Today was supposed to be the start of the second week of my trial in the District of Columbia Superior Court. But, as you know, the judge yanked the trial, perhaps because he wants to break the record of his other long-running case, which is now entering its twenty-third year.
Oddly enough, the parade of genius jurists unable to do anything except extend that case another half-decade or so (the Honorable Frederick H Weisberg, etc) rang a few bells with me. Now why would that be?
Oh, yeah ...because I've had 'em all, too: Weisberg was our second non-trial "trial judge", Anderson our third, and Irving the fourth - so what I thought to be a freakish one-off looks a little more like standard operating procedure from the DC septic tank of justice. Oh, and our case also took an extended intermission to the sclerotic DC Court of Appeals in the middle years of the last decade.
Given that America's hideous and laughably misnamed "judicial branch" has now extended its torments from no-name Canadians to the presumptive candidate of the opposition party, you'd think GOP "leaders" might be giving some thought to at least a few modest judicial "reforms" before the de facto nature of America's one-party state starts getting more de jure. Any chance of that?
In the meantime, I thank everyone who's signed up for one of our limited-edition trial souvenirs: The SteynOnline Liberty Stick. The trial may be postponed for a few weeks (or months, or years), but the Liberty Stick is shipping right now. It features both Magna Carta and the US Constitution - and, given the way things are going, once both documents have been thoroughly expunged from the Internet, my Liberty Stick may be the last discernible trace that they ever existed. Every stick is signed and numbered by yours truly - and is made right here in the USA. You can find them here.
The costs of the last-minute trial cancellation are extraordinary - from my travels home from Europe against my doctors' advice to the standing-down of Ann and Phelim's thespians to the return flight home for my former publicist Amy K Mitchell, who had flown in to DC to do nightly trial updates for us. At any rate, with me reduced to sitting around twiddling my thumbs waiting for Judge Irving's Zoom-call "status conference" in eight days' time, herewith a few thoughts on the passing parade:
~I'm interested in preserving enough of our civilisation so that we have a sporting chance of eventually surviving the new Dark Ages about to descend. A great obstacle to that is the American academy and its anglosphere cousins. If you're a big moneybags who persists in giving money to any educational institution other than Hillsdale and one or two others, you're part of the problem.
I've mentioned before my long-ago cocktail with Tom Wolfe in the Café Carlyle. He was a very clever fellow, and right about most things, but I found myself forced to disagree when he observed that college students just nodded along with what we then called political correctness and promptly forgot it all ten minutes after graduation. That confident complacency has cost us our world: America is now one giant college campus - one of the nuttier ones - with the British Dominions as low-grade equivalents.
So go ahead and "preserve your legacy" by endowing a new building at Harvard. They'll rename it for some BLM pin-up, or an antifa psychotranny, or a Somali suicide-bomber, or some other novelty ...and your "legacy" will be floating down the Charles River to wash up on the west coast of Ireland on some firebreathing imam's beachfront madrassah.
Through bitter experience, I'm not a big fan of sugar-daddy conservatism, but these guys could at least stop funding the enemy.
~As you know, I'm currently suing the UK state censor Ofcom for their ersatz-judicial "rulings" against my coverage of the Covid vaccines, and the damage they've done. Headline from a new survey by the respected American pollster Rasmussen:
Killer Jab? 24% Say Someone They Know Died From COVID-19 Vaccine
And, despite what you might have expected, this must be the most non-partisan issue out there:
There are almost no political differences on these questions. For example, 25% of Republicans say they know someone personally who died from side effects of COVID-19 vaccine, as do 24% of Democrats and those not affiliated with either major party.
~My friend Eva Vlaardingerbroek has a slogan she uses on her social media: Resist Much, Obey Little. Look around your neighbourhood: How many Resisters are there? How many Obeyers? After the last three-and-a-half years, that's really the existential question for the native populations of the western world.
But forget Covid: After the last month, how many of our fellow citizens are still prepared to string along with the Number One Great Lie that "diversity is our strength"? Even as the implacable hatreds of distant lands are imported to our streets, via a malign alliance between a resurgent Islam and a western left raised to loathe its entire civilizational inheritance.
Resisters vs Obeyers is not a fifty-one per cent proposition: as the late George Jonas used to say, it's about which group has the most energy. Here, for example, the Brit Wanker Coppers of the laughingstock Metropolitan Police are harrassing some Londoners for waving what is (for the moment) the national flag of the United Kingdom:
Officer: "There's way more of them than there are of us."
Mob rule more powerful than the law.
Obvious, but interesting to hear him admit it. https://t.co/1TCWfaWlll
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) November 4, 2023
Some bolshy cockney wants to know why the wanker coppers aren't being similarly tough on those with Palestinan flags. The answer - that there are "way more of them than there are of us" - is not the whole story: the constable knows that, were he to try to constrain the Hamas types, they would push back against "the authorities" - and the delicate gossamer pretence of what today's United Kingdom is and who's in charge would disintegrate. A Resister has to be prepared to resist not just the alien mob annexing his nation but the establishment institutions that have been co-opted by them. In this week before Remembrance Day, Westminister Council, unnerved by the Hamas lads' preying on British monuments, has ordered the removal of flags from the Cenotaph - the nation's tribute to its "Glorious Dead" and the services in which they fought. So, to avoid distressing the cheerleaders of baby-butchers, the standards of the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force have been taken down (see top right). In the course of my life, I must have walked down Whitehall hundreds of times, and I can never recall seeing those flags not there.
So this is a first - and a telling one.
There must be many veterans who have an old naval or air force ensign at home. (As you know, at Steyn HQ we are big ensign fans and fly the 1922 Canadian modification of the old red duster in our TV studio.) And there are millions more who surely have a Union Flag to hand. Are there no plucky chaps willing to restore the trio of standards to the Cenotaph and stand guard around it? Or is that kind of provocative energy confined only to one side?
If so, the "Great Transitioning" I spoke of on Friday will accelerate - until nothing remains. As I have said for a month, what's happening on the streets of western cities is not ultimately about Jews; it's about you. The fruits of "diversity" are ripening a little earlier than expected.
~By the way, can we now finally retire Godwin's Law? When Mr Godwin coined it, a third-of-a-century back, it was because it was self-evidently absurd that the trivial disputes of our age would inevitably descend into Nazi accusations. But that's not the reason to mothball it now. Instead, it's time to junk the clapped-out Third Reich comparisons because they are insufficient to our needs.
A post-war German could more or less reasonably claim, "Well, it just never occurred to me the government would kill six million people. I mean, why would it? Nobody had ever done that before." As I said a month ago:
The reason the Germans had to hold their Wannsee conference in secret is because, if they had announced in public they were going to kill all the Jews, even your average quiet-life keep-your-head-down Kraut might have felt a bit queasy about it.
Since I wrote that, kill-all-the-Jews has gone mainstream on the streets of almost every western capital. And, unlike such vital questions as who Laurence Fox is prepared to shag, polite society seems very relaxed about it.
~Final word on flags - and from someone who has more reason to curse the British state than most:
No one will ever stop me from flying the flag of our great nation 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/lgAJCGzNeN
— Samantha Smith (@SamanthaTaghoy) November 5, 2023
One day, when Samantha is next in our studio, we'll re-enact the above with me modelling my Red Ensign and Miss Smith her mother-country original, and viewers can vote on who wears it best.
~As noted above, to while away the longeurs in this twelfth year of Mann vs Steyn, a few weeks back I filed my second Statement of Claim against the UK media censor Ofcom in the King's Bench Division of the English High Court. Many readers, listeners and viewers have inquired about how to support my landmark lawsuit against Lord Grade and his goons over their throttling of honest discussion of the Covid and the vaccines. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a chum a SteynOnline gift certificate;
c) ordering a copy of my latest book The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it); or
d) snapping up one of the aforementioned Liberty Sticks.
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause - and, in the last, a significant chunk thereof save for the shipping costs. And, in all cases, you or your loved one gets something, too.
~Notwithstanding Mark's one-step-forward-three-steps-back health, we had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's big-picture essay on The Great Transitioning. On Saturday our friends Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney addressed the DC Superior Court's weird inability to bring Steyn to trial on a special edition of The Ann & Phelim Scoop. And Mark himself returned to contemplate the sight of his nemesis on the big screen in Dr Mann, Super Villain. We rounded out the weekend with a song for Guy Fawkes Night.
If you've yet to hear our most recent Tale for Our Time - Mark's variation on a theme of H G Wells - its central strand (the demographic transformation of the western world) is more timely than ever after the last months on the streets of London, Paris, Stockholm, Sydney, Toronto, New York, etc. You can start with Part One here.
If you were too busy spending the weekend trashing the Cenotaph, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.