Last Wednesday, over lunch, I had another heart attack (mild), necessitating a trip to hospital, where a couple of days later I had yet another (milder). If you're going to have heart attacks, a medical facility (other than the NHS or the University of Vermont Medical Center) is about the best place to have them, so the doctors and nurses couldn't understand why I was so eager to bust free of their ministrations and leap on a flight to Heathrow for the additional stresses of a hearing in the English High Court:
On balance, however, I'm glad I made the journey. On Tuesday morning, I awoke in London to a myriad of supportive and touching emails by a diverse range of persons - from Oscar- and Tony-winners (of my pre-litigation life) to the indomitable survivors of the grisly and ongoing epidemic of child sex-slavery by Muslim rape gangs up and down the spine of England.
I am especially mindful of the latter, because it is why I miss the nightly iteration of The Mark Steyn Show, whereas I don't miss in the least Fox News Primetime or whatever it was called. As the miserable coverage of the UK's Tweedleleft vs Tweedleright election reminds us, politics is covered by the media largely as a closed-shop soap-opera with no real-world meaning: My old home The Spectator is particularly prone to this - "The Wonderful Guilelessness of Rishi Sunak", etc. You would have no idea that the parlour games of Blair and Cameron, May and Johnson, Sunak and Starmer have actual consequences in a vast mountain of ruined lives. As I used to say every so often on GB News, I have no interest in who next week's Lord Privy Seal is going to be ...but I don't believe working-glass girls should be gang-raped with impunity just because the Diversity Outreach Officer thinks it's a bit of a touchy subject ...and I don't think legions of people crippled and bereaved by a vaccine they never needed to take and which has now been withdrawn worldwide should have their very existence denied just because it's politically embarrassing to the likes of Sunak, Johnson and Hancock ...and I don't regard a thousand Albanians a night on the shores of southern England as something you have to put up with just because the BBC might call you racist if you object to it.
So I was heartened by my eve-of-court emails, and even more so when my cab pulled up outside the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand to find the pavement rather more crowded than it was, say, at the DC Superior Septic Tank back in January: there were favourite Steyn Show guests, Steyn Clubbers from across the British Isles and beyond, the courageous dissenters from the UK medical profession (Ros Jones, Clare Craig, Tony Hinton), dear friends such as Samantha Smith and Leilani Dowding, and of course the fearless Naomi Wolf, my fellow victim of an Ofcom drive-by conviction from no-name judges and prosecutors:
With @MarkSteynOnline outside the Royal Courts of Justice pic.twitter.com/XBgonjMhHd
— Dr Naomi Wolf (@naomirwolf) June 13, 2024
You can find Naomi's statement to the Court here:
I am here today because OfCom, the media watchdog agency, concluded that my presentation of information from scientific reports about the Pfizer injection, on Mark Steyn's TV show in October 2022, caused "harm." Ofcom also referred to me in public documents as a "conspiracy theorist," using that discrediting characterization of my work, as part of its decision to penalize Steyn for airing the show in which I brought forth the evidence I did.
Ofcom's barrister responded to this charge by saying that the regulator took no position on whether being a "conspiracy theorist" was a good or bad thing:
After a day in Royal Court of Justice @MarkSteynOnline talks about some crucial issues for consideration...
Open discussion & debate freely for all is critical pic.twitter.com/kzhxeQGCuj
— Alan D Miller (@alanvibe) June 11, 2024
Despite my having aged half-a-century in the last eighteen months, everyone kept telling me how great I looked. Good to know: another five or six heart attacks, and I'll be having to fight off the birds from all sides. As far as I'm aware, the only naysayer to show was Naomi's creepy stalker (and host of Radio Three's hilariously titled "Free Thinking" show) Matthew Sweet, who approached my pal Lola (our brilliant producer in the Steyn Show glory days). She asked him if he would be attending the proceedings, and he told her no, he was just strolling by on his way to the BBC - which she found odd because there's been no Beeb studios north, south, east or west of there since the World Service moved out of Bush House over a decade ago.
Sweetie & Co call us "anti-vaxxers". But it should hardly be necessary to point out what a contemptible libel this is: my friends at VIBUK and elsewhere are not "anti-vax"; they are crippled and widowed precisely because they and their loved ones took the "vax" - a medical intervention they had no medical reason to take. From that day's Daily Mail:
'My son Adam, 41, had everything to live for. But he died after the AstraZeneca vaccine gave him a blood clot.' Mail readers share stories of the deaths or health problems they fear were caused by the jab... and their battles for compensation.
This line gave me a mordant chuckle:
Your response to Gareth's article [in April] surprised us. We received dozens of letters and emails recounting experiences of ill health, or even bereavement, after having the jab developed by AstraZeneca.
Well, they wouldn't have been "surprised" if they'd been watching the Steyn show two years ago. Alas, as I always say, there is no greater sin in media than being right too soon.
Aside from Kathy Gyngell from The Conservative Woman and the chap from the Press Association, there wasn't a lot of evidence of media presence, but the case did attract quite a bit of press coverage by reporters who, as is increasingly their wont, were not there. From The Daily Telegraph:
Speaking in court for Mr Steyn on June 10th, his lawyer Jonathan Price said: "The rulings against his show have killed his career, killed his career in the U.K. and given rise to what he describes as crude defamation... recycled through the London papers as if they had the force of criminal convictions..."
Ofcom had found that on April 21st 2022 statistics from the U.K. Health Security Agency were presented in a "materially misleading way" in a broadcast which received four complaints.
It ruled that the show incorrectly "provided definitive evidence of a causal link between receiving a third COVID-19 vaccine and higher infection, hospitalisation and death rates".
It "ruled"? Yeah, because Ofcom's anonymous regulators know so much more about that third shot than, say, the Cleveland Clinic. (More from Clare Craig and Stephen McIntyre.)
Beyond the Bear Garden, in Court Two it was a capacity crowd. In the old days, in my experience, the system used to be quite good at estimating the size of courtroom required, but I couldn't honestly say the officious jobsworths of RCJ "court services" were terribly impressive. Even finding a key to open up the gallery proved a challenge. I was getting ready to stand up and reprise my shtick from Washington, re the famous dictum of a former resident of the Royal Courts, Lord Chief Justice Viscount Hewart, that justice has not only to be done, it has to be seen to be done.
But, somewhat surprisingly to me, Madam Justice Farbey took the situation seriously, and invited the members of the public to move forward and squeeze up on counsels' benches and even unoccupied clerks' seats. The splendid isolation of the English court - with only bewigged barristers in the star pew - was dispensed with, and Naomi and I found ourselves squashed up with Ofcom legal director Nuala Cosgrove and her half-dozen other enforcers.
It's not like the DC court, where they recess every twenty minutes. The aforementioned Jonathan Price began and powered straight through to the lunch break. So I am amazed at the number of people who remained outside the door for hours on end to be belatedly brought up to speed on what had gone on within. If you were among them, I cannot thank you enough. The biggest courtrooms in the building are those of the Lord Chief Justice of England and the President of the King's Bench Division. From distant memory of their capacity, I'm confident we could have filled those, and then some.
At the end of the day, Steyn Clubber Chris Davies threw a rather glamorous thank-you reception for well-wishers, and I discovered they had come not just from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but from Spain and Canada, too. Also present were former GB News presenters like Laurence Fox and Calvin Robinson. Most important were vax victims such as Jules Serkin, Wayne Cunnington and Howard Griffiths, people whose very existence much of Britain's politico-media establishment continue to deny:
Thank you @MarkSteynOnline & @justchrisdavies for invitation to last nights Mark Steyn London Event in the presence of global heavyweights.I refrained from taking too many selfies but pleased to capture @justchrisdavies @MarkSteines @julesserkin @LeilaniDowding & @TonyHinton2016 pic.twitter.com/o4lXf3B3ab
— Howard Griffiths ☀️ (@HowardGriffiths) June 12, 2024
Poor Jules collapsed at the event, but fortunately was caught by Leilani before she hit the marble. Chris called the emergency number, 999, whose operator attempted to contact the ambulance dispatcher. But they weren't picking up, so the switchboard lady suggested that maybe the patient could find some other way to get to the hospital. After my two attacks in the previous six days, my own minders were under strict instructions that in the event of anything happening they were to shove me into a cab to Heathrow and book the first flight out, to anywhere else.
My doctors were not wrong to advise against making the trip. On Wednesday I came down with a brutal 'flu, or "Long Covid" or the new monkeypox variant or whatever, and have been bed-bound ever since.
These days, whenever I'm anywhere other than padding about my New Hampshire county or its neighbour across the Connecticut River in Vermont, I sort of assume I'm there for possibly the last time. If this proves to be my final visit to the Strand and St James's and Piccadilly, well, it was worth the trip.
Once again my thanks to all, and assuming the monkeypox abates normal service will be resumed over the weekend.
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly 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.