Further Examinations: From Hellmarsh With Love Ep. 3

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of Scott McKay’s new novel, From Hellmarsh With Love, which is being released exclusively at The American Spectator each weekend in September and October, before its full publication on Amazon later this fall. From Hellmarsh With Love is the sequel to King of the Jungle, which was serialized at The American Spectator in Spring 2024. You can purchase it on Amazon here. And you can pre-order a signed copy of From Hellmarsh With Love at this link.

In Episode 1, our intrepid hero, conservative podcaster and web publisher Mike Holman, married the love of his life, former Secret Service agent and president-saving heroine PJ Chang. After the wedding, Mike and PJ hopped on a jet for a honeymoon in London where all is not as it should be. In Episode 2, we find a Great Britain in turmoil and its leadership class wholly unequal to the task of bringing the country back from the brink of chaos. Mike changes his mind from an initial position of rejecting a working honeymoon to covering the situation. 

PJ tells us what happens next…

London, August 29, 2024

While we were interviewing Sir Ian, something was happening about 170 miles to the north.

Something awful, but not surprising — and neither was the reaction to it.

There was a grooming gang in Leeds. They were a particularly sordid bunch who had raped and prostituted more than 2,000 young girls.

Including Theresa Folan, who was 11 years old when they got their hooks into her. By the time Theresa was 13 she was pregnant and hooked on heroin.

On her 14th birthday, just four days after she had miscarried, Theresa slashed her wrists and bled out in the bathtub of the second-story apartment she and her younger brother shared with their parents above her father’s bicycle shop.

Ray Folan wasn’t a wealthy man. He wasn’t a violent man. He wasn’t tall, athletic, or well-spoken. But he was a dutiful husband and a doting father, and what those animals did to his daughter drove him mad.

A reporter for the local alternative paper in Leeds had uncovered that there was an imam from Libya at the helm of the grooming gang there. The imam had actually issued a fatwa to the congregation at his mosque encouraging it and had quoted a passage from the Qur’an that he said justified it.

And the crazy thing was, as Mike showed me, the imam wasn’t totally off the wall.

This is what Qur’an 23:1-6 says:

The believers must (eventually) win through, those who humble themselves in their prayers; who avoid vain talk; who are active in deeds of charity; who abstain from sex, except with those joined to them in the marriage bond, or (the captives) whom their right hands possess, for (in their case) they are free from blame.

According to the imam, all of the infidel girls were slaves for the taking, and so the grooming gangs were simply taking captives as part of their jihad for Allah.

So it was justified.

The thing is, there were Muslim clerics in Egypt and other places who were making the same religious arguments as the imam in Leeds. Naturally, nobody in Leeds or the rest of Britain seemed very interested in bringing that to light. You’d think the women’s groups would.

You’d really think the women’s groups would.

But this went on openly for four years.

After his daughter killed herself, Folan sued the mosque; the case was thrown out. He filed charges; the police did nothing. Some of the anti-immigrant organizations kicked up a controversy over it, and the BBC and the big newspapers just shrugged.

And then, at practically the same time we were enduring that awful interview with Sir Ian Douglas, Ray Folan saw the imam sitting outdoors at a sidewalk table at a tea house near his mother-in-law’s place. He ran into her house, retrieved a carving knife from a kitchen drawer, casually walked back to the tea house, and politely introduced himself to the imam before slicing his neck from ear to ear.

And then Folan sat down on the curb and waited for the police to pick him up.

By that night a big chunk of Leeds was aflame. The murder of the imam sent the Muslim community there, which was more than 60,000 people out of the 800,000 or so in the city, absolutely off their chain and it was George-Floyd-Minneapolis time. Except these guys were a lot more strategic because, unlike in Minneapolis and the other places where havoc broke out in America, it wasn’t the Muslim neighborhoods burning down in Leeds.

It was the city center.

The whole thing was getting wall-to-wall coverage. Sky News had several reporters on the ground and a whole panel of people pretty much all night long gabbing about the riot and the fact that Stormer, who had been on TV daily castigating the “hooligans and thugs” who had been in the streets regularly for more than a month, had his foot planted in his mouth over the fact that the imam’s followers were now showing what a real riot looked like.

What happened in Leeds was a disaster from every possible perspective. That was obvious.

Watching the Sky News coverage, which we did until late into the night, both Mike and I got the feeling that it was something of a seminal, historical event. One of their reporters did a man-on-the-street interview with a business owner whose shop was lost as rioters burned the building it was in, and, in a sound bite that went viral, the man said this was the night his country was truly lost.

In a terribly disastrous bit of timing, the folks back in Atlanta got the interview with Sir Ian posted online just a few minutes before he appeared on Sky News. He was indignant and hyper-aggressive in trashing Labour for their inattention to the immigrant crisis, as he called it, but Sky News had clipped out some of the exchanges with Mike and hit him with them. Sir Ian looked like an utter fool in real-time just as one of the UK’s principal cities was becoming a war zone.

Finally, the police managed to put down the insurrection and get the fires under control a little before dawn. We managed to get a little bit of sleep before doing the second interview.

We figured that Lady Phillipa Bridgetson, the new Labour Party secretary of state for education, would cancel her interview with us given the fresh crisis, but she didn’t. So, we were there bright and early at 8 a.m. for one of the most bizarre interactions with a public figure I’ll ever see.

We didn’t do the interview in one of the historic offices at Parliament like we wanted to. Instead, it was at the Labour Party Home Office on Rushworth Street in South Bank, in a completely antiseptic conference room, which couldn’t have been a more boring setting.

We got there 15 minutes early. Lady Phillipa was 40 minutes late. We figured that was likely given the disaster in Leeds. Mike said he’d be surprised if she didn’t stand us up, but just when we were about to pack up our gear she breezed in with a whole entourage of college-aged assistants trailing behind.

She was a tall woman, a little taller than me but not quite as tall as Mike’s six feet. She had a pair of flat Mary Janes paired with a double-breasted pantsuit; they were sort of the only telltale sign she was wearing women’s clothes.

Lady Phillipa was not a very curvy woman. At all. And she had a sort of Annie Lennox thing going, except Annie Lennox wore makeup and if Lady Phillipa had so much as lip balm on I didn’t notice it.

She looked like a skinny guy.

Wikipedia didn’t have any information on her personal life, so we didn’t know if she was straight or gay. She didn’t have a wedding ring on. I wanted to ask, just to make conversation, but it was pretty clear we weren’t getting too intimate in this encounter.

Nevertheless, Lady Phillipa was pleasant enough.

“Mr. Holman,” she said, proffering a friendly handshake, which Mike returned. He introduced me as his wife and assistant, and she looked at me like he was lying.

“But you’re…” she stopped herself.

“I’m a little younger than he is,” I said. “But I’m an old soul.”

“Yes, of course,” she said and appeared grateful that I’d saved the conversation.

I knew exactly what she was about to say. She stopped herself before she could announce her surprise that The Racist Mike Holman would marry a half-Chinese girl. I had to take a deep breath at that because it made me want to hit her.

She knew nothing about either of us and didn’t even bother to find out. It’s not like we were nobodies. I was half-famous, and Mike was a lot more famous than Lady Phillipa, even in the UK. That fact about us had become an item and had been in some tabloids and certainly on the internet. Her entourage could easily have briefed her on us.

But they didn’t care.

I was fascinated to see what Mike would do with that pretty open show of disrespect.

The answer, to my mild surprise, was nothing.

I got Mike and Lady Phillipa mic’d up, tested the light balance, made sure all the cameras were recording and the sound was feeding into the laptop and gave him a thumbs up. Meanwhile, Lady Phillipa’s minions were lining up in chairs along the walls, thankfully out of camera shot; I had a terrible feeling I’d have to order one of these kids, all of whom were looking at Mike and me like we had three heads and clearly didn’t want us there, to a different chair and it would turn ugly.

But none of that happened, and Mike managed to get the interview going in a friendly tone.

For a few minutes, it stayed that way. But then he asked her about the controversy that was going on around the Department for Education’s proposal to impose a VAT tax on private school tuition. The VAT, or Value-Added Tax, is a national sales tax most European countries impose on pretty much everything you buy. In Britain that meant a 20 percent hit to the pocketbooks of private-school parents.

Mike asked her why they’d want to tax school tuition since the people who were putting their kids in private schools were covering the cost of educating their kids themselves rather than making the government do it.

“Shouldn’t they get a tax break rather than a penalty?” he asked.

“Certainly not,” she said. “The VAT tax applies to most goods and services, and given that it’s the wealthy who have their children in the posh private schools, this government will give no free rides.”

“I don’t understand what you mean by free rides. They’re literally paying full freight for their kids’ education.”

“Well, the revenues from the tax will go toward teacher salaries.”

“You mean at the private schools.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“The tuition tax. You’re giving the proceeds to the teachers at those schools, right?”

“Well, no. This is to fund supplementary compensation for teachers at state schools at Key Stages 1 and 2.”

“Meaning students up to…age 11, is that correct?” Mike asked. She nodded.

“So it’s a redistributive tax,” he said.

“We don’t call it that.”

“But that’s what it is. You’re imposing higher costs on people you see as wealthier to increase funding for schools that poorer people send their kids to.”

Lady Phillipa didn’t say anything.

“I’m not sure I understand the Equivalency Tax, either,” he said. “Can you explain that?”

“Certainly. This applies to those parents who choose home education. Our data indicate that those parents are generally of a similar demographic profile to those who utilize private schools, and therefore the Equivalency Tax will impose the equivalent rate to benefit the teachers…”

“You’re essentially charging homeschoolers a fine equal to the VAT tax on private schools?”

She nodded.

“Essentially, yes.”

I stifled a cough, and Mike gave me a worried look.

Mike asked her a couple of other questions about test scores and she gave sort of usual-suspect answers, and then he asked her about something that had made some news in the States.

“I understand that there is a professor at the University of East Anglia who has raised some eyebrows in saying that parents who read to their children are unfairly advantaging them over children whose parents don’t,” he said. “Does the Department for Education have a position on this subject?”

I figured this was just a throwaway question. We hadn’t talked about this as something he’d ask her. But Lady Phillipa seemed to light up when Mike asked it.

“Yes!” she said. “Professor Sinclair has certainly identified an issue we must address, though perhaps not quite as such. Studies indicate there is gross inequity among children whose parental influences are varied…”

“Parental influences?” Mike asked. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“We believe there should be a standardized list of acceptable texts that…”

“Wait a minute,” Mike said. “I apologize for interrupting. But you aren’t suggesting that you want to regulate which books British parents read to their children outside of school, are you?”

“Of course,” she said. “The wrong material could create the need for weeks, even months of unlearning…”

“Unlearning?”

“Certainly. The Department has been charged with the transformation of British society along the lines of diversity, inclusion, and…”

Mike looked at me like somebody had run him through with a spear. For a guy who’d been single most of his life and didn’t have any kids, I was starting to understand he had a really, really soft spot for the little ones, and this crazy woman was telling him they were going to do…something? to parents who read the wrong things to their kids.

I sort of cocked my head at him, as if to say calm down. I could tell he was starting to lose his cool.

“Well, what books are problematic?” he asked.

“I would refer you to the standards released last week by Ofsted,” she said. That was a reference to the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, which we’d done a little research on. They were basically cops who regulated all the schools and child-care centers in the UK.

“Are you saying that parents who read to their children at home will have to, I don’t understand…”

“They will register with Ofsted and certify that they will stay within the approved list.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t have a chance to look at the list. It includes all the classics, I assume?”

Lady Phillipa frowned.

“Shakespeare? Chaucer? Kipling? Elliot? Keats?”

“As I noted, the list has been published.”

“Are those authors included?”

“The impetus is to give our young ones a non-colonial and diverse range of material…”

“You’re telling British parents they can’t read Kipling to their kids? What about J.M. Barrie?”

“Barrie?”

“Peter Pan?”

“I don’t believe that’s approved. The derogatory references to indigenous Americans are harmful to the proper development of our youth.”

“And if parents decide not to adhere to your reading list?”

Lady Phillipa shifted in her seat and smiled.

“We are presenting to Parliament a series of changes to the Children Act 1989 to ensure that parental influence comports with the goals set forth by the Department and Ofsted.”

“Meaning?”

“We expect to emplace a system of incentives and disincentives to keep our parents within our guardrails, and…”

“Can you give me an example of disincentives?”

“Well, repeated violations could result in re-custody.”

“I don’t know what re-custody is. You’re not suggesting that you would take kids out of their homes if their parents read the wrong books to them, are you?”

“Certainly,” she said, with a straight face.

“I see,” said Mike.

And then after a pause, he said, “Would it be all right if we took a little break? I think I need to visit the loo.”

She smiled. “Of course,” she said.

I got up as Mike did, and he shook his head at me. So I sat back down. I was going to strike up a conversation with Lady Phillipa, but her little interns surrounded her, and I was left in sort of an uncomfortable limbo.

But it only lasted a couple of minutes before Mike returned with a smile on his face. He was looking at his phone.

The interview started back up and he asked her a few inoffensive and unimportant questions and then he leaned in.

“Secretary Bridgetson,” he said, “I’m trying to understand the proposal your department is considering about school uniforms for Key Stages 1 and 2.”

“We have no public policy on uniforms as yet.”

“But is it true that you’re considering unisex uniforms for children at that level?”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, we’ve not announced this as yet, but yes. That order is to take effect in the new year. We were to make it public in October. It will actually apply through Key Stage 4.”

“For our non-British viewers, that means students up to age 16,” said Mike.

“That’s correct.”

“And the unisex uniforms are…”

“They’re in keeping with British tradition. We would like to pay homage to the history of our fair island…”

“What tradition is that?”

“Well, kilts of course.”

“I’m not sure that’s British tradition so much as it is Scottish tradition, correct? The English were not known to wear kilts, and of course, when Scottish men wore kilts Scottish women didn’t.”

“As you say,” Lady Phillipa shrugged, “but there it is. In the coming year, we will make that change.”

“So essentially you’re putting all the boys in skirts.”

“We are honoring ancient traditions.”

“All right, let me ask this: will children of non-British ancestry — Muslims and Africans, for example — be required to participate in the new school uniform scheme?”

“Certainly not. We will respect the rich diversity of ethnic and cultural identities present among our pupils, though we believe we are sending the correct message to the bulk of our charges in…”

It went on for a while longer, though I could tell that Mike was struggling a bit to maintain his composure while talking to this utter loon.

And then it was over, and Lady Phillipa and Mike exchanged a few pleasantries before she and her entourage got up and quickly vanished.

“Let’s get the f*ck out of this madhouse,” he whispered to me when they were gone. I didn’t have the heart to admonish him for swearing.

They’d called us a taxi, and neither of us said a word on the ride back to the Savoy. Mike’s phone rang a couple of times and he sent texts in response.

Finally, back in the hotel room, he fell on the bed with a big sigh.

“I’m going to upload everything, OK?” I said. “I think this interview will probably get a lot of traffic.”

“I’ve got to write an intro to this and record it,” he said, his eyes shut and a painful grimace covering his face, “but I have no idea how to do that. When this shit hits the internet this country is going to explode.”

“You think it’s that bad? And do you want anything?”

He shook his head.

“These wackos want to take your kids away if you read classic British lit to them while they put your little boys in skirts, and they’ll charge you 20 percent extra if you try to escape this nightmare they’ve got cooking.”

“It’s a big story, though, right?”

“I can’t…”

Then his phone rang, and Mike struggled to dig it out of his pocket.

“Dammit!” he hissed as he forced it from its prison.

“Yeah?”

Mike looked at me as the voice on the other line crackled unintelligibly. Neville, he mouthed.

I nodded, and I pulled out the laptop. I started uploading the video and audio files, emailing Kayleigh and Melissa Swindell, Mike’s assistant, to let them know that everything was on its way to the Holman Media FTP site. “We’re going to record an intro for this,” I said in the email, “but we’re struggling a little with what it’ll say. CRAZY interview. It’s weirder here than you know.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Mike was saying. “She’s going to put all of your kids in skirts, Neville. And they’re going to take kids out of homes where parents read the wrong books.

“Yeah, that’s what she said. You didn’t prepare me for all this, man. This is nationalized child abuse.”

He looked at me.

“Everything’s uploading,” I said. He nodded.

It took maybe an hour to knock out all the rest of the stuff we needed to do so Atlanta could produce the podcast. Mike’s opening, which we recorded on the hotel balcony, was not kind — he said that British subjects should be very, very worried about what the new government was going to do to their children and while Lady Phillipa seemed like a nice lady she was exactly the kind of person who shouldn’t have anything at all to do with anyone’s kids.

In hindsight, I might have cautioned him against going in so hot. On the other hand, I didn’t disagree with anything he said. It was a completely reasonable take on what we’d heard from her, and considering people were already in the streets over their immigration and crime policies and then what happened in Leeds…it was basically a nightmare.

And after that, Mike was still really keyed up.

“I know what will relax you,” I said.

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“How about a little newlywed action?”

“You know, we’ve kind of lost track of that the last couple of days.”

“I know, right? I let you get back into workaholic mode and I’m like a neglected wife. I’m a news widow!”

“What? You’re a partner in crime up in here. What widow?”

“I mean, you’re off being a modern-day Cronkite and I’m just along for the ride.”

“Psh. Cronkite. Lost the Vietnam War because he was stupid enough to buy into bullsh*t.”

“Oh my God.”

“Fine,” he said, striking a cheesy porn star pose. “You want it, you got it.”

“Honey,” I said jokingly, “if you talk any sweeter to me I won’t be able to stand it.”

“Well, maybe we should do less talking.”

“Now you’re talking!” I laughed and knocked him down on the bed.

A while later we walked a couple of blocks up the Strand to Joe Allen’s, which is a New York steak and sandwich place Mike said was a don’t-miss joint in London. I wolfed down my shrimp burger; Mike was talking on the phone with Kayleigh and took forever to finish his ribeye with peas and shallots.

I gave him a naughty look and ordered a second Jungle Bird — a rum, pineapple, and Campari cocktail — while he was struggling to eat and talk at the same time.

“Put her on speaker,” I suggested.

He looked around, shrugged, and pressed the button.

“This woman is Nucking Futs,” said Kayleigh. “You try to put my son in a skirt and I will kick you straight in the cooter.”

I laughed.

“You’re on speaker, Kayleigh,” said Mike. “PJ was feeling left out.”

“Oh my God! Hey, PJ! How’s London, honey?”

Kayleigh likes me. Melissa told me at the wedding that it’s a creepy thing; I think she oversells it. I think Kayleigh has a fantasy…something… going on because she plays Call of Duty, which — weirdly enough — is how she met her fiance Ryan; they played together online and it turned out he was in Atlanta, too, and then when they started dating he turned out to be a productive citizen who was as nerdy as she is. Anyway, when she met me setting up that first interview with Mike, the fact I was Secret Service just did it for her.

So Kayleigh has always been a fangirl of mine, or whatever. And when I asked her to be a bridesmaid she acted like I’d given her a million dollars.

“It’s…weird, Kayleigh,” I said. “It’s a way cool city, but it’s really clear it’s not at its best.”

“We were going to take a trip to Dorset tomorrow,’ Mike said, “so we could get away from all of this for a while.”

“No, you can’t!” came the response. “Robby Thomason is at 11 your time tomorrow over in Enfield, which is like…north of where you are? I’ll email you with the address.”

“You talked me into this,” Mike said, good-naturedly scolding me. “I was just going to have a honeymoon, but noooo.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” I said. “Instead you’re blowing up the internet. Poor you.”

The interview with Sir Ian had gone nuclear after Sky News had clipped it to refute the things he was saying live. In America, a bunch of clips of the interview posted to X had circulated, essentially under the umbrella of “never say this if you want to be in politics.” The Babylon Bee had picked up on the interview and ran a headline that read “American Patriot Brings Revolution To UK, Destroys Tory Sycophants Once And For All.”

I cringed a little when I saw that, though we had found out about it because Neville texted the link to Mike.

He sort of flicked his wrist at me, which I immediately understood meant he wanted me to talk to Kayleigh so he could eat his steak. I laughed and asked her about what she and Ryan were doing about their wedding.

“I can put a good word in for you with Pierce,” you know, “I said. “I think he’d like to turn Liberty Point into the world’s busiest wedding destination. Like Las Vegas, only it rains there.”

“Oh, yeah, whatever. Like he’s gonna fly all our people down there. I’m not famous like you, PJ! We’re gonna get married in Dunwoody this fall, and it’s fine.”

“OK,” I said, “but if you want me to ask, I can.”

Mike was nodding at me and giving me a thumbs-up while he chewed away at that steak.

“OK,” Kayleigh said, “I think we have it all synced up and we’re just running it through the editing program now. It’s going to be live in, I don’t know, three hours? What are y’all going to do?”

“I thought we’d go make a run through the British Museum,” said Mike.

“We are?” I said.

“Yes. I think you should maybe get some culture about you before we leave here.”

“Aren’t you from Cincinnati? Culture? Seriously?”

“PJ, what was the last museum you’ve been to?”

“Kayleigh,” I said, “we’re going to hang up now. You don’t want to hear me beat on this man.”

“I get it,” she said, and that was the end of the call.

Mike smiled at me and scarfed down the last of that ribeye. I downed my second Jungle Bird.

“You want another one?” he asked. “Seems like getting wasted and then going to the museum is the thing to do.”

“I’m in,” I said, “but you need to catch up.”

And he did, downing three gin gimlets in the next half hour while I sipped on my Jungle Bird.

We hit the British Museum with a nice buzz, and Mike kept looking at his phone every few minutes. As we stood in front of a drawing Rembrandt had made of a small child he said, “The interview is up, and the shit’s hitting the fan.”

“Really? I’m not surprised.”

“Colby says it’s a blockbuster. Ten million views in 20 minutes.”

Colby Igboizwe is the editor of the Holman.com website. He was kind of like Mike’s right-hand man, at least journalistically.

“That’s impossible,” I said.

“They uploaded my open separately first. It teased this thing pretty well. But Neville talked about it on his UK News show, and the whole country, basically, is watching it now.”

“That’s awesome, right?”

“Seems like it.”

“Mike, I’m so proud of you. You might actually be the best in the world at this.”

He shrugged.

“I doubt that. I mean, we’re looking at this,” he waved at the drawing, “and that’s somebody who was actually the best in the world. I’m good, I guess, but really…”

“Oh, shut up!” I said, probably too loud. I caught a couple of people looking at us. “You are absolutely that good.”

“I’m the Rembrandt of podcasting?” he asked me.

“Honey, you might just be the Michelangelo.”

“Oh, shit. We can’t stay here. Time to go back to the hotel.”

So we did.

And yes, we did honeymoon things. Phones turned off. Computers shut down.

But there was a knock on the door at…what I’ll call a completely inopportune time.

Cursing, Mike wrapped a bedsheet around his waist and answered the door, and when he did he yelled at me to put something on.

“I’m sorry, mum,” said the shorter of the two, a cold tone in his voice that hardly fit the awkward situation he’d invaded. “I’m DI Alfred Culverhouse and this is DI Rupert Marsden. London Met. We’re here for a word with your man here.”

I’d barely gotten my t-shirt back on, and I escaped to the bathroom with the t-shirt dress I’d worn the previous day over my arm. I left Mike alone with the detective inspectors as I tried to make myself presentable.

But I could hear them talking, and it was a bit unnerving. Culverhouse was telling Mike that the government was quite unhappy with the “insulting” character of his opening to the podcast of the interview with Lady Phillipa, and Mike was telling him that it was an honest reaction.

“Nevertheless, sir,” said Culverhouse, “it would not do well for the recording to remain online.”

“Are you trying to tell me to pull it down?” Mike was saying.

“That would be best for all concerned.”

“Well, gentlemen,” Mike said, “that isn’t on the table.”

“Lady Phillipa is requesting that a more accurate edit of the interview be…”

“More accurate? These are her words, Detective Inspector. You understand this, right?”

“Nevertheless, there it is.”

“No. The answer is no. The interview is important. Your citizens know very little about this government that just took office. This is one of the few windows into what’s actually in store for them in the government’s own words. Like hell I’ll take that down.”

“Look here, mate,” said Marsden, who had a deep voice like a diesel engine. “You want a right bollicking, ‘s your funeral. But you oughtn’t take a piss heah. The PM is vexed, you see? We come round to deliver a message, and that message is this is: you’ve got a gob, and it’s time to sod off, innit?”

“Go back to America, ya tosser,” said Culverhouse. “Do what’s right for you and that pretty chink of yours.”

“All right, gentlemen,” I heard Mike say, in a polite voice I knew was backed by anything but politeness. “If there will be nothing else, my wife and I have plans for the evening.”

“Mark us,” said Marsden. “His Majesty’s government has no time for pagans what crawled across the ocean to make trouble. Leave it out, if you and your girl want to have a nice holiday.”

“Duly noted,” I could hear Mike say.

A few moments later I heard the door click and the coast was clear. I came out of the bathroom.

“What just happened?” I asked.

“I’m guessing Herr Stormer must not have been overly taken with our interview with his education minister,” said Mike.

“I feel like I’m in North Korea. Did that actually just happen?”

“It’s kind of what Neville warned me might happen.”

“You’re lying.”

“Not really, PJ.”

“Holy shit, Mike.”

“I know. And when I was last here they wouldn’t have ever thought about something like this. It’s hard to process.”

“We should leave. Like now.”

Mike smiled. He shook his head.

“Nah. I’m going to do the Robby Thomason interview. Got no choice now.”

Just then that pit in my stomach felt like it reached from my hip to my heart.

Mike texted Neville about the encounter with the two detectives, and he got a message in response inviting us to the Blackfriar Pub for a pint.

When we got there, Mike told him in detail about the unpleasantness at the hotel, and Neville scowled.

“You’re on the radar now,” he said after having made a full inspection of our booth to ensure we weren’t being recorded.

“Well, obviously,” said Mike. “But I don’t understand what just happened. I’m being told to take down an interview with a cabinet secretary because I made her look bad. Was anything said that wasn’t true?”

“Mike, you’ve done nothing wrong,” said Neville. “But things have gone quite barmy in the last few days. This government has taken a turn.”

“Something is very off about that Chelsea Bridge thing,” I said. “Like it was an inside thing.”

Neville gave a half-nod like he thought I could be right.

“Last week they let 3,000 violent criminals out of the prisons and they’ve filled up every space they’ve opened with people who either protested or posted something online the government doesn’t like,” he said. “It’s as if we decided to see your Jan. 6 and raise you the Gulag Archipelago.”

“That’s a good line,” said Mike.

“I should think. I used it yesterday at UK News.”

“Neville,” I said, “can you referee a disagreement between us? I don’t think we should do the Robby Thomason interview. Mike thinks he can’t back out now.”

“Were I you,” Neville said after a pause, “I’d go home and do it on a Zoom call.”

“You think I’m in danger if I interview him?” Mike asked.

“I think you’re already in danger. What I don’t understand is the full depth of this situation.”

“Explain.”

“You must remember that this is not the U.S.,” he began. “We Brits do not have your First Amendment, and our ruling class — in both major parties — is happy to police speech, especially online.”

“I’m aware,” Mike said.

“Yes, but how aware are you? The Online Safety Act, which passed last year, contains what’s called a false communications offense. If you’re found guilty, it’s as much as 51 weeks in prison.”

“But he hasn’t made any false communications,” I said. “Why would this apply to us?”

“Your opening statement to the Bridgetson interview said that this government is pursuing a…how did it go?”

“Transgenderist dystopia of indoctrination and ignorance, attempting to outlaw the basics of British culture,” Mike beamed. “I thought it was a pretty good turn of phrase.”

“That it is,” said Neville. “But they have the power to interpret that as illegal insulting speech rather than an objective judgment, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that they’ll do just that.”

“Psh,” scoffed Mike. “They wouldn’t dare.”

“He’s Mike Holman,” I said. “How do you prosecute him for doing his job? The fallout from that would be…”

“Too much,” said Mike. “Besides, you don’t have freedom of the press in this country? I’m doing media interviews.”

“They don’t see it that way,” said Neville.

“Where do you get people like this?” I said. “I mean, how are you run by a bunch of radicals…”

Neville’s look cut me off.

“The Online Safety Act passed last year,” he said. “The Conservatives passed it. This is the doing of the entire ruling class in Britain.”

None of us said anything.

“It’s a good sign that they only sent a pair of coppers to intimidate you,” Neville finally sighed, as he drained the last of his Guinness. “They probably would have made an arrest if they wanted anything beyond shutting you up while you’re here.”

“I’m not going to be intimidated,” Mike said.

I gave him a frown.

“Mike, we’re on our honeymoon. What happened to ‘it’s nothing to do with me?’”

And yes, that was in my Jason Statham accent.

“Yours is considerably better than his, my darling,” Neville said with a smile.

I gave him a smile in thanks for the compliment.

“Neville, what do you want me to do?” Mike asked. “You didn’t want me to interview Thomason and then you did. You told me I haven’t done anything wrong and now you’re telling me they could prosecute me for publishing a podcast interview with their education secretary. You tell me it’s a mercy that they sent a couple of thugs with badges to threaten me with…I don’t know what. I’m getting mixed messages from you.”

“Because as I said, I don’t have a handle on what’s happening,” he said. “You’re an inconvenience to them. You don’t have a large following in the UK, at least not in comparison to your American audience, and you’ll be off doing other things in a week. The smart play would be for them to grin and bear it.”

“Which they’re not doing.” That was Mike.

“Well, it seems they’re trying to, in their own way. They only reproached you rather than nicking-and-kicking. But yet it’s an aggressive reproach. Could portend worse.”

“And?”

“I’d enjoy your honeymoon. Robby Thomason can wait, the wanker.”

“OK, good,” I said. “It’s settled. Besides, you usually don’t do more than two podcasts a week anyway.”

Mike shrugged and downed the last of his pint.

We didn’t feel like doing anything much that night. Mike suggested we hit a fish-and-chips place in Marylebone, so we did, and then it was back to the hotel.

And I don’t know what possessed me to do it. I wish I hadn’t. But I turned on the TV and put Sky News on.

They were talking about developments in America. Farris, who had become the Democrats’ nominee following Deadhorse’s meltdown, or poopdown, had made a big deal about how she’d been a fast-food worker back in college, but that had fallen apart thanks to a story that Holman Media had broken exposing it as a lie.

Sky News was making a big deal about that. I was getting such a kick out of the fact that Mike’s website was making international news even while he was on our honeymoon.

“Isn’t this great?” I asked him. “You are kind of a big deal, honey.”

“Almost as big as Ron Burgundy,” he said.

But I could tell he was pretty fired up that his site was making such a dent. I’ve seen that satisfied smile a bunch of times.

So I sidled up to him as he leaned against the wall next to the balcony window.

“You seem to be in a better mood,” I said, twirling a lock of his hair in my fingers.

“Yeah, I’m OK.”

“Maybe we could finish what we were doing before we were so rudely interrupted.”

“I guess I’m free,” he said with a grin.

So I took my top off, and Mike kissed my neck as he slowly backed me toward the bed. But just then he stopped.

“What?” I whispered.

“Look at this.”

I broke his embrace and turned toward the TV.

“…Commissioner Brownleigh has raised the stakes on the recent riots and those he says have stoked them,” the presenter was saying. “In an interview, he says the ‘full force of the law’ will come down on the keyboard warriors giving aid and comfort to those in the streets.”

“I guess Neville was right,” I said.

“Even,” said the presenter, “those who do so from beyond the jurisdiction of the UK government.”

Sky News cut to the interview. Martin Brownleigh, the metropolitan police commissioner, was haranguing about people saying mean things online.

“Whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you,” he said.

“What the…” Mike said, exasperated.

The Sky News reporter interviewing Brownleigh then asked about those posting from outside the UK.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “You might think that as a keyboard warrior behind a screen, you are untouchable. I want to assure you that you are not. The law has a long reach, as many will discover.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. Mike held up his hand because Brownleigh wasn’t finished.

“Those who are guilty of incitement, or of stirring up racial hatred, we will pursue them. Under UK law there are numerous offenses under the Terrorism Act regarding the publishing of material.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“PJ, wait!” Mike shushed me. Brownleigh kept going.

“All of those charges are in play if people are provoking hatred and violence on our streets. I’m told I have the full backing of the mayor and also the PM to come after those individuals just as we will physically confront on the streets those yobs who are causing the problems for communities.”

“The communities,” said Mike, irritation in his voice.

“That’s the word they use for migrants, right?” I asked.

“This f*cking guy just said they would prosecute their critics even overseas.”

I didn’t have the heart to admonish him for that F-bomb.

“It’s like we’re in Bizarro World. Like we’re in the old Soviet Union or something.”

Just then the phone rang. Mike answered it.

“Uh-huh,” he was saying. “Sure, that’s fine. We can do that. Plaza Premium Lounge, Terminal 2 at 9 a.m. We’ll be there.”

Then he hung up, suddenly sporting a defiant look.

“What’s going on?”

“That was Thomason’s people. He’s flying out of Heathrow tomorrow and he’ll meet us for the interview at 9 at the airport.”

“Flying out?”

“I don’t know if he’s leaving the country or what, but we’ll interview him and put it in the can. We’ll get out of here and then post it.”

“You sure you want to…”

“Absolutely. Screw these people. I’m assuming that a private conversation, which is what the interview is right up until the time I publish it, isn’t criminal.”

The pit in my stomach became bottomless, and Mike noticed.

“PJ, don’t worry,” he said. “It’s going to be fine.”

“Don’t tell me that! You have no idea what it’s going to be. What if there are cops waiting for us?”

“Nobody knows I’m doing this interview. Come on.”

“No, you come on! How do you know they don’t have the room bugged? Is your phone encrypted? How about Thomason’s people? I guarantee you the police know all about the where and when of the interview right now.”

I’ve come to know the look he gave me. It’s his ‘I know that you’re right but I don’t want to admit it’ look. But he shrugged it off and suggested we watch a movie.

“OK,” I said, far too stressed out to resume our romantic entanglement.

Mike nodded off halfway through Furiosa, and he was out like a light. But I didn’t get a single minute of sleep that evening.

The post Further Examinations: <i>From Hellmarsh With Love</i> Ep. 3 appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.