Graham Linehan—an unemployed former television writer and creator or co-creator of the great British sitcoms Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd—is back in the news again after being arrested for advocating violence against transgender people. We’ve talked about this vaguely sentient fungus named Graham Linehan before after he was facing charges of harassing a transgender teenager online. For those who don’t remember, Linehan has been so obsessed with dedicating his life to hating transgender people that, by his own admission, it has cost him his career and his marriage. May it continue to cost him more and more.
Deadline reports that Linehan was arrested at Heathrow airport yesterday over three tweets he made which called for violence against transgender women. One of the tweets read: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
Now, the U.S. and the U.K. both have different concepts of what they consider free speech, but even in the United States, I can’t, for example, tell you to twist Graham Linehan’s scrotum if you ever see him in person. That’s called incitement, and it’s not protected speech. So I’m specifically not telling you to do that. I’m putting the idea in your head, sure, but I’m definitely not telling you to do that.
“The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two—five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets,” says Linehan in his Substack article titled “I just got arrested—again.” Linehan then whined about how he supposedly fell ill and was taken to the hospital with blood pressure over 200. “The stress of being arrested for jokes was literally threatening my life,” says Linehan in one of the most overdramatic statements I’ve ever heard.
The Metropolitan Police stressed that Linehan was in “neither life-threatening nor life-changing” condition, according to Deadline.
Regardless of whether the stress of being arrested for his “jokes” was really affecting him as much as he claimed, there was good reason for him to be arrested. Considering the violence towards transgender people that already occurs on a regular basis, Linehan had good reason to believe that people would actually take his advice. So yes, his speech definitely qualifies as incitement and should get him arrested in pretty much any free country.
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