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Mark Steyn: Hey, Welcome along. Hope you had a good Father's Day. If you're American here is your Founding Father. Oops, sorry. I mean, your floundering father.
Joe Biden: Well, we're to win and we're going to help, we have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean. We have plans to build it in Angola, one of the largest solar plants in the world. I can go on but I'm going off script, I'm gonna get in trouble.
Mark Steyn: Mmhm, gonna get in trouble with who? You're supposed to be the number one guy in America. A railway across the Pacific Ocean and from there across the Indian Ocean. As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis marveled. "Ambitious."Look at that thing. Joe Biden's engineers are going to be laying track over the Mariana Trench, which is the deepest oceanic trench on Earth. If you put Mount Everest in the Mariana Trench, its peak would still be one and a third miles underwater. Look at it. There's the tallest place on earth sitting in the deepest place on earth. And as I said, if you put Mount Everest in the Mariana Trench, it's still going to be a mile and a third underwater, so that is going to be the longest golden spike ever hammered in the history of railroading. Not like in those days.
Did any of the so called mainstream media, your trusted news sources, cover the announcement of this ambitious 8,000 mile engineering project across the international dateline? No, not the New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, BBC. This stunning announcement went entirely uncommented on those prestigious news organizations. Two days later, Joe Biden was in Connecticut, and ended his speech thus:
Joe Biden: All right. God Save the Queen man.
Mark Steyn: Yeah and there he is, trying to figure out how to get off the stage. And then when his minder shows up, he starts galloping, as if to show that he is a fit healthy man, full of purpose. Why did he say God Save the Queen to an audience in Connecticut? No idea. But again, nothing about it in any of the trusted media outlets you've heard of. Oh, and another. Here's Joe Biden welcoming the actress Eva Longoria to the White House. Um, I think that's what they call a warm welcome. Because that's, that's how the ladies like it right under the breasts like that. You can't go wrong with that maneuver. Anyway, after that warm welcome he then said:
Joe Biden: We've known each other a long time she was 17. I was 40. Thank you, to the entire cast and crew and everyone involved.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, we've known each other a long time. She was 17. I was 40. Actually, when Joe Biden was 40 Eva Longoria was seven, which is right in the demographic he prefers for his hair sniffing. Hmm. Again, what does he mean by this remark? The New York Times, CNN they all declined to say but what we do know for sure is that this man is not the chief executive of a global superpower. He is the dead husk of a moth eaten sock puppet being waggled around by others. It would be nice to know by whom, but again, the Washington Post and NBC News decline to take any interest in the topic. Do you remember Trump and George W. Bush? The slightest verbal infelicity would be seized on by the press and be forensically analyzed for days—not anymore. All my life I've been told that back in the 1930s, the American press declined to tell the American people that their President, Franklin Roosevelt, was a paraplegic. That's not strictly true. The US media were much livelier and more diverse in those days, and publishers politically opposed to FDR would occasionally run photos of him in an apparent wheelchair but such pictures infuriated the White House. And if for example, the Secret Service saw newsmen snapping the President as he was being lifted out of his car, they would seize the newsmen's cameras, rip out the film and smash the plates. They no longer need to do that because America's legacy media are content to serve as court eunuchs. The Emperor has no marbles; he's falling down in public over and over. He's spouting mumbo jumbo. He's providing disturbing glimpses of what remains of his interior life by doing 1970s jailbait jokes to 2020s actresses. The Emperor has no marbles, and yet the entire media play along and woe betide anyone who doesn't. That's the only thing Hans Christian Anderson got wrong in his famous fairy tale.
["The King's New Clothes," sung by Danny Kaye, plays]
People lined the streets as the artillery came by, and the infantry came by, and the cavalry and the pipe and drum corps and the Royal Guard. Finally, the King. Everybody cheered. Because nobody wanted to appear a fool, nobody that is, except one little boy who, for some strange reason, hadn't heard about the king's new magic suit, and didn't know what he was supposed to see. He took one look at the King turned a little pale, and said:
"Look at the King! Look at the King! Look at the
King, the King, the King!
The King is in the all together
But all together the all together
He's all together as naked as the day that he was born.
The King is in the all together
But all together the all together
It's all together the very least the King has ever
worn.
Call the court physician! Call an intermission!
His majesty is wide open to ridicule and scorn"
[Song ends]
Mark Steyn: Majesty is wide open to ridicule and scorn. He is but you'd be surprised. You can beseech God to save an already dead queen and preserve your railway lines as they skim across the Pacific waters to China and onward to Kenya, and nobody who matters will ridicule and scorn you. As I said, that's the bit that Hans Christian Anderson got wrong. Today were a little boy to point out that the emperor has no clothes, the enraged crowd would beat him to a pulp for peddling disinformation, you'd never know he existed, because that little boy's Facebook and Instagram accounts would be instantly vaporized.
The US Constitution vests executive authority in its chief magistrate the president, but he's in the basement eating tapioca and watching Matlock reruns.
[Brief clip plays of Matlock buying a hotdog from a street vendor.]
So who actually is the President of the United States? Come to that who actually is the junior senator from Pennsylvania? The other day in Philadelphia, part of I-95, the principal north south highway down the east coast of America, collapsed. So this critical federal artery is currently closed. Senator John Fetterman was asked if he'd like to comment on this major event in his state.
Sen. Tom Carper: Earlier today, some comments about the tragic accident in I-95. And if you want to make any comments with respect to that feel free you're recognized.
Sen. John Fetterman: No, I would just really like to.....95, 95, 95. You know, obviously the you know, you're pretty much preoccupied with the 95.
Mark Steyn: 95, 95 and 95. John Fetterman isn't 95 unlike Joe Biden. He was elected last year even though he's had a major stroke. This is a rather poignant news story. The collapse of Interstate 95 is emblematic of the decrepitude both of American infrastructure and of the political class that presides over it. Just to underline the latter point here's Senator Fetterman, introducing Joe Biden.
Sen. John Fetterman: And now I'm standing next to the president again next to a collapsed bridge here. And he is here to commit to work with the governor and the delegation to make sure that we get this fixed quick, fast as well too. This is a president that is committed to infructure [sic]. Yeah. And then on top of that, the jewel, kind of a law of the infructure bill that is going to make sure that there's going to be bridges all across like this all across America getting rebuilt.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, I'm Stan Sitting next to a collapsed bridge here. Indeed you are. What most offended America's political industrial complex about Donald J. Trump in 2016. He was all candidate and no minders. I know I was there backstage and I have never seen an American candidate with a smaller entourage, all candidate and no minders. If that were to catch on who knows where it might lead. So Trump was taken out by his precise opposite, Joe Biden, a guy who's all minders and no candidate. Same with that fella Fetterman. Same with California Senator Dianne Feinstein, same with the senator I got into a dingdong with at a Senate hearing a couple of years back. Ed Markey from Massachusetts, absolutely useless unless he's being fed his lines from the staffers behind him. It's almost like the central framing of our politics, as runners in a horse race who's up, who's down, who's ahead is entirely irrelevant to what's really going on. We live in a blizzard of lies by which I don't mean merely that this man is self evidently not the leader of the free world. No, I don't think so. But I don't just mean that I mean, also that the blizzard swirls to envelop everything. What for example, is the takeaway from this across the Atlantic, a party at Conservative Party headquarters in London, just before Christmas 2020?
[Clip plays of party as one person asks off camera, "are you filming this?" Another replies, "As long as we don't stream that we're like bending the rules."]
Mark Steyn: That really could be a scene from The Thick of It, couldn't it? The dreadful anonymous room, the sad drinks table, the lumpy leaden ungroovy grooving of the desperate staffers in their hideous Christmas sweaters. But it took place in December 2020, the year that COVID canceled Christmas for everybody else because it was too dangerous let you be in the same room as grandpa and Auntie Mabel. And what that video shows us is that it wasn't dangerous at all. And the people who govern you knew it wasn't dangerous. They're not wearing masks. They're not socially distancing. Indeed that arrhythmic couple looks like a few more drinks and they'll be getting as socially non distanced as you can get but because of the central lie of the COVID years, your granny died alone entirely unsurrounded by loved ones. The same people who came up with that awful bullying "look him in the eyes" campaign. Oh, look him in the eyes and tell him COVID isn't real. The look him in the eyes guys are looking at that chicky's cleavage and fancying their chances. Let's get the COVID party started because Project Fear is bollocks.
That's bad. But if you're a UK voter, what are you going to do about it? Disdain the unlovely Tories and vote Labour or Lib Dem at the next election? Those guys wanted even more lockdown. So did the Scottish National Party and Sinn Féin. Those guys want to leave the UK in order to set up a country with even more phony baloney lockdown than the one they've just left. We'll have more on this a bit later on with Mahyar Tousi, a blizzard of lies on all fronts, all issues, yet bolstered by quote "disinformation" monitors and fact checkers funded by woke billionaires all designed to ensure that nothing pierces the official propaganda.
As you know, I'm taking the UK state censor Ofcom, that's their two chief commissars, Lord Grade and Dame Melanie Dawes. I'm taking the state censors to the King's Bench Division and asking the High Court to quash their ruling against me that my advice to viewers, that it might not be in your interest to get the COVID booster shot, the third jabber jabber, the fourth jabber jabber, the fifth on and on. It might not be in your interest to get the COVID booster shot, that that was quote "harmful" according to Ofcom. Really? Brand new study from the super prestigious Cleveland Clinic: "Being up to date with your COVID boosters, increases your chances of getting COVID by 33%."
So the only people being quote "harmful" here are the propagandists, the ones determined to maintain the official narrative no matter how many people it injures and kills. A blizzard of lies, a blizzard of lies maintained by ruthless enforcers in the media on behalf of the state. That's why I'm dragging Michael Grade and Melanie Dawes into court and shoving their pseudo jurisprudence down their gullets. I'm the first UK presenter to take off come to court in a decade and a half. And I say to my former telly and radio colleagues, come on in the water's fine, you'll enjoy getting chief censor Grade into the witness box.
I've been very touched by the number of viewers who said, Oh, we'd love to help you get Lord Grade and Dame Melanie testifying under oath. And I said, well, there's multiple ways to support my lawsuit. And I've been asked to reprise those. So very quickly, you can lend a helping hand by buying a chum a SteynOnline gift certificate, or by treating a loved one to a Mark Steyn Club membership. They'll thank you forever. Or by preordering my aforementioned new book, which is very timely, if you're one of His Majesty's subjects and you'll enjoy a massive titter or three. It's way funnier than Joe Biden, even when he's falling down. This is the Mark Steyn Show across the planet. We have lots more to come, including the first of tonight's terrific guests, Dr. Clare Craig coming up. Don't touch that dial.
[Ad] A remote fantastical Kingdom far from Europe's chancelleries of power. An ancient castle where secrets are walled up. An unpopular monarch on the eve of his coronation. A ruling class of plotters and would be usurpers, and a gentleman adventurer on holiday. No, not Ruritania in the 19th century but the United Kingdom in the 21st. Steyn's new book, The Prisoner of Windsor is a contemporary inversion of Anthony Hope's classic The Prisoner of Zenda. In the original an English gentleman on vacation is called upon to stand in for his lookalike the King of Ruritania at his coronation. Over a century later, a Ruritanian on vacation in London is called upon to return the favor and stand in for an Englishman in an absurd fantastical Kingdom, where Brexit never quite happened. Plots are afoot, The Prisoner of Windsor by Mark Steyn, available in hardback and digital editions, or for a personally autographed copy, go to SteynOnline.com. [Ad ends]
Mark Steyn: Well, it's timely I'll say that and people seem to like it. The five star reviews are piling up. Wayne, a first hour founding member of the Mark Steyn Club, he joined quickly. He writes: "Is there a word Smith living who is as witty and entertaining as Mark Steyn?" Don't shout out thousands of names, it's a rhetorical question! "Is there a modern novel as rich and imaginative as The Prisoner of Windsor? This book is what future generations will call literature; it is a classic that we can enjoy now."
Well, I don't know about that Wayne but that's awfully kind of you.
Speaking about this new study from the prestigious Cleveland Clinic in America, showing how well these boosters work. These boosters work so well that they boost your chances of getting COVID by 1/3. That seems odd for something marketed as not only a vaccine, but as an effective one notwithstanding all its safety issues. The pathologist, Clare Craig is back with us. And we are always glad to see her. Clare basically, ever since this stuff started, the facts have been moving relentlessly in your direction, and yet they generally speaking go uncovered in the media. Do you think the Cleveland Clinic study is just going to disappear into the void? Or are people actually beginning to get the reality of what's going on here?
Clare Craig: So actually, Mark, this is the second Cleveland study. So the first Cleveland study came out in December 2022. And this is a study of 14,000 healthcare workers. And you can just imagine the research team seeing their results. So their results showed that with the more doses people had, the higher the rate of COVID infections. So it was doing the opposite of what had been promised in a dangerous way. And that team must have thought, well, we've got to get this out there, it's going to change everything, you know, this is so important. It went out in December 2022. Nothing's happened has it? And they were criticized for it not being peer reviewed. That paper now is peer reviewed and published. And they've come out with another paper, presumably thinking, well, that didn't work, let's have, you know, we better look at it from a different angle and see if we can get people to understand it in a different way. And so they looked at it again, and this time, they looked up just from January of this year, and said, Well, what's the rate of infection among people who are up to date with their vaccines, meaning they've had the very latest booster, or not up to date, which could mean any other category. And there's this funny thing that goes on in science at the moment, where people will find results and share the results honestly, and then write something quite different in their paper. And what they've done, this group is in their discussion, in their conclusion, they've concluded that the reason for the difference is that the people who weren't up to date were likely to have had a BA.4 or BA.5 variant infection. So that's the Omicron variant that was around end of 2022, beginning of 2003. And that's why there's a difference. But in their own results, they have already broken that down. So they took, they had a look at the people who had a recent infection. And they have low rates of subsequent infection. And it's identical, it doesn't matter how vaccinated you are, in effect you're to it. And then they looked at the ones that hadn't had a recent infection. And the ones that were up to date have an infection rate, a third higher than the ones not up to date. So that was not the reason. And yet they write that in the discussion, presumably in an attempt to get it peer reviewed and published, because there is this bizarre thing going on where you have to conform to scriptures and make the statements in the papers in order to get the results out there. It's really ridiculous.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, you're certainly right on that. The first Cleveland Clinic study, which, as you said, came out a few months ago. The interesting thing about that is this is almost 50,000 people who are actually the clinic's employees. And because of federal vaccine mandates, these guys, a huge number of them were obliged to be vaccinated just in order to get into the building and continue holding their jobs. And no matter how they try to finesse it, the reality is that this thing is doing the opposite of what an effective vaccine is meant to be doing. It's not eliminating or even decreasing your chances of getting the disease in question. It's actually increasing them. That's the basic reality, as you say, they can sort of dodge and weave to get it past the peer reviewers or whatever. But that core reality is a devastating indictment of the propaganda of the last two and a half years isn't it?
Clare Craig: It absolutely is. And if you think back to the kinds of things that have been said, about the unvaccinated, putting people at risk, because they're more risk of infection, you can now invert all of those comments, and make them about the people who are up to date with their vaccinations because they are the ones at greatest risk of infection. Now, of course, we're not going to invert those comments, because we're not like that. But it really goes to show how it really, really brings into focus the propaganda that we've had when you see it like that. And I think is worth asking the question about why is this happening right? This is, you know, this is something that I'm sure anybody who's vaccinated will want to try and understand. And there might be a variety of reasons why it might be happening, but the one that has the most evidence behind it, is that if you think about how an immune system works, the job of an immune system is to recognize what belongs to you, what's yourself, and what is foreign. That's what it does, but it also mustn't recognize food as foreign, and you don't want it attacking your food, you'll have an allergy. So there's a sort of sideshow that it does, where it recognizes food, and it switches the immune response to say, well, we can ignore that, even though it's foreign, because it's we don't want to attack it. And that is what's been happening with people the more injection they're getting, the more their immune system is switching over to say we can ignore that. And so if you've got an immune system, deliberately ignoring something that's foreign, of course, you're going to have more infections.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, that's, that's actually a very good way of putting it that in fact, the more boosters you have, the more you are misdirecting your immune system to ignore things that will at some point become harmful to you.
Clare Craig: Well, I mean, the thing is that it's a foreign, it's a foreign agent, and it's something you want an immune response to. And if human intervention is teaching people's immune system not to respond to it, then that's catastrophic, you know, that's doing absolutely the opposite of what you want. And I mean, you know, I've said it a million times that we've got to stop doing this, you've got to stop. It's ridiculous, it's still going on, it's absolutely crazy that this is still going on, and people are still being injected.
Mark Steyn: Well, certain people have figured that out, not in the United States, not in the Big Five at the, you know, not the big guys at the G7. But on the periphery the Scandinavian countries started by first saying, oh we're not going to recommend it for under 18, under 50s, under 65, and then Switzerland just cut to the chase and said, we're not going to recommend it to anybody, the AstraZeneca has effectively been with....well, it has been withdrawn in the UK. Johnson and Johnson has been withdrawn in the United States. I think at some point, the way to bet is that the remaining vaccines will just be shuffled off the table quietly. But that's the point. They're basically trying to roll back the last two and a half years on the sly on the quiet, as if there should be no accounting for it.
Clare Craig: They are doing that. But they are also continuing to pressurize people into having it. So obviously, not me but you know, my parents and my parents' friends who are in their 70s and 80s, these people are still getting text messages from the NHS, one of them I know who has not had COVID yet, so I would say has a pretty good immune system, because there's absolutely no doubt they've been exposed several times by now, being told that they are immune compromised, they're not immune compromised in any way, and that they need to have another jab. And, you know, I think that there's always been this thing hasn't they're about, well, let's talk about the vulnerable in a different category. But what this evidence is showing is it this is a really, really bad idea if you're vulnerable. It's a really bad idea.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, so you're not one of the....the kind of modified, qualified stage by stage withdrawal that we've seen in some countries, where they well maybe if you're a young man, you should think twice about this, okay, maybe we don't need to immunize every toddler under five-years-old. But they still, even as they retreat, they're still claiming there are benefits for this thing, once you get up into your 70s and 80s. And as I just as a layman, when you look at that, I don't actually see that I don't see the evidence for the idea that if you're 87, or you're 94, or you're 112, it's in your interest to take these things.
Clare Craig: So I think sometimes the evidence has been really difficult to interpret on this, that's the trouble, because there's a lot of biases in it. And you never really know how you can unpick it. So you have to try and look at the big picture as much as you can. I would say that like detailed evidence, if you like, has always suggested that the mortality rate was higher in the unvaccinated elderly people than in the vaccinated, but the case fatality rate wasn't that was about the same. And so that that sort of throws it all out, because that doesn't make sense. And furthermore, the working out the fatality rate is entirely dependent on understanding how many people there are in the population. Because what you want to do is say, well, there are this many deaths per this many people. And we can do that quite well for the vaccinated because we counted them as they were being jabbed, right. So we've got an actual measurement of how many people were jabbed in each age group. But to work out how many people weren't jabbed, you have to know how many people were in the country. And then you subtract how many were vaccinated. And we don't know how many people in the country, we have to guess it's not a measurement, just a guess. And in fact, for people in their 70s, for almost every region that the ONS has measured, there are more vaccinated people than they say exist, right? So when you've got that situation, the number of people that you are saying are unvaccinated is a made up number. And if you make up a number that's too small, you're going to end up with a scary death rate because you've got this many deaths per not very many people.
And so you have to accept that that data has got huge confidence intervals, we don't really know the answer. And then you take a step back and say, well, if this was working to save the lives of people at all, it's mostly going to be saving the elderly because they're the ones that are risk of dying. Then we should see an impact on say the size of a wave, the duration of a wave pre vaccine compared with post vaccine. And in the UK, there kind of was actually. Delta did look quite different, was flattened off. Although the token numbers once you measured it across the full timeframe, were still quite bad. But if you look at Europe or the US, then the death curve for Delta looks just like the previous ones. The hospitalization curve looks just like the previous ones and you go hang on a second, guys, you are putting huge emphasis on this idea that there were tons more cases. This is something that we've never measured before. With influenza, we have measured hospitalizations, and deaths. And with influenza, we see similar sized waves each season, with each wave. And that's what we've had with COVID, similar sized waves, pre vax, and post vax. And then you can look at how many people have died over time across the world. And what you see is there's a sort of steady accumulation of people who have died of COVID on a graph, and you get to Omicron. And this steep gradient of deaths that are accumulating dips down because it's not as deadly. So you've got a change in gradient from people dying, accumulating, accumulating, and it dips down, there is no alteration in that gradient because of vaccination. It was incessant it just carried on, if anything it got a little bit worse, okay. So you can't say that the vaccines changed that, it didn't.
Mark Steyn: That's a very interesting way of, of looking at it. As you say the case numbers is an entirely new metric compared to how we look at anything, you know, at any time of the day you know, there are millions and millions of people wandering around with dozens and dozens of medical conditions they're not even aware of. If you were to test for anything, the way you test for COVID, you would think there was an epidemic of all kinds of things going on simply because people are asymptomatic. They're not even aware they're carrying it. Why do you why do you think that governments around the world chose that particular metric? And then the media in particular, if you remember, the COVID years, where they'd have the ticker in the corner of the screen showing the case numbers, the positive test results, just going up continually, minute by minute, day by day, week, by week? Why do you think that metric was universally agreed upon to be the one that counted?
Clare Craig: So if you buy into the idea that we were at the beginning of an epidemic, and at the beginning of an epidemic, you want to be measuring something before you start measuring deaths, you want to be you want to be prepared for the hospitals to start, you know, people are going to need a warning sort of system so you've got some knowledge about what's about to happen. So from that point of view, I think it's reasonable to try and do a measurement of cases, even if it's in the hospital. And also at the beginning, when you're setting things up rapidly, because you know, you haven't got a time, you might make compromises on how you do that testing and the compromise, the kind of compromises are that you are going to overcall because you don't want to miss any cases, because you know, you're still at the stage where you think you can try and control it. I don't think it can be controlled by the way, I think that there's a myth around close contact spread being the only method of spread. But that was the belief system that we were working with, right? So I think it's reasonable, then in that belief system to start out with that intention. Very, very soon after starting now though, there was this thing that happened where a country started publishing their data. And there was a sort of competition between the countries to all be publishing a daily case rate and a daily death rate. And so it became, you know, I think it was literally competition between the countries making that happen and driving and sticking on the news. And then it sort of becomes self fulfilling, because people start to want to know, because, you know, what is it tomorrow. And the fact that it took so long to stop doing that was quite extraordinary, really quite extraordinary. And that what was really bad was at no point. And this should have happened at the latest when we got to peak deaths, at peak deaths you say, right, guys, we've got to reassess this now, because if we're still chasing down every possible case, and not caring if we're over diagnosing, then we're going to cause harm. So we have to have a different strategy now. And the strategy for testing has to be not at the individual level anymore, you start to have a strategy that's starts with a population that's vulnerable and you say, we only want to identify definite outbreaks. And so once you've got a definite outbreak, you can sort of be a bit more generous and say, "Well, how many possible cases are there in that definite outbreak?" But we didn't, we just stuck with possible cases right the way through, even through summer time when you know, there wasn't really much virus around at all and, and at that point, it was really harmful because the vast majority of people coming back positive had no symptoms, hadn't developed antibodies, and yet they were actually fine.
Mark Steyn: No, you're absolutely right, Clare, and they're still actually the sill of certain areas of life in which you still have to be COVID tested to get inside the building. I have been in and out of hospital on both sides of the border in two different countries the last week and a half and in the United States, in hospitals, they're still jabbing the stupid thing up your nose, and still insisting on taking....I've got all kinds of other things wrong with me, but I'm completely clear of the COVID. It's very frustrating that this is all they're interested in. Thank you very much. Dr. Clare Craig, we are always pleased to see you. This is the Mark Steyn Show. We're coming right back in 30 seconds.
[Ad] This is Mark Steyn. After three years in COVID-stan it's time to get out of town. So join me on the 2023 Mark Steyn Cruise sailing from Italy to Croatia, Montenegro, Greece, for a full week of sun, sea and civilizational collapse. I'll have special guests from around the world from America, Canada, Australia, Britain, Europe. And we'll do all the things you like about the Mark Steyn Show and SteynOnline but close up and on water. More details at SteynOnline.com or MarkSteynCruise.com [Ad]
Yeah, our Neptune Suites, which are pretty swanky, have sold out. Although some customers are concerned that what with my aforementioned ailing health, my state room may be opening up any day now. I can't promise The Mark Steyn Cruise will be as much fun as a lockdown party with the Conservative staffers in there wearing their Christmas sweaters where we shall certainly try. Mahyar Tousi,
who is a big star on YouTube is back with us. You know, cake, cake, cake, wine in a suitcase, wine in a suitcase, wine in a suitcase. Meanwhile, there's 1000 excess deaths a week in England and Wales on and on and on and on, the NHS is packed up. It takes two business days for an ambulance to arrive. But let's talk about partygate and wine in a suitcase for another year and a half. What do you make of this? Are you envious that you weren't invited into that cracking Tory party?
Mahyar Tousi: There are a couple of things. Firstly, thanks for having me on the show, Mark. One on behalf of all British people and the rest of the world I'm offended that they call that a party. That was absolutely embarrassing. Secondly, also a bunch of lightweights. Secondly, you're absolutely spot on. Obviously it seems to be a distraction tactic from the media. Maybe not necessarily in an Illuminati way, having a meeting, secret meeting and all this it's a culture, it's a toxic culture and the media is in their blood, that they focus on the Westminster gossip politics. But even when they do that, they mess it up, even when they're focusing on for example, the partygate, which is now two years old. And instead of focusing on all the important things you mentioned, they are still manipulating the public, even on this. But actually, I'm glad it's happening because then obviously for those who haven't watched, so much has happened over the last couple of weeks. You know, Boris Johnson's Privileges Committee found him guilty, even though they're not a legal board. Then one of the members of the Privileges Committee themselves attended a party apparently, allegedly. And you've got Sue Gray, who was in charge of the investigation. All this is actually exposing the establishment themselves. So while they're trying to use that to target Boris Johnson, because they think Boris Johnson is some sort of right wing threat, Boris Johnson of all people in reality, they're actually making a mess because people can actually see them for who they are, just like the European Union. For decades people didn't see the real face of the European Union until the Brexit negotiations started, then they sold them.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, that's absolutely right. I am distracted by this idea of Boris Johnson as a right wing threat. I wish! I've known him for a third of a century and he is never seemed less of a right wing threat. But let me ask you what I think is the most interesting point about this, because as I mentioned at the top of the show, all the other parties were in favor of even more lockdown, Labour, Lib Dems, Scottish Nationalists, Sinn Féin, whoever you want to name, they all wanted actually more lockdown than the lockdown they were given. So now we have this exposure of, you know, lockdown as some kind of hypocritical racket. But as you mentioned, the media are the ones who in some strange way, are the ones who were most was gung ho, about the idea that the integrity of the lockdown should be preserved and maintained. And if you go back, that's what's actually so weird about partygate and all the rest of it is that the media seem more invested in the integrity of the lockdown than any than any of the politicians do.
Mahyar Tousi: Yeah, I mean, what they don't see they clearly don't read the room, the media and the political establishment, the general public who are angry or outraged where because of all this, their party gate stuff, and the new video of Tories central office dancing, and that they're outraged, mostly a majority, because they believe at this point after all these years, that the rules were ridiculous, but you forced us to do it, but you didn't do it. Whereas the media establishment and the liberal left and the whole of the governance of the country, what they see is, well these rules were important, and you destroyed the integrity of the rules, that's not why people are angry. People are angry because the rules were really ridiculous. A lot of people broke the rules, but they're going to trouble but they can see all this video footage and everything else. But again, there's a double standard as well, because when Keir Starmer, the Labour leader was caught drinking beer and eating curry with all his friends and Angela Rayner. The police decided not to investigate that, even the recent incident of the senior member of the Privileges Committee, Bernard Jenkin, who brought Boris Johnson down. He was caught there. He was at a birthday party and there was indeed a cake available. And the police decided not to investigate that either because it's a historic matter. We don't look at the historic matters unless it's Boris Johnson or Donald Trump.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, what I find, you know, I'm sympathetic to that, because we had people on the show last year, people who had fines of 300 pounds, 500 pounds, because they were caught by police drinking with two mates in their back gardens or whatever. So these things were policed and enforced upon ordinary people. But in a in a strictly political context how does this actually play out? Does it damage Johnson? Does it damage Sunak? Does it make it more likely that Keir Starmer guzzling down his beer and his curry is going to be in Number 10? How did the politics play out?
Mahyar Tousi: Yeah, I think and that you can't damage Boris Johnson. He's made of mud. You can't throw mud at mud and no one's like shocked. And the story is already old and boring. Keir Starmer will get away with it surprisingly, he would be seen as Mr. Integrity, even though again he is a hypocrite. Rishi Sunak will be the one who will be mostly damaged. And it's mostly his own doing, not only the fact that Rishi Sunak was also at those parties, yet at the same time, there's no outrage about that he misled Parliament as well, if you want to focus on that sort of nonsense, he misled Parliament as well. But he can't hold his party together. We don't even know what the Conservative Party stands for. He doesn't know what he stands for. So that's how it's going to damage it. Obviously, it's damaging the constitution of this country, obviously not codified British constitution, but parliamentary procedure is mostly completely undermining the little bit of integrity that we had in Parliament. Obviously, over the last few years, we've been losing that but this new class of MPs are completely destroying it, and has nothing to do with just Boris Johnson, it's all of them.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, there is some political space one would have thought for a party that would actually stand up and say, you know, the last few years were madness. We're not doing it again. We should have an amnesty for all lockdown infringements, and return all the funds. I don't even care who would be that party, whether it's Tories, Labour, Democratic Unionists, Sinn Féin, but you would have thought there would be some opportunity for some party to go there.
Mahyar Tousi: Yeah no, and I mean, there isn't unfortunately, mostly because partly the British culture compared to the revolutionary cultures like the French who are ready to burn cars every Tuesday when there's a tax hike. It goes further sometimes, sometimes it goes too far, the British culture, people are just like, I don't want to know, I'm just going to remain ignorant, it's not really an insult. It's not really like they're making a choice, they're not but what they do is they depend on the consensus, which has created the narrative by the mainstream media. So there will be a few, there will be a lot of people including those who watch my channel, for example, who are waking up and everything else but and some people will be left wing, some people will right wing, but the majority of the country who are busy paying their bills and going to work, at the end of the day, they will hardly even care or know who the deputy leader of the Labour Party is or the Tories, even though it's government, and then when the election comes, they just listen to what the BBC or Sky News would say. And they will just assume in their head subconsciously you only have two choices red or blue. And that's the problem. And then Nigel Farage obviously broke that a while ago, only short term and that was the UK for the cause of the Brexit referendum. And even that was a short term success because it was just because there was a cause it was not really sustainable. And even Nigel Farage, went away.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, no, no, you're right. And you're absolutely right, by the way that No self respecting person, anywhere on the planet would call that a party. If you or I walked into that room the first thing you'd say is oh my god, this is terrible. We've got to get out of here before anybody snaps a photograph of us, taxi, and we'd be gone. It's pathetic for that.
Mahyar Tousi: I mean, if these guys want to know what a party is, they don't want to know what I was up to during the lockdown. I'm not admitting anything. I don't want police to knock on my door.
Mark Steyn: Okay, okay, get ready for this. There's gonna be a lot of lockdown boasting. Yeah, you don't want to know where I was on that. Thank you very much, by always great to see you.
We pride ourselves on having a global audience here. We've got viewers from London, Ontario to London, England, even London, Kentucky, and certainly London, Kiribati. And no matter where you are, inflation is rampant. Eggs, eggs are now a luxury item. At one point it was all the rage to blame Putin for inflation. That was Joe Biden's go to, it didn't really catch on. So now enter Mark Carney. This chap is the only man on the planet to have been governor of two G7 central banks. He was governor of the Bank of Canada and then Governor of the Bank of England, so he must be super brainy and reliable. He's currently the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action, whatever that means. And he's talked about as a potential replacement for Dame Jacinda Trudeau as prime minister of the Dominion of Canada. According to Mark Carney, Brexit is to blame for inflation. Look at that. "We laid out in advance of Brexit, that this will be a negative supply shock for a period of time. And that the consequence of that will be a weaker pound, higher inflation, and weaker growth," he told the Daily Telegraph. "There's no joy in saying, well, we told you so because people are having to live with that reality." He does actually appear to be....I would say, I don't like to complain. But I think he is taking a little joy in saying I told you so. This guy is very deliberate about what he says to the press. Last year, our friend Andrew Lawton tried to pin him down on a Canadian issue in Davos, and he wasn't permitted to speak outside a controlled environment.
Andrew Lawton: Hi Mr. Carney, Andrew Lawton with True North in Canada. How are you?
Mark Carney: Nice to see you. I never do spontaneous.
Andrew Lawton: I understand. My one question is Canadian oil and gas sector survive the net-zero approach that's being promoted here?
Mark Carney: As I said I never do...If you want an interview with me, like everybody else, you make a request for meeting up with me.
Andrew Lawton: And will you accept that?
Mark Steyn: Yeah, as you heard, there's nothing spontaneous about Mark Carney. So his blaming of inflation on Brexit would seem, in contrast, rather calculated. Our stats man, Jamie Jenkins is on the case. Jamie, how does Brexit cause inflation in say, Germany and the United States?
Jamie Jenkins: Indeed, Mark. So let's look at the numbers. Many countries across the European Union, Mark, the last couple of years, I've seen inflation much, much higher than the UK. There are countries in the European Union who have had inflation below the UK. And what's pretty much driving inflation across most of the nations across the world Mark is the energy prices. And it all depends really on your energy mix and how much you're kind of exposed to the kind of the gas prices that are kind of gone up low. So Germany has mass, mass inflation. Spain, actually has bigger inflation but that's has come down much, much quicker than the United Kingdom. And obviously, it's a warmer climate down there. So it depends on pretty much where you are. But that clip, we just had of Mark Carney there, Mark, pretty much to me if he says, I can't have an interview without kind of doing the proper booking. It pretty much sums up as absolute nonsense. He doesn't want an interview with somebody outside of his normal protocol, because he probably wants to know, what are you going to ask me about? Let me get my briefing in and let me tell you, the party line or whatever baloney wants to tell you. You just you know this is absolute nonsense. And thing is with Mark Carney, Mark. He was in charge of the Bank of England, obviously, in the United Kingdom. That was a period of time where we still have very, very low interest rates, he probably could upped them a little bit to try and get them from these historic lows that we had off the back of the financial crisis. But, you know, he's a globalist. He's blamed Brexit in the past for certain things. And he's already at the rollback himself by saying that all the doom and gloom that he thought Brexit would deliver actually hasn't happened. And for him to come on and say that Brexit is the cause of inflation when other countries in the European Union and beyond have had inflation, proves that is a bit of an agenda here, Mark. And we remember what we were talking about, probably a couple of months ago, Mark, was we had other people blaming kind of delays at airports on Brexit, everybody, blames Brexit. I can imagine in 2050, Mark, you know, we probably won't be talking in 2050. We'll be long gone by then probably, but in 2050, some people will say, that's probably to do with Brexit.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, you have a preference among recent former governors of the Bank of England. You disdain Mark Carney, but you think Mervyn King might be onto something?
Jamie Jenkins: Well, Mark, yeah, we've touched on this before on the show. So Mark Carney says Brexit is the cause of inflation. But if you just look at economic theory, simple economic theory, this is the kind of the 101 you're taught when you're doing your economics A 11, you don't even got to go to university to do this, if you print loads and loads of money, if you increase the money supply, that will cause inflation. I think your producers have got what Mervyn King thinks is the cause of inflation at the start of all of this.
Mervyn King: Central banks have lost control of inflation. Governments lost control of the public finance, not surprising that markets respond to that.
Woman: And whose responsibility was it then if the both the central bank and the government lost control?
Mervyn King: Well, I think all central banks in the West, interestingly made the same mistake. And during COVID, when the economy was actually contracting, because of lockdown, Central Banks decided it was a good time to print a lot of money. That was a mistake, that led to inflation, we had too much money chasing too few goods. And the result was inflation. That was predictable. It was predicted and it happened.
Mark Steyn: And as you said, you don't have to have gone to university to get that because that's basically the economics you would learn in high school or even younger.
Jamie Jenkins: And a critical couple of words that Mervyn King said there Mark, it was predictable and it happened. You know, it was predictable, all the stuff that he did. And the other thing he said is that they all made the same mistake. So let's look at this, let's decipher this. Predictable and all made the same mistake. Same with lockdowns, all countries made the same mistake with lockdowns. And it was pretty predictable the health services across many nations would kind of collapse off the back of that as well. So you put all this and you start question, you know, people in the public expect, very respected, very intelligent people to be running these institutions. But if you mark the homework of the last four or five years, where obviously the pandemic itself, this big shock for the system but you start marking the homework of what we've seen is the banks have really messed up, who's winning at the moment Mark? The banks are actually winning, because interest rates are going up, the profits of banks are going through the roof. And I think that's probably a topic that we need to look into a little bit more in the coming months but then during the pandemic, who won? Well, all these people who had the links to these PPI contracts and the government paying absolute fortunes. So the public are losing an absolute fortune through all this Mark, central banks have let us down and I'm much more in the Mervyn King camp. He's got no skin in the game, Mervyn King has pretty much retired from public life. He popped up now and again to give his view as a former governor of the Bank of England. But while you've talked about Mark Carney is still looking for that next big post that he wants to have. I'd rather trust Mervyn King's opinion on things Mark than Mark Carney. And if Canada again ended with Mark Carney. Well, God help them.
Mark Steyn: Well, that's an interesting point in and of itself, isn't it? Sir Mervyn, whether he retired or not, but he seems, by comparison, a sort of parochial figure, you know, you can introduce him on the BBC as a former governor of the Bank of England, whereas for some reason I don't quite get, Mr. Carney. You called him a globalist. But he seems to bestride the world like a colossus, oh here he is in Davos or here he is at something in Malibu. Oh, here he is at some conference in Tahiti. It's very strange the way a man who was not obviously successful, simply rises ever upward.
Jamie Jenkins: Well, it's not the saying jack of all trades, but a master of none, because it's pretty clear he hasn't got no trade that he's a master of because if he's doing all of these things, you can't be an expert at economics, expert in climate, expert at running countries. Now, Mark Carney seriously needs to, you know, knock it on the head if he still thinks Brexit. You know, I'm a stats guy, we've talked for, you know, for the last year or so, on numbers. You literally you introduced a clip here today, you've only got to look at the data. If Brexit was to blame for the inflation in the United Kingdom, maybe you should put a call out for Mark Carney to come on the show. Let's ask him what is to blame for the inflation across the European Union? Hungary, Turkey, USA, what are going to blame? He won't come on the show, Mark, because you will give him a proper grilling that he can't actually kind of control when he would agree to do a, you know, a media interview with probably the people who want him on, and who won't give him the grilling.
Mark Steyn: No. And if he ever does decide, he's going to be Prime Minister of Canada, you can bet that the CBC isn't going to give him any kind of a grilling on that. You also send me a rather good quote from Mrs. Thatcher that you like the sound of.
Margaret Thatcher: Let us never forget this fundamental truth. The state has no source of money other than the money people earn themselves. If the state wishes to spend more, it can do so only by borrowing your savings, or by taxing you more. And it's no good thinking that someone else will pay. That someone else is you. There is no such thing as public money. That is only taxpayers' money.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, she is on crack and form as usual there. In fact, you would think people understand that by now because we were given all this free money during lockdown. People were being paid to stay at home. Oh, it's fantastic we're closing all the businesses, but don't worry, you're going to be paid just to sit in your one room flat all week long. And next thing you know, suddenly, the United Kingdom has the highest tax burden since the end of the Second World War. People must be able to make the connection between these two things, don't you think?
Jamie Jenkins: The problem Mark is people can't make the connection and they're fools. So you know, that clip there from Margaret Thatcher. You know, we're coming from an age where politicians on left and right, far more intelligent than what we've got today. You know, that golden era, you know, some people will criticize Margaret Thatcher for closing the mines and devastating some local economies. But she had far more intelligence than the current people we've got in today, Mark. So let's look at what she's talking about, though. She's right to the point that there is no such thing as kind of, you know, government's money, it's all our taxpayers money at the end of the day, we had a huge bailout of people when we had the COVID pandemic, you know, the banks as well, we had the bank bailout back in 2008. That's what led to austerity across United Kingdom and many other nations through that period from 2010 through to 2020.
And where we are at the moment, then Mark is now remember, I think we talked a bit about Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng's mini budget. And this time about, you know, might have been back end of September time I can't remember exactly when they come in there were so many times things have passed but the thing there was, they got kicked out Mark, because interest rates in the markets got kind of spooked. And at the moment, what we've got is the actual interest rates are much higher now than under that kind of regime. So Hunt and Sunak failure us there. But let's look at some really critical numbers. You know, let's put the numbers on this. When we talk about borrowing and who's their money. So in April 2023, a couple of months ago, the government borrowed 25.6 billion pounds in the United Kingdom. Now that's the second highest of the last 30 years. In the financial year ending 2023. Mark, they borrowed 137 billion. The total debt in the United Kingdom is 2.3 trillion. And the government is paying around 10 billion interest in April alone, just on the interest of this debt. So to think that Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak are good at controlling the finances much, much better than Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have is laughable mark, and I think we all got to come back to that Thatcher quote, no, this is not, you know, government's money, it's public money. And the finances have been absolutely shot.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, but it comes back to that sort of contrast between Mr. Carney and Sir Mervyn, is that there are some things you.....there are some things you do that meet the disapproval of the global consensus because the global consensus is entirely relaxed about its particular model of fiscal profligacy.
Jamie Jenkins: Well, I think the biggest issue is Mark, you know, we will have another election in the United Kingdom. We'll have elections in Germany, have elections all over the different world. But these countries when you when you got a debt of 2.3 trillion pounds, Mark, it's laughable to think that people who vote decide who runs the country. The money markets will decide who runs the country, because when you owe 2.3 trillion pounds, when you got, you know, 10 billion interest in a month, a course of a year, that's about 107 billion pounds in the financial year. And in 2023. When you've got those kinds of debt that you kind of hanging over here, it's a bit like having a noose around your neck. So whoever's in charge of the country you know if Keir Starmer got voted in and he started coming up with policy, that the money men and the money women didn't like, well, there'd be a big spook on the markets, the media would be all over it. So democracy, I think Mark has kind of died across many parts of the Western world, because of these deaths is pretty much not the voters deciding on the policies, it's pretty much the money men and the money women on terms of these markets. And that's the biggest travesty, we talk about the democratic deficit. Now, that is the big thing, it's the money that drives what's going on Mark, and people got to wake up and look at the actual money themselves.
Mark Steyn : Oh, yeah. It's literally a democratic deficit. Jamie, the old you know, whatever the old joke was, if you owe the bank 1000 pounds, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a million pounds, the bank has a problem. If you owe the bank, whatever you were saying 2.6 trillion, then your country and indeed the entire civilized world has a problem. If this keeps up it's not going to end anywhere good. Thank you very much, Jamie Jenkins. It's always good to see you. You can follow him at Twitter at Stats Jamie or check out the websites, statsjamie.co.uk. Thank you very much, Jamie, let us get to the most important part of the show, that is you.
[Mark's Mailbox]
Mark Steyn: Ken asks, "You mentioned before, how the Quebec independence referendum of 1995 failed because of the changing demographics in the years leading up to it. The future belongs to those who show up, as you often say."
Just to clarify what Ken's talking about there. Once upon a time Quebec Catholics used to have 11 or 12 children. The former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien is one of 12 kids, that was fairly typical for Catholics in Quebec, up until the 1960s, then they stopped having kids. And as a result come the 1995 Independence Referendum there were insufficient francophones to take that secession referendum over the finish line. If they continued having kids the way they did when Jean Chretien was a lad they would have their little independent la république québécoise by now.
Ken continues: "If by some miracle it passed, it lost by a tad over 1% would Quebec be any different today or would it still be an exemplar of the contradictions of multiculturalism?"
No. If Quebec were to achieve independence, then I don't think it would have the open borders that the United States has, or that Anglophone Canada has. They're rather more serious about that. And the fundamental thing is they believe in majority group rights, you can have a difference of opinion of that. They banned, for example, wearing burkas or other religious symbols if you're working in a Quebec government office, you might not like that. In Anglo Canada, they say, oh you know, why should we start banning costumes or all the rest of it? But the fact is, they're not in the suicide business in the same way that the United States and His Majesty's Dominions, whether in Canada or the UK or elsewhere, are not in the suicide business.
Lowry Durham says: "Regarding boycotts. While it seems that Bud Light and Target appear to be taking some lumps for their alignment with big trans, are we too far gone for it to be a long term strategy to ward off the insanity?"
These people insult you. The LA Dodgers have decided that they want to go with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a trans group, drag queens who are mock nuns. Wickes, the big DIY do it yourself home improvement guys in the United Kingdom, have said they're not interested in having any transphobic customers in their stores. You know, this gets to that basic thing. What you know what is it that meme on the internet? The Hitler thing? Oh, the two German guys sitting around "are we the baddies?" Yeah, yeah. When you're slicing the breasts of middle school girls, you're the baddies.
If sports and corporations and beers want to get it, don't drink a beer that's in favor of slicing the breasts off middle school girls. Don't support a baseball team that wants to render prepubescent school boys impotent. You know, that's about as basic baddie and goodie a thing as you want. You can do what you like to me. Do what you like to grownups. But keep your hands off the breasts of middle school girls. It's not a lot to ask.
Geoff says, "I know many people are already sick of BoJo but his fall is fascinating to watch."
You need to get out more, Geoff, you really do.
"I am curious though, he is a relatively young man. What does he do now?"
He doesn't want.....I think he's just started a column at the Daily Mail. He's done that for 40 years. You know, I think I said on Thursday's show that he did all that stuff, doing a column going on telly. He did all that on his way up. He doesn't want to go back to doing it on his way down. So look for him to become Klaus Schwab's even more evil deputy at Davos or something like that. But this Daily Mail, going on the telly stuff. He's done all that, he's done all that, he's done all that, he doesn't want to do it again for another 40 years. That'll do it for us lots more tomorrow.
Stay safe, stay free.
