Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~A land of legalisms is not the same as a land of law - a vital distinction increasingly lost on Americans of both left and right. Thus, yesterday's Supreme Court decision on "presidential immunity", which was good-ish for Trump, was immediately seized on by Democrats as an opportunity to indulge their kinky and psychologically unhealthy murder fantasies:
One of the lawyers for the fake Ukraine impeachment "whistleblower" just called for Biden to imprison his political opponents and then have them killed. pic.twitter.com/yztjjImsGK
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 1, 2024
There was a lot of that about yesterday - including the penetrating insight that the Supreme Court had just pronounced it okay for Joe to drone its judges in their homes:
There's is actually nothing legally stopping Biden from drone striking Supreme Court justices as long as he claims it's official act
— Tuskey man (@TuskeyTuskey) July 1, 2024
I am reminded of a famous observation, entirely unknown south of the border, by my late compatriot George Jonas:
When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were discovered to be punitively burning down the barns of Quebec separatists, the then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau sneered that, if people were so upset about illegal barn-burning, maybe he'd make barn-burning legal. As George remarked, Trudeau didn't seem to grasp that barn-burning isn't wrong because it's illegal, it's illegal because it's wrong.
Bingo, as Peter Navarro would say, were he not presently languishing in gaol. Likewise, criminalising your political opposition is not wrong because it's illegal, it's illegal because it's wrong. That's it. That's the whole magilla:
Law is not merely downstream from morality; they compete for the same space. And, if you have too much law, you shrink the moral sphere. In contemporary America, where everything is a crime, it's hardly surprising that the moral space is so put upon.
That was me in 2018. Six years later, America is down to the remnants of its "moral space". This is not only the fault of the left in delegitimising any institution - from the Supreme Court down - that obstructs its ambitions, but also that of the right, which being entirely absent from all other societal levers (from Hollywood to the schools) has bet the republic on having five out of nine judges adjudicate every aspect of life. Which is not a "conservative" thing to do, not at all - see Lord Moulton and me.
And thus the remaining societal glue dissolves, and very fast - and faster still, if the Dems are as determined not to permit a fair election as they appear to be. Me four years ago:
To reiterate a point I've made for months: on free speech and related issues, things are going to head south very fast. I carelessly assumed they'd wait till the inauguration, but it seems 'the Office of the President-Elect' is already on the case.
It will be even faster if Joe "wins" his second term - and, despite him being the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock puppet, a huge slab of Democrats remain convinced that better a man who's too dead than one who, like Trump, is too alive.
~A favourite Steyn Show guest, Laura Perrins, has written a piece with an arresting headline:
Never Trust a Politician Without a Tie
This is in reference to the increasingly tieless Keir Starmer. As of this Friday's trip to the Palace, Sir Keir will be the first serving (UK) PM with a knighthood since Alec Douglas-Home, Knight of the Thistle, sixty years ago. But he deflects from that and shows he's a man of the people by ostentatiously flaunting his lack of tie.
I agree with Laura. But I am not blameless in this regard. A few years ago, I was booked on an Australian morning show with various leftie ladies, and was prevailed upon by my minders before getting into the car to adopt the fashion of Oz telly and eschew my usual necktie. I had forgotten that I was going straight from the studio to lunch in an excellent Sydney eatery with the great Aussie prime minister John Howard. He arrived wearing a tie and regarded my open neck and hint of hirsute cleavage with barely concealed contempt. "You're not," he pronounced, "a real conservative if you're not wearing a tie."
No argument there. But I wonder if it doesn't go back even further - to John F Kennedy's decision not to wear a hat at his inaugural and thereby kill the male millinery business. If you're a 007 fan, you'll be aware that in the gun-barrel opening Sean Connery walked into shot wearing a trilby - and none of his successors did. At significant birthday parties for Lois Maxwell, they'd always install Moneypenny's office hatstand so that guests could wing their headgear at it.
At any rate, as our Victorian time-traveller notes in Out of Time, if you walk down the main streets of London, New York or any other western city you will observe that the supposed adult men are mostly dressed as children. Compare and contrast with any movie from the day before yesterday - say, the opening scenes in midtown Manhattan from Hitchcock's North by Northwest. It is, as Laura suggests, not a small thing: We are an infantilised populace, so why be surprised that our governments treat us as such?
~I thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly months - and especially 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. I hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
