How do democracies die? It’s a question that has been frequently asked over the years by those who realize – like Ronald Reagan did – that freedom is fragile and can be lost in a generation.
In Great Britain it has been lost in a fortnight as the Brits would say, or about about two weeks. In the time it takes to buy a new home, the United Kingdom has become a land bereft of free speech and is not just on the verge of becoming a police state – it is a police state, where the government is actually releasing real criminals from the prison to make room for “keyboard warriors,” or social media reporters who are now Public Enemy Number One is this febrile and paranoid nation.
Yes, the land of the Magna Carta, where philosophers and journalists fought for the right to free speech for centuries, where John Locke declared everyone had the right to “life, liberty and property” has become a country of overwhelming political menace and intellectual poverty that cannot with any accuracy or veracity call itself a democracy.
When you watch clips of the British police entering the homes of ordinary Britons and arresting them for “Facebook crimes” you would think you were watching an updated movie version of George Orwell’s 1984 depicting a visit from the thought police to some poor citizen’s home. Especially when one of the cops is a woman with a thick cockney accent that sounds like Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady, who reassures the elderly gent that getting arrested is no big deal. It’s sort of like traditional Britain trying to adjust to the well-modulated tone of dictatorship.
People forget that the setting for his 1949 novel was Britain, not the US, and Orwell knew perfectly that even the land of the rule of law and fairplay could become a monstrous dictatorship given time.
But two weeks? Yes the UK has devolved into a petty dictatorship that quickly and it is debatable as to whether there is any going back.
It all started when riots broke out after the murder of three girls at some crazy Taylor Swift-sponsored dance studio. The perpetrator was mistakenly believed to be Muslim and this set off a backlash against mass immigration in Britain and the growing consensus that the cultural groups in the UK are becoming ghettoized and marginalized and that the police are actively ignoring any breaches of the law. The relatively new prime minister, Labourite Keir Starmer has been nicknamed “Two-tiered Keir” for his duplicitous justice policy.
When riots erupted all over Britain, Starmer made it clear that he wouldn’t tolerate violence on streets or even any passive support for it on social media.
The UK's Director of Public Prosecutions of England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson, stated in a televised interview with Sky News the government had established an internet hit squad that would be monitoring social media platforms and on the lookout for anything deemed to be "inciting racial hatred." Even those who repost said materials will be charged, he said.
The madness went further. Now the UK is actually talking about extraditing people from the US to stand trial for promoting so-called hate speech.
London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley, a clown who has surely seen his opportunity to seize control of the moment, recently warned about extradicting American citizens, and citizens everywhere for that matter, so that they could face the strong arm of British law for any social media posts that violate UK laws, including being forcibly brought to UK for trial.
Even if you’ve never been to the UK.
"We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you,” Rowley stated.
“Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law," he stated. “You can be guilty of offenses of incitement, of stirring up racial hatred, there are numerous terrorist offenses regarding the publishing of material. All of those offenses are in play if people are provoking hatred and violence on the streets, and we will come after those individuals,” according to Fox News.
“Keyboard warrior.” That’s the pat phrase that some imbecile in the UK government talking points department has apparently dreamed up to describe any social media journalist – good, bad or indifferent – who isn’t reporting the news the way the government sees it.
Take Carer Wayne O'Rourke, who just got three years for calling the murder of those three girls a terrorist attack. What this guy posted might be termed mildly offensive at worst but he was treated like a a child molester by the British justice system.
And the reporting of his “crime” was no better, especially by the Daily Mail, as they focused on how O’Rourke was actually making money off of his posts on X – about $1,900 USD a month – and wasn’t that just awful. As if hundreds of thousands of people aren’t making a pittance of an income off of X, Facebook and YouTube for their efforts.
Then there’s the reference to O’Rourke’s X profile that shows a picture of a bulldog wearing a Union Jack jacket. This was once a common symbol of British patriotism or even an oblique reference to Winston Churchill who was often caricatured as a bulldog due to his facial characteristics and obdurate determination to fight Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
Forget the Nazis coming across the English Channel. They’re in London now.
That imagery somehow moved the court to find O’Rourke even guilty of promulgating “racial hatred” with his posts.
Court officer Lucia Harrington accused the social media reporter of being “caught up in the media frenzy” and urged him to “re-educate himself,” according to the Daily Mail. Judge Catarina Sjolin Knight told O'Rourke: 'You were not caught up in what others were doing; you were instigating it.'
Don’t worry, Lucia. The British penal system will undoubtedly find ways to re-educate O’Rouke and hundreds of thousands of other Britons who commit speech crimes. The Nazis called them concentration camps, the Soviets referred to them as gulags.
Labour won a vast majority in the last Parliamentary election in Britain, taking about two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons with a paltry 33 percent of the vote – thanks to vote splitting. Conservative leader Rishi Sunak was hardly inspiring and too much of a globalist but he seems a great deal less dangerous than “Sir” Keir Starmer. Yes, I said sir. What the hell was this career bureaucrat knighted for? I am more inclined to address him as Herr Keir Starmer for obvious reasons. He doesn’t actually look like a Big Brother type; with his pudgy face and perpetual confused expression, he resembles more your petulant little brother. He’s an atrocity on the British landscape, the very embodiment of caustic, totalitarian bluster that politicians without any principles can so easily inhabit.
Do you think this can’t happen in America or in Canada?
Well it’s already happening in the latter country. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Online Harms Act – an odious piece of censorship legislation that actually includes a thought crimes component that can put people under house arrest for speech crimes not yet written or posted – has not even passed second reading in the House of Commons, yet the Canadian police are already behaving like it’s the law.
The RCMP recently arrested a woman in Chilliwack, BC for "discriminatory and harmful language" posted on social media.
Her neighbors and local media turned her in and the cops were just too willing to protect the public from her "racially offensive” content.
Having done some research on this matter, it is clear that this individual may in fact be offensive. But sometimes free speech is offensive. And the state will always attack free speech at its weakest link and then proceed from there.
Before you know, the police will be showing up at your door and accusing you of violating the Newspeak handbook or failing to master doublethink or just posting the wrong thing on your Facebook page.
It can happen that fast.
