J.D. Vance is right. Whether through hate speech laws, digital IDs, or other measures, the U.K. and other Western countries have gone full Orwell in their treatment of those who express “wrong think” about transgenderism, mass immigration, and abortion.
Those who live in the U.K. and Australia like to brag about how polite and civilized they are in personal interactions, especially when contrasting themselves with “ugly” Americans.
Increasingly, though, that’s style over substance. Because by any measure, it is the British and their cultural counterpart who act like brutes. In fact, they’re bloody brilliant at it.
These countries are doubling and tripling down on their efforts to enforce and expand “hate speech” laws against dissenters, or anyone who dares to question leftist orthodoxy on cultural and political topics.
And while Brits and Aussies might be exceedingly genteel when engaging in late-night raids to arrest their fellow citizens and cart them off to jail, they are, nonetheless, arresting them solely for expressing unkind, offensive, unapproved, biblical, true, and even silent speech.
The Joke’s On Us
Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of transgenderism. The U.K. officially recognizes in law that there are only two sexes, male and female, and yet its police are arresting and punishing anyone who “misgenders” someone, jokes about the absurdity of it all, or simply states the truth.
This reality got the world’s attention in early September when comedian Graham Linehan was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport as soon as he got off the plane.
His crime?
Three posts he made on X regarding males who claim to be female.
In an April 20 post, for example, Linehan said that if a male who identifies as female is “in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act.” He added that women in such a situation should make a scene, call the police, or punch the man.
After his arrest, police interrogated him about the posts. Linehan explained that they were serious points made through humor, but as the interview went on, he became so distressed that his blood pressure spiked, requiring hospitalization.
He was later released on bail on the condition that he not use X.
Linehan is best known for writing the Irish television show, “Father Ted,” a series critical of Catholicism and the Catholic church.
He wrote on his Substack,
“Thank God the Catholic Church never had with the police the special relationship granted to trans activists.
I looked at the single bail condition: I am not to go on Twitter. That’s it. No threats, no speeches about the seriousness of my crimes—just a legal gag order designed to shut me up while I’m the UK, and a demand I face a further interview in October.”
Linehan applauded the civility of the officers, many of whom he believed did not agree with the arrest. However, the civility of the officers “doesn’t alter the fundamental reality of what happened,” he wrote, explaining,
“I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online—all because I made jokes that upset some psychotic crossdressers. 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.”
Linehan plans to file suit for wrongful arrest.
Delusion Down Under
Meanwhile, in Australia, Kirralie Smith and her organization, Binary Australia, a group that advocates for single-sex sports, were recently found guilty of “unlawful vilification” for social media posts identifying male soccer players as male.
The case started in 2023 when two transgender soccer players, Justin Dennis, who goes by the name “Riley,” and Nicholas Blanch, who goes by “Stephanie,” filed Apprehended Violence Orders against Smith after she wrote online that the two athletes are males identifying as female and competing in women’s soccer.
Dennis, formerly a transgender activist on YouTube, competes as a member of the Flying Bats, a team of five biological men that have dominated women’s soccer tournaments in Australia over the last several years.
Billing themselves as “the world’s oldest and largest LGBTQIA+ women’s and non-binary football club,” the Flying Bats won their second consecutive Women’s Premier League championship earlier this month.
Dennis claims that Smith vilified him by identifying him as the top scorer in the women’s soccer league and by noting that he is biologically male. She also made it public that while playing for the Inter Lions team, Dennis injured two female athletes. Video from May 21, 2023, allegedly shows the much larger Dennis forcefully shove a female opponent off the field of play and into a fence.
Following the incidents, Dennis left the Inter Lions and applied to three teams but was denied until the Flying Bats approved his application, according to Reduxx.
Blanch’s accusation against Smith centers around an article she wrote in January 2023. In the article and related posts, Smith included pictures of Blanch and a post calling him a “bloke in a frock.”
In a series of posts, Smith effectively said that Blanch should enter the men’s competition or mixed competition. “No one is saying he can’t play,” she wrote. “It is simply a matter of fairness, safety, and dignity. He is male and does not belong in a female division. Women and girls deserve to have the option of a female-only competition.”
The court ruling said that Smith “sought to evoke fear in the reader regarding the fact that [Blanch], who is described as a man/male/bloke is playing in a women’s team (and transgender women playing in women’s sport generally).”
To justify that claim, the court included Smith’s statements that asked: “How can girls, women, and families feel safe when they are not even permitted to question the presence of a man in their space or on the field?”; and “Why should parents be put in the terrible situation of having to deal with an adult man in their daughter’s bathroom?”
The ruling requires Smith and Binary Australia to pay Dennis and Blanch $100,000 each, cover their legal costs, issue a public apology, and develop a policy to prevent future “vilification.” The final penalties will be determined on November 5.
Smith has been repeatedly censored by the Australian government. She has been brought into court 10 times for “misgendering” men who identify as women, and on February 20, 2023, the nation’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant had Smith’s Facebook page permanently deleted.
Fighting Dystopia
George Orwell, the author of 1984, once said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Understanding this, Vice President J.D. Vance has repeatedly called out European governments for their hate speech laws, and the Trump administration has further warned specifically that the U.K.’s censorship of its own citizens, including punishing them for praying in their heads, could negatively impact the relationship between the two countries.
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer responded to these charges by insisting, “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the U.K. and it will last for a very long time.”
Be that as it may, 12,000 British citizens are arrested each year for writing, retweeting, or joking in a way that doesn’t meet the speech standards of the U.K. government.
This is clearly seen in a video released last week. That the police, in true Limey style, are sheepishly apologetic and do their mums proud in the manners department as they inform their fellow citizen that he’s going to be searched and hauled off to jail in the middle of the night for a tweet doesn’t make the underlying policy any less tyrannical.
Meanwhile, the U.K. is experiencing rampant violence that’s disproportionately committed by illegal aliens and migrants who refuse to assimilate and follow British law. And yet, if British citizens speak out about it, they will be arrested, convicted, and sentenced to prison.
Adding to this dystopia, the U.K. government officially recognizes that there are only two genders and that gender dysphoria is a mental disorder and social contagion, but it will arrest and fine those who actually state those facts online or in person.
It is now a fact that those in the U.K., Australia, as well as other Western countries, only have the “freedom” to recite nice, agreeable facts and opinions that bear the government’s stamp of approval.
This isn’t because these government leaders are actually distressed that people are getting their feelings hurt or are made to feel scared by somebody else’s words.
No, it’s about power.
Western countries have been taken over by globalist Marxists who want to implement an agenda that will radically transform their nations — and the first and best way to achieve that is to punish their citizens for speaking out. They only have to do this a few times for in time many people will, first, self-censor their own beliefs and, second, chastise anyone else who dares to speak their mind.
Within the last month, the U.K. (and Switzerland) made that agenda much easier to implement and police after announcing their plans to mandate “digital IDs.”
These “contactless IDs,” stored on a person’s phone, are being hailed by the government as a way to provide faster and easier access to government services while also combatting migrants who are illegally working in those countries. As such, all citizens will have to sign up for and use the ID if they want to have a job, but U.K. officials have also said that, “in time,” the IDs could be extended to other societal “services” to “make it simpler” to apply for driver’s licenses, childcare, and welfare; access tax records; vote in elections, and set up bank accounts.
What might a government already jailing people for errant tweets do with a one-stop shop for every bit and byte of a person’s vital personal information? It doesn’t require much imagination to answer that question. One need only look to Communist China and its digital social credit system, which is used to determine and regulate a person’s “trustworthiness.”
In reality, a digital ID is not about convenience or efficiency — it’s a Trojan horse for tyranny.
It’s time to recognize these once-great “liberal democracies” for what they really have become: authoritarian regimes. So-called “hate speech” laws and digital IDs are tools meant to crack down on dissent and increase control over the population.
How should Americans feel about this? We must continue to resist any and all efforts to impose “hate speech” laws, digital IDs, and other tools of censorship and control in the United States, even as we pray fervently for those in the U.K., Australia, and other countries — who find themselves living in the dystopian reality that Orwell so presciently portrayed in 1984.
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