed for a newfound love of the First Amendment. It’s well understood that the freedom of speech as protected in America is one of the major differences between the two countries. Even so, most Americans still may not realize just how easily wrongthink can be framed as a criminal offense, albeit selectively, in the U.K.—or the danger of such a regime being established here at home.

Coming to America

Americans got their first dose of this sort of cultural engineering during COVID, when their social media posts were scoured, moderated, and deleted, or their accounts were suspended, shadow-banned, or outright cancelled if they didn’t stay within accepted orthodoxy.

This has since been expanded to include topics like immigration, LGBTQ, and others. Conservatives have learned that to disagree with the Left is to invite baseless accusations of racism, homophobia, sexism, and other various “isms.” Cancel culture is one way the Left enforces its narratives and silences its targets. Imagine what it would do if it had laws and a pliable police force to take this further and exact consequences on anyone who dissents.

The selective enforcement of the FACE Act in America, signed into law by President Bill Clinton presumably to protect access to abortion clinics for pregnant women, is one such harbinger of tyranny. The Biden Department of Justice so aggressively enforced it that Mark Houck, a father of seven, was arrested at gunpoint by 25 federal agents in the early morning at his home—in front of his family—in 2022. Why? He participated in a pro-life vigil outside of an abortion clinic and engaged in a verbal altercation with an abortion clinic escort, shoving that person out of the way when the escort harassed his 12-year-old son. Houck was later acquitted.

Just because Donald Trump is in the White House doesn’t mean America is now safe from these anti-speech forces. Reality, science, facts, and common sense continue to be under assault around the world—and even in the U.S. This assault will re-emerge in full force the moment the Democrats take a majority in the House or Senate or win back the White House.

Now is not the time to be complacent. Now is not the time to assume that the current shift toward common sense is permanent. Now is not the time to ignore what must be done to mitigate the inevitable attack on our First Amendment rights and our values.

The Trump Administration must do everything it can to prevent it from being a crime to disagree with the Left. They should be even more vigilant in choosing staunchly conservative judges for the courts, and continue to gut the cancerous infrastructure of censorship that’s metastasized throughout the federal government. And they must cut funding for NGOs and other operations that are designed to spread leftist propaganda deep into the culture. Cutting federal funding to PBS and NPR is a good start—but it is just a start.

Back in the U.K., Linehan is out of police custody on bail as an investigation proceeds. He said that when he was taken into custody, his belt, bag, and devices were confiscated, and later the Metropolitan Police interrogated him with the same seriousness that they use on hardened, violent terrorists.

A condition of bail was that Linehan not post on X. In his article in The Spectator that recapped his arrest, Linehan wrote, “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.”

Earlier this year, Vice President JD Vance was right to call out the anti-free speech regime that’s spreading across Europe. America needs international partners that understand the importance of freedom instead of caving to tyranny.