President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance have serious questions to ponder and important decisions to make.
Namely, what values do Americans and Britons still share in common? Also, more broadly, where does “democracy,” properly understood, actually exist in Europe? What, in other words, does NATO defend?
Tuesday on Substack, famed Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan revealed that five armed police officers detained him recently when he stepped off an airplane at London’s Heathrow Airport.
His crime? In April, Linehan made three very colorful anti-transgender posts on the social media platform X.
“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” for three posts, Linehan wrote.
One of the offending posts referred to men in women’s spaces as “violent” and “abusive.”
“Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the b****,” the comedian wrote.
Another post featured a photo of transgender activists, to which Linehan added the caption “A photo you can smell.” Beneath that post, he added “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F*** em.”
For these “crimes,” the British state subjected one of its own to arrest, incarceration, interrogation, and censorship.
Is Britain too far gone to be saved?
“At Heathrow police station, my belt, bag, and devices were confiscated. Then I was shown into a small green-tiled cell with a bunk, a silver toilet in the corner and a message from Crimestoppers on the ceiling next to a concave mirror that was presumably there to make you reflect on your life choices,” Linehan wrote.
Of course, the comedian used humor to soften his outrage. While in police custody, for instance, he endured woke-sounding questions from at least one officer. (Most of the rank-and-file officers, however, he found reasonable.)
Moreover, the stress of the entire farce drove Linehan’s blood pressure north of 200.
Finally, as a condition of bail, the comedian cannot go on X. Talk about a country in desperate need of a laugh.
“The civility of individual officers doesn’t alter the fundamental reality of what happened. 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,” Linehan wrote.
Last month, Linehan appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast. (WARNING: Following the link will lead to a video that contains vulgar language that may offend some readers.)
Meanwhile, Trump has spent a good deal of energy trying to mediate peace in the Russia-Ukraine War. According to the establishment and its media minions, the fate of “democracy” hangs in the balance there.
The president has also finally convinced NATO members to bear an appropriate financial burden. Good for him.
Of course, World War II ended 80 years ago (80 years to the day for the Allies and Japan). And the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Perhaps, therefore, the time has come to re-evaluate our alliances.
Trump came of age during the Cold War. Back then, everyone knew that the Western world and the Soviet bloc organized their societies around very different values. People in the Western world, for instance, did not suffer arrest and incarceration for political speech.
Not so today.
In fact, earlier this year on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” three German prosecutors bragged about pre-dawn raids on Germans who made offensive social media posts.
Thus, in what meaningful way do Germans enjoy more freedom than the people of Russia under President Vladimir Putin?
When it comes to alliances, it might be too much to ask an older man like Trump to rethink a worldview that dates to the early Cold War.
The younger Vance, however, has already called out European tyrants to their faces. Indeed, the vice president and possible heir apparent to Trump’s MAGA movement seems even more inclined than the president to reconsider whether longstanding alliances with nations hostile to free speech actually serve the cause of “democracy,” let alone U.S. national interests.
Perhaps Linehan’s ordeal will hasten that reconsideration.
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