The Evil of Welfare by Mark Steyn • Mar 14, 2014 at 9:20 am https://www.steynonline.com/6169/the-evil-of-welfare Yesterday, I made a somewhat truncated appearance (my fault; long story) on the Hugh Hewitt show. Breitbart's Jeff Poor has an audio excerpt: "As I say, the great evil of welfare is not that it wastes money," Steyn said. "It wastes people. Barbara Lee and that crowd don't understand that because they exist in that pampered little middle class little bubble where you take it for granted that you'll be able to go to college and get some non-job as a diversity outreach consultant for $300,000 a year like Michelle Obama did before she became first lady. And everybody who is not part of that world will somehow be satisfied instead of living the American dream, living the food stamp dream." One of the peculiar pallid racial obsessives distinctive to the American scene calls this observation not a racist dog whistle but a whole "dog whistle orchestra". Mission accomplished! ~Also yesterday, I checked in with Boston's radio maestro Michael Graham. I come on about one hour 50 minutes into the show. We discussed why "The Ukraine" got downsized to just "Ukraine" and other pressing matters, and we previewed the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference, which starts today in Nashua, New Hampshire. Michael adds: What do Scott Brown, Joe Scarborough, Mark Steyn, Kelly Ayotte, Bobby Jindal and I have in common? We'll all be in the same hotel room this weekend! What a sad fantasy. Actually, it's a maximum three to a room. I'll be speaking to the conference tomorrow afternoon (Saturday). Michael's Boston radio colleague, Tom Shattuck, has a slightly more sober preview: With the pillars of Obamacare crumbling on a weekly basis and the economic and employment situation perennially queasy for too many years now, it will take a profound leader to cure a country with such a toxic and man-made pre-existing condition. That candidate may be in Nashua today. That person may be sitting at our broadcast booth as Herald Radio will be live from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. I think what he's saying is that person is me. I must remember to iron my shirt. If you'd like to come along to the Crowne Plaza, details are here. ~On Saturday night, I'll be joining my fellow alleged defamer Ezra Levant for a full hour on Sun News TV in Canada. It's at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific, repeated on Sunday evening, also at 8pm Eastern. We'll be talking about free speech and related matters. On that very subject, David van Gend writes: Four hundred years ago the poet John Milton appealed to the British Parliament not to enact laws that would prohibit the publication of certain opinions. Milton's address ended with the declaration: "Give me the liberty to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties". Free speech, meaning free argument, is at the heart of a self-governing society. It should not be a partisan issue. As the greatest free-speech warrior of the West, Canadian journalist Mark Steyn, has said: "Free speech is not a left-right thing; it is a free-unfree thing". And yet the liberty to argue freely according to conscience is being constricted throughout the developed world in the name of a new and bogus "right not to be offended". Steyn speaks from experience: 'In Canada, I committed the crime of "offending" certain approved identity groups. And there is no defense to that: truth, facts, evidence are all irrelevant. If someone's "offended", that's that: You're guilty.' Thanks to Steyn's magnificent push-back against the Canadian "human rights" establishment, the Canadian Parliament has now repealed the vilification law under which he was harassed. In Australia that remains unfinished business. Indeed. I'll be Down Under later this year, and I intend to help finish it. One of the other topics we touch on, via David Suzuki's revealingly inept appearance on the ABC's "Q&A", is climate change. On which subject Alan Caruba notes of Mustafa Piece Prize winner Michael E Mann: Mann has brought a libel law suit against columnist Mark Steyn, the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, charging defamation. Such suits cost a lot of money and Robert Tracinski, writing in Real Clear Politics in February noted that "it's interesting that no one asks who is going to go bankrupt funding Mann's lawsuit. Who is insuring Mann against this loss?" Tracinski pointed out that "It is libel to maliciously fabricate facts about someone" but that it is "legal for me, for example, to say that Michael Mann is a liar, if I don't believe his erroneous scientific conclusions are the product of honest error. It is also legal for me to say that he is a coward and a liar, for hiding behind libel laws in an attempt to suppress criticism." The East Anglia emails revealed that they were doing whatever they could to suppress the publication of studies that disputed global warming in various science journals. If you can't be in Nashua tomorrow afternoon, I do hope you'll get a chance to catch me on the telly with Ezra tomorrow night. If you'd like to be part of the pushback against the coward and liar, please see here. My free speech book, Lights Out, is now also available both with Ezra's book and as part of our Steyn vs the Stick package. © 2020 Mark Steyn Enterprises (US) Inc. All rights reserved.

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