A New Twist On 'I'm Leaving The Country': Irish-Born Brit Leaving The UK And Moving To America

Posted • December 13, 2024: Anytime a Republican wins a presidential election, we hear about celebrities who threaten to leave the country. Few of them ever follow through, and we’ve learned that the most recent examples moved before the election and are using Donald Trump’s victory as an excuse to virtue signal. We rarely hear about someone in the entertainment industry moving out of a left-wing country and seeking somewhere more conservative, but Irish-born British comedy writer Graham Linehan announced that he is moving to the U.S. because the UK is too restrictive on free speech. Linehan told his followers that he is moving to Arizona to form a production company with Rob Schneider, Andrew Doyle (the genius behind Titania McGrath), and Martin Gourlay of GB News. He announced: “I am happy to announce that I've written three episodes of a new sitcom which we'll be hoping to shoot in the next year.”

“And to that end, I'm going to be leaving the UK and we'll be moving to Arizona where I will be setting up a production company with Andrew Doyle and Martin Gourlay and Rob Schneider. We have an idea for a sitcom that I think is pretty damn good. The premise is strong. It's not anti-woke comedy, which I think many people would be expecting, because I think that's going to be as dead an end as the woke movement itself is because all of this nonsense is going to seem out of date in a couple of years.” -- I don’t know Linehan’s politics, although I imagine he’s still a man of the center-left. However, he’s a realist when it comes to gender policy, and that has cost him work as well as his marriage. He told his audience that because he has spoken out about gender madness, “I haven't worked in five years in the field that I love, which is comedy.”

“Linehan has previously discussed how dramatically his life changed when he began speaking out about his views on the trans issue, with Debbie Hayton writing last year for The Spectator that ‘jobs began falling away’ for the comedy writer. ‘Accused by his opponents of transphobia, he has found himself out of work and out of his marriage,’ she noted,” writes Steerpike at The Spectator. Linehan said that part of the reason for his move Stateside is that the UK has given up on freedom of speech: “I guess the only thing to add to that is one of the reasons I'm leaving is because freedom of speech in the UK is really in bad shape at the moment and I certainly know I would not be able to get anything on television in the UK. Not only that, but, you know, with police coming to people's houses for tweets and so on. I think that the U.S. is a good place for me at the moment. It seems to be somewhere that values freedom of speech. Whereas the UK gave up on that a few years ago very sadly and the results are unafraid around for us all to see.”

Linehan admitted that he was pleased that the UK banned puberty blockers for kids, as my friend and colleague Sarah Anderson reported earlier this week, but he said that he’s also disgusted with the British entertainment industry for not standing up for children. He also marked his announcement as the end of a chapter of his life. (…)

• More at: PJ Media - A New Twist on 'I'm Leaving the Country'
https://pjmedia.com/chris-queen/2024/12/13/a-new-twist-on-im-leaving-the-country-n4935101