Mark Steyn Leaves GBNews: “Wrong Think”

 

The headline:

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

For years, Mark Steyn has been one of the few fearless voices on the air, most recently with his own program at GBNews in the Great Britain.  And he has been regularly covering taboo subjects such as adverse reactions to the vaxx, grooming gangs in the UK, and other topics that evidently have the GBNews producers’ knickers in a twist.  Mark’s ratings were consistently at the top of the time slot, beating out competitors including Piers Morgan.  Now where is Mark Steyn to go? 

Sundance has the breaking news:

Mark Steyn, the only man qualified to replace Rush Limbaugh, has announced his departure from GBNews after the British media company requested a contract making Steyn legally accountable for any speech or wrong-think as identified by British regulators within the Office of Communication (OfComm). {Direct Rumble Link}

Within Britain, all media speech is monitored by the Office of Communications (OfComm), where official government censors track commentary according to regulatory and compliance rules established by the government.  Previously, Mark Steyn ran afoul of the OfComm investigators when he began questioning the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccinations.  There are two investigations ongoing with possible fines pending for violating rules on government approved speech.

Into this mix comes the now capitulating GBNews organization, where Mark Steyn and Neil Oliver have both pushed the boundaries of acceptable thought.  While Mark Steyn was offline, recovering from two heart attacks, I noticed something was shifting in the past several weeks at GBNews; from the presentation of Oliver to the way the content was being shared (no uploads and missing transcripts).  It seemed like something tenuous and opaque was happening in the background.  Steyn confirms. 

There a video of Mark confirming all this at the link here.  

At SteynOnline here, Mark has some parting shots and touching comments on his departure from GBNews.  And this afternoon, he’s back on the radio with James Golden, a/k/a Bo Snerdley in New York.  GBNews has capitulated to the dark side.

# # #

Mark Steyn has recovered!

 

One of our all-time favorite authors, columnists, and TV guest/host is back from the dead, as he put it.  Mark recently suffered two heart attacks, was hospitalized in France, but is now back on camera, (click here for a 2:15 video clip) with his sense of humor intact.  If I had to guess, since Mark travels all the time, he probably had to get the vax in order to keep his media and speaking dates during the early days of the "plandemic."  This blog has been following various reports of adverse reactions to the jab, so that guess will not come as a surprise to readers here.  Anyway, you can also check out his website at steynonline here.

# # #

Mark Steyn, Richard Dreyfuss, & multiculturalism

 

Jaws image seen on SteynOnline

Mark Steyn’s column yesterday was in part a renewed pitch for his book America Alone The End of the World as We Know It.  Having read the book some years ago, I can highly recommend it.  But it’s Mr Steyn’s reaction to actor Richard Dreyfuss that prompted the column. Here’s some of it:

American conservatives on the Internet are abuzz with the recent interview given to Glenn Beck by Richard Dreyfuss, star of Jaws, Mr Holland's Opus, American Graffiti and many more. Mr Dreyfuss has given up acting to save his country:

@RichardDreyfuss tells me he gave up acting "ONLY for something I loved as much, which was saving my country...It infuriates me that people don't understand what this place means."

SteynOnline regulars will not be surprised by this development. Mark and Mr Dreyfuss have met only once, very briefly, two decades back at the memorial tribute in Montreal to their mutual friend Mordecai Richler. But seven years ago it emerged that the actor was one of many who had read Steyn's bestselling book. As Mr Dreyfuss put it in a three-part theopolitical dialogue with Susannah Black:

Mark Steyn, a writer with an irritating case of the smart-alecs, has written a book I urge you read called America Alone. Just the first few chapters are a geo-political wake-up call, and he is not someone I agree with very much. But he quotes bin Laden: "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." And he quotes Donald Rumsfeld: "If we know anything it is that weakness is provocative."

We are on a clock we don't see or comprehend. We will not survive this century unless civic virtue is revived. We can discuss its origins all day—if we have the right to speak at all, and aren't dead under jihad.

Seven years after that observation, "the right to speak at all" is increasingly imperiled, in ever more areas - even for those as celebrated as J K Rowling, and even in Richard Dreyfuss's own field, the arts. As Mark mentioned on his first post-heart-attack appearance, he ran into an actress friend, a lifelong leftie, who nevertheless has grasped the essential fact of our time - that western civilization is sliding off a cliff. And, as Steyn put it, once that is seen it cannot be unseen.

Mark's book was never Harry Potter boffo, but it kept selling year on year, and picking up new fans en route, including from Hollywood. For a tome by an irritating smart alec, America Alone proved somewhat prescient, but its warnings went unheeded by the presidents and prime ministers in a position to do something about them.

. . .

Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis. After all, most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school "holiday" concert instead of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society. It's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug. . . . Multiculturalism was conceived by the western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb.

For the rest of it, click here.

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Steyn pays tribute to Queen Elizabeth

 

Princess Elizabeth joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS)
 in 1945, becoming the first female member of the Royal Family
to join the Armed Services as a full-time active member
(via Daily Mail)

Mark Steyn pays tribute to the life and service of Queen Elizabeth II:

. . .Three-quarters of a century ago, upon the occasion of her twenty-first birthday in 1947, Princess Elizabeth addressed "all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire, wherever they live"

I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.

As princess and queen, Elizabeth II kept that promise to "our great imperial family" through turbulent times that have wholly transformed the world.

. . .

"Vivat Regina" no more. God save the King.

The full column is here.  It is very touching and sad.

# # #

Steyn: More on Our Banana Republic

 

Ben Garrison cartoon via NewsAmmo

The inimitable Mark Steyn published his “Criminalizing Opposition in a Pseudo-Republic” column yesterday about the FBI raid on Mar-A-Lago.  And as always, Mark has some historical perspective on this latest action by a corrupt DOJ & FBI:

For almost a decade and a half now, the American "republic" has been decaying to the defining condition of a one-party state - that is, the total merger of the ruling party and the state. Last night, the dirty stinking rotten corrupt US Department of Justice signed off on a raid on Mar-a-Lago, so we've now moved into hardcore banana-republic territory: the regime's cops are busting into the home of the opposition leader. We're told this is because Trump took some "classified" documents with him when he left Washington. Yeah, that's always a pretext for an armed raid: You could ask Hillary Clinton or Sandy Berger.

. . .

I see Kevin McCarthy is now threatening Merrick Garland with an "investigation" and ordering him to preserve all documents. Ooooooh! Maybe, after the coming Republican landslide, they can appoint an independent counsel; maybe John Durham or Robert Mueller is available. Why would anyone take McCarthy's threat seriously? If you don't grasp that in today's America there is no equality before the law, there is no point even discussing public affairs.

. . ..

If that's the best McCarthy can do, it's hopelessly insufficient to the moment: There ought to be total non-cooperation with the regime by the GOP with the intent of bringing it to a standstill - because this "administration has gone way beyond politics and is corrupting institutions to a degree that will make violence inevitable.

Oh, but don't worry, says McCarthy, there's that Big Red Wave coming in November.

Yeah, right. A throwaway line from The Mark Steyn Show of December 15th 2020:

By the way, when they mention Covid and 2022, that's code for: 'Yeah the US midterms are gonna get stolen too.'

Read Mark’s full column here.  Recommended.

# # #

Mark Steyn: America The Beautiful

The great Mark Steyn has a regular feature on his website, Steyn's Song of the Week, and his column over this weekend offers the wonderful backstory to the song America The Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A Ward.  Here is most of the column:

. . . And to round out this Glorious Fourth in not so glorious times, at a time when we dwell mostly on what is ugly in our society, here is a hymn to beauty. This much requested essay is adapted from Mark's book A Song For The Season:

In 1893, a Massachusetts professor called Katharine Lee Bates was giving a series of summer lectures on English literature at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs. "One day," she recalled, "some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there."

Professor Bates had not previously traveled in the Rockies or seen much of her country at all beyond New England, and the unbounded beauty of the land awed her - and inspired her. It was "the most glorious scenery I ever beheld, and I had seen the Alps and the Pyrenees," she said.

"My memory of that supreme day of our Colorado sojourn is fairly distinct even across the stretch of 35 crowded years," Miss Bates wrote a year before her death in 1929. "We stood at last on that Gate-of-Heaven summit, hallowed by the worship of perished races, and gazed in wordless rapture over the far expanse."

Though she insisted "the sublimity of the Rockies smote my pencil with despair", she was not "wordless" for long. "It was then and there, as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind":

Oh beautiful for spacious skies

For amber waves of grain

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain!

She put them down on paper that evening in her room at the Antlers Hotel. Today you'd be hard put to find a quatrain known to more Americans. Whether it's Gary Larson's "Far Side" cartoon of Columbus approaching land and saying, "Look! Purple mountains! Spacious skies! ...Is someone writing this down?" or Rush Limbaugh at noon eastern welcoming listeners "across the fruited plain" to his daily radio show, every anchorman, cartoonist, comedian or advertising copywriter who evokes those words is assured that they're as instantly familiar to his audience as any lines ever written in American English.

Though they were born that day on Pikes Peak, they were not given to the world until the Fourth of July 1895, when they appeared in a weekly church publication in Boston called The Congregationalist. Whether or not Katharine Lee Bates could see actual amber waves or purple mountains in that thin air, she captured precisely the scale of America as no-one had done before: As the anonymous author of a long-ago booklet on patriotic music published by the John Hancock Insurance Company wrote: "Among our American songs, none surpasses in nationalistic idealism 'America, the Beautiful.' In it Katharine Lee Bates has caught the beauty, majesty, and immensity of this country of ours." The words have a humility before that beauty and majesty and immensity, yet they rise to the task and do them justice. In The Congregationalist, the editor's introductory note read:

Miss Bates's poem has the true patriotic ring pertinent to Fourth of July.

And over 125 Fourths later, those words are not just the accompaniment to the celebration but part of the fabric and foundation of it.

Mark’s full column is here.  Happy Independence Day to everyone across the fruited plain.

# # #

Mark Steyn: "not a serious country"

 

Mark Steyn is my favorite author and columnist.  I used to enjoy his appearances on Fox News, but since I crossed Fox off my list many months ago, I have to be satisfied with his written commentary.  Yesterday, his commentary was decidedly pessimistic, but I could not see where he was getting it wrong.  Here are some excerpts:

. . .

The biggest-selling book with American conservatives right now argues that the answer to all of the above [litany of government-caused problems] is "constitutionalism". On the other hand, the radio host Jesse Kelly says:

We're not a serious country and we're not a country that will be around much longer.

I incline to the latter view myself.  At this point, conservative complaceniks tend to trot out Adam Smith: "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." But not this much - not Covid lockdowns and open borders, Afghan "translators" and Haitian "refugees", Big Tech and Big Trans, BLM and CRT, ID for the IHOP but not for the voting booth, China as America's manufacturer and America's loan shark...

. . .

To go back to that Jesse Kelly line, "we're not a serious country": A nation where a pasty privileged pajama boy can demand the ruination of his professor because he traumatized the class by making them watch a Laurence Olivier performance is too unserious to survive, and doesn't deserve to.

If the Constitution is the bulwark against madness, then it has already failed; if "capitalism" is the bulwark against express-elevator descent into full-blown madness, the only thing holding that up is the chimera of the US dollar's status as global currency.

. . .

"Land of the free and the home of the brave"? Both are conspicuous by their absence.

The full column is here.  Grim, but highly recommended.

# # #

Mark Steyn on free speech: another casualty

 

image credit: contrarypedant.blogspot.com

Mark Steyn’s column today reports on another grim milestone: the death of Lars Vilks, one of the vocal few who made up the front line in the “free speech wars”:

Here's the score card from that 2010 event [in the free-speech wars, gathered to mark the fifth anniversary of the Danish Mohammed cartoons in Copenhagen in 2010]: Lars Hedegaard, of the Danish Free Press Society, had invited five of us that day - a Dane, a Swede, a Norwegian, a Dutchman and yours truly:

~The Norwegian comedienne Shabana Rehman had already had her family's restaurant firebombed; she now lives under 24/7 police protection, which is not the easiest way to practice observational standup;

~The Dutch cartoonist Nekschot was obliged, for security reasons, to appear on stage with his face obscured and unidentifiable. So he chose to wear a burqa. Funny, but not quite secure enough. Nekschot had already been arrested for "hate speech" with the authorities openly taunting him about the impending loss of his anonymity. He now lives in hiding, and is no longer a cartoonist;

~Our host Lars Hedegaard was subsequently shot at point-blank range, but fortunately by an incompetent, so he survived. Mr Hedegaard also lives in hiding; the would-be assassin lives free in Turkey, where Sultan Erdogan refuses to extradite;

~and now Lars Vilks is dead.

Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, he was being driven in a bulletproof car by two of his protection officers when there occurred what Swedish police regard as a freak collision with a truck. An almighty fire ensued and neither Lars nor the policemen survived; the driver of the other vehicle is seriously wounded and in hospital. This all happened near Markaryd, about an hour north-east of Helsingborg, where Lars was born. Helsingborg, like many Swedish cities, is utterly transformed, which is why Lars Vilks ended his life in an unmarked car being driven home under police protection from a guarded lunch with an old friend.

The BBC reported his demise thus:

Muhammad cartoonist killed in traffic collision

He was not, in fact, a cartoonist. He was an artist, primarily a sculptor - of limited technical skills (as he conceded) but of whimsical imagination. Yet, as the gates clank shut on free speech across Europe, it's easier for lazy Beeb hacks to lump every dissenter under the category of "Muhammad cartoonist".

. . .

It was an unusual traffic accident. On a divided carriageway with a sturdily fenced median, the police vehicle somehow managed to cross into the oncoming lane to find itself just in front of a large truck. As Robert Spencer puts it:

The names of his police guards need to be released. As does the name of the truck driver. Note that 'the rescue service and the police said it would take a lot for a vehicle to be able to pass into the other lane, given that it is separated by a wire fence.'

The Swedish police continue to investigate. Whatever the circumstances of the fatal crash, Douglas Murray is correct as to the broader cause of death:

Lars Vilks was a man, and an artist, of enormous courage. He should never have been in this situation, and if other artists and others across Europe had not been such cowards then he never would have been.

I ponder the grim arithmetic of that 2010 event. Six of us on stage that day: One firebombed, one forced into hiding and out of his job, one shot, and now one dead. It's like Agatha Christie for jihadists: And Then There Were None. Maybe someone would like to produce a film or a play on the theme. Ah, but no: As Douglas says quite correctly, Lars Vilks was only in that van because of the miserable cowardice of our so-called artists, a "community" that spends the whole year giving each other awards back and forth for their "courage" and "heroism".

Mark’s full column is here.

# # #

Mark Steyn: America is not "Too Big To Fail"

 

This weekend the inimitable Mark Steyn posted his column as the catastrophic events unfolded in Afghanistan.  It is a depressing read, and as America’s past and present involvements in Afghanistan impact on our “fiscal responsibility”  (a subject within the scope of Tea Party’s mission), I am linking to it.  Mr. Steyn considers not just the Biden administration’s failures, the U.S. military’s failures, Afghanistan and the Taliban, but also larger consequences, for America and across the globe.  Here’s Mr. Steyn’s opening:

To reprise a line from a decade-old column of mine:

Afghanistan is about Afghanistan – if you're Afghan or Pakistani. But, if you're Russian or Chinese or Iranian or European, Afghanistan is about America.

That's the point to remember: if you're an Afghan schoolgirl, today is the fall of Kabul; elsewhere, in the chancelleries of allies and enemies alike, it's the fall of America. Even by their usual wretched standards, the world's most somnolent media are struggling to stay up to speed on the story. Here's the scoop from USA Today:

Taliban's Afghanistan Advance Tests Biden's 'America Is Back' Foreign Policy Promise

You don't say! Did he misread the prompter, or mishear the guy in his ear? "America is on its back", surely?

But don't worry, the world's most lavishly over-funded "intelligence community" is on the case:

Kabul Could Fall To The Taliban Within 90 Days, U.S. Intelligence Warns

Thank you, geniuses. That was Thursday. So it turned out to be well within ninety hours - which is close enough for US intelligence work.

. . .

One of the depressing aspects of the Swamp is that everything becomes a racket - including even your armed forces. Look at that buffoon at top right, the guy who heads the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Thoroughly Modern Milley: that's an awful lot of chest ribbonry for a nation that hasn't won a war in three-quarters of a century. During his recent wokier-than-thou Congressional testimony on "white rage", I wish someone would have asked Thoroughly Modern what they were all for:

Well, this is for Korea... Vietnam... This small ribbon's for the Jimmy Carter helicopters-in-the-desert fiasco, because that went tits up far quicker than it usually takes... Here's the Pentagon Female Empowerment Award I got for introducing Take Your Child Bride To Work Day to Jalalabad... This one's from the Association of Non-Binary Staff Colleges for Most Transitions in a Single Battalion... Oh, and this most recent one is for getting into a Twitter spat over Tucker Carlson...

If you don't have total contempt for Milley and the rest of the brass right now, you're part of the problem.

And here’s a chilling scenario:

America is not "too big to fail": It's failing by almost every metric right now. The world-record brokey-brokey-brokeness manifested by the current spending bills is only possible because the US dollar is the global currency. When that ends, we're Weimar with smartphones. Clearly, Chairman Xi and his allies occasionally muse on the best moment to yank the dollar out from under. If you were in Beijing watching telly today, would you perhaps be considering advancing those plans?

. . .

Click here to read the full column.

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Mark Steyn on "COVID Forever"

 

Mark Steyn is always worth the read. From his website: 

A year and a half into this thing, how's it going?

From Canada's Globe & Mail, which is like The New York Times but without the jokes, it seems the New Normal is going to have to be cranked up a notch:

Overwhelming evidence now demonstrates that the dominant mode of transmission of SARS-CoV2 is airborne, yet mitigation strategies have not evolved with this knowledge.

Indoor environments where people are in close contact present the highest risk for transmission. Work-from-home should continue as much as possible, as it is premature to return to the office unless absolutely necessary. When indoor close contact is occurring, cloth or medical masks should be replaced with respirator masks, which provide superior protection through a combination of exhalation source control and inhalational filtration.

Respirator masks, huh? They're pricey but stylish - and your kids will soon get used to them.

[I did not know what a respirator mask was, so here's an image: 

- ed.]

On the other hand, from Iceland's top epidemiologist:

Þórólfur Guðnason sagði í Sprengisandi á Bylgjunni í morgun að vonbrigði séu að hjarðónæmi hafi ekki náðst með bólusetningu. Hann segir að einungis ein önnur leið sé fær til að ná hjarðónæmi, að leyfa veirunni að dreifast um samfélagið.

Which means more or less:

Þórólfur Guðnason said on Sprengisandi á Bylgjunni this morning that it is disappointing that herd immunity has not been achieved through vaccination. He says the only other way to achieve herd immunity is to allow the virus to spread through the community.

The great monolithic herd of public health commissars then took the tire iron to him, and Mr Guðnason has now walked that back.

Meanwhile, in America - or at least on Twitter - it's business as usual. Lars McMurtry is following the science:

The CDC should roll out a new program: Get the shot or get shot.

The unvaccinated need to be rounded up and lined up in front of open trenches, Their choice is simple.

America has had enough of their virus. We need to get back to normal life.

With or without them.

The bad news is that America can't dig open trenches, because all the shovels and excavators are made in China and the supply chain's a bit disrupted. The good news is that what Joe Biden calls "the pandemic of the unvaccinated" mostly involves the vaccinated giving the Delta variant to the un-, so Mr McMurtry may get his wish albeit a little more incrementally than he'd like.

My view is that the Icelandic guy is right - that is, before he was clubbed into submission. To recapitulate a pithy line from another apparently silenced researcher, stopping humans from being human won't stop the virus from being a virus. Whatever the original justification (ie, to prevent the collapse of hospital systems), maintaining lockdown after, oh, late April 2020 did nothing to the virus except retard the development of herd immunity and, in the absence thereof, enable it to incubate more lethal variants than it would otherwise have done.

What's the upshot? This medical prof from East Anglia now says "herd immunity will never happen". Well, whose fault is that? Quarantining millions of healthy people while setting a target of zero-Covid is a pandemic policy that no sane government has ever attempted.

Given that we're now being told we have to live with Covid forever, we could at least take measures to punish the Chinese biowarfare lab and its enthusiastic funders in America's diseased public-health bureaucracy for loosing this thing on the world.

Ah, but that's even less likely than open trenches...

# # # 

The future belongs to those who show up

 

Mark Steyn has been on record for years pointing to demographics and birth rates as the primary issue facing civilization.  In his column today, he revisits the issue, quoting liberally from his 2006 book America Alone.  Mr. Steyn begins:

Happy Whit Monday to my Commonwealth cousins throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific, and to our readers in much of Continental Europe. And of course to my fellow Canadians a happy if locked down Victoria Day. Enjoy it while you can.

Front page news from yesterday's New York Times:

World Is Facing First Long Slide in Its Population

Me in my international bestseller fifteen years ago:

The single most important fact about the early 21st century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged... These countries – or, more precisely, these people – are going out of business.

The Times front page yesterday:

All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.

Me in 2006:

The salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia is that they're running out of babies. What's happening in the developed world is one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history... This isn't a projection: It's happening now. There's no need to extrapolate, and if you do it gets a little freaky, but, just for fun, here goes: By 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noël Coward remarked in another context, 'Funiculì, funiculà, funic yourself.'

The Times yesterday:

Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can't find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks.

Me fifteen years ago:

[In Japan] the shortage of children has led to a shortage of obstetricians...

[China's] population will get old before it's got rich...

The 'experts' of the western world are slower to turn around than an ocean liner, and in Europe they were still yakking about the 'population explosion' even as their 1970s schoolhouses, built in anticipation of traditional Catholic birthrates, were emptying through the Nineties and Oughts...

One can talk airily about being flushed down the toilet of history, but even that's easier said than done. In eastern Germany, rural communities are dying, and one consequence is that village sewer systems are having a tough time adjusting to the lack of use. Populations have fallen so dramatically there are too few people flushing to keep the flow of waste moving...

The Times yesterday:

The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older...

Me a decade-and-a-half ago:

Speaking for myself... I'd rather date Debbie Reynolds than Angelina Jolie. But even to put it in those terms is to become aware of how our assumptions about a society's health – about its innovative and creative energies - are based on its youthfulness. Picture the difference between a small northern mill town where the mill's closed down and the young people have moved away and a growing community in the Sun Belt. Which has the bigger range of stores and restaurants, more work opportunities, better school choice? Which problem would you rather have - managing growth or managing decline..?

In theory, those countries will find their population halving every thirty-five years or so. In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there's no point sticking around a country that's turned into an undertaker's waiting room. Not every pimply burger flipper wants to support entire old folks' homes single-handed...

Everything The New York Times finally got around to yesterday, I said in 2006. My book was an international bestseller, including on the Times' own Top Ten list. Yet it did not bother reviewing America Alone. . .

Read the rest here.

# # #

 

Mark Steyn on post-constitutional America

 

Mark Steyn concludes his column “America’s PoliticalPrisoners”:

In post-constitutional America, there is no equality before the law: If you riot violently in Minneapolis or Portland, you'll be cheered on by the media and Democrats, and bailed out by Seth Rogen or a Kamala Harris staffer. If you're let into the US Capitol by its so-called "police" and leave the statuary et al untouched, you'll be charged with trespassing, and, despite having no criminal record, will languish in prison (for over four months so far) until trial begins.

Those jailed for the events of January 6th are what we would call in other countries "political prisoners". Mr Chansley is in the slammer to concentrate his mind: right now, it's trespassing, but we see you used an ATM en route to DC, and you wouldn't want us to throw in "disrupting interstate commerce", would you?

As I've said for a long time, "federal justice" is an oxymoron - and, if you get a whiff that you're attracting the attention of this dirty rotten stinkin' evil system, flee the country. Meanwhile, I'm thinking of making a complaint to the UN Human Rights Council about the detainees of January 6th: If nothing else, it'll give the Cubans and Sudanese a laugh.

Mr. Steyn’s full column is here.

# # #

Mark Steyn on Cancel Culture

 

cartoon credit: michelle-antoinette.com
(click to embiggen or click on the link)

Here’s the conclusion of another excellent column from Mark Steyn:

Going along to get along is killing our society, and the one tiny act that anyone with a modicum of self-respect can perform is refusing to participate. For example, the American Medical Association could try butching up to the standards of nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Heverin of Aberdeen University. Following a campaign led by overseas students to ban the British military from campus, Miss Heverin said:

If the British military makes them feel uncomfortable, why did they come to a British uni?

Then she added, for good measure:

Rule, Britannia!

Young Miss Heverin was promptly banned from all Students Association premises for "discriminatory or racist language", and kicked out of the Politics and International Relations Society for "having a right-wing bias". It's the instant, vicious pettiness of these vile twerps that impresses.

Yet, since the "controversy" broke, a nineteen-year-old student has held firm-ish - or, anyway, more firm than the editor of JAMA or the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens or the chiefs of US Special Operations Command.

And so it spreads . . . from the faculty lounge to the botanical gardens to the general staff to the surgeon in your operating room and the pilot of your plane. Some years ago I wrote:

The dwindling number of sane people in the western world vaguely assume that the politically correct celebrate-diversity nonsense is confined to our increasingly worthless universities or NPR panel discussions. But not so. It's burrowed its way into everything, and is slowly but remorselessly moronizing even vital areas of life.

And some years before that - after a great man, Sir Tim Hunt, had his career vaporized by an utter fraud called Connie St Louis:

So we lose a superb Nobel scientist but keep a third-rate lying mediocrity. My problem with all this is that, increasingly, key levers of society are being ceded to the irredeemably stupid and mendacious, who seem to be the only ones capable of navigating the rocks and rapids of political correctness. One has the uneasy feeling that similar scenarios are playing out every day around the western world. How long before the planes start dropping out of the sky?

Not long now.

Mark Steyn’s full column is here.

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Our Potemkin Congress

 

image from Blazing Saddles via blogspot.com

If you thought our Congress-critters couldn't sink any lower . . .  Mark Steyn loathes the U.S. Congress even more than you do ("Potemkin Parliament, Pseudo-Legislature"):

I despise the United States Congress, and not merely for the weeks I had to spend there during the Clinton impeachment trial: My contempt pre-dates that circus. It dates to the moment I first realized, as a recent arrival to this land, that when Dick Durbin or some such is giving some overwrought speech on a burning issue he is speaking to an entirely empty chamber - because there are no debates, because most of these over-entouraged Emirs of Incumbistan are entirely incapable of debate: See, inter alia, Ed Markey.

But the fact that they might as well be orating in front of the bathroom mirror isn't why I despise it. It's that the American media go along with the racket, and there's only the one pool camera with the fixed tight shot so that you can't see the joint is deserted and the guy is talking to himself. The wanker press is so protective of its politicians that it's happy to give the impression that a boob like Markey is Cromwell in the Long Parliament.

I have never seen such rubbish in the House of Commons at Ottawa or Westminster or their equivalents around the Commonwealth - and it's a charade in which the media are all-in.

So it's a Potemkin parliament.

That leads easily to the next stage of decay - for why would a Potemkin parliament not degenerate further into a pseudo-legislature? The Covid "relief" bill is 5,593 pages. There is no such thing as a 5,593-page "law" - because no legislator could read it and grasp it. 

Read the full article here.

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Mark Steyn: Mueller & the Deep State Dumpster Fire

Photo credit: sharonherald.com

We all know the bottom line: no more indictments from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his band of witch-hunters. However, some of the unfolding developments in the investigation over the past two years have been complex and difficult to follow. The exposure of Deep State corruption in the FBI and DOJ; the cast of characters including bad cops and insubordinate staffers; the blatant abuse of the FISA court in targeting Carter Page as a means of expanding surveillance into the Trump campaign; the weaponization of the previous administration; and the collusion of most of the media – it’s a scandal of intimidating proportions, all of it intended to invalidate the results of the 2016 Presidential election.

My favorite columnist, Mark Steyn, has the best summary that I have read. And as always, it’s succinct, easy to follow, and entertaining. He begins:

For two years, the prefatory "Russia" has been intended to give the word "investigation" more heft, to make it seem as if there was something more than let's-get-Trump-on-anything. But even the unlimited resources of a wretchedly corrupt federal justice system couldn't keep that going without something more than Michael Cohen's taxi medallions (only in America) and a few Russian troll farms, one of whom has amusingly decided to push back in court against Mueller and his showboating cronies.

Mr. Steyn concludes:

Trump Tweeted his way out of the Deep State's grip. I doubt any other Republican president would have proved so wily: It's not difficult to imagine President Jeb deciding to do the right thing and resign for the good of the country - without ever being able to figure what it was he'd done wrong. We have witnessed an extraordinary sustained attempted coup in which senior officials of the "justice" department shoot the breeze about wearing a wire to get the goods on the elected chief executive. If there are no consequences to that, it will happen again.

And the entire article is here. Highly recommended.

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