Man Charged for Racial Muttering in Own Car; WWII Vet Says His Sacrifice “Wasn’t Worth It”

My father, a World War II vet, had been a prisoner of war in Germany after being captured in battle. So he’d certainly “paid his dues.” I occasionally wonder, though: Were he around today — he’d be 102 — would he consider his sacrifice worth it? The question comes to mind with two stories currently in the news.

One involves Briton Don Poole, a WWII veteran who is 102 and doesn’t now consider his sacrifice as worth it. He has said, in fact, “If war was to break out tomorrow, it wouldn’t be worth fighting for this country.”

The second story, which is absolutely shocking, perhaps reflects why. It involves a man in Britain who reportedly was arrested for muttering something “racist” in his own car — something no one outside the vehicle could hear.

Oh, the fellow was reacting instinctively to having almost been run off the road by a reckless driver.

Of course, this isn’t surprising in today’s United Kingdom. It’s a land, after all, where approximately 12,000 people are arrested yearly for “offensive” or malicious messages, often posted online.

Maybe He Shouldn’t Have Called Him “Smelly”

The man in the second story, referred to as Craig, learned the hard way about leftist moral inversion. According to Modernity’s Steve Watson on Friday, covering a case detailed by Free Speech Union (FSU) general secretary Toby Young:

A Glasgow father handed over dashcam footage after nearly being forced off the road, only for Police Scotland to charge him instead.

… [Craig] was driving his four-year-old son home to Glasgow after a day at an amusement park in Falkirk. Exiting the motorway, another vehicle cut him up, forcing him to swerve to avoid a collision. Suspecting the other driver was drunk, Craig called the police from his car. Both vehicles stopped; officers arrived, declined to breathalyse anyone, and took Craig’s dashcam footage to check for offences.

A week later the officers returned the footage and informed him an offence had been committed — by him, not the other driver.

His “crime” was muttering the words “smelly black bast[***]” under his breath seconds after the near-miss.

… [T]he windows were closed, so no one outside the vehicle could have heard him. The other driver was not looking in his direction and could not have seen the words. The only person who might have heard was the four-year-old in the back.

The sole evidence was the dashcam Craig had voluntarily supplied in the hope of seeing the dangerous driver brought to justice.

As for the rest of the story, according to the aforementioned Young writing Thursday at The Spectator:

This is a near-perfect illustration of ‘anarcho-tyranny’, a phrase often used to describe contemporary Britain in which law-abiding responsible citizens are persecuted and criminals go unpunished. “How could you charge me for saying it in my car?” Craig asked the officer reading him his rights: “I was saying it to myself.” “The language was still racist,” she said.

He contacted the FSU, telling us he was being prosecuted for a thought crime, and it’s hard to disagree.

The FSU defended the father, and, ultimately, he was found not guilty (tweet below).

As mentioned, however, two-tiered “justice” is becoming increasingly common in the West, especially in Britain.

Just consider comedy writer Graham Linehan. He was arrested upon returning to the UK in September 2025 over X messages he posted while in the U.S. Police were waiting for him at the airport. (The charges were dropped the following month.)

Then there’s the case of British comedian and actor Russell Brand. He was recently sentenced to 10.5 years in prison for rape and sexual assault, stemming from incidents allegedly occurring between 2004 and 2009. Now, I’m not going to re-litigate the Brand case here; I can’t say anything definitive about his culpability. What can be said, however, is that justice in Britain isn’t blind — but it is dumb.

Consider: In 2013, a judge reportedly refused to give a Muslim rapist any prison time at all. Why? Among other things, because the perp’s Islamic-school teaching influenced him to believe women are “worthless.”

So did Brand get put away because he’s the wrong brand — namely, white and on the right? (Critics note that no charges were brought back when Brand was identified as a liberal entertainer.) And that’s what is meant by “two-tiered justice.”

“There’s No England Anymore”?

This brings us back to veteran Don Poole. We could wonder if the U.K. government might want to arrest him for wrongthink. In a recently published interview, he said that fighting the WWII-era Nazis was worth it at the time. “But [with] … what was allowed to happen afterwards,” he plaintively added — “it wasn’t worth fighting for.”

“If war was to break out tomorrow,” he then continued, “it wouldn’t be worth fighting for this country.”

Poole elaborated, essentially complaining about Britain’s balkanization, about the importation of people averse to assimilation. He fought to protect and preserve his nation from invasion — only to see the U.K. later transformed via a different, self-orchestrated invasion.

Poole’s remarks can be heard below in a Thursday Modernity video. Also featured are other disillusioned veterans who, alluding to the West’s degeneration, echo Poole in questioning what they fought for.

The irony here is that the men in question risked life and limb to combat a racially oriented entity that stifled speech — only to see their own government become a racially oriented entity that stifles speech. Oh, don’t let the fact that the racial focus is different fool you. Yesterday’s National Socialists and our albatross, our international socialists, share some troubling commonalities. Namely, denial of Truth and rejection of virtue.

Warped Senses

Just as those in thrall to Nazism and Marxism fell victim to a dysfunctional worldview, so has the West. Some call it “wokism” — which used to be “political correctness” — cultural Marxism or something else. However it’s identified, though, for sure is that it involves a warped sense of virtue.

For starters, consider police (and others) who are more concerned about an off-the-cuff racial comment than profoundly reckless driving. This reflects a distorted sense of the virtue of Justice.

I’ve called this “racism on the brain,” and we’ve seen it before. During the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995, for example, many people seemed more upset that police officer Mark Fuhrman used the n-word than about two people having been brutally stabbed to death.

“Racism,” however, is merely a subcategory of the deadly sin Wrath, not the end-all and be-all. Its presence in a people does not make them uniquely evil. Nor does its absence in a person make him uniformly good. (Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer emphasized that he was non-racist in his choice of victims.) What’s more, there are six deadly sins aside from Wrath, and one, Lust, now characterizes our society. But we don’t worry much about it; we’ve instead turned it into a faux virtue.

And many (and probably most) moderns couldn’t name a significant number of virtues or deadly sins. They sure have been marinated from toddlerhood onward, though, in the notion that racism is the deadly sin.

And a warped sense of virtue leads to warped laws, warped policing, warped cultural norms — and a society declining at warp speed.