Mark Steyn vs. the Lord of the Flies In My Soup, Waiter!

Bill Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail!

 "...Men in our kingdom shall have and keep all these liberties, rights, and concessions, well and peaceably in their fulness and entirety for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and all places for ever. Both we and the barons have sworn that all this shall be observed in good faith and without deceit. Witness the abovementioned people and many others.Given by our hand in the meadow that is called Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines, on the fifteenth day of June in the seventeenth year of our reign."--the Magna Carta, 1215

The Mark Steyn Show is back! :: SteynOnline:

The "niche Canadian" (thank you, The Guardian) returns! Welcome to the first of Mark's post-cardiac Steyn Shows - with all due thanks to Audrey and his other French nurses and doctors, and no thanks whatsoever to the duplicitous weasels of GB News.

On today's show he welcomes back three of his most popular guests - Leilani Dowding, Alexandra Marshall and Eva Vlaardingerbroek - for a look at different aspects of the Big Picture, from the war on farming to the war on basic biology. They also find time to mull the British state censors at OffComm and the death of free speech in the wider west, and to ponder whether Klaus Schwab is pregnant.

All that plus a bonus edition of Mark's Mailbox. Click above to view the full show. As always, Mark Steyn Club members can read transcripts here

~ One advantage of Mark Steyn Club membership is that you can enjoy The Mark Steyn Show in whatever form you wish - video, audio or text. For the audio version of this episode, please see here.

~There has been a lot of chatter on Twitter about how no one at GB News is standing with Mark. Well, Alexandra and Eva and Leilani certainly are, and we are very grateful to them. If you'd like to know more about this stellar trio, we've introduced a new Contributors page. If you'd like to meet them in person, all three will be joining us on our first post-Covid Mark Steyn Cruise. You can find more details here.

~Mark's departure from GB News continues to rumble through the British press. If you're American and you find the contretemps a bit bewildering, The Conservative Treehouse has a good account:

Mark Steyn Leaves GBNews After Company Demands Contract Indemnifying Them Against Lawsuits for Wrong Think and British Regulatory Speech Violations

One of the guests we were honoured to feature this last year-and-a-quarter was Laura Perrins, co-founder of The Conservative Woman. Here is Laura's take:

The 8-9pm slot now on @GBNEWS is absolutely dire. I 'check' it on youtube now and again the next day.

So clearly what the dudes at Ofcom 'allow' the right wing people have, but nothing important is ever discussed.

Absolutely dire.

Speaking of "absolutely dire", at one point yesterday GB News was down to 700 viewers. As Mark observed, it would be more cost-effective to invite them all round to the car park at Watford Gap.".......

Although Mark has not made the claim, it is widely thought that his heart attacks were Vaxx-induced, just like Diamond's recent death. Only yesterday, Rep. Nancy Mace shared her own Vaxx-injury account at the House's American Gestapo Hearings. Steyn himself has featured many such guests.

We pray for all the Vaxx-injured and we thank You Lord Jesus for their complete restoration and healing, Amen and Amen!

Now there is even a campaign to blame eggs for the Vaxx-Myocarditis. Not just so that Bill Gates can sell his bug-flour #Fake Eggs, but because EGG YOLKS HELP TO BIND THE POISON SPIKE PROTEIN CAUSED BY THEIR TUSKEGEE DEATH SERUM.

JUST AS THEY CLAIMED IVERMECTIN WAS HARMFUL AND VAXX WAS SAFE, WHEN THE EXACT OPPOSITE WAS TRUE, SO THEY ARE TRYING A SIMILAR LIE WITH EGGS. THEY EVEN BUILT A BIRD FLU AT BIDEN BIO-LABS IN UKRAINE TO CREATE A SCARCITY.

#WarCrimesOverEasy

Mark Steyn famously stood up to the Canadian Human Rights Kangaroo Court over Free Speech and won, then successfully took on Michael Mann and his Fraudulent "Hockey Stick" Graph, a Global Warming Forgery. 

Back in the Dinosaur Days of the Blogosphere, we would await his weekly columns with glee, like literary pearls from another world. So what better way to celebrate--besides subscribing--than to steal from some of Mr. Steyn's classic posts?

Oh, Hell, No. Not Again and Not Today, satan.

                                                                         .................

Section 13 Rises from the Dead :: SteynOnline:

In such a world it is no surprise to find that Justin Trudeau's ministry is preparing to restore "Section 13" of the Canadian Human Rights Code. The repeal of that vile law represents one of my few victories in the political realm. As the saying goes, there are no permanent victories in politics, and I would have a tougher time winning that battle today: The principled lefties (Margaret Wente) who offered support have themselves been canceled, and the queasier ones (Neil Macdonald) who objected on the grounds that all the attention was merely helping me sell even more books have been supplanted by more committed warriors who feel that, with Zuckerberg and Bezos at your back, there is no one so lofty he can't be brought low. 

...Until (in the wake of our exposure of the racket) the tenacious Marc Lemire won his landmark victory in 2009, Section 13 prosecutions had a three-decade 100 per cent conviction rate even the Soviets might envy.

That wasn't even the most basic affront. Until Maclean's intervened in 2008, Lemire's Section 13 trial was scheduled to be held in secret. I couldn't quite believe this... Secret trials are for Beijing and Tehran, yet in the name of "human rights" they were introduced to Ottawa.

The line that sums up my objection to the racket was formulated by the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle:

You're too stupid to tell me what to think.

Mark Steyn, excerpts from 2002:

"The other day, Johnelle Bryant, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, gave an interview to ABC News in which she revealed that Mohammed Atta and three other September 11th terrorists had visited her Florida office seeking government loans.
At first," she says, "he refused to speak with me," on the grounds that she was, in his words, "but a female."

Ms. Bryant says the applicant was asking for $650,000 to start a crop-dusting business. His plan was to buy a six-seater twin-prop and then remove the seats. "He wanted to build a chemical tank that would fit inside the aircraft and take up every available square inch of the aircraft except for where the pilot would be sitting."

"He asked me," recalls Ms. Bryant, "what would prevent him from going behind my desk and cutting my throat and making off with the millions of dollars in that safe."

...Mr. Atta then spotted an aerial view of Washington hanging on the wall behind her. He told her he particularly liked the way it got all the famous landmarks of the city in one convenient picture, pointing specifically to the Pentagon and the White House. "He wanted that picture really bad."

"He said, 'How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it,' like the cities in his country had been destroyed?"

Mr. Atta then moved on to other prominent landmarks in other American cities, and enquired about security at the World Trade Center. Ms. Bryant had a Dallas Cowboys souvenir on her desk, and he asked her about their spectacular stadium and, specifically, the "hole in the roof."

At that point, the chit-chat turned to Mr. Atta's own country, which he claimed was Afghanistan. "He mentioned Osama bin Laden," she says. "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from. I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could."

There'll be more of these stories, tales of men virtually screaming their intentions but up against a culture sensitivity-trained into a coma." ..............

Mark Steyn, excerpt from 2005: 

"With hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta’s jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier.

For four years, much of the western world behaved like Bryant. Bomb us, and we agonise over the “root causes” (that is, what we did wrong). Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that “Islam is a religion of peace”. Issue bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can’t wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush, Blair and Howard. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the “vast majority” of Muslims “jihad” is a harmless concept meaning “decaf latte with skimmed milk and cinnamon sprinkles”.

[M]ulticulturalism is a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome. Atta’s meetings with Bryant are emblematic: He wasn’t a genius, a master of disguise in deep cover; indeed, he was barely covered at all, he was the Leslie Nielsen of terrorist masterminds – but the more he stuck out, the more Bryant was trained not to notice, or to put it all down to his vibrant cultural tradition.

[T]he more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room. [A]nyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. Australia’s old cultural cringe had a certain market rationality; the new multicultural cringe is pure nihilism.

Like Doc Hasan, Atta wasn't even trying to hide it anymore. Like the last kid playing Hide-n-Seek after his playmates were called home, we were the only ones hiding."........

Mark Steyn, excerpt from 2009:

"Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year ago that Major Hasan was in regular email contact with Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as imam to three of the 9/11 hijackers and supports all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that this lively correspondence was consistent with Major Hasan’s “research interests”, so there was no need to worry. That’s America: Technologically superior, money no object (not one but two “joint terrorism task forces” stumbled across him). Yet no action was taken.

On the other hand, who needs surveillance operations and intelligence budgets? Major Hasan was entirely upfront about who he was. He put it on his business card: “SOA.” As in “Soldier of Allah” – which seems a tad ungrateful to the American taxpayers who ponied up half a million bucks or thereabouts in elite medical school education to train him to be a Soldier of Uncle Sam. In a series of meetings during 2008, officials from both Walter Reed and the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences considered the question of whether then Captain Hasan was psychotic. But, according to at least one bigwig at Walter Reed, members of the policy committee wondered “how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents”. So he got promoted to Major and shipped to Fort Hood.

And 13 men and women and an unborn baby are dead. Well, like they say, it’s easy to be wise after the event. I’m not so sure. These days, it’s easier to be even more stupid after the event. “Apparently he tried to contact al Qaeda,” mused MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “That’s not a crime to call up al Qaeda, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?” Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?

The truth is we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder.".......

"Instead of having all these individual perimeters around every Dunkin Donuts franchise or every gas station, or ever J.C. Penny, why not have just one big perimeter around the country? We could call it a border! And we could have, like, border security!"--Mark

Mark Steyn:

"Churchill was the Indispensable Man of the 20th century. He presided over the hinge moment in history when the British Empire stood alone against Hitler. No need to apologize for Churchill. You and I live in the world he created."

Mark Steyn: From Barbarous to Evil

"I woke up to the news that, during the night, in Baltimore, Maryland, the oldest monument to Christopher Columbus in the United States had been destroyed by someone called "Ty" and his chum... As you can see at right, almost every word painstakingly engraved on that obelisk has been obliterated. It stood for 225 years, and it was destroyed in the blink of an eye. Julia Manchester, The Hill's reporter, continues:

This comes amid a heated debate across the country over removing Confederate monuments...

That's one way of putting it, but not an honest one.  It's hard to have a "conversation" with a guy wielding a sledgehammer.".......

“For a century, Edison's light bulb was regarded as a beacon of American genius; then it became a 'climate criminal." That transformation is American decline in a nutshell. ...There's no such thing as "sustainable" development. Human progress and individual liberty have advanced on the backs of one unsustainable development after another. Bet on human ingenuity every time. We're not animals, and it's a cult as deranged as the screwiest fringe religion to insist we are. Earth's most valuable resource is us."

Mark Steyn on his book "A Disgrace to the Profession" The World's Scientists - in their own words - on Michael E Mann, his Hockey Stick and their Damage to Science - Volume One

"The "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures over the last bazillion years is the single most influential icon in the global-warming debate, gleefully seized on by the UN's transnational climate jet set, heavily promoted by Al Gore's Oscar-winning crockumentary, tirelessly used by governments around the world to sell the Kyoto Accord to their citizens, and taught as "incontrovertible" "settled science" to impressionable schoolchildren around the world from kindergarten to graduation. Mann's hockey stick told the simplest of stories: climate-wise nothing happened for nine hundred years until suddenly, in the 20th century, the mercury took off and shot up through the top right-hand corner of the graph - and now we're all gonna fry.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the global-warming "pause" is about to enter its third decade, which suggests it may all be a bit more complicated than that. And yet Mann's cartoon science was so effective as propaganda that the Big Climate enforcers cannot renounce it.

You'd never know from all the constant bleating about "the 97 per cent consensus" that Michael E Mann and his hockey stick are, in fact, held in very low regard by many of the world's most eminent scientists. I was a bit surprised myself - until I noticed how few scientists were prepared to support him and I started to dig around."..............

"If I just move this little decimal point, no one will ever know. What harm could it possibly do? It's for a good cause--Al Gore says I'm even saving the planet! And who's going to check my work a century from now? But if I don't manipulate the data, I won't get a paid vacation...for the rest of my life! Say, I wonder if that little red-head is going to be at the beach house next door this summer..."

Web-Slinger, But No Friendly Neighborhood :: SteynOnline:

"Ah. One person has died "with" Omicron. Shelter in place until further notice.

And don't even think about "snogging under the mistletoe," advises Mr Johnson's cabinet colleague Thérèse Coffey.

And so the "free world" staggers on to the third year of "two weeks to flatten the curve". Chinese New Year #3: Year of the Bat, Year of the Pangolin, Year of the Wuhan Institute Researcher... On Friday's Mark Steyn Show, Douglas Murray quoted David Starkey: The world gets a Chinese virus, the world gets more Chinese... I'm not sure the initial "two weeks" would have been possible forty years ago - or even ten, when the concept of "social media" was in its infancy, and "smartphones" weren't quite so. Before the Internet, before 24/7 cable news, confining the entire population would have been more obviously seen as "house arrest", and it would have grated more quickly..." .......

 The [Un]documented Mark Steyn:

Consider Vermont. Unlike my own state of New Hampshire, it has a bucolic image: Holsteins, dirt roads, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, Ben & Jerry's, Howard Dean... And yet the Green Mountain State now has appalling levels of heroin and meth addiction, and the social chaos that follows. Geoffrey Norman began a recent essay in The Weekly Standard with a vignette from a town I know very well — St Johnsbury, population 7,600, motto "Very Vermont", the capital of the remote North-East Kingdom hard by the Quebec border and as far from urban pathologies as you can get. Or so you'd think. But on a recent Saturday morning, Norman reports, there were more cars parked at the needle-exchange clinic than at the farmers' market. In Vermont, there's no inner-city underclass, because there are no cities, inner or outer; there's no disadvantaged minorities, because there's only three blacks and seven Hispanics in the entire state; there's no nothing. Which is the real problem.
Large numbers of Vermonters have adopted the dysfunctions of the urban underclass for no reason more compelling than that there's not much else to do. Once upon a time, St Johnsbury made Fairbanks scales, but now a still handsome town is, as Norman puts it, "hollowed out by the loss of work and purpose". Their grandparents got up at four in the morning to work the farm and their great-great-great-whatever-parents slogged up the Connecticut River, cleared the land, and built homes and towns and a civilization in the wilderness. And now? A couple of months back, I sat in the café in St Johnsbury, and overheard a state bureaucrat and a Chamber of Commerce official discuss enthusiastically how the town could access some federal funds to convert an abandoned building into welfare housing...
What does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps... The assumption is that mass, multi-generational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be a member of either the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you're wondering why every Big Government program assumes you're a feeble child, that's because a citizenry without "work and purpose" is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neo-feudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn't just be "economic inequality", but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.

 Mark Steyn, 2012:

"Courtesy of David Maraniss' new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama's identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram'pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack's "memoir" who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama's autobiography as "a symbol of young blackness" was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather, supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people's valiant struggle against colonialism, met his actual demise when he "fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes." David Maraniss is no right-winger, and can't understand why boorish nonliterary types have seized on his book as evidence that the president of the United States is a Grade A phony.".......

The First Rule of Debate Club Is That There Is No Debate

--His Excellency, President-for-Life, Field Marshall, Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC,
Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth, Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire
in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular

Eating Your Words: The Cannibalization of Free Speech

Steyn: Leftists Are Openly Mocking Free Speech As A “Right-wing Fetish” – Summit News:

Appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonight Wednesday, author and columnist Mark Steyn warned that we are at the stage where free speech is being mocked by the left as a “right-wing fetish”.

Steyn responded to a call in the New York Times for Joe Biden to appoint a “reality czar” to debunk “disinformation,” a notion that many pointed out conjures up the Ministry of Truth from Orwell’s 1984.

Steyn emphasized that the left “regard an ever-expanding range of topics as there being a correct view … whether it’s climate change or Islam or same-sex marriage or transgender participation in sports, there is a settled view and once we have settled it we need no longer need to debate.”

“The problem is there are an ever-expanding range of issues that are added to the list,” Steyn continued, adding  “in the United States, where disagreeing with the official state position on, for example, a new coronavirus that nobody heard of a year ago and nobody knows anything about — just disagreeing with officialdom now is forbidden.”

“That is why the weasel phrase ‘disinformation’ — what is the information you are dissing? It’s official information. Ministry of Information information,” Steyn added. Steyn further described “a malign alliance in Washington between big-tech and the state,” and noted “we are moving into a literally Orwellian world where phrases out of 1984, he uses the phrase ‘reality control’… The New York Times is in favour of establishing a Federal Agency of ‘reality control’.”

“These people are so unself-aware, and frankly so illiterate that they don’t even realise that these are tired ideas that they are lifting from ["1984"], a 70 year old indictment of the totalitarian state,” Steyn urged." .......

 MARK STEYN FROM 2003:

"Speaking as a foreigner myself, I've always found it one of the more charming features of the American scene that "progressives" are obliged to find justification for their radicalism in a piece of old parchment. In Europe, they can simply say: We need to get with the beat, daddy-o. But in the U.S. the Left at least observes the niceties and pretends that the powdered-wig guys had somehow ingeniously anticipated the need for a constitutional right to gay marriage or a partial-birth abortion. Perhaps recognizing that this particular penumbra is pretty well tapped out, Justice O'Connor is now saying that there's gold in them thar Scandinavian hills. ...In considering the pros and cons of sodomy in Texas, the Supreme Court did not rely on the large body of Nigerian sharia precedents and Taliban jurisprudence in this area. ...

Given that this is the Court that elevated "Celebrate Diversity" from a bumper sticker to a bedrock constitutional principle, it's a little bewildering to find that they cheerfully accord the white European a unique monopoly on the judicial consultancy positions. Heartening though it is to know the white man still has his uses, this privileged access is, alas, unwarranted. For one thing, the fact that the U.S. Constitution is older than the French, German, Italian, Greek, and Spanish constitutions combined suggests that this member of "the Western tradition" is more traditional than others. For another, can you imagine any judge in France, Denmark, or New Zealand taking U.S. court decisions into account when deliberating on, say, gun ownership or capital punishment?

Let me come at it this way. I love borders, the more the merrier -- town lines, county, state, and, of course, national. Borders symbolize one of the few remaining constraints on government: You don't like the grade school here in town? Move ten miles up the road. You don't want to pay Vermont sales tax? Drive over the river and shop in New Hampshire. Arianna Huffington huffs against "tax loopholes for fat cats," but I'd say the ability to rent a post-office box in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands is a "loophole" in one of the original 16th-century senses -- an aperture to let in light and fresh air. The fact that there's somewhere else to go to is the ultimate limitation on government. Borders give people choices -- and, to put it in a bumper sticker, "I'm Pro-Choice and I Vote with My Feet." When starry-eyed utopians speak of a "world without borders," you can pretty much guess what kind of a place the one-world one-party state would be, with tax rates starting at more than 50 percent, where they are in Sweden right now.

That's why Justice O'Connor's indifference to jurisdictional integrity and partiality to foreigners is not just a kinky fetish but something philosophically incompatible with the job she's meant to be doing. If you wanted to construct the precise opposite of the U.S. Constitution, it would look an awful lot like "international law." The former is a document that limits the state's grip on the people, the latter is designed to ensure they can never wiggle free, no matter where they go. "International law" is the new colonialism, the imposition on the world's peoples of the moral certainties of a remote, unaccountable Western elite -- indeed, one far less tolerant of local customs and culture than the old-school imperialists. The Europeans haven't had much luck imposing their laws on Saudi Arabia and Sudan but, thanks to Justice O'Connor, other backward jurisdictions like Texas and Alabama are about to be whipped into line." ...........

Someday, when I grow up, I hope to write like that.

Since there is no good stopping place, we'll simply stop here, but the Genius of Mark Steyn continues.

No more Jabs, okay, buddy? We need you--now more than ever!

Columns & Essays :: SteynOnline