UPDATE! We have a judge, a courtroom and a time - 10.30am Tuesday June 11th in Court Two, conveniently located on the first floor (in the non-American sense) of the Royal Courts of Justice right next to the transgender bathrooms:
Before MRS JUSTICE FARBEY DBE | COURT 2 | At 10:30 AM | AC-2023-LON-001656 The King (on the application of STEYN) v OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS | FOR HEARING.
~I am en route to London for Tuesday's hearing in the High Court in my suit against the UK's state censor Ofcom over The Mark Steyn Show's coverage of the Covid vaccines. It was a rough time for me health-wise last week, and I would rather not be making this journey. Aside from anything else, it seems faintly absurd that it is necessary to litigate this matter at all. The official narrative enforced by Ofcom - that the vaccines are 100 per cent "safe and effective" - is now obsolete and indefensible; the principal British vaccine has been withdrawn worldwide; and the United Kingdom's legions of celebrity telly doctors are belatedly known to have been paid by Big Pharma to promote the efficacy of the jabba-jabba.
But they still have their TV gigs, don't they? And Ofcom has no plans to do anything about that. Even though what they did - to receive compensation for promoting a medical product - is supposedly illegal.
~In such a world, the European election results are ...well, modestly encouraging. On the basis of mere exit polls, the Belgian Prime Minister has been forced to resign and the French President has been bounced into doing a Sunak - dissolving the National Assembly and calling a "snap election" for the end of the month. An election he is certainly going to lose, and very badly.
So the bigshots whooping it up at Normandy just a couple of days ago had a bad night: Macron's party got less than half the votes of Marine Le Pen's. Indeed, between her triumphant National Rally and M Zemour's Reconquête (the Reconquest party), what the BBC and even the Telegraph insist on calling the "far right" got just shy of forty per cent of the vote. (M Zemour's party is for those who think Mme Le Pen is no longer "far right" enough.) In Germany Olaf Scholz saw his party come third, behind the even more "far right" Alternative für Deutschland. Over a million of Scholz's voters switched to the ooh-ever-so-far-right AfD.
So the "far right" are getting a lot nearer: maybe the Telegraph should try holding the telescope the right way round.
Instead, the media took consolation in finding the far-right rampage didn't go quite as far as it might: in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders' Freedom Party has gone from zero seats to six to emerge as the largest single Dutch party in the European Parliament - but all the experts are agreed that for some reason this is a wee bit of an under-performance.
Within the numbers are some interesting trends: Green parties did badly across the board, and in Germany significant numbers of their young voters switched to AfD. The question, as always, is whether these shifts are urgent enough to arrest the Continent's accelerating degeneration into a Eurabian dump - or whether it's a last half-hearted spasm before surrender to the inevitable.
But what is undeniable is that voters across the west are demanding more choices than their blinkered elites are willing to offer. Random example: "There was also less success for the far right," pronounced the Beeb, "in Belgium where the separatist Vlaams Belang lost out to the nationalist New-Flemish Alliance."
Like much of the BBC's reporting, this isn't quite accurate: Both the Vlaams Belang and the New Flemish Alliance are "separatist" and "nationalist". Both parties want to bust up Belgium and have an independent Flanders, but the NFA is more "centre-right" about its secessionist ambitions than the harder-core VB. This would not have been considered a normal electoral choice in the capital city of the European Union as recently as a decade ago.
Is there a way out for the Euro-princelings? As Marine Le Pen said last week, "You get the feeling Macron wants a war." There's a lot of that about.
~As I had cause to reflect after watching the seven-party UK election "debate" on the Beeb, Ofcom-approved "public discourse" isn't worth a tuppence three-farthing. Indeed, the purpose of Ofcom, "BBC Verify" and the various "disinformation" and "misinformation" units that now afflict us is to ensure that free speech gets hemmed in ever more tightly within parameters that ensure nothing of any consequence will ever be discussed. The most pitiful moment on Friday night came when Farage's riff on mass migration was received in stony silence and the Scots Nationalist bloke denounced him and said migrants were great and very necessary - and the crowd erupted into rapturous applause, cheering their own eclipse and the death of their nation. It is kind of impressive to see even a BBC audience willing to go down on the Titanic of multicultural illusions: we don't need no stinkin' lifeboats.
There is no point to Scots nationalism because there aren't going to be any Scots. In 2022, Scottish deaths outnumbered births by thirty per cent. The Scottish people don't need a nation because, on those trends, eventually you'll be able to fit 'em all into a suburban cul-de-sac. So whoever that SNP guy was has now come up with a new rationale - Scots nationalism that doesn't require any actual Scots: you're so touchy that you don't want to be in the same nation as the English, Irish and Welsh, so you want to leave it and be in the same nation as the Sudanese and Albanians.
In the end, it's all demography. The trans madness in which the present Scottish government is so invested is fascinating but ultimately a biological dead end: You can change all the boys into girls and all the girls into boys but in the end there aren't enough of either to alter the outcome. You're merely arguing about who'll be using which bathroom on the Oblivion Express.
~I thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly few 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 I look forward to seeing a few of you in and around the King's Bench Division of the English High Court tomorrow.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on destiny, demography and the perils of over-gatekeeping. On Saturday, Mark Steyn on the Town noted the connection between the King of the Swingers and the Emperor of Austria. For his weekend movie date, Rick McGinnis picked the second James Bond film, From Russia with Love, and Steyn's Song of the Week bade a nostalgic farewell to the Second World War as living memory. Our marquee presentation was Mark's latest Tale for Our Time - the Hans Christian Andersen story The Shadow: You can find Part One here, and the concluding episode here.
If you were too busy wondering if we should change the name of the "far right" to the near right, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.