RUTHFULLY YOURS

Well, friends, have I got a treat for you.

Following his live appearance at Chapters Indigo in downtown Toronto, I had the pleasure of sitting down with the great Mark Steyn for an in-depth conversation on his new, best-selling book, antisemitism, the collapse of Western civilization, hate speech, Official Jews, and the possibility of being sent to the Middle East to sing groovy James Bond songs to soothe the savage ISIS beasts.There is so much hot stuff in this interview, I’d be shocked if your computer was not smoking, as you read.

Please enjoy the transcript of our chat, painstakingly transcribed by yours truly with adoration intermittent hot flashes great affection and admiration.

I hope you enjoy it.

Q: I definitely want to start with the new book, and then talk about something that are specific to Canada. The [Un]documented Mark Steyn-Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned. I was wondering if that feel like the story of your life at this point. Is that going to be inscribed on your tombstone? “I told you so, don’t say you weren’t warned-it’s all in my book”. How does it feel to try to explain in real time what’s going on in the world today?

“It does feel like that and that’s not a good feeling. Apart from the fact that ‘I told you so’ is generally not an attractive quality in a person but also because I find whatever happens in the news, you know you wake up on a Wednesday morning or Thursday morning and something’s happened in paris or brussels or wherever and a radio or tv station asks you to come in and comment about it you sigh wearily because you said exactly the same thing 8 or 9 years ago. At a certain point it becomes very tedious and actually faintly obnoxious to say ‘if you had listened to me in 2005 2002 you wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“And that’s one reason why I assembled this particular book, is because there are different specifics but a lot of the big points that I am more and more convinced of, I wrote about 10-15 years ago, you do it initially in the hope people will change course but if they don’t change course you might as well put a book together saying hey this is what I said in 2007 while you fellows were listening to people who were wrong about everything, people is, “hopelessly optimistic” and “pollyannish”, people who have lived in this sort of post 1950 bubble and can’t actually imagine a scenario in which all the certainties of your world are upended. That is what is objectionable about most commentary, it takes the assumptions of that post-1950 bubble and assumes they are eternal and can’t be overturned. That’s the reason I put that book together basically.

No one cares if Christians, Hindus, Jews, Confucians, Sikhs, Zoroastrians or what-have-you committed foul deeds in the distant past. Islamists are committing them egregiously and everywhere right now, yet the alleged leader of the Free World blubbers about the Crusaders and the Inquisition.

Don’t keep too calm. Be, at least, somewhat alarmed. A feckless post-modernist (at best) is in the White House and medieval barbarians are at the gate. Make no mistake of underestimating the threat.

We face an implacable, religiously-inspired foe. There are Islamic terrorist militias stretching from North Africa, across the Middle East, to Asia and down to South East Asia, with growing fifth columns in all Western countries. Only the United States is capable of bringing to bear the moral authority, the leadership, the resources and the manpower to defeat them. And right now the Commander in Chief is fiddling away while urging us to remember the sins of our ancestors.

Apparently Christians must remember the Crusades and the Inquisition before being critical of ISIS. And, presumably, using the same logic, Churchill should have been mindful of Cromwell’s transgressions before taking on Hitler. FDR should have brought the treatment of American Indians into his calculations before responding to Tojo. If you can’t get to grips with that; if it confounds you, then join the club of the level-headed.

Republicans are making progress, albeit slowly, toward replacing Obamacare. Last year, three Republican senators — Tom Coburn, Richard Burr, and Orrin Hatch — outlined a serious plan to replace it with a set of health-care policies that are much more free-market and limited-government in orientation, and not just compared with Obamacare but compared with what we had before it. Senator Coburn is not, alas, in the new Congress, but the other two senators have offered a slightly revised version of the plan with Representative Fred Upton.

Conservatives who worry that Republicans will come up with “Obamacare Lite” and call it a replacement can rest easy about this plan. It has no individual mandate, no employer mandate, no federally supported exchanges, and no Independent Payment Advisory Board. Obamacare essentially outlaws what conservatives consider true health insurance (protection against the risk of financially devastating health expenses); this plan legalizes it, and allows it to compete on a more level playing field than even the pre-Obamacare system did.

In 2015, Europe faces two major problems. First, across the continent, rebranded Communists are selling the snake-oil of painless utopia, where government provides everything and balance sheets don’t exist. Second, Russia is invading.

Where the first problem threatens the future of millions of young Europeans, the second problem threatens the sovereign peace upon which the European project resides.

This Russian invasion requires American honesty. Today, in the Baltic States, Russia is threatening pro-Western politicians and kidnapping intelligence officers. And in Ukraine, Russia is stealing a nation. In recent weeks, Russia has escalated offensive actions across eastern Ukraine. Arming, mobilizing, and directing Ukrainian separatists against the Kiev government, President Putin has shredded last September’s Minsk agreement. Under this deal, Russia had agreed to cease its support for rebel aggression. Instead, it has done the exact opposite. This was predictable. As I wrote in December, lower oil prices and Putin’s philosophy meant that Russia’s heightened aggression was always likely. Moreover, Western leaders aren’t exactly deterring him.

There may not be too much to add to the commentary of Jonah, Eliana, and others on President Obama’s condescending and offensive remarks on the Crusades and slavery at the National Prayer Breakfast speech last week, but there a few things I haven’t seen folks say.

After six years, it is so tiring to constantly be lectured to, talked down to, by Barack Obama that at some level, the content doesn’t really matter. It’s the principle of the thing. We elected a commander-in-chief, not a scold-in-chief, but the latter is what the progressive Left, embodied by Obama, sees as its primary role today. They just can’t see the rest of the country, outside the Upper East Side salons and Cambridge and San Francisco dining rooms, as adults. We’re all of us, all 300 million of us, the slightly dim children that need to be lectured to constantly. Sit up, don’t slouch, you’re forgetting your racist past, etc., etc.

Something I have asked myself: Does he really believe what he says, or is it all just for political effect, to send conservatives into a tizzy, eat up the airwaves, and keep us off-balance? He must have known how ridiculous, how unintelligent, and how offensive his comments were going to sound, correct? There’s a pause after he delivers the Crusades remark, you can see it below, and I just wonder, did he know that this was a stupid thing to say?

Last week, everywhere I went in Washington it seemed as if the country’s cultural and ideological divisions came down to a debate over the state of Texas and whether or not it was “a crazy state” or the “place that is still most like America.”

Congressman Alcee Hastings, a Florida Democrat, started the rumble during a House committee meeting by saying that Texas’s refusal to join Obamacare’s exchanges made it “a crazy state.” He then refused to apologize to Representative Michael Burgess, a Texas Republican who challenged him.

Those became fighting words. Former governor Rick Perry, a likely 2016 presidential candidate, responded during a speech at the American Principles Project: “He is right! We are crazy!” he enthused. “We’re crazy about jobs, we’re crazy about opportunity, we’re crazy about liberty, we’re crazy about the Constitution!” Charles Murray, the libertarian American Enterprise Institute scholar who hails from Iowa, weighed in by saying, “I’ve always thought of Texas as the place that is still most like America,” pointing to the self-reliant, can-do spirit the state still represents. Florida governor Rick Scott also joined in, noting that he has often cited Texas as a tax-cutting role model; then he joked about out-dueling Perry as a jobs generator.

When Obama burst upon the scene, prescient souls saw through the mask and asserted that, like all alleged utopian dreams, his would only result in inequalities and injustices. As world-renowned Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth, writes in his 2013 Haggada: Collected Essays on Pesach:

In the history of the human mind there have been many utopias, imagined paradises. None has been realized. Indeed the word ‘utopia’ itself means ‘no place.’ Utopias never happen because they come without a realistic map of how to get from here to there. They are discontinuous with the present. They can be brought about only by revolution, and almost without exception, [these utopian] revolutions replace iniquities and inequities with injustices of their own (33).

Consequently Americans have been and continue to be deluded by a man who feels he is entitled to a divine right to rule over his subjects, the very subjects whom he reviles and despises, especially those who still value freedom.

In all of Obama’s executive orders and unconstitutional actions, one characteristic is abundantly clear and that is the “negation of liberty.” Instead he creates an “ongoing despair” as people work harder and earn less, as people strive for success, but are shackled by ObamaCare lies, excessive regulations, and increasing taxes.

In the previous article in this series I noted some differences between Hebrew and English—differences that are not surprising since the two are from different language families. And yet, at the same time, in large part via the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew has considerably influenced English.

As this informative article notes:

Both because of a desire to read the Bible in its original tongue and a belief in Hebrew as “The Mother of Languages,” it figured prominently in the Puritan movement in England…. English Puritan emigrants were also instrumental in promoting Hebrew as part of the curriculum in such prominent American universities as Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth and Pennsylvania (Yale, Columbia and Dartmouth still bear Hebrew inscriptions on their seals). In Harvard’s early years, more time was devoted to the study of Hebrew than Latin or Greek.

It makes sense, then, that not a few common English words originate in Hebrew—and the following, of course, are just examples.

Unlike Nixon and Clinton, who lied in self-defense, Obama lies proactively, which is decidedly more dangerous. He will say practically anything to achieve his goals without regard to the truth. The repeated assertion about keeping your doctor and your health insurance under the Affordable Care Act is just one famous example. But only a few days ago on Fareed Zakaria’s show [1] the president made a statement that dwarfed his claims about Obamacare. When asked if we were in a war with radical Islam, the president replied:

….I reject a notion that somehow that creates a religious war because the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject that interpretation of Islam. They don’t even recognize it as being Islam, and I think that for us to be successful in fighting this scourge, it’s very important for us to align ourselves with the 99.9 percent of Muslims who are looking for the same thing we’re looking for — order, peace, prosperity.

99.9 percent?! I will bypass for the moment Obama’s rather self-serving definition of Islam and focus on that outrageous number, which is absurd on the face of it and not remotely supported by any of the numerous polls [2] on the subject

In her December 28 CNN article, “How Germany Banishes Climate Myths [1],” German environment minister Barbara Hendricks argues that the climate policies enabled by her country and the EU as a whole have been an economic success.

This is nothing more than East German-style disinformation.

The reality is that Germany’s so-called “Solar Valley” has become a mothballed industrial rust belt. Nearly all solar energy manufacturers have closed their doors.

In support of her argument, Hendricks claims that while greenhouse gas emissions in the EU fell by 18% between 1990 and 2012, there was cumulative growth of 45% in the EU’s economy during this period. However, this represents a growth rate of only 2% annually, while typical investment portfolios grew by between 100% (4.5% annually) and 300% (13.6% annually) during this time.

Hendricks asserts:

Scientists have long agreed that climate action strengthens economic development and creates an opportunity for comprehensive modernization of our economies.

This makes no sense. Scientists aren’t experts on economics, and unbiased scientists never agree on such contentious matters. Hendricks continues:

The age of fossil fuel is coming to an end, just as the age of the horse and cart, the steam locomotive and the oil lamp eventually came to an end.