The Facebook police come calling

In the United States, despite an attorney general who appears unclear on the concept, we enjoy the freest speech laws of anywhere in the world. Not so in the UK, where police casually drop by to harass citizens about their Internet activity. They visited the wrong cottage this summer, as we see in a video released this week by the UK’s “Free Speech Union”. The Thames Valley Police paid a visit to the home of “an American cancer patient and Trump supporter,” who wasn’t having it.

“You can come in,” she said, “but you’d better have a damn good reason for being here.”

They did not.

“I’ll have Elon Musk on you so quick your feet won’t touch,” she said, in a statement that may have carried more weight in June than it does today.

The officer, who seemed to have no idea he’d bumbled into a Key and Peele sketch, sat on an orange blanket and said, “Something that we believe you’ve written on Facebook has upset someone.”

“You’re here because somebody got upset?” she said. “Is it against the law? Am I being arrested?”

“You’re not being arrested.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

The officer said he wanted her to make an apology to the person she’d offended.

“I’m not apologizing to anybody,” she said. “I can tell you that.”

Well then, said Officer Friendly, perhaps you can come in for an interview. This “allegation,” he said, has been reported to the police.

“So what?” the woman said. “Are there no houses that have been burgled lately? No rapes? No murders?”

“Yeah, that’s all going on as well.”

“Well then why aren’t you out there investigating those?”

“Because I’ve got to investigate everything that’s reported.”

“You’re not investigating houses being burgled?”

“No,” the officer said. “That’s not my job today.”

His job was to be the thought police. That didn’t make our heroine very happy.

“Do you know how many houses in this neighborhood have been broken into?” she said.

“I don’t look after this neighborhood,” he said.

“No, of course you don’t. Unless there’s a tweet. Then you do… you should not be doing this. I’m a cancer patient. You can see that because I’m bald.”

We should point out that the video is from the woman’s point of view, so we don’t see that she’s bald.

“Well, I didn’t know that before I came,” the officer said. “But it still doesn’t say anything. You still can’t break the law. If you don’t break the law, nothing happens.”

Some laws are meant to be broken, she implied, and we agree. In fact, some laws shouldn’t be laws at all.

“The public knows what you guys are doing,” she said. “We know what’s going on in this country.”

Thank you, random Internet lady with cancer. All the people in my feed today – and there are hundreds of them – fulminating about the free-speech violation of Jimmy Kimmel, one of the wealthiest and most prominent voices on the American stage, should take a peek at this case, and hundreds like them, taking place in a country that truly doesn’t support free speech.

As the Free Speech Union points out, the Thames Valley Police is guarding President Trump as he makes his UK rounds this week. Wouldn’t Trump like to know what the cops are up to on their regular rounds? As long as Donald Trump is visiting the British Isles, he should consider staging a bloodless coup to free UK citizens from the busybody free-speech police, who literally knock on doors and tell sick ladies to stop making mean tweets.