OPINION:
Freedom of speech is under attack as Britain’s newly elected Labor majority wages war against anyone daring to oppose its policies. It’s a preview of what’s to come should Democrats win another four years in the White House.
Across the Atlantic, Lee Joseph Dunn was sentenced on Monday to two months in prison for sharing three photos on Facebook last month. One of the images showed foreign-looking men with knives in front of Westminster Palace with the caption “Coming to a town near you.”
Ridiculing his country’s reckless immigration policy is one of the few crimes that British police are willing to investigate these days. London Metropolitan Police Chief Mark Rowley is so zealous about snuffing out dissent that he hinted he may even target speech originating abroad.
“We will throw the full force of law at people, whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the street or committing crimes from further afield online — we will come after you,” he said in a Sky News interview.
He was referring to Elon Musk, the billionaire who spent $44 billion to wrest Twitter from the grips of left-wing activists who had been actively censoring conservative thought online. Renamed X, the platform has become a refuge for open discussion of important issues.
Mr. Musk’s supposed crime was drawing attention to what, he said, “sure seems like unequal justice in the U.K.” Jordanian asylum-seeker Mustafa Al Mbaidib was let off with a $33 fine for assaulting a police officer last month. Mr. Musk compared that outcome to the two-year sentence imposed on Stephen Mailen, a British citizen with no criminal record, for “gesticulating towards” a police officer and “shouting abuse at him” outside an asylum center.
England has seen rioting in response to an attack on a dance class for children in the seaside town of Southport last month. According to police, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana killed three girls under the age of 9. Furious working-class residents lashed out, breaking windows and setting fire to a Holiday Inn Express where migrants are being housed.
In a recent Omnisis poll, one-third of respondents said, “Attacks against refugee homes are sometimes necessary to make it clear to politicians that we have a refugee problem.” Britain’s politicians have responded to this dark turn in public sentiment by cracking down with an iron fist on its citizens while looking away as the asylum-seekers rampage on their own.
This two-tiered justice is a sad departure from the principle laid out in the Magna Carta, “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.” In England, as here, those who commit violent crimes should be prosecuted without regard to religion, skin color or political belief. Wrongthink — saying something with which the government disagrees — must never be a crime.
While it may seem like events 3,500 miles away could never be replicated here, they already have. The Department of Justice secured a seven-month sentence and $15,000 fine against Douglass Mackey for posting an image on X mocking Hillary Clinton. Prosecuting him was a test run.
The FBI just restarted its COVID-era collusion with Big Tech monopolies to suppress “misinformation,” which is defined as anything that conflicts with the narrative established by Democratic Party elites. As in Britain, the suppression of speech will only worsen here should left-wing activists prevail in November.
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