As you may know, global warm-monger Michael E Mann's twelve-year defamation suit against me is going to trial at the District of Columbia Superior Court on January 16th - supposedly, that is: given the last-minute cancellation of the previously scheduled trial, I'm not taking anything for granted until jury selection has been underway for an hour or two. Mr Mann is the creator of the famous climate-change "hockey stick"; I have to make do with the SteynOnline Liberty Stick.
Mine is not, however, the only defamation suit in America's depraved capital city. A Georgia mother and her daughter cannily chose Washington as the venue in which to sue the formerly beloved "America's mayor". It has paid off handsomely:
Jury Orders Giuliani to Pay $148 Million to Election Workers He Defamed
I've had multiple requests to discuss my upcoming trial in light of the Giuliani verdict. Well, the two cases don't really have anything in common - except that the fine upstanding jurors who will decide my fate are drawn from the same pool that decided his. Gulp.
I doubt by this stage of his fortunes that Giuliani has a hundredth of the amount he owes the victorious plaintiffs. However, his lawyer did not help his cause with this line:
A jury decision awarding tens of millions of dollars in damages for defamation would be a "death penalty" for Rudy Giuliani, his lawyer said during opening statements in a trial that got underway Monday....
"If you award them what they are asking for, it will be the end of Mr Giuliani," Joseph Sibley, Giuliani's attorney said.
I would fire any counsel of mine who said that - because it would, very obviously, be too big a temptation for a DC jury to resist.
~A generation back, when Bill O'Reilly started talking on Fox News about "the war on Christmas", it was mainly cultural: store owners who ordered their clerks to say "Happy Holidays!" instead of "Merry Christmas!", etc. In Europe, the war on Christmas is literal. Courtesy of Bild, here's a German Santa who evidently didn't check his naughty list twice:
The Königsalm at the Christmas market had hired Rainer B. as St. Nicholas. "I've been doing this for years in different cities. This was my first Christmastime in Kassel. I've been to discos and to private parties, sometimes on horseback. I am happy when others are happy – not only the children, but also older people."
On 6th December [the Feast of St Nicholas], dressed as St. Nicholas and carrying a sack full of tangerines, apples, nuts and some chocolate as well as a rod made of hazelnut branches, the 54-year-old made his way to the city centre...
"Everything was very peaceful," said Rainer B.
But then:
"Five or six youths came up to me from across the street and asked me to take off my costume because this was their country. They said they were Muslims, then they yanked me around until my cloak broke. They insulted me as a 'fat bag' and a 'son of a bitch'. One grabbed me round the neck..."
Passers-by are said to have applauded and laughed – without helping.
He told police that the youths had an apparent migrant background, aged between fourteen and sixteen... "It all happened so quickly. I'm still shocked, depressed, almost traumatized. I've been doing the St Nicholas job for so long now, with never a bad word. On the contrary, people were always happy."
The game Rainer B nevertheless staggered on to keep his date at the Christmas market. As his boss told Bild:
He was very upset when he arrived at our place, his costume was torn. That's why we didn't take photos on that day.
As I first wrote twenty years ago, Islam attaches great significance to control of the public square. Kassel is a city of 200,000, a little over forty per cent of whom have a "migrant background", as Bild puts it. The "migrant" forty per cent is young; the ethnic Germans are old. Think there'll be sidewalk Santas in, oh, 2030? That Christmas market is going to need a lot more bollards.
~Maybe these guys need to form a paramilitary wing - the Red Brigades or the Santanistas or some such. From the Bayshore Mall in Ottawa:
A large group of anti-Israel demonstrators surrounded Santa in Ottawa's Bayshore Shopping centre yesterday.
You can hear the terrified screams of children as the demonstrators chant "Jesus was Palestinian" pic.twitter.com/aMzTW70bsE
— Dacey Media (@chrisdacey) December 17, 2023
~Oh, well, you say. That's just Father Christmas. As they say in America, Jesus is the reason for the season. So how's that going? I generally just keep an eye on places I have a slight connection with - such as Milan, where I was for a bit of post-Steyn Cruise medical treatment a couple of months back. Fortunately, I got out before Midnight Mass:
Moroccan Muslim breaks into a church in Villastanza (Milan) with ax, destroys crucifixes and nativity scenes and then burns church. They hate us. pic.twitter.com/PkAo06LSZs
— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) December 15, 2023
Mohammed is the reason there'll be no season.
And so much for that "Jesus was Palestinian" shtick in Ottawa. Evidently the arsonist axeman didn't get the memo.
~Meanwhile, across the border, The Spectator's French correspondent Gavin Mortimer writes of Macron's refusal to hold a referendum on immigration:
So the French people continue to be denied a voice on the most important issue of the century, one which is rapidly transforming their country. The most recent census in France, in 2020, revealed that 40 per cent of children between the ages of 0 and 4 have an immigrant background of some kind, overwhelmingly from Africa.
So the "Great Replacement" is just a conspiracy theory and Camp of the Saints is a sick racist fantasy you shouldn't even mention. But forty per cent of your pre-schoolers having an "immigrant background" is perfectly natural, could happen to any country. Any day now, forty per cent of Saudi kindergartners will be Jews, you'll see.
What do you reckon? By the 2030 census, when those infants will be in middle and high school, will that forty per cent have dipped a little? Or will it be up, maybe over fifty per cent?
Macron may be right: we're getting way beyond referenda. The practical options look more like: a) converting to the incoming majority; or b) sacking the Élysée.
~What do the young 'uns want for Christmas anyway? New poll:
Majority of Americans 18-24 think Israel should 'be ended and given to Hamas'
Even Simon (Open Borders) Schama is beginning to get a little worried about where all this is headed. But relax: that "majority of Americans 18-24" is probably just those fringe right-wing neo-Nazis the ADL is always going on about.
~A few months back I filed my second Statement of Claim against the above-mentioned UK media censor Ofcom in the English High Court. Many readers, listeners and viewers have inquired about how to support my landmark lawsuit against Commissars Michael Grade and Melanie Dawes over their throttling of honest discussion of the Covid and the vaccines. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand this Yuletide season, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership - it makes a great Christmas gift;
b) buying a near-and-dear one a SteynOnline gift certificate;
c) ordering a copy of my latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it);
d) snapping up one of the above-mentioned limited-edition SteynOnline Liberty Sticks;
e) treating your loved ones to one of our seasonal Steynamite Specials; or
f) lavishing upon your beloved a once-in-a-lifetime Mark Steyn Caribbean Cruise.
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause - and, in the rest, a significant chunk thereof. 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 busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark pondering our revolting elites. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date starred Joan Blondell, Bette Davis and Ann Dvorak in Three on a Match, and Steyn returned to look at the latest example of those revolting elites. On Sunday our Song of the Week celebrated the ultimate Christmas standard - part of a special slate of seasonal programming that also included Mark's adaptation of A Christmas Carol: click for Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.
If you were too busy spending the weekend having gay sex in the Senate chamber, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
