« Catch-and-release for all: Biden now seeks to allow online asylum applications from anywhere in the world | Ten minutes to brighten up your Monday »
August 1, 2022

A veteran in England is taken away in handcuffs for 'causing anxiety'

By Andrea Widburg

To the extent the Founders believed free speech to be a necessity — so much so that it got first place in the Bill of Rights — it was because they claimed that right as Englishmen.  Because the Bill of Rights of 1689 enshrined freedom of speech and debate in Parliament as well as the right to petition the king, 90 years later, America-based Englishmen considered that speech to be their birthright.  That makes it unutterably tragic that, on Friday in England, Darren Brady, an army veteran, was arrested and cuffed for "causing anxiety" to an anonymous complainant because he retweeted a Pride flag shaped into a swastika.

You've probably seen this Pride flag swastika, which actor turned activist Laurence Fox tweeted out during "Pride" month:

This reworking of the now omnipresent Pride flag is not a threat that Nazis will round up the LGBTQ++ crowd and stick them into concentration camps.  Instead, the point of the reworked flag is to show that the LGBTQ++ crowd has become so ascendent and powerful in Western society that it has Nazi-like control over others in society.  As all who live in totalitarian societies know, criticizing those in power is dangerous.

As if to prove precisely that point, on Friday, in England's Hampshire, police arrested Darren Brady, 51, because "someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post.  That is why you have been arrested."

The larger history was that the police had been trying to force Brady to pay to attend a class that would train him to feel the love for the LGBTQ++ crowd.  In exchange, he would not be in trouble for daring to cause anxiety to unnamed LGBTQ++ snowflakes through his tweets.

The matter caused enough of a fuss, in part thanks to Laurence Fox, that the Hampshire Police chief, a woman named Donna Jones, issued a sort of apology.  There was no embarrassment on her part about the fact that free speech is dead in England, of course.  However, she did promise that she would school her force to be less aggressive about such public interactions.  Britain's conservatives are so beaten down, and so lost to the concept of true free speech, that they think that's a win:

In the second half of the 18th century, the British lost all of their ancient rights because England was anxious to trample the colonists' efforts to assert those same liberties.  Thus, when the colonists demanded their rights as Englishmen, Parliament announced that all of England's ancient rights — some going back to the Angles and Saxons, some to the Magna Carta, some to the English Bill of Rights, and some to other longstanding traditions — applied only as between citizens and the king.

With this, Parliament declared itself unconstrained by any rights inherent in British citizens.  For about 240 years after the fact, England chugged along, pretending those rights still existed, but they're gone now, seemingly for good.

Here in America, our Founders had the wit to set out our rights explicitly in the Bill of Rights.  However, as the past 20-odd years have shown us, even rights put down on paper matter only if we defend them in the flesh.  Otherwise, we will find ourselves under arrest for hurting someone's feelings...kind of like the January 6 prisoners, who languish in cells without bail and without trials for having "paraded" and "protested," all because it's convenient to the Democrats to keep them that way.

Image: Twitter screen grab.

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com