Programming note: Please join Steyn this evening circa 7pm North American Eastern/12 midnight British Summer Time for another nightly episode of his current Tale for Our Time, Sapper's Bulldog Drummond.
~Four summers ago - July 2020 - I presented as our seasonal audio entertainment my contemporary inversion of The Prisoner of Zenda - The Prisoner of Windsor, set not in Ruritania but in a far more fantastical kingdom, in which a doppelgänger is obliged to fill in for the UK prime minister. I subsequently revised it a little for hard covers.
It's a romance - not in the Hollywood romcom sense, but in that defined by Sir Walter Scott as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents". A lot of chaps don't care for "marvellous and uncommon incidents" such as doppelgängers. They prefer the sober constraints of news and politics, where what matters is whether Mitt Romney is up two points in Iowa.
And yet, and yet... As Steyn goes, so goes the Deep State four years later:
Let me tell you what I really think. I don't have *any* inside info about this particular event. However, it is a fact that presidents have body doubles and decoys for security reasons. And, from a very reliable, firsthand source: To the extent our intel agencies (or whomever)... https://t.co/lAgeTIYQbm
— Sharyl Attkisson 🕵️♂️💼🥋 (@SharylAttkisson) July 26, 2024
Hmm. Ms Attkisson is a five-time Emmy winner, Edward R Murrow Award recipient and a former investigative reporter for CBS. And, as she says, the important thing to remember is that, if it is a doppelgänger, the reason they're making it so obvious is because they want us to know...
I wish I'd thought of that for The Prisoner of Windsor. But that's why they're the Deep State, and I'm a "niche Canadian"...
~On Saturday Tommy Robinson organised a "Unite the Kingdom" rally in Trafalgar Square. It was a huge success:
100, 000 Tommy Robinson, March for Freedom protest in Trafalgar Square, huge numbers police totally out numbered if it kicks off pic.twitter.com/vbs3x1g6UD
— Paul Brown 🇬🇧 Browns fan🏈 London News 🎥Vlogger (@PaulBrown_UK) July 27, 2024
As you can see, a lot of people carried the national flags of England and the UK. So, naturally, it was denounced as a "far right" rally - especially as a "trans pride" march was being held the same day: that's the respectable one to be at - the one about slicing the breasts off twelve-year-old girls and rendering them infertile.
My friend Leilani Dowding was among those in Trafalgar Square:
Home now. My thoughts on today's rally. Never felt so safe in London.. well done to @TRobinsonNewEra for organizing such a peaceful rally. Uniting the Kingdom pic.twitter.com/yGi3n3dqRP
— leilani dowding 🌸🚜 ☮️ (@LeilaniDowding) July 27, 2024
The following day Tommy Robinson was arrested under the Terrorism Act. London's wretched Metropolitan Police confirm his "alleged arrest" but plead it's nothing to do with them or the rally: it's apparently some other constabulary for some other offence.
In FDR's famous formulation, there are no coincidences in politics - whether it's Trump surviving assassination followed by Biden stepping down, or Tommy Robinson pulling off a huge peaceful rally and getting nicked for "terrorism" immediately afterwards.
How can he avoid this happening? The obvious strategy would be to yell "Allahu Akbar!" and overturn police cars, beat up coppers and steal their truncheons. If you do that in Britain, the nancy plods will just turn and run away, in the interest of "community relations".
Alas, it's not Tommy's style. So he has to endure this shameful, highly selective and brazenly politicised policing from an utterly corrupt establishment.
[UPDATE! Tommy Robinson was a no-show in court today. Having been arrested at Folkestone and then bailed, he is reported to have fled the country. I can't say I blame him. The police interrogated him on whether he could stop the "Great Replacement" - an odd line of questioning for HM constabulary.]
~Here's another from Sir Walter's "marvellous and uncommon incidents" file. As predictably awful as the opening ceremony was, I didn't see this one coming:
Paris Olympics 2024: Food becoming an issue for athletes
Wait a minute, the unconvincing trannies and breakdancing Marcel Marceaus are all very well, but how can things be so bad that food is now "an issue" ...in Paris? Well...
Paris Olympic officials attempted to offer more plant-based foods in an effort to reduce the Games' carbon footprint... Vegan meals aren't in line with what the athletes prefer to eat while competing.
And, even if you were toying with going vegan, doing it forty-eight hours before you run the Olympic 400 metres probably isn't the day you'd have picked. Kind of arrogant, even for Macron, to change the diet of world-class athletes off his own bat.
So don't expect any new records this games. Except maybe in on-track flatulence.
~Oh, one more "marvellous and uncommon incident". Headline from my old paper, The Irish Times:
Kamala Harris is a descendant of an Irish slave owner in Jamaica
Hamilton Brown, from Co Antrim, was paid equivalent of €11m in compensation by British government to free slaves after ban
Eleven million euros? Wow. No wonder everyone's favourite Montreal schoolgirl could afford to live in swanky Westmount.
I have no use for the old-school race-baiters, like Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the Republic of Himself. But I confess to feeling a twinge of sympathy when the Rev Jesse professed a desire to cut Obama's nuts off. The New York Times tells us, incessantly, that the most significant date in American history is 1619, when the first African slaves were brought to Virginia. And yet the only black guy who gets to be president is some semi-Kenyan who's got nothing to do with any of that?
And now the second black president is a high-caste slave-owner from India, Jamaica and Quebec?
As Lady Bracknell would have told the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson: To lose out on the presidency to one British subject may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose out to a second British subject looks like carelessness. So 1619 is the true American founding but four hundred years later none of their many descendants get to ascend to the White House? Only Commonwealth blacks?
I'm amazed actual African-Americans put up with this bollocks, but that's identity politics for you: for Democrats in November, voting for the hereditary beneficiary of slave-owning will be a necessary act of racial penance. You know it makes sense.
~Oh, a footnote on the Olympic trannypalooza. Because Biden's doppelgänger was playing a bar mitzvah in Jersey, the United States was represented at the opening ceremony by Jill Biden, who, as far as we know, is still the original Jill Biden. Like Mitt Romney, she enjoyed all the bumping and grinding and blaspheming:
Biden remarked that the U.S. would have to work hard to top Paris' opening ceremony when the games are held in Los Angeles in 2028.
"So, last night, it was just spectacular," Biden said in a statement. "The rain did not dampen our spirits.... Every step of the way, I was thinking to myself, oh my god, oh my god. How are we going to top this?"
Maybe a transgender crucifixion?
Ah, but spare a thought for poor old Jill. It had not occurred to me until she brought it up, but, among all else they have been forced to surrender, the Bidens will now never get to open an Olympic Games.
~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 whales and whoppers. With the Olympics in mind, Steyn's Saturday music show got unusually sporty, and for his weekend movie date Rick McGinnis picked James Coburn in The President's Analyst. Steyn's Song of the Week opted for what was for half-a-century one of the best-known tunes in America, and our marquee presentation was our continuing Tale for Our Time, Bulldog Drummond, which is proving very popular with listeners. Click for Part Fifteen, Part Sixteen and Part Seventeen. Part Eighteen airs tonight.
If you were too busy spending the weekend auditioning doppelgängers, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
