When the Irish comedian Graham Linehan arrived at London Heathrow Airport this past weekend, he was greeted by five armed British police officers who arrested him for — get this — three rude tweets.

Or, as Linehan wrote on his Substack, “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.”

Whether or not you find his words offensive, it’s hard to disagree with Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling, who tweeted, “This is totalitarianism. Utterly deplorable.”

Surely, many Americans reading this must be thinking this was some terrible mistake. A one-off, as the British might say.

Actually not. It’s more like standard operating procedure. The British writer Ed West has compiled an illuminating list of Britons prosecuted for tweets deemed offensive, noting that “the vast majority of these cases seem to involve people who have offended progressive norms, or who are seen as being enemies of the progressive alliance.”

American commentator Mike Benz, citing The Times of London, claims that there are more than 30 arrests per day, 12,000 over the course of a year, typically on vague charges of inciting violence, for offensive messages and jokes in tweets or WhatsApp chats.

Unsurprisingly, some tweets are deemed more offensive than others. The same judge who threw the book at former cops’ WhatsApp messages found a paroled transgender woman (born a man) not guilty for a tweet calling for punching women in the face, West points out. It helps explain how British justice can give a Muslim defendant 180 days for raping two 9-year-old girls while giving a white English woman 270 days for uttering the N-word on a playground.

What is the common principle behind this disparate treatment? The idea that government and law enforcement should bend over backward to protect the feelings and reputations of supposedly oppressed groups — transgender persons, Muslim immigrants — while responding with self-righteous vigor against any speck of rudeness by the oppressive native population.

This seems to be the animating purpose of what The New York Times’ Ross Douthat calls the “managerial multiculturalism” of law enforcement and civil service, especially in Britain, but also in much of Europe as well.

Case in point: the official response to displays all over England of the red-on-white perpendicular St. George’s Cross flag — one of the three crosses that joined together form the United Kingdom’s familiar Union Jack. People have also been painting the St. George’s Cross on roundabouts and sewer covers — and local officials have been painting them over and removing flags from lamp posts.