Eight days to jury selection! After twelve years of pseudo-jurisprudential bollocks in the city where justice goes to die, the Mann vs Steyn trial will finally commence in Washington, DC on January 16th, just in time for my fourth heart attack.
If you seek a sane alternative to Michael E Mann's global-warming "hockey stick", there's always our handsome limited-edition trial souvenir: the SteynOnline Liberty Stick, made in the USA and showing both Magna Carta and the US Constitution. They're exclusively available here - and I sign and number each one.
~I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one who got a mordant laugh out of this line in Joe Biden's Feast of the Insurrection sermon:
"Political violence" is when the FBI kicks in the door of a fat old man with a cane and guns him down like an animal for putting up some spicy Facebook posts.
What Joe Biden is saying is he'd like to retain a monopoly on the political violence in America. https://t.co/gqs8glCuRx
— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) January 5, 2024
So "political violence is never ever acceptable in the United States political system. Never, never, never. It has no place in a democracy. None."
An odd thing to say about a "political system" in which Lieutenant Michael Byrd was able to kill Ashli Babbitt in cold blood as his Capitol Police colleagues were able to do likewise to another defenceless woman, Mariam Carey. I would hope to be wrong, but I would be surprised if America gets through this year without more "political violence" - because one side seems to be fomenting it as a pretext for intensifying what Mr Kelly calls their "monopoly" on it.
That monopoly is part of a broader problem in the United States: the abolition of equality before the law. If you can avoid getting dispatched as swiftly as Ms Babbitt, you will nevertheless have what remains of your life ruined by detention without trial, solitary confinement, double-digit years of prison with no possibility of parole... Americans have gotten the message. Do you recall, after the Canadian truckers' heroic Covid protests inspired the world, there was talk of a similar American Freedom Convoy?
Oh, you don't remember? Me neither. That's because it all fizzled out, as its proponents figured that the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt US Department of Justice would just treat it as January 6th on wheels.
~Of course, it didn't work out too great for the Canadian truckers, either: Frozen bank accounts, protracted prosecution... Small potatoes by US DOJ standards, and Lieutenant Byrd wasn't around to shoot them dead, but it has certainly been fierce and targeted by Canadian standards. Why? Because in Ottawa the "traffic disruption impacted residents' lives in many ways".
On the other hand, "pro-Palestinian" groups are currently disrupting traffic in Toronto. For over a week they've shut down the Avenue Road bridge over the 401. Why?
Well, it's a key artery into Toronto's and Canada's most Jewish neighbourhood. But, relax: they're not anti-Jew, they're just anti-Zionist. After all, many of these Jews in Armour Heights and Bathurst Manor are out every night bombing Gaza daycare centres. It's part of the same expansive definition of "pro-Palestinian" that has seen International Delicatessen Foods attacked because it has the same acronym as the Israeli Defence Force. But don't worry, they're not anti-Semites, just acro-Semites. If I were the famous Japanese tea master Takeno Jōō, I would hire additional security. But fortunately he died in 1555...
Yet, as I said, it all comes down to equality before the law. The Canadian truckers handed out coffee and doughnuts to locals and are still in the dock two years on. Whereas on the blockaded Avenue Road overpass the Toronto Police deliver coffee and doughnuts to the pro-Hamas lads:
"The Police are now becoming our little messengers."
Here's an idea. How about not delivering coffee to protesters who are disrupting traffic and blocking a bridge?@TPSOperations @TorontoPolice #Toronto @MPPKerzner @oliviachow pic.twitter.com/j3tnL90Txp
— David Jacobs (@DrJacobsRad) January 6, 2024
Roll up the Jews to win! In the old days, the German coppers pleaded that they were just obeying orders, but, as Kate MacMillan points out, the Toronto constables are just taking orders. Did you hear the way that fellow put it? "The police are now becoming our little messengers."
~And so it goes across the west: the police are delivering the message. In England, the coppers are entirely indifferent to Pakistani Muslim rape gangs enslaving white working-class girls in towns up and down the realm, but are ferociously obsessed with the bloke who has the poor taste to keep pointing it out, Tommy Robinson. In Nanterre, Nahel Marzouk, a teenager but already a career criminal, was unfortunately shot after fleeing a police stop; the entire French state and its media went into paroxysms of self-abasement before the Fifth Republic's very own George Floyd. When another teenager, Thomas Perotto, was fatally stabbed at a village dance, the state's priority was to go to considerable lengths to obfuscate that it was close to a dozen of Nahel Marzouk's co-religionists who had driven all the way to a rural commune for the express purpose of stabbing whites.
~The ruling classes of America and Europe have both chosen to dissolve the world's most advanced nations in the remorseless tide of open borders. But the Continent is a little advanced in the de-civilising process: As we noted recently, by 2020 forty per cent of "French" children four and under had what is euphemistically called an "immigrant background". In any society, who are your policemen? Young people. So what's the recruitment pool going to be for the gendarmerie in, say, 2040? We are in a fast transitioning world, and, on this existential issue, voting for Tories over Labour, or Giorgia Meloni over the "centre-left", does not seem to make any difference. The logic of that bleak truth does not lead anywhere good.
~Half-a-century back, Nathan Phillips Square was a symbol of the new multicultural Toronto. More prosaically, during the long Ontario winter, it was an agreeable place to skate. But that Canada is skating on ever thinner ice. Here the old and new Canadas meet:
There are a lot of people in Toronto that owe the early conservatives on twitter an apology. You were warned that Muslims will one day be accosting people on the streets of Toronto. Here it is. @MarkSteynOnline @ezralevant #TOpoli #onpoli #Toronto #ottawa #ottnews https://t.co/88hZ30NGFn
— @TheDailyNeedle (@TheDailyNeedle) January 8, 2024
The oldster is likely some (Pierre) Trudeaupian multiculti liberal who voted enthusiastically for all of this. But to those new Torontonians he might as well be Sir John A Macdonald or the first Viscount Melville. The transformation is accelerating. It is the young Mohammedan chappies who have, in the Britannic idiom, got their skates on.
Final word from the incoming:
Muslim illegal immigrants threaten the Danes: "We have 5 children and you have 1 or 2. In 10 years there will be more Muslims here than Danes. There are only 5 million Danes, soon you will be extermin@ted!" pic.twitter.com/uiIJ1lJ5it
— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) December 26, 2023
Those guys aren't wrong. The picture at top is the scene on New Year's Eve at the monument in Milan to Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of the newly united Italy. It looks super-united for New Year: no Italians, no women, just young Muslim men.
~My first and second Statements of Claim against the UK media censor Ofcom have been accepted for judicial review by the High Court of England and Wales. The King's Bench Division will hear the case in March. Many readers have inquired about how to support this landmark free-speech 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, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
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 - ask Kathy Gyngell);
d) snapping up one of the above-mentioned limited-edition SteynOnline Liberty Sticks; or
e) 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 the unravelling Covid narrative. Rick McGinnis's Saturday picture date examined not the movie business but the business movie, and Steyn returned to mark the Feast of the Insurrection. On Sunday our Song of the Week celebrated Buttons and Bows.
If you were too busy plagiarising your application for President of Harvard, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
