Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, our midweek Clubland Q&A presents another hour of questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet - and this time, the time zones having re-aligned themselves, we're back at our regular hour for listeners in the US, Canada, Jamaica, the Caymans and one or two other places. So that's 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European.
Some notes on the passing scene:
~Yesterday was another dark day for the west's fast-fading freedom of speech. Scotland's new "Hate Crime" law came into effect, formalising (among other things) my perennial gag that in the UK (or at least this miserable corner of it) everything is policed except crime: The wanker coppers will now be spending ever more of their worthless days sitting around monitoring your Twitter account. Oh, don't worry, Scotland's "First Minister" and the plods themselves have been at pains to assure you that they're going to keep a sense of proportion about their new thought-crime powers. That's why their "training exercise" for the new law was a lady Tweeter called "Jo" who wants to send all transpersons to the gas chambers.
The Jo in question took it in her stride:
'Arrest me!': JK Rowling challenges Scotland's new hate crime laws
There followed on her Twitter feed a witheringly sarcastic roll call of the various bepenised women (see picture at top right) whose pathologies the decadent end-stage Scottish state has indulged.
Hers was the only sane Scots reaction I read yesterday, certainly from any public figure. Everyone else seems to have figured that cis-discretion is the better part of valour.
Her splendid isolation will surely have been noticed by that totalitarian constabulary. Maybe they will arrest her. As I said in After America some years ago, what matters are the habits of liberty. Once a people lose those, there are no easy ways back.
~Remember that guy in Sweden last year burning Korans in front of mosques? Last week, the authorities in Stockholm ordered him to be deported. Now we have a dramatic development:
Quran-burner Salwan Momika reported to have been found dead
The body was discovered in Norway.
~In the glory days of Hollinger's global newspaper empire, Caroline Glick was one of my sharpest colleagues. This was her reaction to last week's Moscow terror attack by the Tajik hair stylist:
The attack in Russia is a terrible tragedy. But we need to understand the humanitarian aid to the innocent families of the gunmen.
— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) March 23, 2024
Speaking of "humanitarian aid", almost every Gaza-derived "fact" recycled by the rubes of the most respected western media outlets withstands not the slightest bit of scrutiny. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times:
.@janearraf of @NPR quotes a Jordanian official as saying that 30,000 aid trucks are stuck at the Egypt/Gaza border, waiting for Israeli approval to enter Gaza, with some Jordanian trucks stuck there for the last two months. Meanwhile, Gaza kids starve. https://t.co/4h5fLTdknN
— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) March 27, 2024
Not many of these "aid trucks" are eighty-foot-long American-style eighteen-wheelers. But, even if they're all just the basic twenty-foot delivery lorry you see all over Egypt, thirty thousand of them would still stretch over a hundred miles across the Sinai desert halfway to Cairo. Impressive.
Give it another week, and poor old General Sisi will be unable to get to his presidential palace.
~By common consent, the best coverage of the Mann vs Steyn travesty came from "Ann McElhinney's and Phelim McAleer's hour-long daily reconstruction of the trial with actors reading out court transcripts as a play—and an exciting one at that". Not long after October 7th, Ann and Phelim flew to southern Israel to interview the survivors of that day, including those who'd been dancing the night away at the peacenik music festival. They have now turned those recordings into another "exciting play", although in this case a far bloodier one. Phelim McAleer:
OCTOBER 7 is a verbatim play. It is based entirely on interviews with those who lived through the day. No added drama or editorializing. It's the story of Israel's darkest day in the words of those who lived through it...
You'll hear the suspenseful, riveting stories of a dozen people who lived through that day. There's a police officer who defended his village for 24 hours, a mother who kept her family safe while terrorists tried to breakdown their door, and young people who had their peaceful worldview shattered when they were attacked at a concert.
October 7 opens at the Actors Temple Theatre in midtown Manhattan in May. You can read more about it in The Daily Mail - because apparently it takes a Fleet Street newspaper and a couple of Irish chancers to do the job Nicholas Kristof's "newspaper of record" won't do. Ann and Phelim plan to take this play to every Jew-hating college campus, in which case it will be on tour longer than the road company of Cats. But, as you'll gather, the security costs of such an endeavour are extraordinary, so any support you can give this production would be much appreciated.
~Speaking of Andrew Lloyd Webber, if you've ever been to a Trump rally, you'll know he's very partial to the title song from Phantom of the Opera - which we played a week back by way of tribute to Steve Harley. As I had the pleasure of telling the candidate way back when, I eventually worked out that all his warm-up music was by tenants of his at Trump Tower - such as Andrew.
Now the Never Trumpers at the Lincoln Project have decided to use Trump's musical-theatre enthusiasms against him. No, I didn't know they were still around either, not since the founder got exposed for hitting on fourteen-year-old boys. But apparently they're still in business, although without the funds to hire a parodist of wit. This is super-lame:
By the way, if the object is to make Trump look like a total loser, it doesn't help to show Melania in an absolutely fabulous dress.
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly couple of months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead. And we look forward to bringing the UK state censor Ofcom into court in just over two months' time.
