I'm still recuperating from my courthouse exertions in London last week. However, a couple of thoughts on the passing parade:
~As I first wrote over two decades ago, Islamic supremacism attaches great importance to the annexation of the public space. To mark the Canadian centennial of 1967, half of Dominion Square in Montreal was renamed Place du Canada. Half-a-century later, during a Defund-the-Police protest, the magnificent statue of Sir John A Macdonald was toppled and decapitated, and the craven city council decided he would not be returned to his pride of place.
But these are mere poseur flourishes. (Pierre) Trudeaupian nationalism is dead, and the "anti-colonialist" nihilism that supplanted it is a mere death-spasm of demographically irrelevant western youth. Like the man said all those years ago, the future belongs to Islam. Bottoms up:
Welcome to Canada 🇨🇦 This morning at Place du Canada in Montreal
🎥 @guillaum3roy pic.twitter.com/yJlHuQiSNl
— Melissa 🇨🇦 (@MelissaLMRogers) June 16, 2024
~This headline caught my eye:
U.S. Justice: the Strange Cases of President Donald Trump & Mark Steyn
I'm flattered, but, in fairness - looking at, say, proposed Congressional legislation to withdraw Secret Service protection from Trump - I don't think I'm up against the same implacable urge actually to kill me. Then again, who can say? I have no particular desire to end up as merely the latest "justifiable homicide", like the unfortunate Executive Director of the Bill and Hillary Clinton International Airport.
In any event, the above turned out to be the title of a lecture at the Danube Institute in Budapest by James Allan, law professor at the University of Queensland. If the video gets posted, we'll certainly link to it. However, Professor Allan did give an interview on both trials to The Hungarian Conservative.
What all these cases have in common - Giuliani, Navarro, Bannon, Flynn, the J6 grandmas, etc - is the determination to inflict utter ruin. And thereby render politics, as that term is understood in civilised societies, entirely impossible.
So yet again, by pretending that anything approaching the necessary conditions for politics currently exist in the United States, Conservative Inc and the butch boys with the butch bumper music are merely deluding their followers.
~Why do I think the UK state censor Ofcom should be put out of business? Because there are very few areas of British life that this strange, secretive body does not "regulate". Take, for example, this current UK election campaign, which the media are keen to keep as a torpid Potemkin struggle between TweedleLeft and TweedleRight. So, on Thursday night, BBC bigshot Fiona Bruce will host a debate between the four party leaders - that's to say, the head honchos of the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.
Wait a minute: what about Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform party? Since the beginning of the year, Reform has been third-placed in the polls, ahead of the LibDems and Greens, and last week they rose to second place ahead of the unlovely Tories.
So why wouldn't the second-place party get a spot in the leaders' telly debate?
Ah, well, you're looking at it all wrong, you hick. Here's how the Beeb explain it:
The Ofcom guidance gives 'greater weight on the actual performance of a political party in elections over opinion poll data' taking into account the 'greater uncertainty associated with support in opinion polls'.
The "actual performance of a political party" refers to their results in the two previous elections - 2019 and 2015 - when Reform didn't exist. A lot of other things didn't exist in 2015: Brexit, Covid, lockdown, the Ukraine war, legions of vaccine victims, the massed ranks of Albanian males occupying English country-house hotels...
But, per "Ofcom guidance", Campaign 2024 has to be conducted on the basis of how things stood a decade ago.
You know who would also be ineligible to participate under Ofcom's rules? Everyone's favourite Lana Turner sweater-girl in Kiev, Volodymyr Zelenskyyyyy. He only formed his Servant of the People party in late 2017, so no election debates for you, sweater-girl. And don't try blaming it on Putin, because it's "Ofcom guidance" so we all know it's on the up-and-up.
Because, as their barrister assured the High Court, Ofcom are "expert regulators". Lord Grade and Dame Melanie Dawes probably did a module in regulation at Rotherham Polytechnic or whatever.
I can see why the likes of Naomi Wolf's creepy stalker-boy Matthew Sweet like this system: it's a club and they get to decide who's admitted. It's less obvious why the generality of the citizenry put up with it. At any rate, get set for another thrilling BBC election debate in which all four "opponents" agree on Covid, climate, Ukraine, the joys of mass Muslim immigration and the inviolability of the NHS ...but ever more furiously denounce each other for not tossing enough money that doesn't exist into the sinkhole.
Don't get me wrong, I quite like that pixie Green leader who describes herself as a "pansexual vegan", and I certainly don't have the personal baggage with her that I have with Nige. But under what rational conception of media "regulation" does the six per cent basement-dweller get guaranteed a seat at the table but not Reform?
And you wonder why nothing changes?
~Further to my own case against Ofcom, here are a couple of rounds-up worth noting. If you live in one of those countries where one is permitted to access Rumble, Hearts of Oak has a report here. And, over at The Conservative Woman, the indefatigable Kathy Gyngell writes:
There is little doubt in my view, that Ofcom had decided to bare its teeth against GB News and Mark Steyn, its foremost broadcaster and the first and only one to challenge the official covid narrative on air. The tragedy, as I have said time and again, is that in a misjudgment of significant proportions for itself, GB News hung Mark out to dry instead of making this a test case against the arbitrary powers the Government delegated to Ofcom in 2003. These are powers it has blatantly abused; powers which allowed it not just to write its own broadcasting code but to interpret it as it likes and later also to monitor for 'covid misinformation'. As both judge and jury it has the ability to make up rules as it goes along and the right to apply them unilaterally. A tribunal with total powers, you could say.
Actually, it's worse than that. Ofcom are not just "both judge and jury" but also prosecutor - indeed, to put it in Keir Starmer terms, they are judge, jury and Director of Public Prosecutions. All justice systems have an element of "selective prosecutions", but, when it's as "selective" as Ofcom, that's corrupt. Four complaints about my April 2022 show were enough to launch an "investigation" - whereas celebrity doctors on the take from Pfizer and AstraZeneca ballyhooing the jabs as "100 per cent" safe and effective attract no such inquiries.
Even in Canada, as I discovered seventeen years back, the feds and almost all provinces separate their thought-crime enforcers into a "human rights" commission (the prosecution) and a "human rights" tribunal (the adjudication). The regime Blair created (and that Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak and GB News backed) merged these functions. If, with respect to Farage's participation in political debates, Ofcom gives the impression of being able to do whatever they want, that's because (after a decade and a half of fake-o Conservatives) they can.
~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.
~We had a very lively weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on his court date in London. For his weekend movie date, Rick McGinnis picked James Stewart in The Naked Spur, and Steyn's Song of the Week came by way of request and his answering service. Our marquee presentation was a Father's Day edition of On the Town, which proved very popular with listeners.
If you were too busy being fitted for your burqa, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
