Programming note: Join Mark later this evening for another episode of his nightly audio adventure: Mystery in White, a "Christmas crime story" by Jefferson Farjeon. It airs right here at SteynOnline at 7pm North American Eastern - which is midnight Greenwich Mean Time.
~After my Friday column on our unmanned world, Veronica wrote from Auckland with respect to my citation of Laura Perrins' piece on the continuing Fleet Street fevers over Masterchef judge Gregg Wallace, who is to middle-class media women d'un certain âge what drones are to New Jersey:
I (usually) agree with Laura Perrins's viewpoints, but I think she has the whole Wallace 'scandal' a bit backwards - his supposedly offensive behavior toward the 'women of a certain age', including Rod Stewart's wife, has been given so much media attention precisely because it DOESN'T MATTER, it's pure slop, whereas the rape gang victims, and the potential Southport cover-up, DO MATTER which is why they're largely ignored.
Distraction, deflection and containment are the tools of Power - Gregg Wallace, an older Cockney male from a lost world of music hall style jokes, barrow-boy banter and calling women 'love', does make a very 'convenient' (agree with LP here) and useful villain.
What will the Regime do when they don't exist anymore?
Create new categories - as George Zimmerman discovered when he woke up to find that The New York Times had reinvented him as a soi-disant "white Hispanic".
Veronica somewhat misstates Laura Perrins, which I'll come back to. But there is a lot of truth in her broader observation. I found it hard to credit that, even by the debased standards of contemporary boutique celebrity, Gregg Wallace could command the front pages this long. But the point to remember is (in my new catchphrase) as I wrote twenty years ago - longer; back in the Nineties, in fact - individual celebs can (and must) be sacrificed from time to time but the cult as a whole must be maintained even as it has fragmented and splintered from the days of Lucille Ball and Milton Berle to levels of celebrity that can barely be detected. Did you ever see that show "Girls"? Nah, me neither. It attracted an audience of 500,000, in a land of over three hundred million. If I'd pulled half-a-mil guest-hosting for Hannity or Tucker, never mind Rush, I'd never have worked again. And yet Lena Dunham, the presiding eminence of "Girls", was profiled endlessly by a doting media as if she was the biggest thing since, oh, Dinah Shore. Or Eddie Cantor. Or Ukulele Ike.
The point isn't Lena Dunham or Gregg Wallace, Ellen DeGeneres or Matt Lauer, all of whom are very disposable. The point is to maintain the overall apparatus of what Veronica calls "distraction", so that nothing that matters ever gets a look-in. That's true of politics, too, which is mostly palace intrigue about people who matter even less than Miss Dunham - what I used to refer to on GB News as 24/7 speculation about "who's going to be next week's Lord Privy Seal".
All together now: as I wrote twenty years ago ...whoops, my mistake, as I wrote a mere fifteen years ago:
If you've read A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, you'll recall that Hank Morgan, the eponymous time-travelling New Englander, was much taken by the Court Circular published each week in Camelot:
On Monday, the king rode in the park.
'" Tuesday, " " " " " " ".
'" Wednesday, " " " " " " ".
'" Thursday, " " " " " " ".
'" Friday, " " " " " " ".
'" Saturday, " " " " " " ".
'" Sunday, " " " " " " ".
Today our news-gathering is far more sophisticated:
On Monday, Dr Jill Biden rode in the park.
On Tuesday, Republicans pounced on President Biden's absence from riding in the park.
On Wednesday, following rigorous fact-check by fifty-seven heads of intelligence agencies, posts speculating that Biden incapable of riding in the park were taken down as Russian disinformation.
On Thursday, fifty-seven heads of intelligence agencies say Putin likely behind detonation of pipeline in park boating lake.
On Friday, world's scientists ban public riding in the park for 'fourteen days' to 'flatten the curve'.
On Saturday, Dr Jill Biden rode in the park to re-open it as temporary full-service migrant resort.
On Sunday with Stephanopoulos on ABC: No truth to Trump claims that migrants are eating swans in the park, but multiple juries have found that Trump is raping women on both swings and roundabouts.
It should hardly need saying that, when something's in all the papers and all the news shows day after day, by definition it's a massive distract-op. We should all have learned that lesson since Covid: everything we were told - on masks, lockdown, the efficacy of vaccines - was bollocks, and, as we have additionally learned, they knew it was bollocks at the time they told us. Right now, it might be useful to have Covid back in the public prints, at a time when Biden is proposing to extend Pfizer and Moderna's immunity from liability and give Fauci et al a preemptive pardon for anything they may have done anytime, anyplace, anywhere. Alas, four years after the cable-news 24/7 death-counters, Covid can't even make the bottom corner of your screen.
Same with the ongoing war in Europe. When Boris and Biden were promising the downfall of Putin any minute now, the western press were all over Ukraine. Now it's a meat-grinder, and, because all the young men are dead or fled, chaps in late middle-age are being press-ganged into the trenches:
In September, my 45-year-old nephew, a father to three girls, was apprehended by recruitment officers in his hometown in Ukraine. Within hours, he was dispatched, alongside many other detained men, to defend the frontline in eastern Ukraine. A month later, we learned that he was missing in action.
The last news of him was that he was seen trying to apply a tourniquet to the stump of his leg, which had been blown off in an explosion. The Russian forces were pushing forward, and the combat was brutal. I doubt my nephew had any real chance of surviving that chaos.
One month from conscription to missing. That's not far off the Great War, when, at various stages, the life expectancy of an infantryman was two weeks. That would seem like an interesting story. But Ukraine is as gone from your screen as Charlie Rose. Does Bono still have Zelenskyyyy on speed-dial? Don't tell me you're so squaresville you've kept your post-Covid Ukrainian flag avatar!
Of course not. Last week I replaced it with a Syrian one:
Verify-Sy, a Syrian fact checking group, now says that this man is Air Force Intelligence First Lieutenant Salama Mohammad Salama, notorious for extortion and theft in Homs, who had been arrested due to disputes with his colleagues about profit sharing: https://t.co/wFmstO8ZWo https://t.co/2PcbCbHNh4
— Evan Hill (@evanhill) December 15, 2024
And so it goes: In recent days, the United States Military Academy (a wholly corrupted institution under the likes of "highly decorated" generals like Thoroughly Modern Milley) colluded with a media outfit called ProPublica to insist that Trump's Defence nominee Pete Hegseth had NEVER been accepted at West Point.
Unfortunately, Pete had kept a copy of his acceptance letter:
We understand that ProPublica (the Left Wing hack group) is planning to publish a knowingly false report that I was not accepted to West Point in 1999.
Here's my letter of acceptance signed by West Point Superintendent, Lieutenant General Daniel Christman, US Army. pic.twitter.com/UOhOVZSfhJ
— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) December 11, 2024
If you're wondering why the world's most lavishly funded generals, responsible for forty per cent of planet-wide military spending, can't beat goatherds with fertiliser, there's your answer: The West Point wankers failed to foresee that Pete is exactly the kind of guy who'd have kept his acceptance letter. Because back then it was still considered to be some kind of achievement.
That's the issue: the money-no-object Pentagon hasn't won anything that mattered since VJ Day.
For every story that makes it onto ProPublica or ABC, there are all the others excluded to save space for their weird priorities. Which brings us back to Laura Perrins and the biggest issue of all. In fairness to Laura, I don't believe she said that Mr Wallace's behaviour "matters". She said his middle-class media victims count, and the working-class Rotherham/Rochdale/Your Town Here gang-rape victims don't count, not at all.
Which is true - and a miserable indictment of the so-called fourth estate.
When I first went to Rotherham a decade or so back, I was astonished at how easy it was to see the "grooming gangs" in action just by hanging around a well-known shopping centre in broad daylight for half-an-hour. That was also when I first encountered the indomitable Sammy Woodhouse, who will be a guest on next year's Mark Steyn Cruise. Sammy was not yet the media figure and public campaigner she has since become. She was "just" a victim. Yet she, like other victims of these evil child-rapists, was relatively easy to track down, even for a "niche Canadian" thousands of miles beyond his comfort zone. It would have been the work of moments for the London tabloids to cover Rotherham as they cover Gregg Wallace. But the first thing you noticed when you spoke to Sammy or anybody else was how few UK "journalists" had attempted even to contact them.
And it most certainly matters. Because it's Britain's future - even, eventually, for the middle-class media women living in dread of sharing a green room with Gregg Wallace. Here's the kind of story Sammy covers now:
URBAN SCOOP - SOPHIE'S STORY
An Illegal migrant (supported by you, the British taxpayer) forcibly takes a young British woman off the streets and rapes her in a church graveyard.
Please support Sophie and her father in their fight for justice here - https://t.co/bdLQWq8wqb pic.twitter.com/fO1MfuDLn4
— Urban Scoop (@ScoopUrban) December 13, 2024
That gave me a start. In my 2023 summer diversion Out of Time, there's a scene featuring the gang-rape of a child in an abandoned English churchyard. But the horror stories of reality come so thick and fast it's hard for mere imagination to keep up.
What everyone who counts is telling those who don't is not difficult to figure out: They're willing for ever larger numbers of you to be raped and stabbed in order to maintain the Official Fictions.
I dunno 'bout you, but that seems like a pretty big story.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on our unmanned world. His Saturday music show featured bandleader Artie Shaw on the song that got him into showbiz and composer Burton Lane on the film that got away. Rick McGinnis's movie date found Kirk Douglas & Co on the Last Train from Gun Hill, and our brand new seasonal Song of the Week celebrated a Christmas classic. Our marquee presentation was a brand new Tale for Our Time: for Part Fifteen, click here; for Part Sixteen, here; for Seventeen, here. Part Eighteen airs tonight at SteynOnline.
If you were too busy shooting down drones this weekend, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
~We opened The Mark Steyn Club over seven-and-a-half years ago - May 6th 2017 - and we're thrilled by all those across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. We have quite a bit of fun in The Mark Steyn Club, with audio adventures, video poems, planet-wide Q&As, and much more (heart attacks permitting). We appreciate the Club is not to everyone's taste, but, if you're minded to give it a go, either for a full year or a three-month experimental period, we'd love to have you. You can find more details on The Mark Steyn Club here - and, if you've a loved one who'd like something a little different for Christmas, don't forget our special Gift Membership.
