A couple of days ago, Graham Linehan, the brilliant Irish comedy writer behind smash hits like Father Ted, was arrested at Heathrow Airport upon disembarking his flight from Arizona. Five armed officers detained him and informed him that they were taking him into custody under suspicion of “inciting violence,” citing three tweets he posted in April of 2025.
I’m going to let you read the tweets for yourself. They read as follows:
“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.”
A photo of a trans rally captioned: “A photo you can smell.”
“I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F*** em.”
Linehan was ultimately released from custody upon one condition: no posting on X pending the conclusion of the investigation.
You guys, this is wild. In the past decade, Hollywood has poured billions into dystopian blockbusters, flashing neon warnings of totalitarian nightmares, yet we’re too busy sleepwalking into one to care. The UK’s Big Brother–style policing of tweets isn’t new; just look at Kellie-Jay Keen, hauled in by West Yorkshire Police in 2018 over posts about a transgender activist’s son. Though the charges were dropped, the ordeal laid bare a grim reality: speaking out can cost you your peace, your privacy, and your voice, as the state flexes its muscle to crush dissent under the pretense of shielding feelings.
This isn’t about whether you like Linehan or Keen personally. It’s about precedent. Once the state starts punishing ordinary people for words — especially words that reflect widely held beliefs about biology and boundaries—the dam has already broken. The political right has long sounded the alarm on equating words with literal violence, and now we’re living their prophecy: a world where a tweet can land you in cuffs.
And here’s the kicker: women online face far worse every single day. The abusive, porn-soaked, violent tirades hurled at us by men rarely trigger a police investigation. Surely if Linehan can be arrested for suggesting trans activists smell bad, then thousands upon thousands of trans activists and garden-variety incels should likewise be arrested for calling women c*nts, or telling us to be raped, or to die in a fire. If calling a man a man makes that man feel unsafe, how in God’s green earth do they think little girls feel when naked men swing their penises around in the gym locker room? Why don’t their feelings matter? Selective enforcement isn’t about justice — it’s about power.
As a writer, I know words wield power. They shape minds, spark revolutions, and yes, can wound deeply. I’m no fan of reckless speech that injures, maligns, or destroys. But for the most part, that’s an individual person’s territory to police, not the state’s. Once we give the government that kind of power, we’re in trouble.
To be clear, even as a free speech absolutist, I see obvious lines where words cross into actionable harm and should no longer be categorized as “free speech” but as actual crimes. Defamation and slander, for instance, should stay prosecutable — malicious lies can torch someone’s reputation, career, and livelihood. Likewise, harassment, like relentless, targeted campaigns to intimidate or degrade, isn’t just “speech”; it’s a calculated assault on a person’s ability to exist in public or private spaces. Credible threats of violence — say, specific, targeted calls to harm someone with clear intent — cross another line, morphing from expression into imminent danger. These aren’t hypotheticals; they’re real-world promises to try to ruin lives.
But let’s not kid ourselves: the state’s not swooping in to protect us from slander or threats alone. It’s increasingly about control, about policing thoughts that don’t toe the line. Keen’s 2018 tweets, which used accurate pronouns to denote corresponding biological sex, didn’t threaten violence but still triggered a police probe. Linehan’s arrest yesterday stemmed from a tweet suggesting women “make a scene” or “punch” a man in a female-only space — action that would have been considered basic self-defense until about two minutes ago, when the world lost its ever-loving mind. This is the dystopian script Hollywood’s been selling: a world where words are weaponized, not just by individuals, but by governments eager to silence dissent. The right warned us about slippery slopes; now we’re sliding, and the state’s all too happy to decide which words are too dangerous to utter. Meanwhile, actual harassment and credible threats often skate by if they align with the “correct” politics, exposing the hypocrisy of selective enforcement.
Hate speech is currently being defined by the same people who insist women can have penises. All it really means anymore is “opinions I don’t want to hear.” Your feelings are not deserving of legal protection. Banning speech, however unpleasant, does nothing to solve the problem. It just prevents you from having to look at it and allows you to live in denial of the reality that these other opinions exist in the same world as you. Penalize credible threats of violence, sure — but policing hurt feelings is a one-way ticket to tyranny.
Free speech doesn’t mean you have to be a doormat for people’s abuse. There’s a difference between personal boundaries and censorship. For example, if a trans activist wants to tell me how ugly I am and how much more beautiful he is than me, boundaries look like me hitting the block button and choosing not to engage him further. He’s still free to say whatever he wants. I’m just choosing not to participate. Censorship looks like me reporting the post, trying to get him kicked off social media, and potentially contacting his employer to restrict his ability to say anything anywhere. There’s a marked difference between the two.
Because once censorship masquerades as “safety,” the line between protecting people and controlling them dissolves. Boundaries empower the individual; censorship empowers the state. One is voluntary and preserves freedom; the other is coercive and erodes it. The test of a free society isn’t how well it protects popular opinions, but whether it allows the unpopular ones to survive. And if we don’t defend that principle now, we’ll wake up in a world where the only speech left is state-approved propaganda.
And here’s the bottom line: free societies don’t survive by silencing uncomfortable truths. They survive by protecting the speech we hate just as much as the speech we love. If the government can handcuff a comedian for a tweet, then none of us are safe. Today it’s Linehan. Tomorrow it could be you.
Kaeley Harms, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women’s Coalition, is a Christian feminist who rarely fits into boxes. She is a truth teller, envelope pusher, Jesus follower, abuse survivor, writer, wife, mom, and lover of words aptly spoken.
