Mike Benz On The UK: This Is A Tyrannical Hellhole State Trying To Export Their Censorship Here
Mike Benz on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast with co-host Natalie Winters.
MIKE BENZ: Well, this story is so insane, it may actually be a kind of tipping point in the free speech fight in Europe. Graham Linehan is an award-winning comedy writer. He wrote Father Ted and a bunch of other sitcom series. He’s a pretty famous guy. He took a trip to Arizona from the UK and he tweeted about three comedic tweets on X about transgender and gender issues. And when he returned to Heathrow Airport in London, he was met by five armed police officers who immediately took him effectively off the tarmac into state custody. And he is now facing prison over the tweets that he made in the US making fun of transgender people. And the one condition of his bail was that he, so he’s allowed to essentially, his bail condition was that he’s not allowed to post on X. So the only reason that he is not remaining in custody awaiting trial where he will surely face this kangaroo court in the monstrosity of the UK judicial system under these hate speech laws. So the only way that he was essentially allowed to spend his remaining days of freedom until his trial, not in a prison cell was by agreeing not to have a social media account, not to post on X. So essentially it falls to the rest of the world to tell Graham Linehan’s story because the UK state is so afraid of his Twitter account that if he tweets, his bail will be revoked and he’ll be immediately in jail. So this is kind of the worst case scenario come to pass. He made these tweets while in the United States. These tweets were completely banal. They were making fun of the mental instability of many folks in the trans community with a kind of comedic punch him in the balls punchline to one of the tweets. This is the sort of thing, and he’s a comedian and a high profile one. I mean, this is very clearly a message from the British state that if you challenge the system in any way, however light, however comedic or satirical, there is no quarter, you will be immediately rolled up by the police. The UK now has over 30 arrests for online speech a day. The estimate was 12,000 a year people arrested for their tweets in the UK based on a Times report from April. That is, I think something like 30 to 50 times more than the amount of people that get arrested in Russia for online speech. It is just, they are truly the world’s new North Korea. And I think the entire US-UK special relationship has to be immediately renegotiated because this is a tyrannical hellhole state who is trying to export their censorship here. I have to add one more thing. And I think that we discussed this last week. The British government is also fining American tech companies, American social media companies like 4chan for not censoring what the British state wants. While these are American websites hosted in America run by Americans. So this is like no taxation without representation all over again. They’re trying to tax us from abroad. They’re trying to arrest people who visit the United States and make speech in the United States the moment they return back to the UK. I think all negotiations have to be ground to an immediate halt until we can figure out what the hell is going on in the UK.
