Beyond the Realm of Manners

by Mark Steyn
Steyn on the Big Picture

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Programming note: Tomorrow, Saturday, Mark will be back for his weekend music show Mark Steyn on the Town. It airs at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here. On Sunday, he will have a different kind of audio diversion, with Part Three of the brand new serialisation of his highly prescient America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.

I regret that the President of the United States is quite so susceptible to the blandishments of a dying monarchy. While he was swanking about Windsor Castle, just a few miles away this was happening to one of his fellow Americans:

I greatly admire Mrs Anderson's total contempt for the Brit Wanker Copper, especially given that he attempted to strongarm her by saying that, if she apologised, she might avoid being taken to the cop shop: Just plead guilty, and throw yourself on the mercy of officialdom. Worked for Lucy Connolly, right?

I also regret that the President is now back on American soil. Because, if Air Force One's return flight had been scheduled a day or two hence, I would love Mr Trump to have responded to the above as follows:

That's it. The entire US delegation is checking outta your lousy castle. We know Your Majesty likes to treat his own subjects as wards of a prison state, but you ain't doing it to American citizens when the President is doing you the courtesy of visiting your dump of a country because we supposedly share all those 'values' you keep boring on about. So fire up the chopper for Stansted. We're outta here.

Oh, and, just to be clear, I have nothing against your people, only their rulers. So, to channel General de Gaulle at Montreal City Hall, vive le royaume-uni libre!

But, alas, instead he held a press conference with every Ukrainian lad's favourite adenoidal power-bottom who did his usual we've-had-free-speech-in-this-country-for-a-very-very-long-time robotic shtick:

Well, pubs had "long lived in this country". Then, mysteriously, a quarter of them closed down in nothing flat. Sometimes it isn't hard to see the direction of travel:

So the UK arrests more people for Twitter and Facebook posts than Belarus, Germany, China, Turkey and Russia combined. Useful to know.

For many decades I have quoted the great insight of the English jurist Lord Moulton that the most important zone in society is what he called "the realm of manners". In fact, I have cited His Lordship in my testimony to both the US Senate and the Canadian House of Commons and probably a few more parliaments I can't recall. As I explained it to the lads at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation - here it comes, folks; just to set you up for the weekend - a mere ten sodding years ago:

Lord Moulton said that human action can be divided into three domains. At one end is the law at the other is free choice and between them is the realm of manners. In this realm Lord Moulton said, 'lies a domain in which our actions are not determined by law but in which we are not free to behave in any way we choose. In this domain we act with greater or lesser freedom from constraint, on a continuum that extends from a consciousness of duty through a sense of what is required by public spirit, to good form appropriate in a given situation'.

In other words, a healthy and free society is determined by the space in which one polices oneself. At each far end are the tiny number of things one cannot do - murder, rape and steal - and the tiny number of things one must do - pay one's taxes, join the army. In between comes the preponderance of human existence. A country in which Sir Keir takes time off from his Slav rent boys to police basic social relations cannot, by definition, be free.

So the "realm of manners" shrinks remorselessly across the west, but never more totally than in the land in which it was invented. It shrivels likewise in the great republic across the sea. It should not be necessary to get your third-grader's teacher fired because she boasts about how much she enjoys watching and re-watching the video of Charlie Kirk getting assassinated. Because, until fairly recently, she would understand that this is not what Lord Moulton calls "good form" and would cost her most of her friends and family.

Except that these days it doesn't. L'il ol' ladies who present as normal have rich vibrant not-so-fantasty lives in which they enjoy seeing their fellow Americans' skulls blown apart live on stage before the world. And, if the side on the receiving end of the assassination-porn objects that this is in Moultonian terms bad form, a talentless arse incapable of speaking a word without a fifty-seven-man writing team and getting indefinitely suspended with a multi-million-dollar payoff is a way bigger victim than some hater who got shot dead in front of his kids because he was asking for it:

Yeah, tell me about it. In 2010, I spoke for the first time - under the protection of the PET, the very conspicuous Danish Secret Service - at a free-speech event in Copenhagen:

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.

Here's the scorecard at the time of writing: Lars, our host, was shot at point-blank range by a jihadist since fled to Turkey. Miraculously, he survived. He now lives in hiding under 24/7 police protection. As does the Dutchman, a cartoonist who published under the pseudonym "Nekschot", and hasn't been seen since 2011.

Oh, by the way, do you know what "Nekschot" means?

It's Dutch for "neck shot". When I asked him at dinner why he chose that particular moniker, he said it was because it was the preferred method of Communists and Fascists for eliminating their enemies. I'm just throwing that out there if you're one of those expensively bouffed ABC or CNN anchors still professing bewilderment at the tranny fetishist's lack of motive.

Of the remaining quartet, the Norwegian comedienne Shabana Rehman had her family restaurant firebombed and the Swedish artist Lars Vilks had his house suffer a similar fate and then had an event shot up in Denmark at which a film director was killed. Both Shabana and Lars wound up living under police guard and are now dead.

So two dead, two unseen for years ...but the niche Canadian is still just about around. Still, a sixty-seven per cent hit rate on just one event is pretty impressive. As we discussed over the weekend, the Bush "war on terror" framing was always misleading and reductive. Yet, even within those narrow confines, it's effortlessly trumped by "diversity" and "migrant rights":

So even the "convicted terrorist" category is entitled to come to your country and live at your expense:

He claimed asylum when he arrived in the UK in April 2023, and was housed in taxpayer-funded hotel accommodation while his application was considered.

Abouelela was allowed to wander around freely and even posed for a selfie picture in January last year outside the Imperial War Museum North Museum in Trafford, Greater Manchester.

Home Office officials spent 17 months pondering over whether or not to grant his asylum application, despite apparently knowing of his bomb-making conviction, before he raped the vulnerable woman in Hyde Park last November.

UK taxpayers are paying for convicted terrorists to stay in four-star hotels; Spanish taxpayers are paying to import more au courant murderers who, as I mentioned on last week's Q&A, killed dozens of their fellow "asylum-seekers" on the incoming boat because they suspected them of being "witch-doctors". In totally unrelated news, homicides and sex attacks in the Canary Islands are up four hundred per cent.

Since the mass murder at Charlie Hebdo, there have been fewer and fewer free-speech events on the Continent to shoot up and firebomb. So the "refugees" have had to retreat to their core business model of raping and stabbing your children. In Epping, ever since Lord Justice Mister Bean ruled that the rights of "migrants" yet to board their dinghies override the rights of local residents, the "asylum-seekers" have taken that as carte blanche to wander round your daughter's playground. The same police who have the resources to dispatch a SWAT team to take down elderly American cancer patients for infelicitous tweets, alas, lack the manpower to respond to strapping young Mohammedans ogling your nine-year-old in the schoolyard.

Law cannot solve problems that are the province of the realm of manners; it can only pervert the very concept of law and transform it into a means of totalitarian social control, as the Ukrainian twink aficionado is doing to American cancer patients. When society is so vibrantly diverse, there are no agreed social norms - hence all those videos of men defecating and masturbating in the streets - and so there can be no realm of manners.

However, there is one vital distinction between the loss of this realm in Europe and what's happening in America. In Europe, the people who want you dead are the imported barbarians - the rapists and beheaders loosed upon the land by madmen like Merkel and Johnson. In the US, as we have learned this past week, the people who want you dead are your fellow Americans controlling the commanding heights of your society - the schools, the hospitals, the mainline churches...

As has been noted in these pages, beyond their mutual enthusiasm for Hamas and the like, Islam and the western left are becoming increasingly synchronous: for Islam's adherents, submission to the faith supersedes what used to be core western liberties like freedom of speech; for the acolytes of newly invented religions such as climate change and mass trannification, the same rule applies. If you're thinking a firebreathing imam doesn't really have much in common with a bepenised woman and her besotted lover, you're overlooking the willingness to kill.

Which is not a prudent thing to overlook.

Here, for example, is Ken White, an American lawyer I used to have some Internet exchanges with back during the early years of the Michael E Mann suit - legalistic debates about the breadth of SLAPP statutes, that sort of thing:

On Wednesday the D.C. Court of Appeal decided to decide, probably... On the other hand, the Court still wants to hear more arguments about whether it should be hearing more arguments. The Court also ordered that the appeal be expedited, which means something somewhat different than you or I mean when we say 'expedited.'

One can understand why typing that sort of stuff all day long might become a tad wearisome. So now Mr White has a taste for blood:

The American right is now being enjoined to give as good as it gets. Meanwhile, the respectable types of Conservative, Inc caution that "we're better than that". Which may be true. But we're also deader than that.

So, when it comes to worrying about what they'll do to us when they get back in, I generally take the view of this fellow:

"Prove me wrong," said Charlie Kirk. So they shot him, and proved him dead. We are moving, very rapidly, to a stage beyond debate, beyond free speech, beyond abstract principles - because across the west one side has moved on to the next phase. As Belloc wrote:

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.

Pale Ebenezer thought it right to debate
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) couldn't wait.

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