"Free Speech" startup GB News blows.
Mark Steyn, arguably the greatest free speech warrior at present, leaves the cowardly channel, now fully captured by one of the most undemocratic institutions on earth.
When Amazon debuts rednecks and tramps bumming each other in some crap supposedly inspired by a video game, then promotes euthanasia at the same time, it takes a lot leave me despondent. Not exactly Cassandra, but I did allude to it: yesterday it came to pass that Mark Steyn will no longer be on GB News (watch from 19:59), that the station sought to make him personally liable for the OFCOM complaints and fines, and attached with these new contract parameters that would have almost certainly involved ignoring the vaccine injured, or the victims of Pakistani rape gangs. No bueno, said a stronger looking Steyn - GB News can fuck right off.
I share the sentiment - and I feel for my friends who remain there, particularly Laurence Fox, with whom I’m close. I’ll leave you to explore the detail, but I’m going to revert to happier memories, those of spring / summer 2020, when he helped me in ways I will never be able to thank enough him for.
At a time of hyped crisis, London was enjoying one of the most glorious Aprils in recent history. After “3 weeks to flatten the curve” had failed, I returned to my office, in defiance of regulations. As a small business owner hawking enterprise technology to other small business owners, we were designated “non-essentials”, but unlike the PPE grants and furloughs, I refused to take a dime from the government - so I had to hustle. Careful at first not to be seen by the idiots masquerading as a police force, soon I couldn’t give a monkeys: on one occasion I was followed by a police car, through the streets of St. John’s Wood, until they were summoned elsewhere - someone had obviously been misgendered or something, so the flashing lights appeared along with a command to assemble the SWAT and anti-terrorist apparatus.
Every morning I kissed my wife goodbye, and set off on the non-essential journey, starting parallel to Hampstead Heath, through Hampstead village, down Haverstock Hill, passing the demonic Tavistock Clinic, where young men emerged as girls (something obviously considered “essential” at the time), through St. John’s Wood, through Regent’s Park to arrive in Marylebone, a distance of approximately 8km. At 4pm I’d close shop, and walk the same route home.
I had been following Mark Steyn for two decades, since I picked up America Alone in Johannesburg. During coof however, his magic brain cornered, consumed and overwhelmed me; on almost everyday of my walks to work he produced an audio show, roughly 45 minutes to an hour in length, in which he made his feelings about the expert class, the politicians who had surrendered to them, the consequences of what would happen and China’s role in the disaster - explicitly clear. After listening to a single episode, I didn’t bother to watch government briefings - all that nauseating theatre - scheduled for 6pm on the BBC each evening.
The format was: Steyn’s show (“Coronacopia”) would kick off with his signature tune featuring the flute, drums, piano and trumpet, before his own rendition of “Kung Flu Fighting” (“from my house arrest to yours”).
“Everybody was Kung Flu Fighting / Those stats climbed fast as lightin’ / In fact it was a little bit frightenin’ / Chicom’s expert timing / There were funky china men / From funky Wuhan town / They were chopping bats up / They were chowin’ ‘em down / Its an ancient Chinese dish / And everybody says ‘delich’ / Chairman Xi will book your flight / You’ll be in Milan tonight…”
He would then tear into, amongst others, the WHO, Big Tech, Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci, for whom Steyn holds special - and warranted - contempt. Yet amongst the tearing of strips off people so obviously gaming the pandemic, his sympathy for the little man was perpetual; through each and every episode he stood for families tormented by the chaos of closed schools, relationships being shredded by uncertainty, the behaviour of wanker coppers from London to Melbourne to South Africa and the question - the balloon knot of a giant pink elephant planted upon the faces of the initiated (read: “non-essentials”), rendering us incapable of thinking about anything else: exactly who would have to eventually cough up to lock down?
The year before on Dec 12th I had voted conservative - a mistake I’ll never repeat. I was reluctantly emerging from normieness and whilst I had serious doubts about Boris Johnson’s relationship with the truth, I couldn’t, at the time, entertain a man as thick as Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister. Just not possible.
(Steyn and Boris went way back. Way back to the old Spectator offices. He knew the measure of the pathological liar - and his predictions would all come true).
So as Boris supposedly lay dying in a south London hospital from a supposed virus with a supposed zoonotic origin, I appointed Mark Steyn my own Prime Minister. A beautiful spring turned into a lovely summer, then an acceptable autumn. Soon Steyn added additional features - a section at the end of the show dedicated to those who had fallen to coof, from singers to wrestlers to writers and Holocaust survivors. He dealt with America’s obsession with dismantling statues: he nailed coverage of the US elections in November in a way that completely embarrassed his corporate contemporaries. Of all the things I’ve ever listened to, that have intrigued, upset, motivated or moved me, nothing comes close to what I heard during those bleak, depressing months of empty streets and red tape and wanker coppers sitting in their cars next to parks jigging in their seats to Sam Smith. But the hope that I extracted from the daily routine with The Mark Steyn Show still follows me.
And of all the things that I learned, the most important: Steyn, like Andrew Breitbart before him, emphasised that politics is downstream from culture. But at the same time, it’s not only culture - the place where we spend 99% of our time attacking - or being attacked by - our ideological opponents. Its class too.
What I mean what I wrote in respect of the great Rhoda Kaladie’s death: we are fighting things that have been intentionally positioned, cast as adversarial. The real enemy is the asymmetrical status structure whose symptoms include upwardly failing politicians and the unjustified interventions of undemocratic institutions, be they OFCOM or Big Tech. We suspect we are losing the culture wars because elected representatives are stupid or swap sides. That is not true: whole point is to exhaust and distract us. You may think that victories against pro-trans lobby groups equals the survival of free speech. It doesn’t.
Here I evidence a creature of the structure - Dame Melanie Dawes - the chief executive of OFCOM. An economist by trade (lol), Dawes was central to the policy that no news in the UK contradict the official WHO coof narrative. Just look at her:
What you’re looking at isn’t an individual: it’s actually a shapeshifting formula programmed to obfuscate, a foot soldier of an oligarchy. Nobody voted for her, but she’s an instigator within the overlord class - its people like her that agitate the citizenry with contentious culture features, which results in us arguing to no end in sight. And if you’re wondering how this class fights its enemies, observe the requirements someone like Steyn would have needed to withstand an investigation from her organisation: expensive lawyers, possibly crowdfunding to finance the expensive lawyers, a monumental amount of time - for the expensive lawyers to identify how tenuous the links between her investigation and the law actually are - reports, assistants, files, someone to punch holes in the reports then place them into the files, etc. And what does that tell you? Another of Steyn’s extraordinary insights that reveal the way western civilisation now works: the process - all that mentioned above - is actually the punishment.
So now, if you want to know about how Pakistani gangs have destroyed thousands of young English girl’s lives, or the corrupt meandering of vaccine production and policy, or how Liz Truss was toppled by a scam involving almost every single pension manager in the UK, or the relationship between the Biden crime family and Chairman Xi, just go back to Mark Steyn’s private platform.
(To the 5 or so viewers who’ll remain loyal to GB News despite its monumental charlie foxtrot, well, this rent boy sends his appreciation)