Speaking Ill of the Ted

By Mark Steyn
https://www.steynonline.com/9565/speaking-ill-of-the-ted
July 22, 2019



This weekend we were busy marking the demi-centennial of Apollo 11's moon landing with some thoughts onThe Lost Frontier and some appropriately lunar music. But 1969's giant leap for mankind coincided with one almighty flying leap for a very different kind of man: with his usual exquisite timing, Senator Edward Kennedy chose the day before Messrs Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin reached the Sea of Tranquility to drive Mary Jo Kopechne into a pond of tranquility, at least until he came flying off that bridge. And, by the time America was paying attention, Teddy had been fitted with his neck brace and the minders had everything under control.

Last year there was, very belatedly, a fine feature film about Chappaquiddick, which I reviewed here, and which contains a dialogue exchange taken almost verbatim from a ten-year-old column of mine:

As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe: 

'Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.' 

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than 'betrayed' him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he?

That bit turns up in the movie:

Joan Vennochi's words are put in Ted's mouth: He says defensively that all men are flawed - 'Moses had a temper, Peter betrayed Jesus.' And my cheap riposte - 'Moses didn't leave a girl at the bottom of the Red Sea' - is given to the outraged Joe Gargan, already on his way out, supplanted by better, colder, harder fixers. When the guy gets out and leaves the girl at the bottom of the sea, it offends the natural order: Joe is telling him he's not a man.

He wasn't - and nor were those who went along with it. I have rarely been more disgusted by the public discourse of a free society than by the obsequies that attended Kennedy's passing a decade ago. Yet, even so, I would not have bothered re-posting the column below were it not for the fact that they're still doing it. On this fiftieth anniversary, the Associated Press, purveyors of unreadable J-school sludge to America's dying monodailies, are still reflexively playing oleaginous courtiers to a dynasty that no longer exists. In a country that now vaporizes careers for an infelicitous tweet, Ted Kennedy killed a woman and dared us to call him on it. Thanks to the likes of the Associated Press, America failed that test:

~from Mark Steyn's syndicated column, August 28th 2009:

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its "mainstream" media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Senator Edward M Kennedy's passing, America's TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there's a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:

Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life.

That's the way to do it! An "accident," "ugly" in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted's the star, and there's no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than "betrayed" him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it's kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of "tremendous moral collapse." When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it's usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy's biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne."

You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don't know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo's – but you're struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy's Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At The Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo "would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history. Who knows – maybe she'd feel it was worth it." What true-believing liberal lass wouldn't be honored to be dispatched by such a death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second's notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you'll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain's comparatively very minor "Profumo scandal," the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen's Privy Council and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children's playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the "Kennedy curse," a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim – and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn't, he made all of us complicit in what he'd done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.

His defenders would argue that he redeemed himself with his "progressive" agenda, up to and including health care "reform." It was an odd kind of "redemption": In a cooing paean to the senator on a cringe-makingly obsequious edition of NPR's "Diane Rehm Show," Edward Klein of Newsweek fondly recalled that one of Ted's "favorite topics of humor was, indeed, Chappaquiddick itself. He would ask people, 'Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?'"

Terrific!

Who was that lady I saw you with last night?

Beats me!

Why did the Last Lion cross the road?

To sleep it off!

What do you call 200 Kennedy sycophants at the bottom of a Chappaquiddick pond?

A great start, but bad news for NPR guest-bookers! "He was a guy's guy," chortled Edward Klein. Which is one way of putting it.

When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterward, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator's passing marked "the end of civility in the U.S. Congress." Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost "civility" of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution."

Whoa! "Liberals" (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored resegregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked "the end of civility" in American politics, that's a shoo-in. And in fact setting a new moral standard in which a drunken adulterer's appetites can cause a woman's death and he pays no price is also an end to civility.

If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy's comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Ted himself, who knows? He buried three brothers, and as many nephews, and, as the years took their toll, it looked sometimes as if the only Kennedy son to grow old had had to grow old for all of them. Did he truly believe, as surely as Melissa Lafsky & Co do, that his indispensability to the republic trumped all else? That Camelot – that "fleeting wisp of glory," that "one brief shining moment" – must run forever, even if "How To Handle A Woman" gets dropped from the score. The senator's actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.

We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting and finishing with the aforementioned lunar commemorations, The Lost Frontier and Fly Me to the Moon. Kathy Shaidle's film column celebrated The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and our marquee presentation was a brand new edition of The Mark Steyn Show, with former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and Mrs Thatcher's former speechwriter John O'Sullivan discussing populism and globalism, both generally and more particularly - as in the Somalification of Minnesota. If you were too busy visiting the new madrassah at Lake Wobegon this weekend, I hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.

As the third year of The Mark Steyn Club cranks into top gear, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and have been so eager to re-re-subscribe for another twelve months. We thank you all, and hope to see at least a few of you to thank personally on our Second or Third Steyn Cruise. For more information on the Club, see here.

The Lost Frontier

By Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/9562/the-lost-frontier

July 20, 2019

Neil Armstrong

Fifty years ago today man landed on the moon, in the persons of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and courtesy of a lunar module from Apollo 11. The most I've ever written about the "space race" was in my book After America, and the passage attracts criticism both from the Nasa types and those who think the whole man-on-the-moon thing was a crashing bore. Nevertheless, the modern world was built by the men who ventured beyond the edge of the map, and in that sense the stasis of the last half-century is both unusual and a little disturbing. To mark the anniversary, The New York Times wondered when a woman might reach the moon - which sounds a humorless rewrite of the old feminist gag that "if they can put a man on the moon, why can't they put them all there?" So here's a few of my thoughts on the subject over the years:

The Wright brothers' first flight was in 1903. Fifty-nine years later, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, and seven years after that Buzz Aldrin became the first man to fly to the moon and play "Fly Me To The Moon" on the moon - thanks to the portable cassette recorder he took with him. In a certain sense, the moon landing was the culmination of the tremendous inventive energy of the nineteenth century (if I had to pick a so-called "greatest generation" it would be somewhere in the latter half thereof). Half a century from the Wright Brothers to The Right Stuff - from nosediving into the neighbor's cornfield to walking the surface of the moon - followed by half a century devoid of giant leaps and even small steps.

When After America came out, I was booked on "Fox & Friends" to talk it over with Brian Kilmeade. Sitting next to Brian on the couch waiting to get going, I watched Steve Doocy across the studio link to an item on the space shuttle Enterprise beginning its journey to whichever museum it's wound up at. Steve called it "historic", and, as I remarked to Brian, pity the nation whose greatness becomes "historic" - whose spacecraft exist only in museums. There's a passage in After America on just that theme:

In 1961, before the eyes of the world, President Kennedy had set American ingenuity a very specific challenge—and put a clock on it:

'This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.' 

That's it. No wiggle room. A monkey on the moon wouldn't count, nor an unmanned drone, nor a dune buggy that can't take off again but transmits grainy footage back to Houston as it rusts up in the crater it came to rest in. The only way to win the bet is with a real-live actual American standing on the surface of the moon planting the Stars and Stripes. Even as it happened, the White House was so cautious that William Safire wrote President Nixon a speech to be delivered in the event of disaster: 

'Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace...' 

Yet America did it.

It was not a sure thing. In 1961 the Soviets had it all over the Americans in the space race: They had already reached the moon, with the unmanned flight Luna 2, and they had put a man in space, Yuri Gagarin. Gagarin and the cosmonauts were inspirational figures well beyond the Warsaw Pact. By contrast, all the US unmanned missions had been failures, and their astronauts were earthbound - or sub-orbital at best. Kennedy was cautioned against his moon speech on the grounds that he was setting America up for very public humiliation.

But he chose to go ahead.

And now? From After America:

Four decades later, Bruce Charlton, professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham in England, wrote that "that landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achieve- ment of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans." That's a good way to look at it: the political class presented the boffins with a highly difficult and specific problem, and they solved it—in eight years. Charlton continued:

'Forty years ago, we could do it—repeatedly—but since then we have not been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.

'Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something.... But I am suggesting that all this is BS. . . . I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75—at the time of the Apollo moon landings—and has been declining ever since.' 

Can that be true? Charlton is a controversialist gadfly in British academe, but, comparing 1950 to the early twenty-first century, our time traveler from 1890 might well agree with him. And, if you think about it, isn't it kind of hard even to imagine America pulling off a moon mission now? The countdown, the takeoff, a camera transmitting real-time footage of a young American standing in a dusty crater beyond our planet blasting out from his iPod Lady Gaga and the Black-Eyed Peas or whatever the twenty- first-century version of Sinatra and the Basie band is. ... It half-lingers in collective consciousness as a memory of faded grandeur, the way a nineteenth-century date farmer in Nasiriyah might be dimly aware that the Great Ziggurat of Ur used to be around here someplace.

How long will it even half-linger? Great civilizations can survive a lot of things, but not impoverishment of spirit. That's one reason I didn't join in the media sniggers at Donald Trump's new Space Force - because I'd like it to be true. Here's me and Michio Kaku taking it seriously:

As I commented a year or so back:

Those "Space Age" astronauts were men of boundless courage and determination: they strapped themselves in and stared not just death in the face but death in hideous and unknown ways. Yet they were also ordinary men, who were called upon to do extraordinary things and rose to the challenge. These days we are unmanned in more than merely the sense of that Luna 2 expedition. Glenn and Armstrong are gone, and their surviving comrades are old and stooped and wizened, and yet the only giants we have. Space may still be the final frontier, but today, when we talk about boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies' bathroom. Progress.

~adapted from Mark's bestseller After America. Personally autographed copies areexclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore.

As the third year of The Mark Steyn Club cranks into top gear, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and have been so eager to re-re-subscribe for another twelve months. We thank you all, and hope to see at least a few of you to thank you personally on our Second or Third Steyn Cruise. For more information on the Club, see here.

Smuggling Conrad Black over the border was always my Plan B

By Mark Steyn
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/mark-steyn-smuggling-conrad-black-over-the-border-was-always-my-plan-b?video_autoplay=true
May 17, 2019


Former press magnate Conrad Black leaves federal court in Chicago in June 2011 after being re-sentenced to three and a half years in prison.(Brian Kersey/Getty Images)

The last time I saw my old boss Conrad Black was a week ago. It was a very Conradian occasion: We ended up keeping a visiting prince (not from the House of Windsor, as it happens) waiting in the lobby, and by the time we parted on the doorstep the conversation had worked its way round to Doris Day, then still among us. When Miss Day died a few days later, almost all the broadcast tributes played a snippet of:

Que Sera Sera
Whatever will be will be
The future’s not ours to see…

That’s a little fatalistic for my tastes. Nevertheless, in just a very few areas of life the future is ours to see, with piercing clarity: For example, if you attract the attention of America’s federal justice system, you’re going down, no question. You have the “right to a fair trial,” but U.S. prosecutors win 99 per cent of the cases that go to court — a success rate that would embarrass Kim Jong Un and Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the feds win 97 per cent without ever going near court. In 2007, on the first day of Conrad Black’s trial on the 12th floor of the Mies van der Rohe skyscraper that houses Chicago’s dozens of federal courtrooms, I went looking for somewhere to make a discreet call on my cellphone. There were people everywhere — reporters, lawyers, spouses, curious deputy attorneys dropping in from neighbouring offices, a fan of mine wanting me to autograph my Broadway book to his pal John Mahoney from “Frasier”… Eventually, I pushed open a door and found myself in an empty courtroom. So I phoned from there in complete privacy. When others attending the trial discovered the room, I went to the empty courtroom further down the corridor. And, when in turn that grew popular as a handsomely paneled telephone booth, I went to the empty courtroom upstairs, or downstairs.

So many courtrooms, and no trials. Because, when the odds of not losing are one in 100, who goes to court?

Americans who know anything about the country’s evil and depraved “justice” system grasp that central fact. It’s only rubes who say “let the process play out” or “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear.” For a start, by the time the process “plays out,” you’ll be broke and scavenging from dumpsters (as Trump’s fallen National Security honcho Michael Flynn learned, shortly before copping a plea). Second, from a prosecutorial point of view, “if you haven’t done anything wrong” they can still get you on misremembering to the FBI in a matter for which there’s no underlying crime (as Martha Stewart discovered), or, alternatively, on Robert Mueller’s second-favourite process crime of hanging out with too many foreigners in alleged breach of the “Foreign Agents Registration Act,” which Trump aide George Papadopoulos told me recently Mueller had threatened him with. (I met most Aussie cabinet ministers of the John Howard years, so I’m undoubtedly guilty on that front, even before you factor in dinner with Jason Kenney and a bit of chit-chat with Maxime Bernier).

It’s a corrupt system heavily reliant on blackmail. But its crude thuggish simplicity concentrates the mind, and thus everyone gets it. Which is why, when the dismantling of Conrad Black’s business empire began 16 years ago, the rich and powerful were the first to abandon him: whatever will be will be, but one thing’s for certain — Conrad’s screwed, he’s over, cut him loose now. The U.S. government threatened to send the “independent” directors of Hollinger “Wells Notices” — that’s to say, a public warning that you may be on the hook for violating securities laws. The way to avoid getting a Wells Notice was to testify against Lord Black at trial. So former Illinois governor Jim Thompson, former ambassador Richard Burt and former vice-chair of the Royal Commission on Canada’s National Passenger Transportation Marie-Josée Kravis meekly trooped up to the witness stand to explain that, although their names appeared on all the same documents Conrad’s did, they had no idea, as mere simpleton governors, ambassadors and royal commissioners, what they were signing, and had simply “skimmed” the paperwork — “skimmed” being the agreed formulation. InMaclean’s I described them as America’s synchronized skimming team.

On the day of Jim Thompson’s testimony, a staffer approached me and said the governor wondered if I were free for lunch. I replied that I’d rather eat dog feces than dine with a dead husk of a nothing of a shell of a non-man who’d lay down his friend for his life.

And yet, although not a synchronized skimmer myself, I too fell prey to their fatalism. As I disclosed after the trial, I’d advised Lord Black to climb into the back of my pick-up, I’d throw a tarp over him and drive him across the minimally guarded Pittsburg, N.H./La Patrie, Que. border post and east to Fortune, N.L., where he could take the ferry to St. Pierre et Miquelon and a waiting twin-prop….

Nonsense, thundered Conrad. He was an innocent man, and he would be vindicated by the justice system of this great republic.

I suppressed a titter and the urge to tell him that would support an insanity plea.

And so the battle consumed vast amounts of money — and even more if you add in the cash the feds simply stole from him, like the proceeds they confiscated from the sale of his New York apartment. It cost him also lifelong friendships, as prosecutors bought up his closest business partner, David Radler, and his secretary and anyone else who helped them get closer to the big fish, and threatened those in Toronto and London willing to testify on his behalf what would happen should they choose to set foot in the U.S. to appear at his trial.

It is a sad fact that many Canadians revile Conrad Black: They loathe him for his politics and his peerage and his publications (including this one). But even so they ought to give him credit for the sheer strength of will required to push back against the onslaught of the last decade and a half. His ordeal ended with a Trump pardon I confess I had minimal hopes of, because, as the president was doubtless advised, there’s nothing in it for him.

For the record, here’s the final score:

The Government of the United States initially brought 17 charges. Everyone seems to oooh and aaaah over that, but to bring multiple charges over a single crime is, in itself, malodorous. Even with the Boston Marathon bomber, it wasn’t enough that the guy loaded up his backpack, detonated it and killed and maimed a bunch of people; it was also necessary to charge the surviving Tsarnaev brother with “unlawful interference in interstate commerce” because he used a stolen credit card to withdraw US$800 from an ATM. There’s no question the bomber is guilty of bombing, and, if I had my way, he’d have been dangling from a gibbet six weeks after, but this kind of wanker sophistry degrades the very concept of law.

So why do it? Well, it’s a way to force you to forego justice: You’re facing 47 felonies adding up to 397 years in jail. So you agree to a plea “bargain.” Because otherwise you risk a jury that wants to show how Solomonic it is by acquitting you on 44 counts but convicting on three — enough to destroy your life. The U.S. Attorney operates on the same principle as the IRA, who, after the Brighton bombing, taunted Mrs. Thatcher that they only had to be lucky once; she had to be lucky every time. Patrick Fitzgerald had to be lucky once; Conrad Black had to be lucky every time. He came close.

Of those 17 counts, four, including perjury and money laundering, were abandoned before trial, and the US$400 million he was accused of “looting” was reduced to US$60 million.

Of the 13 remaining counts, Conrad was acquitted on nine, including racketeering and tax evasion, and found guilty of stealing US$2.9 million.

The surviving four counts were appealed to the Seventh Circuit. Unfortunately, Black had the misfortune to appear before a quasi-celebrity judge smitten by his own genius. Come the big day, alas, Richard Posner was just another lazy hack who all too obviously didn’t know the case and hadn’t read the briefs and was blustering his way through with windy generalities about “pretty naked fraud,” even though “pretty naked” is not really a legal term, never mind an appellate argument.

Conrad pressed on, to the highest tribunal in the land. If you followed the Kavanaugh hearings, you’ll know that America’s hideously politicized Supreme Court has four lefties and four righties and a designated swinger who’s the Supreme Judicial Arbiter of 300 million people. Yet, on June 24th 2010, the Supremes ruled unanimously in Conrad’s favour. That’s right: The left, the right and the swinger all voted as one with Madam Justice Ginsburg’s withering opinion about Posner’s “anomalous” “judicial invention.” His judgment was vacated, Conrad was released from prison, and the four counts kicked back down to the Seventh Circuit for “further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

Of those four counts, two were overturned through gritted teeth by the Seventh Circuit, but the deeply insecure Posner could not bring himself to quash the two remaining counts, and in turn kicked them back down to the trial judge, Amy St. Eve, for “re-sentencing.” Judge Amy, just as insecure if not quite such a narcissist, decided to send Conrad back to prison for seven months on the grounds that incarceration seemed to be doing him good. She also revised down the financial penalty to US$150,000 — or (if my rough math is correct) point-oh-oh-oh-three-seven-five of what he’d originally been accused of “looting.”

Those two surviving counts were one of mail fraud and one of obstruction of justice, in which, as with Martha Stewart, there was no underlying crime left to “obstruct” other than that sole lousy count of “mail fraud,” one of those stupid catch-all non-crimes designed to provide a pretext for federal jurisdiction over almost anything that tickles their fancy. For that reason, none of those Canadians who feasted on Conrad Black’s comeuppance could actually explain, in the midst of their conga lines, what crime it is he actually committed. Because it isn’t a crime in Canada, or England, or Australia or Belize or Mauritius, Singapore, St Lucia, Tuvalu or anywhere else in the common-law world.

Recently, Conrad Black was kind enough to testify on my behalf in one of my own more modest legal proceedings down south, against a sociopathic billionaire who won’t stop suing me. We worried about how much credibility an ex-con might have before an American jurist, so we figured we might as well own it in the briefs, and described the witness thus:

“The Lord Black of Crossharbour is an eminent Canadian historian, a member of the House of Lords, a papal knight, the former Honorary Colonel of the Governor General’s Foot Guards, and in America a convicted felon.”

We took the position that, in a system run by the likes of Patrick Fitzgerald and Robert Mueller, that last distinction, like the foregoing, is just another badge of honour. It shames only a wretched and ugly system that no American should support.

The Incredible Shrinking Crime Spree of Conrad Black, after shriveling from 17 to 13 to nine to four to two counts and from 400 million to 92 million to 60 million to 2.9 million to 285,000 to 150,000 dollars, has now vanished entirely. Throughout an ordeal that consumed over a fifth of his life and more of his wealth, he staggered on, refusing to cut the deals that his pathetic deputy and his wretched worthless board did. That requires an amazing resilience few of us could muster.

There is one bit of unfinished business. In a pitiful spasm of belated Canadian me-tooism, the then governor general and the then prime minister decided, on account of those two surviving convictions, to have Conrad Black removed from the Queen’s Privy Council and the Order of Canada. A man who endured what he did can surely survive having his post-nominals cut off. Nevertheless, it was a craven and gutless move. It would be appropriate, I think, for the successor regimes on Sussex Drive to reverse those actions.

On the other hand, I’m not sure Conrad would take those baubles back. He lost almost everything, but in the end, on what mattered, he won. Last year, after CRTV/Blaze TV sued me for ten million, lost the case and were ordered to pay me four million, Conrad declared on stage that my victory was “the greatest act of accidental justice produced by the American legal system in decades.” I would return the compliment, but, in the case of Conrad Black, there was nothing “accidental” about it. He fought back against a disgusting system of unlimited resources and overwhelming power, and inch by painstaking inch he prevailed. I was wrong to offer him a ride to Miquelon under my tarpaulin. His way was better.

Taqiyya for Easter

By Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/9317/taqiyya-for-easter

April 22, 2019

Sri Lankan military officials stand guard outside St. Anthony's Shrine in Colombo, Sri Lanka on Easter. (Reuters)

Let's say a fire breaks out at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris at the start of Holy Week, and just after two of the city's other most prominent houses of worship - St Sulpice and the Basilica of St Denis - have been attacked and vandalized.

Well, I think we can all confidently say as the first flames are beginning to lick the ceiling that it's undoubtedly an accident. Cigarette butt. Or maybe computer glitch. Probably just an overheated smart phone. We don't need to get in there and sift through the debris. We can just announce it.

On the other hand, when there are coordinated attacks on Easter services at several churches in Sri Lanka, it becomes a little more challenging to pass off multiple suicide-bombings killing nearly three hundred people as an electrical malfunction.

So, in contrast to the confident declarations of a week ago, on Sunday morning the media opted for a subtler narrative. Lead sentence from The Economist:

IT HAS BEEN nearly ten years since the guns fell silent in Sri Lanka's civil war. But bloodshed returned with a vengeance...

So it's something to do with the Tamil Tigers? Their guns fell silent, but now they've returned with a vengeance, eh?

Well, er, no, er, not, ah, precisely... But it's useful for "context", lots and lots of context. And, if you pile up enough context, you can bury the actual story. My old chums at The Age in Melbourne produced an especially fine example:

Colombo: More than 200 people were killed and hundreds more wounded in eight bomb blasts that rocked churches, luxury hotels and other sites in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday - the deadliest violence the South Asian island country has seen since a bloody civil war ended a decade ago.

Ah, there's that bloody civil war flaring up all over again, right?

Steady on. We're not quite saying that, but it's important to know the historical background and so forth...

The scale of the bloodshed recalled the worst days of Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war, in which the Tamil Tigers, a rebel group from the ethnic Tamil minority, sought independence from the Buddhist-majority country. The Tamils are Hindu, Muslim and Christian.

So it's a Hindu-Muslim-Christian attack on churches and hotels?

Er, not exactly. We're still doing ten paragraphs of general throat-clearing here...

Sri Lanka, situated off the southern tip of India, is about 70 per cent Buddhist. While there have been scattered incidents of anti-Christian harassment in recent years, there has been nothing on the scale of what happened on Sunday.

So it's part of a tradition of Buddhists' anti-Christian harassment?

Well, these Buddhists are notoriously "hard-line"...

There is also no history of violent Muslim militants in Sri Lanka. However, tensions have been running high more recently between hard-line Buddhist monks and Muslims.

So the hard-line Buddhists attacked the churches to get at the non-hard-line Muslims?

Whoops, did we give you the impression Muslims had something to do with this? Our mistake...

Two Muslim groups in Sri Lanka condemned the church attacks...

Let us turn to The New York Times:

Religious Minorities Across Asia Suffer Amid Surge in Sectarian Politics

Gotcha. This is all part of a general problem of various unspecified religions in unspecified countries suffering in a general sort of way. But could you be a little less general and more specific?

Okay. Opening paragraphs:

The deadly attacks in Sri Lanka on Sunday highlighted how easily religious coexistence can be ripped apart in a region where secularism is weakening amid the growing appeal of a politics based on ethnic and sectarian identity.

In India, the country's governing right-wing Hindu party is exploiting faith for votes, pushing an us-versus-them philosophy that has left Muslims fearing they will be lynched if they walk alone. 

In Myanmar, the country's Buddhist generals have orchestrated a terrifying campaign of ethnic cleansing against the country's Rohingya Muslims.

And in Indonesia and Bangladesh, traditionally moderate Muslim politicians are adopting harder-line stances to appeal to more conservative electorates.

So Hindus are attacking Muslims, and Buddhists are attacking Muslims, and "hard-line" Muslims are attacking moderate Muslims. Thank God for some clarity on the situation. But what were all these Muslims doing in church on Easter morning?

Well, as we said, it's all very complex - not like "Edelweiss" being a white-supremacist dog-whistle by a notorious Nazi Jew composer. Best not to think about it.

Sri Lanka is a popular tourist destination, so there were many western victims of yesterday's attack, including young ones: from an eleven-year-old English boy and a ten-year-old Australian girl to three of the four children of Denmark's wealthiest man, retail billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen. Yet throughout Sunday the UK, Aussie, Danish and the rest of the world's media saw their job as thorough obfuscation of the truth. I heard about yesterday's attack from the BBC, which had extensive rolling coverage with correspondents on the ground - and yet seemed mainly to be trying to tell us as little as possible. A lady think-tanker from Chatham House was keen to focus on the brutality with which the Sri Lankan government had ended the Tamil insurgency a decade ago: a fascinating topic no doubt, but utterly irrelevant to the mound of Christian corpses in Colombo that morning. In the entire hour, hers was the only mention of Islam - when she cautioned that it would be grossly irresponsible and "Islam-phobic" even to bring up the subject.

She didn't really need to spell that out, did she? It used to be said that ninety per cent of news is announcing Lord Jones is dead to people who were entirely unaware that Lord Jones was ever alive. Now the trick is to announce Lord Jones is dead and ensure that people remain entirely unaware of why he is no longer alive. One senses that a line was crossed in yesterday's coverage. As one of our Oz Steyn Club members, Kate Smyth, put it, the media have advanced from dhimmitude to full-blown taqiyya.

The lights are going out on the most basic of journalistic instincts: Who, what, when, where, why. All are subordinate to the Narrative - or Official Lie. All day yesterday and into today, if you had glanced at the telly, switched on the radio or surfed the big news sites of the Internet, you would have thought the Tamil Tigers were back "with a vengeance", as The Economist put it - even though with one exception (the 1990 police massacre) the death toll was higher than any individual attack the Tigers had ever pulled off.

Meanwhile, back in that fast shrinking space known as the real world, from the very first hours the headline of this story was completely straightforward:

Islamic Suicide Bombers Slaughter Three Hundred on Easter Morning

But apparently that can no longer be said.

~Notwithstanding the atrocities in Sri Lanka, we had a very busy Easter weekend at SteynOnline, starting on Good Friday with a particularly timely Tale for Our Time in light of recent events - Mark's reading of pertinent passages from Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris. Our Saturday movie date offered Mel Gibson's take on The Passion of the Christ, and we wentOn the Town with an audio exploration of Easter parades, rotogravures, and the dearth of sonnets about bonnets. Steyn's Weekend Notebook presented a pop-culture scorecard if you're having difficulty keeping up with the Great Purges: Kate Smith's a racist, Rodgers & Hammerstein are Nazis, and Dame Edna's done. Our Sunday song selection mourned the passing of Les Reed with his first Number One hit: "It's Not Unusual." If you were busy over the weekend with Easter or Passover observances, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.

This evening Mark will be keeping his Monday date on "Tucker Carlson Tonight", across America at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific. Our latest Clubland Q&A will air live around the planet on Wednesday - and later this week we'll be launching a brand new audio adventure in Tales for Our Time.

Calling Out Around the World

By Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/9249/calling-out-around-the-world

March 18, 2019

Palestinian Muslim students at NYU accuse Chelsea Clinton of stoking New Zealand massacre

All jihad is local, but all "Islamophobia" is global. So, if a Muslim of Afghan origin shoots up a gay nightclub in Florida and kills 49 people, that's just one crazed loner and no broader lessons can be discerned from his act. On the other hand, if a white guy shoots up two mosques in New Zealand and kills 50 people, that indicts us all, and we need to impose worldwide restraints on free speech to make sure it doesn't happen again. I'm ecumenical enough to mourn the dead in both gay clubs and mosques, but I wonder why we are so conditioned to accept Islamic terror as (in the famous words of London mayor Sadiq Khan) "part and parcel of living in a big city" that it is only the exceptions to the rule that prompt industrial-scale moral preening from politicians and media. [UPDATE: Utrecht isn't that big a city - 350,000 - but it's today's designated "part and parcel".]

The Christchurch killer published the usual bonkers manifesto before livestreaming his mass murder on Facebook. Brenton Tarrant purports to be an environmentalist - indeed, a self-described "eco-fascist" - who admires Communist China (notwithstanding, presumably, its indifference to environmentalism). He wants to massacre Muslims in order to save the planet:

The environment is being destroyed by over population, we Europeans are one of the groups that are not over populating the world. The invaders are the ones over populating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by so doing save the environment.

Does he mean this? Or is it a giant blood-drenched leg-pull?

No matter. For the the politicians stampeding to the nearest camera to dust off their tropes, what counts is that, if you're American, Donald Trump pulled the trigger; and, if you're British or European and you're not prepared to say that Google-Twitter-Facebook should silence anybody to the right of Trevor Noah, then you're part of the problem. Here's the rather less homicidal environmentalist Catherine McKenna, Canada's Climate Change Minister, getting it pitch-perfect in two steps. First, visit a mosque (although obviously not to kill everyone to "save the environment", like Mr Tarrant); second, blame those whose exhibitionism isn't as gung ho as yours:

I spoke to parents at Ottawa Main Mosque today whose kids are too scared to pray & go to school. In Canada.

Meanwhile Andrew Scheer has to be called out before he can call out Islamophobia.

For non-Canadians, Mr Scheer is the Conservative Opposition Leader. But the point is you can call him out and, as Maxime Bernier noted of his former colleague, like many jelly-spined Tories he will instantly squeal, "No, wait, hold that last seat on the bandwagon for me." Even more disturbingly, the broadcaster Charles Adler denounced the Governor General for not "calling out" Islamophobia.

The Governor General of Canada is the Queen's vicereine. As the old joke has it, she is obligated to speak in governor-generalities - as, indeed, Her Majesty is. That is what is expected of an apolitical monarch. So, when there is an act of mass murder, the Crown and its viceroys express shock and sympathy and revulsion - and leave the politics to the likes of Ms McKenna and the hapless Scheer.

I would be interested to know why Mr Adler thinks it is in the national interest to lend the imprimatur of the Crown and the state to as specious and opportunistically deployed a conceit as "Islamophobia". One of our Antipodean Steyn Club members, Kate Smyth, drew my attention to a fine example of that: After the Islamic terror attack in Melbourne four months ago, Muslim community leaders refused to meet with Aussie Prime Minister Scott Morrison because of all the systemic Islamophobia. After the Christchurch attack, the same Muslim community leaders are demanding a meeting with Morrison because of all the, er, systemic Islamophobia. To say Terror Attack A is something to do with Islam is totally Islamophobic; to refuse to say Terror Attack B is Islamophobic is even more totally Islamophobic.

Were the Queen or the Governor General to pull an Andrew Scheer and sign on to this somewhat selective view of the world's travails, it would necessarily imply that "Islamophobia" is now beyond and above politics, and in that sense beyond criticism. The use of "Islamophobia" in the Melbourne attack is, in fact, its standard deployment: it is an all-purpose card played to shut down any debate.

Not, of course, that there's much debate as it is. And there's likely to be even less in the future. Facebook, which is unable to devise algorithms preventing a depraved psychopath livestreaming mass slaughter on its platform, is busy fine-tuning its controls to expel the most anodyne dissenters from the social-justice pieties. Less speech inevitably means more violence - because, if you can't talk about anything, what's left but to shoot up the joint?

Thus the revolution devours its own. It goes without saying that right-wing madmen like Donald Trump and Andrew Scheer are to blame for Christchurch, but did you know that, when you peel back the conspiracy and discover who's really pulling the Trump-Scheer strings, you find Islamophobic white supremacist Chelsea Clinton?

Muslim students have berated Chelsea Clinton at a vigil for the victims of the New Zealand mosques massacre, saying she is to blame for the attack...

'This right here is the result of a massacre stoked by people like you and the words that you put out into the world,' says Dweik, gesturing to the vigil for the 49 who were killed in Christchurch when a white nationalist shooter stormed two mosques.

'And I want you to know that and I want you to feel that deeply - 49 people died because of the rhetoric you put out there,' Dweik continues, jabbing her index finger toward Clinton as other students snap their fingers in apparent approval of her words.

Click below to watch:

All poor Chelsea was doing was trying to cut herself a piece of the grief-signaling action, and suddenly she finds herself in one big unsafe space:

According to NYU student Rose Asaf, who posted the video on Twitter, students at the vigil were angry about Clinton's accusation last month that Rep Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, used 'anti-Semitic language and tropes' while criticizing Israel...

Clinton was one of many who condemned Omar's remarks, writing in a tweet: 'We should expect all elected officials, regardless of party, and all public figures to not traffic in anti-Semitism.'

It's hate-filled Islamophobic statements like that that will get us all killed, Chelsea. Personally I blame Christchurch on Nancy Pelosi's recent House resolution condemning the Dreyfus Affair.

But I'm sure Chelsea's learned her lesson. How eager do you think she'll be to criticize Ilhan Omar's next outburst?

Things are changing faster than you think. The urge to change New Zealand's gun laws might be politely excused as a reflexive response to the means by which an appalling attack was carried out. But the demand throughout the west to restrict both private gun ownership and free speech are indicative of a more calculated clampdown, and of broader assumptions about control of the citizenry on all fronts. In the transition to the new assumptions, we are approaching a tipping point, in which the authorities of the state (as in the average British constabulary's Twitter feed) are ever more openly concerned to clamp down on you noticing what's happening rather than on what is actually happening.

Finally, an observation from Steyn Club member Steven Payne:

Does anybody know how many mosques there are in the city named Christchurch? Am I the only one who sees the irony there?

Like the old Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah joke about the "24-Hour Dry-Cleaners" shop, "Christchurch" is just the name. In my bleaker moments, I recall a memorable line from the opening scene in Daniel Silva's novel The Secret Servant, about the murder of an old Jew in the streets of multiculti Amsterdam. He dies in the shadow of the Zuiderkerk, a seventeenth-century church where Rembrandt worshiped and which Monet painted, but long since converted into a municipal information center - although the bell tower remains:

No one intervened— hardly surprising, thought Rosner, for intervention would have been intolerant—and no one thought to comfort him as he lay dying. Only the bells spoke to him.

'A church without faithful,' they seemed to be saying, 'in a city without God.'

The Drumbeat of the Mob

By Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/9148/the-drumbeat-of-the-mob

January 21, 2019

~Guest-hosting for Rush on Friday, I mentioned the strange need of the right to virtue-signal to their detractors - as in the stampede of Congressional Republicans to distance themselves from their colleague Steve King over an infelicitous interview with The New York Times. Democrats never do this; Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam declare that the Jews are pushing defective marijuana on black men in order to turn them gay - which would appear to be a prima facie slur on at least four Democrat constituencies: blacks, gays, Jews and potheads. Yet Clinton, Obama et al speak not a word against Calypso Louie.

There was another conservative virtue-signaling stampede over the weekend. A short video from the Lincoln Memorial went "viral" (notwithstanding its ubiquity, I'm keeping the word in scare-quotes because, like any other virus, this one should be contained): it purported to show a group of Catholic schoolboys in MAGA hats harassing an elderly Native American drummer. The lads were instantly identified as students from Covington Catholic High School, which I'd never heard of but is clearly the kind of tony white-privilege joint where they book Brett Kavanaugh to spike the punch at the gang-rape prom. So naturally social media instantly convicted them and moved on to the usual doxing and death threats. The school itself leapt to dissociate itself from its own pupils and threatened to expel them.

Midst the present fevers, my advice and practice is that, when the media are in lockstep on a particular "narrative", proceed with caution and, if you must join the great thundering herd of independent minds, tag along at the tail end out of sight. A genuinely conservative temperament should be wary of crying "Me too!" and scampering after the media-Democrat-cultMarx bandwagon - if only because, regardless of the wrongs and rights, no true conservative should assist in furthering the nano-second due process of trial by social media, through which whole lives are destroyed by the reflex twitching drive-thru jury of Twitter. "Sentence first - verdict afterwards," said Alice's Queen. Hang him high - and we'll figure out later what, if anything, he's guilty of. That's about as deeply unconservative a proposition as one could find. The cure is worse than whatever disease (racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia) it claims to be healing.

Yet, instead of a prudent skepticism, my former colleagues at National Review joined the stampede and decided to get way out in front of the story. My old friend Jay Nordlinger wasanguished:

The images of those red-hat kids surrounding and mocking that old Indian are unbearable. Absolutely unbearable. An American disgrace.

Of course, the virtue-signaling availed him naught from fellow Tweeters. Alex Natt:

'Old Indian'?

Tracy Kennedy:

Yeah, 'Native American man' or 'Indigenous Man' or even 'Vietnam Vet'...

Etc.

National Review decided to up their game and published a piece by their deputy managing editor, Nicholas Frankovich (presumably the assistant to Jason Lee Steorts), with the arresting headline:

The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross

Unfortunately for the scolding schoolmarms of the right, the facts were not as they appeared to be from that brief clip. Over at Reason (with hindsight, a better name for a magazine than I used to think it was), Robby Soave watched the two hours of surrounding footage, and found - surprise, surprise! - that it told an entirely different story:

Far from engaging in racially motivated harassment, the group of mostly white, MAGA-hat-wearing male teenagers remained relatively calm and restrained despite being subjected to incessant racist, homophobic, and bigoted verbal abuse by members of the bizarre religious sect Black Hebrew Israelites...

They call them crackers, faggots, and pedophiles. At the 1:20 mark (which comes after the Phillips incident) they call one of the few black students the n-word and tell him that his friends are going to murder him and steal his organs. At the 1:25 mark, they complain that "you give faggots rights," which prompted booing from the students. Throughout the video they threaten the kids with violence, and attempt to goad them into attacking first. The students resisted these taunts admirably: They laughed at the hecklers, and they perform a few of their school's sports cheers.

Under sustained crude and obnoxious provocation, the boys were remarkably good-humored throughout - a credit to the school that threatens to expel them.

Halfway through, Jay's "old Indian" decided to insert himself in between the Black Hebrew Israelites and the MAGA cracker-faggot-paedo schoolboys, and start his "Native American drumming". A little ethnic drumming goes a long way with me. Have you ever heard that Japanese taiko drumming? It's not exactly Buddy Rich. So I wouldn't welcome someone doing it in my face, and needless to say, if a white male drummer (from the Edinburgh Tattoo, say) went up to some black kids and started drumming, it would be a hate crime.

Nathan Phillips, on the other hand, is a revered tribal elder - so revered he plays one in a "music" video that has 380 million hits (best to hit the mute button before pressing play):

Almost nothing about this story is as reported. Jay Nordlinger's "old Indian" isn't that old: he was born in 1955, which, not to be ungallant or anything, puts him in slightly-older-brother territory to Jay - who has known some seriously old men, like the recently departed Bernard Lewis, born 1916. Nathan Phillips seems to be some sort of Native American version of Quaker Oats pitchman Wilford Brimley, who's been playing old since Cocoon in 1985, when he was barely fifty yet was cast as a contemporary of Don Ameche, Hume Cronyn, Jack Gilford and other chaps three decades his senior. In fact, Steve Sailer wonders if Nathan Phillips is, in fact, a "Vietnam vet", at least in the quaint and possibly obsolescent sense of having been in the vicinity of Vietnam while wearing a military uniform. All US forces were withdrawn in March 1973, when Mr Phillips would have been either a few weeks past his eighteenth birthday, or still seventeen and in drum school.

Curious. But, as the appellate judges say (hey, welcome to my world), we need not reach the merits of Mr Phillips' antiquity, because long before that question arises the official media narrative turns out to be thoroughly bogus. This was just another fake hate crime - I believe you can do a Master's in them at Oberlin. My old boss at National Review, Rich Lowry, has deleted his Tweet, as has Jay Nordlinger (seconding Rich with a somewhat perfunctory "same here"), and the spit-on-the-Cross piece by their hysterical junior editor has disappeared from the website. By contrast, over at The New York Times, the in-house conservative, Ross Douthat, can rouse himself to no more than ecumenical scolding:

Good rules for life: Don't let your Catholic school's students wear MAGA hats on a field trip for the March for Life.

Don't *immediately* make a teenager a symbol of everything you hate about your political enemies based on a short video clip. Give it a day at least.

That doesn't quite do it for me. What's disturbing about this fake hate crime is not that the Twitter mob scented blood in its nostrils and went bounding after its prey, but that a big chunk of Conservative Inc piled on, as enthusiastically as the left. And Jay Nordlinger's finger-wagging about an "American disgrace" is absurd in its sanctimony: However you wish to characterize a professional tribal elder intervening in a showdown between upscale Catholic private-school pupils and "Black Hebrew Israelites", it isn't an "American" disgrace. An American disgrace is the declining life expectancy of white males due to addiction, or the collapse of the family in rural America, or a bipartisan political class admitting millions of unskilled illegal immigrants to the country so that MS-13 gangs are now a fact of life in suburban Long Island in order that the Dems can get voters and the GOP's donors can get cheap labor ...or any one of a ton of other "American disgraces" Conservative Inc doesn't talk about because it only takes to the field on the left's terms.

I talked on Rush last Friday about the folly, in philosophical terms, of always accepting your opponents' premises, even unto accepting and advancing the notion that "western civilization" is hate speech. How is that in the interest of even the most milquetoast and watery version of "conservatism"?

But accepting not just your opponents' framing of the argument but their most repulsive totalitarian rituals is even worse. The Orwellian Twitterstorm is something utterly disgusting: It reduces man to a cyber-jackal, feasting on whatever prey is tossed in his path. I have argued, at some length, that you cannot have truly conservative government in a liberal culture. Culture is like air - it's all around, and you don't even think about it. So we live in an age of social-media feeding frenzies that can vaporize a fellow's Oscar-hosting gig or drive an unfortunate porn actress to suicide. There is nothing in the least bit "conservative" about such a world: It's like the young student in Milan Kundera's great novel of Warsaw Pact totalitarianism, The Joke, facing the party committee and wondering why none of his friends will speak up for him - except that it's now at Spaceballs Ludicrous Speed, and the respectable right cannot even bring itself to forgo the pleasure of getting played for saps. Every time.

~We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline starting with a few Rush moments, a Pennsylvania radio appearance, and Howard Dean Canadianizing his "I have a scream" epic. Our Saturday movie date offered my two favorite Cate Blanchett film scenes, and our Sunday song selection bounced the buckboard with "Buttons and Bows". If you were too busy preparing for a hard Brexit, soft Brexit or adjustable-sleep-number Brexit all weekend long, I hope you'll want to catch up with one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.

My appearance on WPHT was, of course, in service of Dennis Miller's and my impending arrival in the Keystone State together on stage for the first time. We'll be starting the tour next month in Reading, Pennsylvania and later hitting the pronunciation minefield of Wilkes-Barre. And remember that with VIP tickets you not only enjoy the best seats but you get to meet Dennis and me after the show.

Catch you on the telly tonight with Tucker - and live across the planet for Clubland Q&A at 4pm North American Eastern/9pm GMT on Tuesday.