The Britain First leaders have been jailed

The leaders of the Britain First hate mob have been jailed for their lawless campaign of harassment against several innocent people.

The rest of the extreme-right are up in arms about this criminal case and have fallen back on their usual victim complex narratives about how the jailed pair are somehow the poor innocent victims of an attack on free speech.

This extreme-right victim complex narrative couldn't be further from the truth. The reality is that Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen were jailed for repeatedly targeting abuse at innocent people, including Fransen shouting abuse through the letterbox of a terrified pregnant woman who went on to have a miscarriage.

Both of the pair were also found guilty of falsely harassing and defaming innocent people of by yelling "terrorist" and "paedophile" at them in the street outside their shop.

Fransen was sentenced to 36 weeks, and Golding to 18 weeks.

Of course the extreme-right would love to live in a nation where "free speech" is interpreted in such a way that they can sling whatever abuse and lies they like at innocent people, but the rest of us realise that free speech has important limitations. 

In general we're free to express whatever opinions we like,, but free speech doesn't give anyone the right to say or write defamatory things, and it certainly doesn't give anyone the right to intimidate or harass other people based on their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or political stance.

The fact that these serial criminals from the Britain First hate mob have been found guilty again and jailed for their crimes raises an important question about the social media sites that have hosted this lawless extreme-right hate mob for so many years.

The Britain First online hate chamber is full of people who use hate speech, threaten violence, call for genocide and ethnic cleansing, celebrate acts of genocide, glorify acts of extreme-right terrorism, and even plot to raise funds to induce more acts of extreme-right terrorism. 

Followers of the Britain First hate mob have even carried out two deadly extreme-right terrorist attack (the murder of Jo Cox and the Finsbury Park attack).

The evidence is absolutely clear that Britain First are a lawless bunch of extreme-right hate preachers who have built up a vast following of people who consider it fine to spew hate, spread lies, glorify terrorism, and even carry out extreme-right terrorist attacks, yet Facebook and Twitter do nothing to clamp down on them.

Extreme-right fanatics are whinging away to misrepresent Golding and Fransen getting themselves locked up for their lawless behaviour as some kind of attack on "free speech", yet the real problem seems to be that the Britain First hate mob have been left free to spread hatred and lies, behave lawlessly, celebrate terrorism and genocide, radicalise vulnerable people into carrying out terrorist atrocities, and even host plots to raise slush funds to induce more people into carrying out acts of extreme-right terrorism.

All of this stuff is illegal, yet the Britain First hate mob and other extreme-right fanatics have been allowed to get away with it for years, which leaves us in no doubt as to how the extreme-right have ended up suffering the delusion that "free speech" supposedly gives them the right to sling discriminatory abuse, make defamatory allegations, and conduct terrifying campaigns of harassment against innocent people.

Either some real effort is made to clamp down on this kind of extreme-right hate-mongering, or others will surely suffer their harassment, or die in terrorist atrocities carried out by people who have been radicalised in their vast online hate chamber.

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