Programming note: Join me tonight for the next installment of our new Tale for Our Time: The Girl on the Boat by P G Wodehouse. Tomorrow, Saturday, I'll be back for the latest episode of our Serenade Radio weekend music show, On the Town. It starts at 5pm Greenwich Mean Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and (for this month only) 1pm North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
A few thoughts on the passing scene:
~Heathrow Airport is closed today - all day, until midnight. Massive flight disruptions from San Francisco to Paris to Tokyo to Perth.
So why's that? Well, there's a large fire at a nearby sub-station.
So what caused it? Putin? Zelenskyyyy and Victoria Nuland out after dark? A Somali with "mental-health issues"? A gang of psycho-trannies protesting the failure to meet Net Zero targets? Or just the general crappiness of a world in which nothing works anymore?
Beats me. But there's going to be a lot more of this in your future.
~On The Mark Steyn Show three days after the 2020 US "election" I suggested:
It's my view that after the Biden regime takes power, as in many coup situations, they will want to have the previous leader arrested. I'm being perfectly serious here. It is the intention of the Democrat Party to put Trump in gaol.
That was still quite an unusual thought less than five years ago; now it is taken as read. All that has changed since November is that the Permanent State was sufficiently discombobulated by its inability to steal the 2024 election that criminalising Trump the man has been put on hold and been replaced (per the Chief Justice and his close personal friends) by criminalising any Trump policy that might make a difference.
The same process is at work elsewhere in "the west": in Romania, two candidates (at the time of writing) have now been banned from the presidential election; in Germany, a fifth of MPs voted to ban the AfD; in France, a public prosecutor wants Marine Le Pen not only banned from public office but gaoled for five years. The old line was that politics is showbiz for ugly people, but it's actually meant to be showbiz for boring people: Game of Thrones between Tweedleleft and Tweedleright. Nothing that seeks to go beyond that can be permitted.
As The Washington Post's NeverTrump columnist Jennifer Rubin put it back in the wake of Biden's 2020 "victory":
It's not only that @realDonaldTrump has to lose, his enablers have to lose. We have to collectively burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them. Because if there are survivors....they will do it again.
Well, there were "survivors", despite Jen's best efforts, and they did do it again. As I wrote five days after the 2020 "election":
My advice is to take Ms Rubin and her chums at their word...
Even if they never succeed in gaoling him, they will surely use the 'peaceful transition' to put in place a couple of decades' worth of litigation-without-end. Come to that, can he even trust the Secret Service agents they'll assign to him?
Well, we sort of learned the answer to that last summer, with the two least investigated presidential assassination attempts in American history. To quote that Rumsfeld line again: the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So the question to ponder is: Have the people who want Trump dead put that ambition, like the Trump prosecutions, on hold? I don't think so.
Where once sat Steve Allen and Johnny Carson, "mainstream" TV now offers:
"Wow, you guys like domestic terror"
The Daily Show's audience applauds the domestic terror incidents against Tesla, disturbing even the liberal host... pic.twitter.com/WAyFPS0ZrK
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 20, 2025
The Tweeter is being naïve. The "liberal host" was not "disturbed": there is no joke in the montage; it had no purpose except to elicit whoops and cheers. The audience is like Jennifer Rubin: they're turned on by political violence and happy to reveal their kinky fantasies, but for the most part have no desire to go skulking about in ski-masks with Molotov cocktails. Yet there are, as we saw in Pennsylvania and Florida, exceptions to the general rule, and the "respectable" media are anxious to incentivise them.
~Across the Atlantic, the British state is happy to let any dissidents out there know that it's willing to kill you. Yesterday, in the King's Bench Division of the High Court of England (where I appeared last year) held a hearing on Tommy Robinson - not on the substance of whether his months of solitary confinement constitute a breach of his human rights under the European Convention of Human Rights, but on the procedural matter of whether his rapidly deteriorating condition warrents the scheduling of an expedited judicial review.
Kathy Gyngell of The Conservative Woman attended Tommy's hearing, as she attended mine, and, unlike Fleet Street and the Beeb, has filed a full account of what happened. At one point, Judge Chamberlain ordered that Mr Robinson, watching the proceedings from his cell, be permitted to speak with his counsel by telephone. Halfway through the conversation, the call was terminated by the goons of HMP Woodhill, presumably at the direction of its sadistic governor, Nicola Marfleet, she-wolf of the SS (see picture at top right).
His Lordship happened to see, via the video link, that Tommy was holding up a pink card reading:
THEY CUT MY PHONE OFF
The Court was not amused by Commandant Marfleet's subversion of its hearing, and ordered a recess to permit Tommy to confer with his KC via the courtroom video. But it was an interesting glimpse into the brazenness of Nicola Marfleet and her Starmtroopers.
Unable to testify in his own defence, Mr Robinson had his notes on his condition read by his barrister:
I am panicking. I feel I am being provoked. I want to leave prison mentally whole, not broken . . . I am terrified of the next five months. I believe this is politically motivated.
Yes, of course. It is the British state's intention that he should leave Woodhill not "mentally whole" but wholly "broken". As readers of The Prisoner of Windsor will know, I anticipated, via a fictional Home Secretary, the state's determination in such matters:
"There was an Australian blogger," she wheezed. "Full of shite like they are. Mouthing off about 'Londonistan' and 'Eurabia'. We were shutting down a free-speech demo in Luton, and he got lippy with a copper. Then in court he started swearing at the judge. Very Oz. Got thirty days for contempt in HMP Tea-Cosy. Someone in the department thought it might be a big up-yours to these 'citizen-journalists' if we transferred him somewhere harder. I sort of knew where they were going with this, but I signed off on it anyway. Third night he was there, six of the jihad boys jumped him. He's a vegetable now, so no more blogging...
"I thought I'd feel bad about it. But nobody else did, not even the Aussie government. They hated the bugger, too. So I was surprised, after a day or two, that I felt fine. Made it easier to do it again."
Speaking as a Canadian, I find it striking at yesterday's hearing that the judge, the government, the defence and the press all accept it as perfectly normal that His Majesty's UK Prisons are run by Muslim gangs. Just one of those things, old boy. Almost as if Nicola Marfleet relies on them as her enforcers. Almost as if it's a pilot programme for the broader society.
UPDATE! Tommy lost - as I did. The British state has decided to deny him the right to challenge his cruel and unusual confinement until he is dead or a in a vegetative state. The judgment is a disgrace:
The cancellation of visits and curtailment of calls with associates believed to run social media platforms is a proper response to the need to avoid the use of his incarceration for campaigning purposes.
~People are sometimes confused about the apparent contradictions in that wider world: What do, say, open borders have to do with the trannification of the school system? Well, it's not difficult: what they have in common, throughout the west, is chaos: you get on the bus and a "migrant" stabs you; you send your little girl off to school and she comes back a little boy; your boy gets picked for the rugger team and drops dead on the pitch; you could really use a break, but the airport is closed...
The easiest way to figure out the purpose of public policy is to look at the universal outcome: the abolition of even the possibility of normal life.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.
