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Yes, it's me! Mark Steyn of that ilk - back in the saddle for another hour of questions from Steyn Clubbers around the planet. The fun starts at 3pm North American Eastern - which nota bene (due to time-zone adjustments on one side of the Atlantic but not the other) is for this month only:
7pm Greenwich Mean Time
- which is 8pm in western and central Europe.
Yesterday's column was headlined The Usurpers - with reference to the judicial coup underway in America. Before sunset in Washington, in just one day, no fewer than five lousy judges had ordered the undoing of significant executive-branch actions:
As I said to Tucker way back in 2020 (about 35 minutes in here), "a judges' republic is a contradiction in terms". America is living that right now. For those who think the Roberts court needs to act, the Chief Justice instead issued a press release appearing to rebuke Trump.
In thirteen years in the choked septic tank of the DC Superior Court, where justice goes to die, I can at least say that none of the six (so far) trial judges has ever sought to conduct the case by press release. For what it's worth, Roberts sent the press release only to selected "legacy media" (ie, leftie outlets) and declined to make it available in the press-release section of his court's website.
But, even if he had, Roberts should not be rebuking via press release a party who will be appearing before him very shortly. Had, say, the execrable Judge Natalia Combs Greene done such a thing to me in DC when my case started in 2012, I would certainly have called for her to recuse herself. Furthermore, Roberts has tipped his hat on the central issue before the court. Washington's Permanent State is attempting to hobble the forty-seventh presidency as it hobbled the forty-fifth, this time by using five judges a day to divert the energy in the executive into legislation-without-end - and Roberts says, "Hey, lighten up, and just let the appeals process play out."
Yeah, right. After thirteen years, I know how that works.
I don't think judges should be addressing key legal questions yet to be adjudicated via press release. That in itself strikes me as grounds for Roberts' impeachment.
~Time lost to this judicial coup is time taken away from America's last chance before it and the wider west go off the cliff. If you're minded to bring that up, I have more to say in the new issue of Quadrant, some of which has been excerpted in The Australian:
How the West Was Lost
Indeed:
In the rest of the world – and the rest of the world is where one now goes for demographic energy, industrial production and geopolitical clarity – no one wants what we're selling. They don't want it because it leads to societal death - literally. Sometime in the course of the second half of the twenty-first century (demographers dispute whether it will be 2055 or can be postponed to, say, 2080), ethnic Swedes will become a minority in Sweden. How'd that happen? All those millions of colonial subjects from the vast Swedish Empire on every continent making their way to the metropole?
Not so long ago, we would have taken as read that the first requirement of any such thing as Sweden is that it be brimming with Swedes. Now we are all America - 'proposition nations': anyone can be Swedish as long as he embraces Swedish 'values'. 'Abbahu akbar!' as my compatriot Laura Rosen Cohen likes to say. In practice, the inverse seems more likely: we will embrace their values. In a telling bit of symbolism, the most famous Swede on the planet, Greta Thunberg, the angry environmentalist turned angrier Hamas groupie, is already wearing a keffiyeh.
It's odd to become a minority in your own hitherto ethnically homogeneous nation within three generations. And it's even odder to do so without the subject being raised as part of mainstream public discourse.
Happy to take your thoughts on either of the above or anything else today. Whether or not you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, you can listen to our show live as it happens wherever you chance to be on this turbulent earth: Club membership is required only to ask a question. We love to hear from brand new members, and especially appreciate those who are having such a great time round these parts that they've signed up a chum for a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Among the additions to our ranks in recent days are newbies from around the globe - from Ontario to Ouderkerk, Rancho Cucamonga to the Rhineland, Hong Kong to Hernando. If you've joined this week either for a full year or a see-how-it-goes experimental quarter, do shoot me a head-scratcher for today's show.
But, if you're not interested in joining, no worries, as they say in Oz: We seek no unwilling members - and as always the show is free to listen to, so we hope you'll want to tune in. So see you back here at 3pm North American Eastern - which, for March only, is 7pm in London, 8pm in Paris, 9pm in Kiev, 10pm in Moscow; half-past-ten in Teheran; midnight-forty-five in Kathmandu; 3am in Singapore and Honkers (sorry about that); 6am in Sydney and Melbourne; 8am in Auckland, and an even more convivial hour for the kippers and kedgeree in His Majesty's Dominions eastward across the Pacific, where you're so far ahead Michael E Mann's probably lost his appeal by now...