England goes totalitarian on Tommy Robinson #TommyRobinson #FreeTommy

England, once the cradle of liberty, summarily imprisoned Tommy Robinson for his daring to report on the trial of accused Muslim sex groomers.

Tommy RobinsonI have an unhealthy weakness for Britain’s Daily Mail, a crazy amalgam of news, gossip, and human interest. Right now, there’s a story playing out in England that ought to be on the Daily Mail’s front page, with the 26 point headline . . . but it’s not, and the Daily Mail’s silence is part of the story. Its silence perfectly symbolizes that liberty is an endangered species in the West. To understand quite how bad things are, though, I need to take you through two preliminary discussions, one talking about England as the cradle of American liberties and the other talking about Tommy Robinson, a familiar name in England if not in America.

We Americans like to think that we originated the liberties embodied in our Bill of Rights. You know the ones I mean: No state religion nor any prohibitions against practicing our chosen faiths, speech free from government constraints, a free press, the right to peaceable assembly, the right to petition government, the right to bear arms, the right to due process of law, and so many more rights.

The truth, though, is that these core rights of individual liberty originated in Britain. They were part of a long process beginning with the Magna Carta and culminating with the English Bill of Rights of 1689. That document was limited to Protestants and had other constraints our Founders jettisoned, but it was the Founders’ inspiration inspiration. Other inspirations came from British writers and thinkers such as John Locke and Adam Smith. Indeed, up until the Revolution itself, all of the Founders would have called themselves Englishmen, both free and proud.

So it was that our Revolutionary War came about, not because Americans had discovered new rights, but because they were protesting the British government’s policies denying them their old rights. It is no exaggeration to say that England is the cradle of American liberty — although I would argue that the infant liberties nurtured in that British cradle came to glorious maturity in America.

Meanwhile, back in England, those liberties have slowly been stifled in the cradle and have now begun to rot. The stifling began back in the 18th century. It was then that, to strike back against the nascent America rebellion, the British announced that any limitations on government power set out in the 1689 Bill of Rights applied only to the crown (which has steadily decreased in power and authority until now it’s nothing more than a glorified wedding theme park), and placed no limitations at all on Parliament, the fount of all English law.

Despite Parliament’s position, for almost two centuries the British still believed in those rights. That’s why both Parliament and the Courts kind of, mostly acted as if the English people had inherent rights to freedom of worship, speech, press, assembly, arms, etc.

Beginning with the socialist takeover after WWII, and continuing with accelerating, exponential fury since then, those rights have vanished from England. The same identity politics that American Progressives started with Obama and hoped to finish with Hillary (hence their rage at Trump’s victory), are ascendant in Britain. Any speech that is not pro-Islam, pro-LGBTQWRSTUV, pro-third wave feminism, or pro any of the other shibboleths of the ascendant Left is considered hate speech and criminalized. All of England is like some giant Ivy League campus, except for the addition of the power to arrest and imprison anyone who violates those totalitarian norms.

One need only look to recent stories out of England to understand how far gone that country is. The government imprisoned a man for the stupid prank of teaching a dog to do a Nazi salute on command, convicted a man for giving the finger to a traffic camera, and arrested a woman for saying “Have a gay day.” While the British are busy policing any thought deviations, the flip side is that their police did nothing for decades as Muslim gangs all over Great Britain groomed and pimped thousands of non-Muslim children (see, e.g., Rotherham, the most famous, but not the only example). The police also sat on their hands despite knowing that thousands of highly placed British officials and entertainers had been engaged in vile, widespread acts of pedophilia for decades.

In a nation in which only the government carries guns, acid attacks and knife attacks have spiked so much . . . that the government responded by banning sharp objects in London. Meanwhile, an elderly man who wrested a screwdriver from a robber threatening him in his own home, and who killed the robber in the ensuing struggle, was arrested for murder. An Englishman’s home is no longer his castle; it’s the antechamber to a government prison. The streets are prisons too, for Britain is watching its citizens’ every move with millions of close-circuit cameras.

Of special concern for many British people with deep roots in the country, or simply with a love for liberty no matter their place of origin, is the influx of Muslims into England. After WWII, England began to mass import Muslims, initially to meet post-war labor shortages and eventually to punish itself for the sin of having once colonized Muslim states. Islam is now the second largest religion in England, and almost 5% of the British population is Muslim. As Edward Cline said about that 5% number,

From 5% on they [Muslims] exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. They will push for the introduction of halal (“clean” by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature it on their shelves – along with threats for failure to comply (United States).”

[skip]

At this point, they [Muslims] will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves under Sharia, or Islamic law. The ultimate goal of Islam is not to convert the world but to establish Sharia law over the entire world.

Although most of England’s Muslims are concentrated in London, they’ve also made their presence known in Northern England. When I lived in Leeds, it was a very British city. It’s now almost 8% Muslim. Nearby Bradford, an old English mill town when I knew it, has become a Muslim town.

The demographic change in Bradford, incidentally, was deliberate. Bradford used to have a significant Jewish population (significant, that is, by British standards). The Muslims made a point of moving into Jewish neighborhoods and making them untenable for the Jews. Do that often enough, neighborhood by neighborhood, and you have Bradford, an “olde English town” no more:

So that’s England. Now let’s look at a single Englishman — Tommy Robinson. Tommy Robinson, born Stephen Christopher Lennon, a married man with three children, has been concerned about the Muslim takeover of England. He became concerned when local Muslims in his town of Luton were recruiting people to fight with the Taliban against British troops. He may well be a despicable racist. Certainly, to the Leftists, he is a “far-right racist.” To people concerned about a sharia takeover in England, he is a visionary patriot.

For purposes of the matters described in this post, I don’t actually care whether Robinson is a patriot or a racist. What I do care about is that the English establishment has abandoned all pretense of British rights and liberties when it comes to silencing Robinson and others who are concerned about profound government backed changes in England.

You can see the British ruling class’s disregard for ordinary Brits (indeed, its enmity to ordinary Brits) most obviously in the government’s refusal to act on the Brexit referendum. England is being governed entirely by those whom Peggy Noonan called “The Protected” and they are doing it without regard for the majority of English people. Here’s Noonan’s riff on the West’s elitist leaders, both in America and in Europe:

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and Western Europe is immigration. It is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.

I’m not a Noonan fan, but what she wrote is very important and I recommend that you read her entire article. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)

All of the above brings me to the point of this post. I’m sorry I went on for so long, but without it you simply cannot understand how bad what just happened in England yesterday to Tommy Robinson is without first understanding England’s one proud history of liberty or its current drift into being a totalitarian police state.

In my old stomping grounds of Leeds, a criminal trial is underway against a group of Muslim men accused of sexual trafficking non-Muslim children. Tommy Robinson stood outside the courthouse and live-streamed what he saw going on outside of that courthouse. The police arrested him for “interfering with justice” and, in ways that are still unclear, he was summarily sentenced to 13 months in jail for interfering with justice. That 13 months is tantamount to a death sentence because British prisons are Muslim enclaves, and the Muslims don’t like Tommy Robinson.

Because the British media is prevented from reporting on what happened, posts on the subject are being deleted at warp speed. As just one example, Russia Today posted a story with this URL: https://www.rt.com/uk/427750-tommy-robinson-arrest-court-sex/ Follow the link, however, and all you’ll find is this message:

Error 404
Page not found
This might be because:
— You have typed the web address incorrectly, or
— the page you were looking for may have been moved, updated or deleted.

Fortunately, the internet means that the story still gets out. Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch has a good summary:

Arrested, tried, and sentenced within an hour: Tommy Robinson gets 13 months for livestreaming outside courthouse.

Not only that, but it is very hard to get any information at all, as the police have imposed a gag order regarding this case — obviously they know how bad it makes them look, as the darkness of Sharia-compliant totalitarianism descends upon the UK. Future generations of free Britons, if there are any, will curse the name of Theresa May as the destroyer of free Britain.

Caolan Robertson is saying that this is a death sentence for Tommy because, like Britain First leader Paul Golding, he will likely be placed in the general prison population, which is dominated by violent Muslims who will be quite happy to dispatch Tommy to jahannam.

Britain is finished, and its death as a free society is by its own hand.

I learned about this story because, having abandoned Facebook, I got to jonesing for streaming news and switched my attention to Twitter. (You can follow me there.) Twitter is also obscenely anti-conservative but (a) it still doesn’t have a single individual quite as powerful as Mark Zuckerberg and (b) despite its conservative censorship, the speed with which posts accrue means that it can’t censor everything in real time, so one can still get instantaneous information on news stories around the world.

I give this short Twitter talk because, while England is muzzled, Twitter still tells the story. I’ll therefore wrap this post up with some of the most recent or comprehensive tweets about Tommy Robinson, which are coming in from all over the free world. The tweets aren’t in any particular order. I just picked them off the feed almost randomly. My agreeing with or promoting a specific tweet’s contents should not be construed to mean that I support or agree with the person who wrote the tweet:

If you are interested, there is a petition up demanding that the government release Robinson.

England has turned into the country Orwell prophesied. In America, I do believe that Donald Trump is our one chance to stop that from happening here. Trump is our moment to push back and preserve Constitutional government and, with it, individual liberties.

As November nears, please remember that Trump can only put the brakes on our slide into the Leftist pit if Congress is on his side (or at least not completely opposed to him). Do not get complacent about polls showing that the Blue Wave is stalled. The Progressive base is agitated and they have proven in almost all elections since 2016 that an agitated Leftist base can determine election outcomes. We need to be agitated too, or else, in a few short years, we’ll all be Tommy Robinson. This fall, hold your nose when you see unappealing people on the ballot and vote Republican.