The arrest of Graham Linehan is an abomination

Weasel words have abounded since the arrest of Graham Linehan. It seems a tad ‘heavy-handed’ for five armed cops to collar a man over his tweets, said Index on Censorship. It feels ‘disproportionate’, some say. Perhaps the police should be focussing on more serious crimes, said that supposed devotee of the liberty to speak, Sir Keir Starmer. What wet, weak protestations. What puny complaints. What spineless bluster. The rest of us must speak more plainly: the armed interrogation of a comedy writer for daring to demur from gender ideology is not some mere regrettable incident – it is an abomination.

What we saw at Heathrow Airport on Monday was nothing less than the militarisation of cancel culture. It was the enforcement at gunpoint of what the ruling class deems to be correct-think. Mr Linehan was nabbed like some common criminal as he got off his flight from Arizona. Five armed officers – five! – took him to a room and told him he was being arrested over three tweets. Eventually they bailed him, with a strict condition: he must not go on X. In the old days, ‘witches’ were made to wear a metal bridle that encircled the head and compressed the tongue so that the town might be spared their heretical drivel – now the ‘witch’ is warned not to utter a word in that modern town square of social media.

Linehan is suspected – with supreme ridiculousness – of ‘incitement’. His sinful tweets include one showing a photo of trans loons protesting in London alongside the quip: ‘A photo you can smell.’ I looked at the photo. You can smell it. Don’t arrest me, please. In another tweet he said any ‘trans-identified male’ who goes into a female-only space is committing an ‘abusive act’ and women should ‘make a scene, call the cops or if all else fails, punch him in the balls’. That’s not incitement – it’s a joke. Linehan is riffing on the farce that these fellas pose as women despite having testicles one might possibly want to punch. It is a testament to the Soviet-like humourlessness of Britain’s creaking, censorious bureaucracy that this shit needs to be explained.

The Linehan outrage shatters the snivelling notion that there is nothing political about policing ‘incitement’; that it’s just the state keeping the peace. Get real. Linehan was subjected to an ideological interrogation. Like those writers in the GDR hauled in for a grilling by the Stasi, it was his beliefs that were on the table. He was asked about ‘trans people’. When he asked what they meant by that, an officer fired back: ‘People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.’ When Linehan said our sex isn’t ‘assigned’ – something all of humanity knew until about seven years ago – he was told that was ‘semantics’. It’s not semantics – it’s science; it’s truth.

The seriousness of this cannot be overstated. It feels like a moral waterboarding, the callous quizzing of a comic whose only offence is to know that people with cocks are men. If the arrest of a comedian for supposedly sinful speech doesn’t give this country pause for thought, nothing will. There is not a sliver of difference between these armed men at Heathrow holding forth on the trans ideology and the morality police of Iran’s Guidance Patrols instructing the Iranian masses on the right, godly way to think and dress. Both are species of religious tyranny, with mere mortals being menaced by the state for daring to dissent from its post-truth lunacies.

Few in modern Britain have suffered for their beliefs as much as Linehan. For the moral transgression of standing up for women and homosexuals against the untruths and misogyny and mutilations of the trans ideology, he lost everything. He was cold-shouldered by comedy colleagues. He was blacklisted by the media. Friends spurned him, like cowards, preferring their own social survival to that old thing called solidarity. Now armed men grill him and forbid him from speaking online. How could Britain do this? A supremely talented Irishman brings his gift for comedy to our shores and we destroy him. The elites brutishly cast him out the minute he deviates from their cultish ways. There’s a medieval feel to the barbarous cancellation of Graham Linehan.

He became unwell during his interrogation. His blood pressure rose to over 200. ‘Stroke territory’, he writes in his summary of his tyrannical experience, with characteristic sang-froid. So this is England, is it? A country where a man almost collapses under cruel, unjust interrogation, all because he thinks women deserve rights? Today we will hear meek cries of ‘too far!’ from leftists and liberals worried that this gross act of state oppression might cast their trans religion in a bad light. Don’t buy it. These people paved the way for the state persecution of Linehan. His arrest is the savage logical endpoint of cancel culture, of the ruthless policing of ‘transphobia’, of a climate in which the feelings of deluded men in dresses have come to count for more than the right of everyone else to speak the truth without impediment.

Anyone still denying that Britain has a serious free-speech crisis can now safely be ignored. They’re not serious people. They’re in denial as much as that person with a penis who says ‘I’m a woman’. The Linehan abomination is our John Wilkes moment. Wilkes was the rabble-rousing newspaperman of the 1700s frequently hauled off to the Tower for his ‘seditious libels’ and glorious pisstakes. The people rallied to his defence and demanded the liberty to utter for all. Will we do likewise? Will we take to the streets and cry ‘Linehan and Liberty!’, just as everyday Britons, and Americans too, cried ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’? We must. The future of our own freedom depends on our full-throated rejection of what the wicked state just did to Graham Linehan.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy