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.
~It's difficult to improve upon this Tweeter's summation of the present state of the United Kingdom:
#UK the British police wasted hours interrogating #TommyRobinson under the "terror act" while someone actually planned a terror attack and was able to carry it out ‼️🙄#Southport pic.twitter.com/795lO17zlr
— Lilly inLondon (@Lillyin_London) July 29, 2024
However, just for the record, from the BBC:
The attack was not terror-related, police said.
Well, it certainly struck terror into the heart of Southport. But presumably Merseyside Constabulary meant that the perp was not a card-carrying member of a recognised terrorist organisation acting on instructions from a renowned terrorist mastermind. Instead, as merely yet another paid-up member of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves, he fatally stabbed two young children at a Taylor Swift "dance workshop", and injured nine more, six of them critically. [UPDATE: A third victim has died. Three dead, all girls - six, seven and nine.] Two women who put themselves between the stabber and his target are also badly wounded:
This is Leanne the yoga teacher who tried to save the lives of the children in Stockport. She is in a critical condition.
I am sure your thoughts and prayers are with her at this awful time. pic.twitter.com/CVQ4S7kjDk
— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) July 30, 2024
As is now traditional on such occasions, police profess to be baffled by the "motive" for the attack.
Perhaps the notion that there can be a plausible "motive" for the stabbing of infants is not terribly helpful. Motivated or not, Europe has rather a lot of it. From our friend Eva Vlaardingerbroek:
With all due respect to the witness, this is not something you'd "think of in America".
We have been seeing constant attacks from a certain demographic of "knifemen" targeting and killing innocent young children here in Europe. https://t.co/ezCHmZwjBK
— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) July 29, 2024
Eva is quite right. America has mass shootings; Europe has mass stabbings. From Southport to Annecy to Dublin, your kid goes to a dance class ...or the park ...or her kindergarten - and gets stabbed. Eva and I used to cover these motive-less "incidents" on The Mark Steyn Show soberly and honestly, in part because:
a) very few other people did, save for Tommy Robinson, whom the British state has now driven into exile; and
b) there is not a lot to be said for a polity willing to sacrifice its youngest and most vulnerable on the altar of "diversity". Such a society will not survive, and indeed does not deserve to.
And yet the state, in Britain as in Europe, seems to be making a conscious effort to accept occasional child sacrifice as a routine feature of life. If one were genuinely baffled by motive, one might expect a bit more effort in media reports as to why this happened, instead of tedious examples without end of the ghastly hand-wringing passivity of official reaction, from the King and his first minister down - and zero coverage of the realities of the crime and the truth about its perpetrator.
Which cumulatively suggests that this is just the price one has to pay for the vibrant multiculti utopia the Uniparty has brought us: Don't worry, there won't be a lot of it, we'll try to hold it down to what the cynics at the Home Office used to call (with respect to Irish terrorism) "an acceptable level of violence". But once in a while your moppet will go to a Taylor Swift workshop and not come home.
This is beyond cynical: it is depraved and disgusting. As Eva notes above, the recent Euro-spate of what she calls "knifemen" come from "a certain demographic". But in Southport, according to a prominent barrister Steven Barrett, the narrative is being "managed":
I have been privately contacted by a Police Officer - which is rare for me
And told that what we are being told about the Southport stabbings is being managed
And that their priority is that our response is managed
Innocent Children are dead, I do not need to be 'managed'.
Indeed. But it is apparently being "managed" by the Home Secretary herself, and the media are mostly minded to comply. Which may explain the palpable sense - at least to those familiar with officialdom's modus operandi - that their principal concern is to obscure the nature of the murderer and let it all fade away into just another passive-voiced "tragedy". According to The Daily Telegraph, but no other newspapers, he's Rwandan:
The youth, who cannot be named for legal reasons and is originally from Cardiff, in Wales, moved to the Southport area with his Rwandan parents when he was aged six.
On Twitter, he is purported, albeit by a total bollocks clickbait source that has nevertheless gone viral, to be a Muslim on an MI6 watch-list.
On LinkedIn, Eddie Murray, father of two of the children present, describes him as a "migrant":
My two youngest children went to holiday club this morning in Southport for a day of fun only for a migrant to enter and and murder/fatally wound multiple children. My kids are fine. They are shocked and in hysterics but they are safe...
The above-mentioned David Atherton, who has a better track record in this area than much of the media and the police, says:
All images suggest he is black.
But pay no attention to any of that. Merseyside's Chief Constable, Serena Kennedy, was at pains to characterise the man in custody somewhat differently:
Ah. He's "originally from Cardiff". So he's a Welshman? Like accused BBC kiddie-porn manufacturer Huw Edwards*? Ah, well, unfortunately the Welshman in question - or, alternatively, the "Lancashire teenager" - is alleged to be seventeen, so he's a minor, so nothing more can be said about him.
Which happens to suit officialdom's "management" of the narrative. And the media's: One notices that neither the BBC nor anyone else is beating a path to Mr Murray's door.
But, more broadly, the reason no one knows nuthin' is because that's the nature of the atomised societies the Uniparty has built for citizens of the west.
If "diversity is our strength", you'd think more polities would have given it a go over the millennia. Instead, the few that did, such as the Habsburg Empire, are no longer with us. "Diversity", especially on the British, European and North American scale, leads to low-trust societies where you have no clue about your neighbours: That chap coming through the door, isn't he sweet, that nice Tory Lord Chancellor Ken Clarke was so right when he said how much more interesting all this diversity has made us ...oh, wait, he's getting out his machete.
This is not how functioning nation-states are meant to live. As someone said, over and over across the decades, diversity is where nations go to die. That it is our daughters who bear the brunt of this mad experiment, whether at dance class or on the streets of Rotherham, only makes it more shameful.
So why is officialdom's priority to "manage" the narrative?
Because the children cut down yesterday are the direct result of public policy favoured in the UK by both governing parties. When public policy has consequences of which the state disapproves, they change it: restrictions on cigarettes, helmets for motorcyclists, twenty-mile speed-limits in urban areas, Covid isolation for granny... Yet nothing can be allowed to arrest the transformative consequences of this particular public policy. Instead, in the House of Commons, hours after yesterday's horror at Southport, Green Party leader Carla Denyer called for more "safe routes" for "refugees".
The west dishonours its child sacrifices before the bodies are even cold. If you wanted to turn the present low-trust society into a no-trust society you would "manage" this atrocity exactly as the dissembling and evasive authorities are doing.
*For non-Britons, Huw Edwards was the BBC's highest-paid presenter (and has a cameo in Skyfall). He was the voice of great state occasions: it was he who announced the death of the Queen (not very well, in my opinion). He was taken off air last year after The Sun revealed he was sending naked selfies to teenage boys. Nevertheless, the Beeb still paid him half-a-million pounds of the public's money, including a forty-thousand-quid raise. That's right: they gave him a bonus for the shot of his nude bottom!
In fact, as I think of it, Edwards came out of his predilection for teenage boys rather better than I came out of my Ofcom complaint. In my case, while I was still in the ICU in France and not earning, the GB News CEO, Angelos Frangopoulos, stuck me with the bill for not only for my makeup lady but for Farage's autocue operator. No forty-grand bonus for Steyn. And, unlike me, Huw Edwards did not want for high-profile supporters, such as The Guardian's Owen Jones ("The Sun must pay for what they've done to Huw Edwards") and former BBC Washington man Jon Sopel ("The allegations have turned out to be not that much"). I'd have got a better press from the "mainstream" media if I'd been emailing my arse to miscellaneous twinks instead of interviewing victims of the Covid vaccines.
Huw Edwards has now been charged with the creation of thirty-seven examples of "child pornography", including six in the most serious category, Category A, which means penetration. He will appear in court tomorrow, Wednesday. Naomi Wolf's creepy stalker Matthew Sweet found time to swing by the Strand when Naomi and I were waiting to enter the Royal Courts of Justice last month. Will Sopel and his BBC colleagues be in court tomorrow for the Category A colleague they so vigorously defended?
~We thank you for all your kind comments this 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.
