British comedian Stewart Lee says he won’t book shows in the United States because he fears he’d be arrested for his jokes in Trump’s America.
Lee appeared on UK Channel 4’s Change the World and falsely claimed that authorities in the U.S. would “go through” his jokes and would be thrown in jail for them.
In his comments, Lee bloviated that he doesn’t “see a way out of where we’re going.” And by “we” he meant the “fascism” he sees in the United States.
“People are pussyfooting around this idea,” he said. “People are being deported wrongly from the States and sent to an El Salvador jail without due process,” he added parroting the extremist, left-wing attack on Trump’s immigration policies.
He went on to accuse Trump of “doing deals with dictators” and then urged people to take up arms against Trump by acting “more quickly” than should have been done “in the 30s” to oppose Hitler. He then insisted that he won’t do shows in the U.S.
“But I wouldn’t work in the states at the moment,” he explained. “I’d worry about them going through my jokes and ending up spending two days locked up without my heart medication. I just would worry about it.”
The comedian, who is practically unknown in the U.S., has been a sharp Trump critic in columns written for the left-wing U.K. paper, The Guardian. But he has seemingly not commented on the loss of freedom of speech in his own country.
Meanwhile, even as not a single comedian in the U.S. has faced any of the oppression Lee alleges, it is a fact that one wrong word uttered in public, in private, or on social media will get you arrested in Britain as the U.K.’s “hate crime” laws continue to be used to throw thousands of British citizens in jail.
Data from the U.K. reveals that through last year, officials prosecuted 140,561 “hate crime” cases. But the British government carefully avoids reporting how many people are convicted and jailed each year after arrests for these supposed hate crimes.
U.K. police have even threatened to arrest Americans for sharing things on social media that British officials claim are “dangerous.”
Further, a British Youtuber named March Meechan was fined £800 in 2018 for posting a humorous video of his dog, Buddha, seemingly giving a Nazi salute. There is no similar incident in the U.S. of such an arrest or fine for a comedic social media post that authorities branded as a “hate crime.”
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