Is Britain Becoming North Korea? | The American Spectator

That’s the question Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s Reform UK Party, asked last week at a U.S. House hearing on the censorship of free speech in the UK. Mr. Farage, who is probably the most interesting person in English-speaking politics, asked, “At what point did we become North Korea?”
President Trump should immediately condemn the arrest of Mr. Linehan and the attempts by the UK and EU to censor what we say and write in the U.S.
Mr. Farage was speaking of the arrest at Heathrow airport of Graham Linehan, an Irish citizen, who was detained by five police officers for something he wrote and posted on the internet while he was outside the UK, probably in the U.S.
According to the Associated Press, “Linehan, who is well known for posts asserting that trans women are men, said in April that trans women were violent criminals if they used women-only facilities. He advocated hitting them if calling police and other measures failed to stop them from using such facilities.”
Which seems fairly reasonable considering that several U.S. fathers have taken such action in response to their daughters being subjected to men in women’s bathrooms or locker rooms.
What that means, of course, is that Americans can be arrested in the UK or the European Union for something they write anywhere, including inside the U.S.
This censorship is separate and apart from the EU’s war on U.S. tech companies, exemplified by the EU’s imposition of a fine of $3.5 billion on Google for the supposed antitrust violation of favoring its own advertising. President Trump had warned against targeting U.S. tech companies.
The UK’s Communications Act is the problem, and they are paralleled by EU statutes. The Communications Act of 2003 makes it an offense to send messages of a grossly offensive or indecent character, to send false messages to cause annoyance, or to use a public electronic communications network for those purposes.
The Linehan arrest is perhaps the first time that someone was arrested for s…