Yesterday, the news came that Graham Linehan was arrested by five police officers the moment he stepped off a plane at Heathrow. Though he’s less well-known in America, Linehan is an Irish comic genius who created two of the most beloved U.K. sitcoms of the last 30 years — Father Ted and The I.T. Crowd. Linehan’s supposed crime is that he has been a persistent online critic of the transgender movement, and his arrest was over three tweets, which you can read here. Nothing about his tweets are debatable as a matter of free speech or incitement. In a sane society, they would all be protected.

For a while now, people have been screaming that the U.K. has transformed itself into an Orwellian police state. The U.K. now arrests as many as 30 people a day for online speech, and like what happened to Linehan, much of what is punished is benign by First Amendment standards.

Yet, the punishments handed down are quite severe, and there are numerous examples of how political U.K. courts operate according two a two-tiered system of justice. One woman got a 31-month sentence for an offensive tweet that was deleted after four hours; the same judge gave a 21-month sentence to someone who participated in a violent mob that tried to kick down the door of a pub looking to possibly attack the people inside.

Still, arresting someone as high profile as Linehan marks a significant escalation. Not because Linehan’s rights deserve more deference than any normal U.K. citizen that’s been arrested for speech, but because the U.K. government is openly inviting the enormous amount of criticism that will come with such a high profile arrest. Just last year, persistent transgender critic J.K. Rowling dared the Scottish police to arrest her under the country’s new and laughably expansive hate crime law. Scottish authorities demurred, not because they couldn’t punish her under the law, but because presumably they realized the blowback that came with arresting one of the most beloved authors of the last century would be too great.

Still, I hope the Linehan arrest shines a harsh spotlight on the U.K.’s increasingly draconian speech laws and leads to much needed reforms — here is a good primer on where the U.K. should start. But for now, the incident should lead those of us in America to act on some inescapable conclusions to help restore freedom of speech in the U.K. and elsewhere.

American Exceptionalism Is Very Real

It seems that every few months or so, a viral monologue from Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived 2012 TV show The Newsroom starts circulating on the internet. In the show, a famous TV news anchor played by Jeff Daniels upends his career by daring to tell some obviously deluded college girl the unspeakable truth — America just isn’t that great or exceptional. What’s remarkable about this speech is that Sorkin seems largely, if not entirely, unaware of how this monologue is perceived by the people whose beliefs he’s challenging. The result is that the monologue is entirely polarizing. Whenever liberals see the the clip they cheer at the hope they might be building consensus around their belief America is deeply flawed. Whenever conservatives see the speech, their eyes roll out of their head over Sorkin’s apparent belief that anyone who’s been alive at any point after 1960 hasn’t already been on the receiving end of many similar sanctimonious diatribes about the evils of America.

But aside from mangling stats about America’s problems, the monologue has a very revelatory passage that in the last 13 years has proven to be a damnable lie at the heart of contemporary liberalism:

And with a straight face, you’re going to tell students that America’s so starspangled awesome that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom, Japan has freedom, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom. Two hundred seven sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom.

Hilariously, the premise of this show was that this rant against American exceptionalism went on to threaten the high-powered career of the show’s protagonist. Rather than a daring statement, Sorkin’s puppet was just echoing a longstanding tenet of American liberalism. Indeed, Barack Obama, a popular Democrat president at the time the show aired, had roughly the same demeaning view of American exceptionalism: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

But we are exceptional, and the First Amendment proves as much. England arresting people for tweets is not unique. In Germany, you can be arrested for calling a politician a “professional idiot.” Last year, France arrested the founder of the social media network Telegram — who’s not even a French citizen — on a dubious pretext. Australia has passed a series of laws in recent years limiting speech. We can go on and on, but Aaron Sorkin can shut it. There are 195 sovereign states in the world, and only one of them has the First Amendment.

Thanks to the First Amendment, it’s almost impossible to imagine a similar scenario to the arrest of Linehan in America — it would be like if Larry David was arrested because a transgender person complained the infamous “Man Hands” episode of Seinfeld was demeaning. Come to think of it, that would make a pretty great Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, but David, who declared that longtime friend Bill Maher talking to Trump was the equivalent of entertaining Hitler, clearly no longer has the, uh, balls to make an artistic statement in defense of free speech.

The post-Trump trajectory of American liberals makes it clear that they are frankly covetous of European free speech controls. After Elon Musk bought Twitter, the “Twitter Files” revealed that government agencies were deeply involved in censorship at the social media company. And Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has allegedly done away with the “fact checking” censorship mechanisms at Facebook, later revealed he was pressured directly by the Biden White House to censor people. This very publication and its editors were directly subject to attempts by government agencies to suppress their speech. Major social media organizations literally censoring news of Joe Biden’s family’s corruption involving foreign oligarchs in 2020 was nothing less than overt election interference that may have swung the election.

Which brings me to the second reason for American exceptionalism. For Americans, free speech isn’t just about 45 words in a 233-year-old amendment. It remains a vital part of our culture. When Trump was kicked off of Twitter following January 6, liberal commentator Matt Yglesias famously remarked, “It’s kinda weird that deplatforming Trump just like completely worked with no visible downside whatsoever.” That turned out to be laughably wrong. While there remains a core of liberal elites that remain anxious to censor the political opposition, Donald Trump is president again in no small part because of the backlash to these transparent attempts to censor political opposition.

Whether you like Trump or not, his reelection was in part due to Americans sending a message about rejecting censorship while Europe continued to silence its citizens. While there is still much work to be done in America to safeguard our right to free speech by dismantling the rogue national security agencies and bureaucracies that assailed Americans’ right to free speech in the last decade, the political momentum in recent years has all been toward more freedom. On the cultural front, Americans have also clearly begun to reject the work of academia, HR departments, and other nongovernmental institutions that have been policing speech.

Among all other nations, the character of the American people and their support for free speech has proven uniquely admirable and resistant to totalitarian temptations. We should be proud of our commitment to free speech, openly proclaim the superiority of our beliefs, and offer encouragement to the growing number of U.K. citizens that agree with us.

America Must Continue To Lead The Global Order

Speaking of the superiority of American beliefs, earlier this year Vice President J.D. Vance rebuked European leaders for failing to defend free speech. “If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you,” Vance told a room full of stunned European leaders.

Naturally, the response was a bunch of unhinged commentary all dubiously premised on the idea that Vance is a fire-breathing radical encouraging anarchy. The response from Europe was about what you’d expect. Here’s a British professor and free speech expert telling Vance his critique of Scotland’s laws are all wrong, they just merely tell people they can’t display signs that express certain opinions on their own property.

And in the U.S., Politico accused Vance of bringing a “culture war” to Europe because he said that Europe should honor free speech, a right that the American founders correctly observed was universal and exists prior to the authority of any legitimate government. But nothing can top CBS’ Margaret Brennan, who observed that Vance gave his speech in Germany, a place where “free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.” Suffice to say, if you are confident enough to stare into a TV camera and say the problem with Nazi Germany was that they were too permissive of civil liberties, well, I’m glad I am writing this in America where I won’t be arrested for calling you a professional idiot.

American and European liberal elites hate Trump, Vance, and any other politician even nominally on the right, and further, they maintain their institutional power by hiding the truth from voters and limiting their democratic choices. But at a certain point it becomes a little too obvious what they’re doing. When you’re arresting comedians for tweets and running around suggesting Goebbels’ real crime was letting people say whatever they want, you simply lack the moral authority to lead.

This is especially true since the primary enemies of the West are Russia and China, places where censorship and state repression do occur on a grand scale. But the uncomfortable reality is that there are now some things that you can publicly say in Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea without reprisal that will get you arrested in the U.K. or Germany — and this indictment applies to every one of Linehan’s criminalized statements. European leaders remain skeptical of U.S. global leadership under Trump, but that’s in no small part because Trump is a reminder of what real democratic outcomes look like, in addition to the fact that Trump and Vance have an actual ideological, nay spiritual, commitment to free speech and free association, in addition to having actual experience with what it looks like when the liberal establishment undermines democracy by trying to throw their opponents in jail.

So long as they flout something as basic as free speech, European leaders and their allies in the American left do not have the moral standing to fight totalitarian and dictatorial opponents on the global stage. (I suspect one reason for the invention of so many false Trump-Russia narratives was to hide the fact that the left’s own illiberal impulses make them look simpatico to Putinism in ways they do not want to admit.)

As ever, it’s not just America’s economic and military power that makes us the natural leader on the global stage, even when compared to our ostensible allies, it’s our moral priorities as well. We should not shy away from criticizing and shaming our allies in Europe and elsewhere when they fail to honor the basic rights of their citizens.

Transgenderism is a Totalitarian Ideology

While there are all kinds of illiberal tendencies wrapped up in modern progressivism and “woke” cultural trends, there is a reason why transgenderism has emerged as the biggest flashpoint. It is simultaneously the most demanding woke belief — the notion that you can change your sex requires you to deny the most basic ontological premises of human existence — and the most militant, given that forcing everyone to buy into transgenderism requires applying extreme pressure on people to get them to deny reality.

And when transgender people don’t get their way, it’s well established many of them are willing to go to extremes to force acceptance. Transgender people routinely make explicit calls to violence that go unpunished in the U.K., even though similar rhetoric from others would be punished under the country’s Orwellian speech laws. They’re essentially a privileged class at this point. (Perhaps worth noting that in this respect transgenderism is not wholly unique, as under the U.K.’s “managerial multiculturalism,” Muslims and immigrants seem to benefit from a similar double standard.)

In fact, before he was arrested, Linehan explained that he had moved to the U.S. because, “At the moment we have UK police basically acting as a goon squad for a bunch of petty criminals who have have started to wear dresses and found that they they have almost magical wizardry powers over the police forces in the UK.”

To the extent transgenderism is a political movement, it is an enemy of freedom, and it should be treated as such. In response to Linehan’s arrest, Wesley Yang, an astute critic of trans ideology, observed the following:

The transgender movement is global and unitary and seeks the same things everywhere it obtains the power to impose them. Its ultimate aim is to deploy state power to make it illegal to deny the movement’s dogmas. It is an assault on the freedoms of speech, conscience, religion, and association that will imprison people for saying that men aren’t women, that human beings cannot change sex, that there has never been an evidence base for transgender medicine, that children are never born in the wrong body, that women need their own private spaces from which men are excluded, that letting men compete against women in sports is deeply unfair because trans women are men, that sex is binary and immutable, that Rachel Levine is a deeply corrupt man who abused his power to advance the aims of a cult of medicalized self-harm that brainwashes quirky kids to yearn to be chemically castrated and dismembered, and that all of it is in the service of a mad imperative to make a false claim true.

No doubt many well-intentioned people who pride themselves on being tolerant and accepting would declare Yang’s assessment divisive and harmful to the people being critiqued, i.e. the usual ritual incantations the left utters as a means of avoiding the question of whether what’s being said is true. And in the case of transgenderism, Yang is correct that none of their factual claims can withstand scrutiny.

While we should reserve sympathy and dignity for individual transgender people, there can be no compromise with a movement that demands their critics be arrested. Fortunately for us, this is another area where Americans have proved exceptional. Transgenderism is in retreat politically, legally, and culturally in America. But there’s more that needs to be done, so long as many institutions in America still honor transgender dogmas. “We should treat it the way we treated radical Islamism after 9/11, or communism in the 1950s,” John Davidson recently observed. “It should be understood as a dangerous threat, and anyone advocating or working to advance it should be treated as a criminal and an enemy of the people.”

And simply put, we need to make it clear that no one can make us deny the most basic biological facts of our existence, and attempts to use political force to make people publicly honor someone’s private delusions will be resisted as long and as forcefully as it takes. Repelling a global and unitary anti-free speech movement here is a step toward stopping them everywhere.