Programming note: Tonight, I'll be back with Episode Five of our latest audio adventure, P G Wodehouse's The Girl on the Boat. Tomorrow, Wednesday, I hope to be here for our regular Clubland Q&A taking questions from Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is (for this month only, due to time-change disparities) an hour earlier across the Atlantic: 7pm Greenwich Mean Time, and 8pm in western and central Europe. Hope you can swing by.
~It is over four years since Shannon Bream and I talked on Fox about the US Chief Justice's wish to avoid the Supreme Court being dragged into "controversy". And I remarked to Shannon that at a certain point the desire to avoid controversy becomes itself controversial. We are now well past that stage - to the point where any old rinky-dink district-court judge in Dead Moose Junction can presume to substitute his own foreign policy for that of the President and usurp the conduct of privileged state-to-state relations:
The Administration did not 'refuse to comply' with a court order. The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist TdA aliens had already been removed from U.S. territory. The written order and the Administration's actions do not conflict. Moreover, as the Supreme... https://t.co/DnjUsuWTLH
— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) March 17, 2025
So a "judge" can order foreign terrorists to be flown back into the country to terrorise anew. And, if the "judge" regards his powers as extending into international airspace, who's to say they don't go far beyond?
Federal Judge Orders Astronauts Be Returned To Space Station https://t.co/j8XQJbA3Cs pic.twitter.com/wEcVnLAJrb
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 17, 2025
The spaced-out judge who serves as self-appointed Chief Commissar for Venezuelan Relations is some bloke called Boasberg. But America has a lot of judges. I know. I've been up before more of them than I have been in the rest of the world combined, and - with two exceptions - I found them not of impressive quality. Nevertheless, they're quite numerous, so any day now some other Boasberg type will appoint himself Chief Commissar for Russian Relations and strike down a Ukraine peace deal. And sadly, even if some five-and-dime jurists up-country are willing to make do with East Timor or the Solomon Islands, there aren't enough countries to go round. So, if ever there were a time for the "controversy"-averse John Roberts to step in and shut down this codswallop, now would be it.
Unless, of course, the Chief Justice regards it as "constitutional" that the executive branch be forced to litigate every single action it takes, and through an openly lawless judiciary that offers no possibility of sanity until ever higher up the appellate process.
If so, if Boasberg can simply annex the Venezuela desk, there's no point to elections. Republicans are making much of the fact that Democrats, in the preferred cliché of the moment, aren't "reading the room": their approval numbers are down somewhere between MS-13 and the ebola virus, and yet these clueless Dems show no signs of moving away from such crowd-pleasing policies as re-importing terrorists and more bepenised women in your daughter's changing room.
Well, that's because the Democrats have made a bet, as they did with Obamacare: the other guys (despite the best efforts of the Maricopa County voting machines) will occasionally win ...but all other societal levers will remain in the hands of those inclined to the Dems' view of things. So for them it's worth digging in on this stuff.
As a snapshot of institutional capture, for example, consider Illinois School District 109 - the Deerfield Public Schools:
A middle school in Illinois reportedly forced a class of thirteen-year-old girls to change in front of a trans-identified male student in the school locker rooms after a Physical Education class, according to the mother of one of the girls involved.
Nicole Georgas revealed that on February 5, her daughter came home "frightened" and "upset" after finding a male student in the girls' bathroom at school. Concerned, Georgas contacted the administration, and was told that under direction from their legal counsel, that if the student identifies as female, they are free to use any of the sex-segregated facilities as they so choose.
Yes, but the school took it a little further than what the "law" requires:
These school administrators marched the girls into the locker room and stood there to make sure that they undressed.
The school didn't just say "you'll lose PE credit if you don't change"
They literally marched the girls into the locker room.
Who do these women think they... pic.twitter.com/znKg4ORidt
— Audra Worlow 🇺🇸 (@audrawrongspeak) March 15, 2025
As someone sneered at the complaining parent, why are you so obsessed with genitals? But, in fact, it's the school district that's obsessed with genitals. So it's not enough that one of the middle-school "girls" happens to be swinging the old meat-and-two-veg around the changing room, the non-bepenised girls have to be forced to look upon her Works, ye Mighty, and despair. Which is why Cathy Van Treese, Assistant Principal, plus Ginger Logemann, Director for Social Services, and Joanna Ford, Assistant Superintendent for District 109, and multiple teachers were all on hand to march the girls in there and, metaphorically speaking if only just, shove the wedding tackle in their faces - while, in turn, "she" got to gaze on a roomful of naked girls.
In any sane and functioning society, that would be considered child abuse and the misses Van Treese, Logemann and Ford would be forbidden to be around minors ever again. But in America it's perfectly normal (about 45 minutes in):
Incidentally, why are half of those standing behind the aggrieved mom wearing face masks?
Who knows? To mark the fifth anniversary of the introduction of lockdown?
It was five years ago that the entire western world except Sweden replaced various forms of self-government with a completely new, homogeneous system. In the west's new lockdownocracies, no contradiction was too stupid not to be swallowed: the same "public health" officials who presumed to decree how many relatives you could have over for Thanksgiving and to insist that circles be painted every six feet down the sidewalk outside Starbucks were happy to let Black Lives Matter and antifa hold non-socially-distanced riots every night because racism is a "public health" issue. An unvaccinated New Yorker could not work as a waitress, but on the Rio Grande millions of persons of unknown vaccination and/or Covid status could simply walk into the country.
And yet Lockdown remains the ruling class's model for your future.
On this fifth birthday The New York Times felt bold enough to complain that it had been "badly misled". As Mark Steyn Cruisemate Allison Pearson rebuked them:
No @nytimes you were not "badly misled" about Covid's origin in a Chinese lab.
— Allison Pearson (@AllisonPearson) March 16, 2025
You failed to do JOURNALISM. Indeed, you accused and suppressed those who tried.
McCarthyite, Biden shills. You shamed the free Press. https://t.co/JpDJPwznfc
The Times was not "badly misled". It was one of the worst misleaders. There's a lot of that about. Five years ago, the BND (the German foreign intelligence service) told Angela Merkel that it was eighty-to-ninety per cent certain that the Covid was engineered in a lab. Frau Merkel decided that it would not be helpful for the German public to know this.
Next up, MI6:
"A classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020 which stated: 'It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the WIV.'" https://t.co/L48cimyB0A pic.twitter.com/u6EwCNyWtE
— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) March 16, 2025
Likewise my old Speccie chum concluded, that like Mutti Merkel, his interests were better served by lying to the citizenry. And of course the bloodsoaked madman Fauci knew from Day One that the WuFlu was a taxpayer-funded project of his that he'd offshored to the Wuhan branch of GainOfFunction R Us.
So Fauci decided to make 2020 the Year of the Pangolin - and set up the poor little scaly anteater as the designated fall-guy for what was essentially the sainted one's own corpse-count. And BoJo, Mutti Merkel and The New York Times were happy to string along. Anyone who attempted to counter the lies found their careers destroyed, and were occasionally driven to suicide. The Covid years were not just a public-policy "failure" but - as much as climate mullah Michael E Mann in the witness box - a conscious fraud. As I wrote in 2021 - that's four bloody years ago:
My main interest remains the origins of the WuFlu.
At the same time, one notices the almost total lack of interest in its origins from virtually anyone who matters, starting at the very highest levels of government. As Rumsfeld used to say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Somewhat analogously, overwhelming lack of interest in evidence is paradoxically evidence of interest. The truth about the origins of Covid would have serious consequences for the US Government and its 'public health' bureaucracies, and for the broader 'science' community and its peer-reviewed journals and grant-application processes. Furthermore, the public deference to political leaders who claim to be 'following the science' - already fraying badly in France and Australia - would take a huge hit once it became clear that the killer virus is itself the creation of 'science' and of a Washington public-health bureaucracy that followed it all the way to an insecure lab in Wuhan.
Now that all the old 2020 conspiracy theories have come true, how about some new conspiracy theories? From De Andere Krant in the Netherlands:
The American engineer/researcher Jim Haslam attributes to Vincent Munster, a former Erasmus virologist who obtained his PhD under Ab Osterhaus, a leading role in the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Munster is said to have made the virus transmissible by air in an American lab using the 'serial passage' technique, a specialty of the Viroscience department of Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
Which American lab would that be?
The Rocky Mountain Laboratories of Hamilton, Montana. Golly, that also rings a bell.
But here's the interesting thing. Even as the Great Walkbackening (in Laura Rosen Cohen's phrase) accelerates through The New York Times and MI6, always bear this in mind:
Half your neighbours would be willing to string along with it all over again.
Look at that roomful of school administrators in Illinois. They look so nice and normal, don't they? I'll bet they listen to NPR and read The New York Times or some similar snoozefest. Which is why they think there's nothing odd about unknown judges making foreign policy, or local administrators forcing schoolgirls to shower with penises, or government scientists manufacturing viruses that shut down the world and oblige your ailing relatives to die alone, unsurrounded by tiresome loved ones.
Remember that line the Pfizer and AstraZeneca pushers told us? If you don't take it, you're a granny-killer. In reality, Fauci, a mad scientist out of a 1950s creature-feature, killed your gran'ma ...and half of America would be happy to let him do it to them all over again. Lockdown me once, shame on you; lockdown me twice, shame on me.
Judges usurp self-government; scientists usurp core liberties; and educators usurp parents. That doesn't leave a lot.
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