[In Salem their] next choice was very shrewd. The fourth person the “afflicted girls” accused was a highly religious and respectable woman who had publicly expressed skepticism of their ridiculous bullshit. She was immediately arrested and imprisoned.
Genuine belief would do for most; preference falsification would keep the rest quiet.
After the skeptic, the next “witch” accused and imprisoned was an elderly church lady of spotless reputation. And the same day, a four-year-old girl. She went to prison too. At that point, the accusers knew they could get away with anything.
That quote is from the wonderful Samizdata blogsite where they write of Boiling frogs in Salem and Hertfordshire and although their focus on recent outrages by the British Police is on speech, the above video still from 2020 shows how all this really exploded with the concept of Lockdowns.
I’ve written a number of posts now about the outrages of the British Police (a small sample is listed below the fold), but they’re actually getting much worse:
On Saturday, the Times reported that in late January six uniformed officers in three marked cars and a van had been sent to arrest Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine after their child’s school, Cowley Hill Primary, objected to a series of emails and “disparaging” comments in a parents’ WhatsApp group. As the police carried out a search of the house, the couple were detained in front of their three year-old daughter, before being held in cells for eight hours. And all this for querying the recruitment process for a new headteacher.
Accused of “casting aspersions” on the chair of governors in an “upsetting” way, they were then questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property.
After five weeks of investigation no charges were laid, but of course the message the authorities of school and cop had already been sent via the knock at the door with the cop cars outside and a highly public arrest by half a dozen cops.
Unfortunately for the Establishment one of the arrestees was a producer at Times Radio and was instantly in the MSM news:
It was absolutely nightmarish. I couldn’t believe this was happening, that a public authority could use the police to close down a legitimate inquiry. Yet we have never even been told what these communications were that were supposedly criminal, which is completely Kafkaesque.
References to Kafka are becoming increasingly common in the West, which is a sign of the times in itself – and what of people without such access to the MSM? Samizdata raises the obvious point:
The fact that the police felt confident to proceed as they did strongly suggests that they have done this before to less well-connected people and it worked.
Confident doesn’t even begin to describe the bastards, although you could admire them perhaps for “Speaking Truth To Power” in one sense:
Hertfordshire Police also warned Michelle Vince, a local county councillor, to stop helping the family by sending emails to the school on their behalf – or risk being investigated herself.
And still there’s more. The email to Ms Vince asked her to forward the warning to anyone she’d cc’ed when contacting the school. This included the local Conservative MP, and former Deputy Prime Minister, Sir Oliver Dowden. Ms Vince said she felt “uncomfortable” passing on the warning to Sir Oliver. For his part, he was “astonished that a situation could have arisen where any police officer could think it would be remotely acceptable to suggest that an MP should be curtailed in carrying out their democratic duties”.
From parents to a local councillor, then a Knighted MP. In the case of the last two the cops must have known who they were – but went ahead anyway because by then they thought they could get away with anything.
Including lying through their teeth, as described by writer Charlie Bentley-Astor about what happened to her in the wake of her coverage of the sentencing of the Southport Killer, Axel Rudakabana, live on Twitter/X as events unfolded in the courtroom on 23 January 2025:
This was followed by indirect criticism from Merseyside Police who claimed the families had asked for the details of the case not to be published.
As she points out anything said before a public gallery in a courtroom is considered to be ‘in the public domain’ unless the judge places specific reporting restrictions on it and aside from the children’s identity nothing else was:
This statement by Merseyside Police also contradicts the numerous discussions I had with families who had been affected by the attack. Whilst one family cannot speak for another, all the affect families to which I had spoken had, contrary to the Police memo, expressed a desire for every detail about the attack to be in the public domain. They want the nation to known what their children had to ensure at the hands of Axel Rudakubana, and government incompetence that had facilitated the attack.
Which is why the Police made that criticism, as her reporting quickly garnered 27 million views on the day and 50 million across the week.
That was when it went beyond criticism. Her X-account was hacked, with all the stuff specifically related to her trial reports rendered “unavailable“. The rest of her account was left alone. After weeks of back-and-forth with X, with even Musk getting involved, the whole thing was restored as if nothing had ever happened. But in the meantime the advice from X to simply start a new account also failed when it was suspended after 48 hours, almost as if they weren’t entirely in control themselves:
The restoration of my X account feels (almost) more strange than its disappearance: the hack came out of nowhere with explanation whilst the restoration came out of nowhere but after having been told “No” over and over again.
My colleagues, with some trepidation, have observed, “If this can happen to her, it can happen to anyone, professional researcher or humble citizen. Whilst the UK has routinely struggled to call itself a nation of “free speech” — concerned as we are with politeness and decorum — it has certainly been freer than this. The slow creep is speeding up into a gentle jog, and I shall be making some rather pertinent inquiries, both to X and the UK Home Office in the near future.
Good luck with that, because this seems to have involved more than the Police. As Bentley-Astor writes of the strangeness of the hack she points out that she had two-factor authentication switched on, plus sticking only to her private WiFi networks, being a typically savvy young user of social media:
I received the customary text to my phone with a code to input to authenticate my X login. Only…I hadn’t logged in. When I viewed the text, I was thrown out of my account, and my password was changed preventing my reentry.
This meaning that whoever hacked my account not only had my credentials, but had been able to view my phone screen remotely to obtain the authentication code.
There’s really only one group in Britain that can do such things and if you think that’s OTT, understand that the British government had demanded that X hand over access to 806 accounts that had posted about Axel Rudakubana and the events in Southport, requesting people’s email addresses, internet addresses and private messages. X handed over that detail for 379 accounts.
As with that still at the top of the post, Bentley-Astor links this back to the days of the Chinese Lung Rot Pandemic:
The Ministry of Defence’s 77th Brigade — the ‘information warfare’ brigade — was a scheme established to keep a close eye on politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the pandemic response. There ambition? They claim the exist only to monitor ‘overseas threats’ of disinformation.
British police authorities are now, shockingly, making around 12,000 (!) arrests every year in this country because of what people wrote online, on mail, or said on the telephone —much of which, we are told, made others feel “anxious”, “uncomfortable” or “emotionally harmed”.
When I first started writing such posts here a few years ago a couple of commentators were offended (on behalf of the British Establishment) at my comparison to the infamous East German secret police, the Stasi, including my creating such a tag for these stories.
I didn’t think it was hyperbolic then – even less so now. Britain is in a very dangerous place.
===============
Who’s More Stasi: Britain or Germany?
The Sound Of Silence
Should The Government Issue a Travel Advisory for New Zealanders Travelling to Britain?
America and Britain Joined by a Common Word: Stasi
Airstrip One strikes again.
Crime and Punishment in Airstrip One
Will I be Arrested Now Or Later?
No Minister 