You Can Go to Prison for Saying This

How a 'Whitest Kids U' Know' bit went from the Supreme Court to a Channel 5 daytime show, and what the UK is actually doing to people holding cardboard signs.

One of my favorite comedy sketches of all time is 2007 bit from The Whitest Kids U’ Know called “It’s Illegal to Say…” If you’ve never seen it, do yourself a favor and watch it before you read the rest of this.

The whole thing is Trevor Moore, sitting on a stool in front of a blank backdrop, delivering the most deadpan public service announcement you’ve ever seen. “Did you know,” he asks, “that it’s illegal to say ‘I want to kill the president of the United States of America’? It’s a federal offense. One of the only sentences you’re not allowed to say.” And then, of course, he spends the next minute saying it, over and over, in increasingly elaborate forms, while insisting the entire time that he’s only informing you that it’s illegal, not actually saying it

By the end he’s talking about mortar launchers and the best vantage point for hitting the White House and an “illustrated diagram,” each one “extremely illegal,” “ridiculously, horribly felonious,” and he’s letting you know all of this purely as a public service. The comedy is in how straight he plays it. He’s not winking. He’s basically your local news anchor warning you about a scam.

WKUK was a great show, and Moore was the engine of it. He died in 2021, at 41, after a fall from his balcony. (Fun fact, and a sad one: Zach Cregger, who made last year’s Weapons, was a founding member of the troupe alongside Moore, and he’s said in interviews that the movie came out of his grief over losing him. There’s a lot of Trevor Moore buried in that film if you know to look for it.

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My favorite part, though. Moore was apparently worried enough about whether doing the bit was itself illegal that he called the ACLU to check. He told Wisconsin Public Radio about it:

“I called the ACLU and I was like, ‘Hey, am I getting in trouble for this? Is this fine? Can I do this bit?’ And they’re like, ‘We can’t advise on that kind of thing.’ But they did say, ‘If you did get in trouble, we would defend you.’ And I was like, ‘Well, OK, that’s enough for me.’”

That’s a guy doing a joke about an unspeakable sentence and quietly making sure he wasn’t about to become a test case.

And then, years later, the sketch became one anyway.

In 2010, a man named Anthony Elonis was going through a divorce, and he started posting on Facebook. Some of it was the script of Moore’s sketch, reworked so that the unspeakable sentence was about his estranged wife instead of the president. Other posts read like rap lyrics, which is what he said they were. He was convicted of making threats, and the case went all the way up. In 2015, the Supreme Court reversed his conviction, 8 to 1.

Worth getting right what he actually won, because it isn’t what you’d assume. Elonis didn’t establish a right to post a guy’s wife into a comedy bit about murder. The Court reversed on a narrower question about what’s going on in the speaker’s head. The jury at his trial had been told it only needed to find that a reasonable person would read his posts as a threat, and the justices said that bar was too low, that his own mental state had to factor in. True threats still aren’t protected speech. What the case really showed is how far the American system will bend to protect even genuinely menacing words, because it cares so much about whether you meant them. Moore, for his part, thought it was hilarious that the whole Supreme Court had to sit and watch his dumb sketch.

I think about that case a lot, and I think about it more now. Because for all the criticism I have of the United States, and living under a second Trump term, I have a great deal of it, I’m genuinely grateful for the First Amendment. I’m grateful that “I support an unpopular cause” is not, here, a sentence that can put you in a cell. Free speech is good. It’s worth protecting. And it’s worth protecting most on the days the government would rather you shut up, which, lately, is most of them.

(For the record, and for any federal employee whose job involves reading sentences like the ones a few paragraphs up: this is a column about a comedy sketch. Nothing here is a threat against anyone. I’m just letting you know what’s illegal to say. As a public service.)

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom…

Moore’s sketch was a joke about a country that would throw you in prison for the shape of a sentence, no matter what you meant by it. Britain has spent the last year running the real version.

Last June, activists with a group called Palestine Action broke into RAF Brize Norton and sprayed red paint on two military aircraft. That’s the kind of thing the group does, mostly property damage aimed at weapons manufacturers and military sites tied to Israel’s war in Gaza. Broken windows, spray paint. Days later, the British government, under the control of the Labour Party, proscribed it under the Terrorism Act 2000, which made it a crime not only to belong to Palestine Action but to “invite or recklessly express support” for it. The ban took effect at one minute past midnight on July 5, 2025. It was the first time a direct-action protest group had ever been classed as a terrorist organization in the UK, which dropped it, legally, into the same bucket as ISIS and al-Qaeda.

You don’t have to like Palestine Action to see the problem. Spray-painting a plane is a crime, and Britain has laws against that already. What it didn’t have, until last summer, was a rule that made it a terrorism offense to say out loud that you back the people who did it. Even the UN’s human rights chief, Volker Türk, called the ban a “disturbing” misuse of counterterrorism law.

And look at the word in the statute: recklessly. The whole fight in Elonis was over how sure the government has to be about what’s in your head before it can punish you for your words, and the Court raised the bar. Britain set a very, very low one. Reckless is enough.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. People have been arrested for holding cardboard signs that read “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” One of the first taken in, on the day the ban took effect, was Rev. Sue Parfitt, an 83-year-old retired priest. At a single demonstration in Parliament Square last September, the Metropolitan Police arrested 890 people, 857 of them for supporting the banned group, the biggest mass arrest London had seen in decades. At an earlier protest, nearly half of the people arrested were 60 or older, and fifteen were in their 80s. More than 3,300 people have been arrested across the UK since the ban, according to Amnesty International. Terror-related arrests jumped 660% year over year, and 86% of them were tied to supporting Palestine Action. A law written for terrorists, used mostly on pensioners with poster board.

(Photo by Matthew Horwood/Getty Images, photo by Andrew Aitchison / In pictures via Getty Images, photo by Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images, photo by Martin Pope/Getty Images)

The courts have gone back and forth on it. In February, the High Court ruled the ban unlawful, calling it disproportionate and a breach of free expression. The police briefly signaled they’d stop arresting people, then started again in March anyway. And this past Monday, the Court of Appeal overturned the High Court and said the government had it right all along. They were arresting supporters outside the courthouse the same day.

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Owen Jones did the bit on live TV

Which is roughly where things stood when I watched a clip from an episode of Jeremy Vine on Channel 5. The journalist Owen Jones was on the panel, and when Palestine Action came up, he did something I recognized right away.

He started saying the sentence. “You can’t now say, ‘I support Palestine Action,’” Jones said. “That’s an illegal offense. You can’t say, ‘I support Palestine Action with all my heart.’ You can get arrested and sent to prison for 14 years for doing that.” Vine, looking like he wanted to be anywhere else, cut in: “You’re skating around it, aren’t you?” And Jones, who was not skating around anything, kept right on going. “No, I’m not. I’m saying it’s illegal to say, ‘I support Palestine Action, and they are fighting to stop a genocide.’ You can get arrested and sent to prison for 14 years for saying that. And retired vicars are now being arrested and face prosecution for holding a placard saying, ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.’ This is absurd, and everyone knows it.”

That’s the Trevor Moore bit! The exact same move: say the forbidden thing over and over while narrating, in real time, that it’s forbidden to say it. Moore was doing a joke about a law that mostly didn’t exist the way he pretended. Jones was doing it about a law that does. Vine and the other panelist spent the segment looking like the floor might open up. (I emailed Jones to ask whether he’d seen the WKUK sketch, and whether it had anything to do with his decision to try it on live daytime television. I haven’t heard back.)

Here’s what gets me, though. There’s been no shortage of hand-wringing about a “free speech crisis” in Britain. But a lot of it has been about whether men like Graham Linehan should be free to harass and threaten trans women online, not about a government arresting thousands of people for a sentence on a piece of cardboard. The loudest free-speech voices went quiet when the speech in question wasn’t theirs. That’s the tell. It always is.

And I say all of this from the United States, where the president spends his days testing how much of the First Amendment he can get away with ignoring. We’re not safe from this. The reason I can type “I support an unpopular cause” without a 14-year sentence hanging over it comes down to one amendment and a Supreme Court that, on a good day, still cares whether the government can prove what you meant. That’s the whole margin. It’s thinner than people think. Britain is what it looks like when it’s gone.