There's an infamous scene in Hannah Arendt's work where she details the Nuremberg Trials, focusing on the Nazi atrocities. She noted, "The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal." This is the secret truth of those authoritarian moments - the people carrying them out are normal.

Arendt wrote this of the Germans who watched atrocities pile up. She could have just as well noted the same of the modern United Kingdom. The banality of a land that was once made of free people now arresting them for social media posts is insane to the American mind. However, the normality with which the British are doing this is what is most terrifying.

Comedian Graham Linehan began his travels in Arizona. He's a television writer who wrote the hit U.K. show Father Ted. He flew from Arizona to Heathrow Airport and was immediately met by five police officers.

In Linehan's own words, "They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets. In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer."

They were after him for three tweets in which he criticized trans ideology. Linehan says, "Later, during the interview itself, the tone shifted. The officer conducting it asked about each of the terrible tweets in turn, with the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like… oh, I dunno—crime?"

He's now banned from making posts on Elon Musk's X/Twitter platform.

He concludes by saying:

The civility of individual officers doesn't alter the fundamental reality of what happened. I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online—all because I made jokes that upset some psychotic crossdressers. To me, this proves one thing beyond doubt: the UK has become a country that is hostile to freedom of speech, hostile to women, and far too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled, abusive men who have turned the police into their personal goon squad.

He notes the friendliness of the officers involved and how they have to "do their jobs." And that's where we are now. Everyone is forced to go along with these unseen forces. That's the banal part of it. It's just the government "working."

But it no longer works for the people or to protect their rights. It works against them. It now protects those deemed more worthy than everyone else. No dissent of any kind is allowed.

What Linehan said on social media doesn't even merit a mention in the United States. It's not even a blip on our radar. In the United Kingdom, it's something that will land you a police investigation.

It has been clear for a while, but this is a pivotal moment in history where the United States and the United Kingdom diverge. I noted a few weeks ago, after U.K. police arrested a man for criticizing his employer, that the United States now stood alone in protecting the West. That point is clearer now than ever before.

A man talked and walked freely in America and was arrested immediately upon arriving on the shores of a nation that at one time boasted John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and David Hume.

The American Founders saw themselves as continuing the English civil rights tradition on American shores. We are no longer the same. Those great thinkers would be jailed in the U.K. - not even Orwell is welcome in his homeland. England has fallen, and the choice was self-inflicted. This new creation is something both immediately recognizable if you take Arendt's view, but still shocking for who it represents.

The United Kingdom once held evil at bay, entirely alone, to start the Second World War. Less than a century later, and they've given up every idea and concept that once made them great. They once ruled the seas, and now they rule against each other over speech.

It is one of the great travesties of our time. Canadians are killing themselves, and the British have forsaken their birthright. The United Kingdom is dead, and England has died with her. Nothing in the unwritten "English Constitution" is saving them, nor can their defanged royals, who serve as nothing more than an entertaining gossip distraction while the country is reduced to rubble.

The only path forward is one that English ancestors knew well, but that their modern children have forgotten. You can't sit idly by and become part of the banality of evil. Overthrowing that requires far more outrage, fury, and political upheaval.

Unless the people of the U.K. rise up and throw off these chains and declare a new freedom, they will be lost for good. But what is so depressing of all is that the march towards banality is continuing unhindered.

The people who need to be in jail are those who pass these laws and enforce them. That is the real issue.

Americans told the British one time, "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

We separated ourselves from these absurdities over far less. What will the downtrodden people of the British Isles do now?

My fear is they roll over, accept the banality of evil, and die with their once great country.