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It shouldn’t be lost on us that the Irish comic Graham Linehan was arrested by British authorities for a joke he made on X while in his Arizona home. The man behind the classic British show IT Crowd moved from the United Kingdom in 2024 because it had become inhospitable to free expression.

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How could any pundit or comic or bus driver who has expressed allegedly controversial views on biological reality, or a host of other issues, visit the U.K. without worrying that they may be prosecuted by the government?

The police wouldn’t even offer Linehan, who taped his arrest, any specifics of the thought crime.

Police: “You published a post on X that was deemed to be intended to instill hatred and incite violence.”

Linehan: “What post?” 

Police: “I can’t tell you that.”

As far as we can tell, however, the most offensive of Linehan’s recent posts reads as follows: “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 joke, of course, is that only “biological males,” and what a stupid time we live in that I am forced to pretend there’s a distinction, possess external genitalia.

As Linehan points out, in a country where pedophiles regularly escape sentencing, knife violence is out of control, and women are habitually assaulted and harassed without consequence, the government deployed five armed Metropolitan Police officers to arrest him over a political statement as he arrived at Heathrow Airport. By any measure, that is authoritarian.

Now, of course, even if London were a crime-free utopia, no one should fear the state hauling them to prison over misgendering a man. In many ways, specifics of the offense are also irrelevant. Free speech isn’t predicated on saying the right thing. “If liberty means anything at all,” the great Englishman George Orwell once wrote, “it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” John Locke, another great Englishman, argued that allowing falsehoods to be expressed only helps to clarify the truth in the long run.

The point, one suspects, of Linehan’s persecution isn’t to see him in prison — it’s to chill speech among the public, especially among those who lack the resources or inclination to fight state over speech codes.

I often hear people contend that free expression is dead in Europe. That’s not exactly right. Not for everyone. Countries such as Britain may as well pass laws targeting specific opinions because speech codes are only selectively enforced. The same state that arrests a comic for jokes about transgender ideology will allow Islamic migrants and British celebrities to fly flags of terrorist states and use slogans celebrating genocide. X users threaten the author J.K. Rowling’s life over her defense of women about once every minute, and yet, as far as I can tell, not one of them has been detained, much less prosecuted.

Britain provides a perfect example of how empowering authorities to limit genuinely ugly words in the public spaces evolves into limiting truthful words they simply dislike. In Europe, it began with bans on social media posts explicitly threatening minorities. Now, contending that a man dressed as a woman is a man is an act of criminality, as well. How long before raising the St. George’s Cross, now apparently a divisive symbol in English society, becomes an expression of racism?

This week, I watched British politicians arguing that the Linehan arrest was necessary because of the special circumstances surrounding Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. These days, anyone can spread hateful and dangerous words to millions, unfettered. What speech Musk allows to go on his site is his business. But look at history, and you will find that censors virtually always make the case that speech limits must be set to protect democracy and the common good in uniquely perilous times.

Of course, Britain’s descent into authoritarianism isn’t sudden. In 2016, long before Musk bought Twitter, a dozen street preachers were arrested in London for disturbing the peace by quoting, verbatim, from the King James Bible. These words were deemed Islamophobic and homophobic hate speech by the police. One might have chalked up the arrests to overzealous woke policing, but when London Mayor Sadiq Khan was asked whether Christians should be able to openly read from the Bible in public without fear of arrest, he replied, “There’s not an unlimited right to freedom of expression or free speech.”

The limits to free expression in Britain are evidently Christian doctrine and physiology.

This isn’t some minor problem, either. Linehan is also on trial right now for allegedly “harassing” a transgender activist. The backlash to his position has not only cost the comic financially, but, according to him, helped end his marriage. Over 10,000 Britons have reportedly been arrested every year for speech offenses since 2021 — an average of 30 every day. A criminal investigation into allegedly hateful words can be launched without any evidence other than someone’s feelings being hurt. For years now, British police departments have asked the public to report on neighbors, not merely over “hate incidents” motivated by prejudice or hostility, but ones that might be “perceived to be so.” These days, an “elite team of police officers” spends its time monitoring social media for anti-immigrant sentiment.

In the United States, constitutionalists on the bench are largely the ones preserving our rights. I’m not sure how long that is going to last. Britain, however, only ostensibly protects free speech via Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which was incorporated into national law in 1998. As the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once quipped, every “banana republic in the world has a bill of rights.” That included Soviet bloc nations that had constitutions with a laundry list of rights and protections that were assiduously ignored.

Our First Amendment ensures freedoms of religion, speech, press, petition, and assembly in a single sentence. Article 10 gives “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression,” but then goes on for two paragraphs proving that it doesn’t. Free speech in most of Europe is contingent on the vagaries, conditions, restrictions, and concerns of “national security,” “territorial disorder,” “crime,” and protections of “health or morals” of the state,” which are all highly malleable notions that, in the end, empower government to impose arbitrary limits on expression whenever it feels like it. Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission has a handy explainer on what you can’t say under the header: “Restrictions to the right to freedom of expression.”

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The fall of Europe is tragic. But let’s face it, most nations have no genuine liberal traditions. One can’t say the same for Britain, the place where our own conception of rights was born and the home of much of the Enlightenment. There are some Americans, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) among them, who mock the idea that men are imbued with rights that preexist the state. Yet, it’s the foundational idea of our nation. It is our own version of “Rights of Englishmen,” which holds that all men are imbued with fundamental liberties that the government can’t arbitrarily limit.

The fall of a free Britain is not the same as the others. It’s a tragedy for us, as well.