The thought of being arrested for criticizing policies of a school at one time would have seemed Orwellian, but that’s exactly what’s happened in the UK.
Two parents with a special needs child took issue with the lack of a transparent hiring process for the school’s headmaster. What happened next was astounding.
The Sunday Times reported:
When Maxie Allen complained to his daughter’s primary school about the recruitment process for a new head teacher, he hoped it would result in more openness and transparency.
Instead six uniformed officers from Hertfordshire police were sent to arrest Allen and his partner after the school objected to them sending numerous emails and to their criticisms including “disparaging” comments on a parents’ WhatsApp group.
Allen and Rosalind Levine were detained in front of their young daughter before being fingerprinted, searched and left in a police cell for eight hours. They were questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property. After a five-week investigation, police concluded there should be no further action.
By now, most people have seen TikToks or Instagram reels of citizens in the UK being arrested for Facebook posts or for even just liking or reposting a social media post.
This latest incident with the Levines cements just how dead free speech and freedom of thought is in the UK.
This kind of police enforced censorship, coupled with the country’s increasingly two-tiered system of justice, is bound to lead to mass civil unrest. Yet British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is doubling down.
And this kind of extreme speech policing is not just going on in the UK. In Germany things are just as bad.
Every day it seems the UK is proving the premise of Vice President Vance’s Munich speech: Europe has a serious free speech problem.
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It should not be overlooked that a version of what happened to the Levines under Starmer happened here when Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland issued his memo instructing the FBI to investigate parents speaking out at school board meetings.
I’ve been privy to at least two instances in North Carolina where, under direction of Garland’s memo, FBI agents showed up on a parent’s doorstep. Neither parent would go on the record about the visits, but both characterized it as an attempt to intimidate them.
As it would turn out, Garland’s memo was prompted by a National School Boards Association (NSBA) letter sent to President Joe Biden in which the NSBA likened school protests to domestic terrorism.
Later on, during a Congressional hearing, it was revealed that the FBI was using its counterterrorism matrix to identify parents using a threat tag called “EDUOFFICIALS.”
Under the Trump administration, that memo is now history. On Feb. 4, the day after she was confirmed, Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded Garland’s memo as part of some of her first actions taken in that role.
Over at North State Journal, I extensively covered the Garland Parent Memo for those who wish to review what happened. In my latest update on Bondi rescinding Garland’s memo, I also included a handy timeline of events.