Dominic Green Asked

In his lede, Green asked

Which is worse, a young Englishman bleeding out in handcuffs while police ignore his cries for help, or the vice president of the United States expressing his opinion about it?

What JD Vance, the supposedly miscreant Vice President, said was this:

Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies, abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, through his spokesman (apparently because Starmer is too timid to speak for himself on this),:

accus[ed] unnamed foreigners of “trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division on our streets….”

How does Green’s question even exist? Given the naked bigotry demonstrated by the British police and by the government that created that police department, there can be no question of relative morality here. The one is an accurate commentary; the other is naked, state-sanctioned, and this time murderous, bigotry.

Nor was Vance’s statement in any way an interference in British democracy. There was no push for the British to do anything differently, only an objection to what that government has chosen to allow on its streets. If there was any pressure from Vance’s remarks, it was only because his words struck hard into what passes for a conscience in that government’s collective mind.

There’s a hint on the whole interfere in our democracy matter, though:

The administration-adjacent Elon Musk, whose X website outflanks Britain’s speech laws, told his 28.5 million followers to share the Nowak footage “to everyone you know,” so that all can see how the police “cravenly kowtowed to his murderer.”

Outflanks Britain’s speech laws. Maybe the nation that increasingly restricts what is permissible speech and that increasingly shrivels religious freedom is becoming less and less a democracy in the first place.

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