Free speech is a pretty fragile thing, it seems. In Britain, considered by some to be the original home of freedom of expression, it’s all but dead. You can be jailed for social media posts that fall into some nebulously-defined “hate speech” category, and to make things even more ridiculous, at least one British cop, this one being Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley, is arguably threatening to extradite people who make unacceptable social media posts — from Britain or even from “farther afield.”
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OK, now, the interviewer mentions Elon Musk. The Commissioner does not mention him. What he does have to say is bad enough. Rowley says:
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.
What does that mean? The interviewer asks him to expand, and he does.
Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law. You can be guilty of offenses of incitement, of stirring up racial hatred, there are numerous terrorist offenses regarding the, uh, publishing of material. All of those offenses are in play, if people are provoking hatred and violence on the street. And we will come after those individuals just as we will physically confront in the streets the people that, who are causing the problems for the communities.
That is, unless those people who are inciting hatred are in Iran, or Syrian, or Dearborn, Michigan, and belong to a certain religious orientation.
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Commissioner Rowley is, of course, speaking ex-cathedrafrom his fourth point of contact. He says that the Metropolitan police will come for people who are “farther afield,” although he does not specifically mention extradition from other countries. In that, we admit, the “End Wokeness” X post is a tad misleading. The interviewer handed him an opening to talk about extradition, but Rowley didn’t bite. That shows the only flash of sense that this top cop shows in the entire clip; any attempt to extradite, say, an American for making X or Facebook posts unacceptable by Britain would be met with a level of outrage from ordinary Americans that hasn’t been seen since a bunch of guys cosplaying as native Americans tossed a bunch of tea into a certain harbor.
But don’t think for a moment that this guy wouldn’t like to do just that. Free speech is a dead letter in the once-Great Britain, and even the Brits themselves are finding themselves out of place in their own homeland.
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But look carefully at this man’s face. This is the face of totalitarianism, people; a rather ordinary-looking guy, not some wild-eyed ideologue but a middle-level bureaucrat with the firm conviction of his own righteousness. This is how liberty dies; not necessarily with a bang or a whimper, but with pious pronouncements from apparatchiks on power trips.
Don’t think for a moment that Commissioner Mark Rowley doesn’t have his counterparts on our side of the Atlantic. He does, and if Kamala Harris is elected president in November, they will be encouraged to emulate Britain’s practices here in the United States.