Programming note: Please join me tomorrow for the twentieth Serenade Radio edition of my weekend music show Mark Steyn on the Town. It airs Saturday at 5pm UK/6pm Western Europe/12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~Half of America gets its news from respectable "mainstream" "journalists" such as ABC's David Muir, a man who "fact-checks" Donald Trump by citing a press release from the city manager of Springfield, Ohio that there's nothing to see here.
Being a most solicitous court eunuch, Mr Muir - like his fellow mainstreamers - sees no reason to listen to those who actually live in Springfield. In the last four years, so many Haitians have descended on this Ohio town that they now constitute one-in-four of the population. And, whether it be the right to decapitate and eat waterfowl from municipal parks or the right to rental accommodation, the Haitians take priority over the remaining seventy-five per cent:
This is an absolutely insane video.
A Springfield, Ohio homeless advocate tells the city council that landlords are kicking people out of their homes and replacing them with Haitians and that the Biden-Harris government is paying them to do it.
He says he personally knows... pic.twitter.com/edNKl4tpDz
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 12, 2024
Trump should go to Springfield and do an event with just the locals - like this bloke:
JUST IN: Springfield, Ohio 911 caller says he saw a group of Haitian illegal immigrants carrying four geese in audio footage obtained by the @FDRLST.
Caller: "I'm sitting here, I'm riding on the trail, going to my orientation for my job today. And I see a group of Haitian... pic.twitter.com/7z3guSubYq
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 11, 2024
Oh, but the above chappie is no David Muir, is he? He's impertinent enough to put his own lived experience over the word of the city manager!
The distinction between Springfield officialdom and Springfield citizenry is mirrored in the divide between US media and US masses in the reaction to Tuesday's Godawful "debate". Yes, Trump was not good, and Kamala was glib and smooth and assured. But she was also unreal, and, when her opponent could be sufficiently self-disciplined to focus on the state of the nation, the things he said accorded with what people see in their daily lives.
~Meanwhile, how's that sleepwalk into nuclear Armageddon going? From the BBC:
Speaking in St Petersburg, President Putin sent a clear warning to the West: don't allow Ukraine to use your long-range missiles to strike Russian territory.
Moscow, he said, would view that as the "direct participation" of Nato countries in the war in Ukraine.
You can understand how the Kremlin might get that impression. The Ukraine war began over two-and-a-half years ago. Nato members supplied the weaponry but limited the Ukrainians' use thereof:
At first, Zelenskyyyy was forbidden to fire the long-range missiles into Russian territory.
Then, western restraints were modified somewhat. As yesterday's New York Times reports:
This past spring, Mr. Biden put specific limits — around 60 miles — on how far Ukraine can fire American-made weapons into Russia...
The Times story requires suspending any disbelief that this "Mr Biden" character has been doing anything these last three-and-a-half years other than watching Matlock and eating tapioca. Be that as it may, Mr Biden is now reported to be "wavering" - and not just in his usual sense of a slight wobble before tumbling down the steps of Air Force One:
Amid signs that President Biden is wavering, the issue will be on the table when he meets in Washington on Friday with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, after the two leaders dispatched their top diplomats to Kyiv on Wednesday to hear out the latest pleas from Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
So, if Nato leaders are not just giving Ukraine the weaponry but micro-calibrating how it can be deployed on the ground, that would appear to be "direct participation" in the war against Russia, no?
Ah, well, relax. According to Euractiv, which (along with The Economist, The Washington Post et al) claims to be part of the bigfoot media "Trust Project", so you know you can trust it:
Sergei Karaganov told Kommersant newspaper in an interview that Moscow could launch a limited nuclear strike on a NATO country without triggering all-out nuclear war.
"All-out nuclear war": There's a phrase to be carelessly bandied. As I said a couple of weeks back:
By the way, if the nukes do start flying, I would bet that (enough of) theirs will work ...and ours won't.
But maybe Mr Karaganov, a Putin confidante and member of the International Advisory Board of America's Council on Foreign Relations, is correct. Perhaps the one lesson the Pentagon and the Military-Industrial Complex have learned from their Afghan humiliation is that the sweet spot in war without end is to be the country that supplies the weapons and let someone else do all the dying. If Putin were to launch "a limited nuclear strike" on one of Nato's softer, more peripheral members, it's not hard to imagine, say, the Czech Republic being once again a faraway country of which we know little.
I don't usually do Second World War allusions. As you know, my view is that its predecessor was the one that unravelled the map and whose pathologies haunt us still. At some point, the slo-mo escalation will pass the point of no return.
~I apologise for some intemperate language veering on the semi-profane on Wednesday's Q&A. We don't usually go in for the f*ck-sh*t-c*cksucker form of public discourse so ubiquitous today, and I strayed a little too close to it, alas.
I was wiped out from my long-haul flight from Heathrow (still am), and probably should have ceded the mike to a guest-host. As I mentioned, my doctors think I should retire from everything but my Serenade show. And, certainly, thinking about fellows like Cheney - to whom I laid out almost two decades ago exactly where we would find ourselves today - does nothing for the strains and stresses on my heart. Nevertheless, I regret my descent into the coarser demotic (rather as Eva did on the Steyn Show last year).
~Noted without comment:
The UK's police and crime minister Dame Diana Johnson had her purse stolen at an annual conference for senior police officers on Tuesday.
~I thank you for all your supportive 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, and I look forward to your company at Mark Steyn on the Town tomorrow.
