Monday

May 19th, 2025

Insight

Shell Games

Mark Steyn

By Mark Steyn

Published May 19, 2025

Shell Games

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Last week, the famously straight-shooting G-man James Comey tweeted out an arrangement of sea shells he happened to "come across" on the beach:

Mr Comey is always "finding" cool shells on his beach walks:

Back in the Nineties, I used the term "eighty-six" in The Sunday Telegraph in London. It not being an expression familiar to Britannic ears, my editor demanded I explain it to readers, which proved rather complicated:

It apparently started in the Thirties as soda-fountain slang for an item that was not available: "I'll have a chocolate malt, please." "Eighty-six on that." It quickly evolved to become the act of making something unavailable by killing it. On Broadway long ago, I once heard a producer instruct his director: "Eighty-six the dance number." To a certain type of ne'er-do-well, it then advanced further to become a synonym for making you unavailable in a more permanent sense by putting you in a concrete overcoat and lowering you into the East River. To explain all that to non-Americans would have taken up half the column, so I eighty-sixed the "eighty-six" and replaced it with the more familiar "off" (per Webster's, intransitive verb: "to kill, murder").

Yet we are now expected to believe, even in the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt craphole of federal law enforcement, that James Comey could ascend to the heights of FBI director, the head G-man lui-même, without ever having a clue that "some folks associate those numbers with violence":

As far too many Americans have come to learn, a citizen "lying" to the FBI is in big trouble. But an FBI man lying to the citizenry can do so with impunity. Yet "86 47" does not seem capable of being interpreted in any way other than a call for the violent termination of the lawfully elected president. So we have the most famous FBI honcho since J Edgar Hoover selling sea-shell arrangements on the sea shore and encouraging another shot at the President after two actual assassination attempts, one of which came within millimeters of blowing Trump's skull apart on live TV. At the very least, it suggests that this weird creepy dweeb is too psychologically unhealthy ever to have been permitted anywhere near the Director's office.

Do only Democrats get to do this? Or can I call for a money-no-object dawn raid on Comey's house during which, in traditional FBI fashion, he accidentally gets eighty-sixed while reaching for his dressing-gown too hastily?

It is not normal to have a public discourse where senior civil servants are slavering for the murder of their political opposition. Have Comey's official portraits in the Hoover building gone the way of Thoroughly Modern Milley's in the Pentagon? UPDATE! DNI Tulsi Gabbard wants him "behind bars". Preach it, sister.

~At Sir Keir Starmer's direction, the British state brazenly lied about the slaughter of the Southport girls last year, and then ordered its goons to arrest anyone minded to disagree. So Lucy Connolly languishes behind bars, while the mass murderer is on a loose enough incarceration regime that he gets to wander about hurling boiling water over prison officers. The best account of the injustice of Mrs Connolly's treatment is by Steyn Show cruisemate Allison Pearson here. But I summarised the case thus:

The UK is now a land where violent criminals have to be released from the country's overcrowded gaols to make way for Starmer's political prisoners. Trump and Vance were right to call him out in the Oval Office for his assault on free speech, but wrong not to kick him to the carpet and beat the crap out of the bastard. In a land where paedophile rapists walk free, an admirable woman, the survivor of personal tragedy, sits in prison for a tweet - having been sentenced to eight months' confinement for every hour said tweet was visible to the public.

Yesterday Mrs Connolly's appeal came to the lousy old Royal Courts of Justice, where I had the misfortune to find myself just last year. As in my own case, there was a large turnout of supporters, including Allison, Dan Wootton and other old friends, gathered under an unimpeachable slogan:

It is not a difficult case, and the Court was expected to rule from the bench. Instead, the Rt Hon Lord Justice Holroyde and his two colleagues decided that Mrs Connolly would be returned to prison and the Royal Courts of Injustice would issue their judgment at a later date, if she's still alive. Viscount Hewart, Lord Chief Justice in a better England and a man who sat in the very same building as yesterday's travesty, famously observed that "justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done". But that dictum was subordinated to Starmer's political needs. As Katie Hopkins put it:

In America, an ex-FBI head can tweet assassination porn to his heart's content; in Britain, the real threat are housewives who dissent from the state lies.

~I keep getting asked about that Jake Tapper "Now it can be told!" book. Can someone who spent four years lying to his audience and insisting that Biden's dementia was a mysteriously returned childhood stutter reinvent himself, even in the Land of Opportunity, on this scale? This is the best showbiz casting since they remade All the President's Men with Woodward and Bernstein played by Liddy and Dean.

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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