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A Turn for the Worse: From Hellmarsh With Love Ep. 4
Editor’s Note: This is the fourth 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. In Episode 3, Mike and PJ commit some introductory acts of journalism, only to find the new British government quite impolite in their reactions.
PJ tells us what happens next…
Heathrow Airport, August 30
We were a little early at the Plaza Premium Lounge at Heathrow the next morning, and while I had this horrific feeling Mike was the opposite. He was energized and happy, and it was infectious.
“This is going to be a great interview,” he said. “Having watched this guy, he seems like the one public figure in this whole country who’s got the guts to fight for what he believes. I can’t wait to chop it up with him.”
“I’m glad you’re fired up, honey,” I told him.
“You’re not feeling this. I can tell.”
“OK, remember how I started freaking out when we were about to land and saw those fires?”
“Yeah. You wanted to turn the plane around and go somewhere else. I remember.”
“That feeling, times ten. Zero sleep last night.”
“Why?”
“The two cops. The doubletalk from Neville, like he’s playing psych games with you for some reason. The weirdness of everything here. And the fact you’re interviewing somebody who’s been in and out of jail pretty much as a political dissident for most of the last ten years. Honey, this is dangerous.”
“Boy, when you said you were done with the badass chick stuff, you really meant it, didn’t you?”
“Hey, in the Secret Service, you learn to pick up on things that don’t smell right. This doesn’t smell right.”
“Look, we aren’t releasing any of this interview until we’re safely out of the country. We’ll do this, then we’ll go see Windsor Castle, then we go out tonight, and then we’ll go see Dorset like you want. After that, if you’re still feeling like the world’s gonna end, we’ll catch a flight back to Atlanta.”
“You want to cut our honeymoon short?”
“I want you happy. If this isn’t making you happy, then focusing on our move to that gorgeous palace in Jupiter, Florida, that our best friend gave us as a wedding present probably will, right?”
“You have me there. I’m pretty much salivating over that.”
“Then why wait? I was hoping for an idyllic English honeymoon, but if that doesn’t exist because the country is going to shit, then we’ll pivot. No big deal.”
I smiled at him. Have I told you how much I love this man?
I was going to kiss him, but just then Robby Thomason and his little entourage of a pretty blonde twentysomething English girl with a cross tattooed on her wrist and a nose ring and three gigantic dudes in black t-shirts showed up.
Thomason introduced us, and then the gigantic dudes backed off to give threatening looks to everybody else in the lounge who might want to watch us. The pretty blonde said her name was Lucy and she was Thomason’s personal assistant.
I got the impression she was more than that, but it was none of my business, so whatever.
Thomason said Lucy had been with him for five years. She said he’d helped to rescue her from a gang of rapists in Bristol, who’d hooked her on heroin, turned her out and prostituted her when she was 14. Thomason faced down the gang, getting himself arrested for trespassing in the migrant hotel where she’d been held in the process, got her clean, found her family a new place to live and start over, and when she finished school he gave her a job.
“Robby literally saved my life, yeah?” she said. “The things they say about him are bollocks. It’s mental. He doesn’t hate anybody; really, he loves people more than any bloke in England.”
I’ll admit it. I teared up a bit at that. Especially when Thomason said Lucy was only one of a couple hundred girls he and his organization had done that for.
Mike was a little more composed, but he couldn’t hold back his excitement to get the interview done and it made me feel better.
Well, not better. What’s more accurate is that I was still scared absolutely stiff, but it struck me we were doing a good, important thing with this interview. Maybe this guy was a racist and a nut, and if so Mike would smoke that out and discredit him. But if he wasn’t, and the people in charge of the U.K. were persecuting him for calling out their failures, Mike would smoke that out as well.
And presumably we’d be gone from Great Britain before the interview got published, and so we’d be fine.
Maybe.
I’m not going to give you a word-for-word recitation of the interview. It went on for an hour and forty-five minutes and it was crazy good. I remember sitting there watching Mike coax out answers from Thomason, getting him to admit stuff he didn’t want to and really digging in. It was like an MRI for his soul.
Mike started with the biographical stuff, how he got started as an anti-immigration activist, his background and family, the whole bit. I guess you know most of that. Thomason was an athlete, captain of a club rugby team as a kid, and he took pains to explain that his teammates were really diverse racially and “they’re all my mates; some of them have been with me in the organization from the beginning.”
In other words, not racist.
But he admitted that he’d had problems with the Muslims in Stoke-on-Trent, where he was from, practically all his life. Muslims in his neighborhood had bullied his little brother until “I sorted them f**ckers out, didn’t I?” and there were lots of clashes between the athletes and football hooligans on one side and the Muslims, who he said had doubled in population since he was a kid.
And he went into detail about a Pakistani group that ultimately went on the government’s terrorist list after a couple of them had blown up a supermarket parking lot in Birmingham with a car bomb in 2013. He said he knew both terrorists and had been in street fights with them as a teenager. He talked about how the people calling him all those names hadn’t grown up with literal terrorists in their neighborhood, and the ignorance of accusing him of bigotry when his judgments were completely factual was something he’d never be able to get over.
Mike asked him how many fights he’d been in in his life. Thomason said he couldn’t even give an estimate. Mike asked him how many times he’d been arrested. Thomason said 14. But he said everything was misdemeanor stuff — bar fights, street fights, a drunk and disorderly charge, vandalism a couple of times — until he started as a political activist.
“I never took nothing that didn’t belong to me,” he said. “But I also didn’t stand by and wait for the law, because I didn’t see much of no law where I grew up. The police would show up at a row and they’d arrest everybody rather than sort it out. They never cared to do what’s right. They just want to keep everything quiet even if that means lettin’ wrong go. So I came up with principles rather than law, yeah?”
Then after he and a few of his friends started what would ultimately be For England — which was an organization that had to disband in 2016 and had come back in various iterations a couple of times since only to be suppressed by the government — there were more serious charges. According to Thomason, he’d been to prison three times for a total of forty-one months, was found not guilty twice, and had a contempt of court charge hanging over his head that likely would land him in prison for a couple of years.
What for? He went through each case with Mike. They were all political. Thomason led protests that got violent when counterprotesters showed up to fight, and he was twice charged with inciting violence, There was a criminal mischief charge because he’d uncovered a bunch of dirt about a BBC reporter who was trying to do a hit piece on him and published it before the hit piece went on TV. Fight the BBC in a British court, he said, and you’re going to lose big.
And the contempt of court thing hanging over his head stemmed from Thomason publishing a documentary film on X that a judge had handed down an injunction against. It was all about Muslim rape gangs being ignored by police all over Great Britain.
We’d watched it. Or at least, Mike had. I got through half of it and then I had to stop. It was too horrific what they’d done to those girls, with the politicians and the cops just sweeping the whole thing under the rug. And when Thomason and his people would go into these towns and hold a demonstration, they’d arrest the demonstrators.
Again, and again.
Usually, they’d get Thomason out of there when it looked like there would be trouble, because his organizations wouldn’t be able to run effectively with him in jail. So there would be local organizers who’d take the blame and go to prison for inciting violence.
“All we do is raise awareness,” he said, “but the government don’t want people aware. Because if the public is aware of the full scope of what they allow, daily, there will be a reckoning.”
“By reckoning, what do you mean?” Mike asked.
“What I hope,” Thomason said, “is a peaceable revolution. Sweep out the political class and bring in new people what care about the country.”
“How realistic is that?”
“Realistic. You had something like it in your country with Trumbull. And I see him goin’ back in, so you might really throw out the elites this time.”
“Maybe. It’s the hope, right?”
“It has to be. And you Yanks have it better than us. The establishment here is absolutely mental, yeah? Sellouts! It’s all Davos and the EU. We voted to get out of that shite. Did they listen? Naw, we need a reckoning.”
“Where are you going to get that from, though? Is this something you’re going to do?”
“What, run for office?”
“Yeah.”
“Can’t see that happening, bruv.”
“Why not? You’re clearly a natural leader.”
“I can’t do politics. I’m not a lawyer or an economist. But you find me someone who will fight for the English, I’ll make him or her the PM. I can do it.”
“I don’t suppose that would be Savage.”
“We don’t get along. He’s got an ego, yeah? Wants to be loved by the establishment. I want to break it. But I voted Renew this last round.”
“You think it has to be somebody else?”
“I think there will be an awakening. I see it.”
“I don’t mean to contradict you, but since we got here, what I see is riots.”
“Bruv, you missed the Hamas riots we had here before this current round. The streets are bloody hell. They been for months. But that’s why the awakening is starting.”
“And the awakening leads to the reckoning, and a new class of leaders will emerge to replace what’s there.”
“That’s gotta be it, mate.”
“You know what that sounds like? It sounds a little like Marxist theory.”
Thomason chuckled.
“Yeah, it does at that, don’t it? Revolution of the proletariat and what all. But I ain’t a Marxist. I built two businesses when I weren’t in court or prison. I’m a pretty good home contractor, yeah? Plumbing, electrical…”
“So you’re an idealist and you’re going to take out the elite from Oxford and Cambridge and the London School of Economics who’ve turned your country into a woke hellscape.”
“People say I’m a dreamer,” Thomason said with a smile. “But I’m not the only one.”
“Again with the Marxism,” Mike said. “You’re quoting Imagine to me, that’s as commie a song as there is.”
“I know. I’m taking a piss. But I’m serious that we gotta crush the establishment. The elite gotta go. Not just here. You got bad ones. Canada, it’s horrible. France. Germany. They don’t even let the people have an election but they rig it.”
“So you think democracy is dead.”
“I think you gotta get quits with the elite. That’s the key. Before this, whatever, cabal, or junta, or regime that runs this country and lots of others takes away all our freedom.”
Mike leaned back.
“You know, it’s funny,” he said as he began his response. “You’d probably say that I’ve been doing this, whatever you want to call it, ‘high-level journalism,’ for thirty years. I’ve interviewed some of the most powerful, connected people in politics, culture, business, all walks of life.”
“Yeah, mate” said Thomason. “Everybody knows you’ve been around.”
“And I’m not saying this to brag, or anything, and I’m certainly not saying it to lay claim to membership in any elite. Far from it. If ever I had aspirations to that, they went away when ANN fired me. And that didn’t happen because I asked the wrong questions or threatened the wrong people, any of it. I got in a fight with the idiot son of the guy who owned the network because he was pawing at my ex-wife at a Christmas party. It was a stupid thing, but it was enough to get me blackballed from network TV. And it taught me how much I hate working for anybody else. I think you and I are the same in that regard.”
Thomason nodded.
“But here’s where I’m going with this. All that time interviewing these heavy hitters, and a great many of them have been highly, highly impressive people, you know what I’ve noticed? The ones in media and politics tend to be the dumbest ones.”
“That’s what I seen as well,” said Thomason.
“Now, you can go two ways with that. The way I go, or at least the way I’ve gone until the last couple of years, is to say that the idea there is some secret super-powerful elite running things, toppling regimes, setting narratives, all of that, is giving these people too much credit.”
“Yeah, but…”
“Wait, hang on, because you might agree with what I’m going to say next. The other way, which maybe I’m coming around to, is that it’s because these politicos and media people are so unimpressive and do nothing but spout conventional wisdom that you have people pulling strings behind the scenes.”
“Now you have it!” said Thomason.
“Still, I have a lot of questions about this, because if there is some shadow organization out there, some sort of SPECTRE like in the James Bond movies that can reach out and ruin people or dictate all kinds of effects around the world, why aren’t they better at their jobs?”
“Because the world is too big, innit?” Thomason replied. “End of the day, free people can’t be controlled. At least not forever. And for the same reason communism don’t work, this don’t work either. People gonna do what they will, and bugger the government or the ruling class, whatever.”
“That might be true.”
“I’m a student of history, yeah? My family have done the genealogy of the whole Thomason clan. Originally we’re Scottish, and it’s MacThomas. Or Thomson. In fact, there was a famous Thomson who fought with William Wallace and then Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn, and that’s my lineage. Our branch of the family goes back to Manchester, six hundred years or more, and we’re all over the Midlands.”
“My wife is the genealogist in the family,” said Mike, gesturing to me. “PJ sat down at the computer and managed to trace Holmans going all the way back to the 15th century in Dorset. One of our goals on this trip is to run over there and see some of the family heritage.”
“That’s great, mate. But PJ, can I ask you a question?”
“Certainly,” I said from off camera, loud enough that the microphone would pick me up.
“You did Mike’s line. How much of yours have you done?”
“On my mom’s side it’s already done. Mom traced the Smithsons back like ten generations.”
“What about your dad? He’s Chinese, yeah?”
“Most of that is lost. He was a kid during the Cultural Revolution and the family got almost wiped out. They had to escape to Hong Kong and then to America.”
“So you had tyrants wipe out your heritage, see?”
I nodded.
“And that’s what we got here. In a different way, obviously, because Stormer isn’t strong like Mao. He isn’t going to round you up and put you into camps for reeducation, the people won’t stand for it. But it’s more sophisticated, innit? You can trace your line but you’ll be told that if you take pride in it you’re a racist. You want to promote your heritage, you’re a bigot.
“That’s what Britain has become. And I got into activism and making documentary films because first it was jihadists and terrorism, and then it was rape gangs. Yeah? Outward threats to ordinary people like mine, who’ve been living in our homeland for generation after generation, from people what don’t belong in our country.”
“OK,” said Mike. “Look, I don’t disagree with the point you’re making, but you do get that when you say ‘don’t belong in our country,’ you’re immediately going to get hit with the racism card, right?”
“But Mike, I’m not talkin’ about race. Like I said, where I grew up the whites and blacks never had a problem. We’ve always got along fine, least as long as I was around to see it. That ain’t the issue. When I say people what don’t belong, what I mean is Muslims who want to impose sharia. Have you read the Qur’an?”
“I’ve read it,” Mike said. “Or at least an English translation of it.”
“Then you know what’s in it. It ain’t written for coexisting with people who don’t believe in Islam.”
“So your point is that Islam isn’t a race and so racism is a false charge.”
“Of course. That’s it.”
“But they’ll still say what you’re peddling is bigotry. Just that it’s about religion instead of race.”
“I’d even argue with that. I actually got friends who are Muslims. In fact, and we made a documentary on it, there were some lads who got falsely accused of runnin’ a rape gang in Hull and we went up there and investigated it and I spoke up to defend ’em because we knew the girl was lyin’. It’s not the people, yeah? It’s the bad ideas I’m fightin’ against with my activism.”
“I can understand that. But why are you so demonized? You’ve got this contempt of court charge that’s hanging over you, and in doing this interview I suppose you’re violating your bail conditions…”
“Sure I am,” said Thomason.
“And you’ve spent, what? Three years and change in jail all told on, I guess it must be four different things since you first started For England? You’re practically Public Enemy Number One. How could this be if you aren’t a bad guy?”
Thomason smiled, and he wagged a knowing finger at Mike.
“Because it’s what I represent,” he said. “Better or worse, I somehow turned into the personification of the working class, the people on the outs, the yobs. I’m who represents the unwashed masses the posh tossers are so afraid of. And they don’t scare me. I keep comin’. So the stakes get higher and higher and they gotta discredit me.”
“Have they?”
“What they done is ruin me financially. They separated me from my family. Broke up my marriage. My wife couldn’t stand it no more, and I don’t blame her. All that’s happened, it’s made me mental at times, I won’t lie. I spend some time in a very dark place because it’s exhausting, being made the villain when you know you’re only followin’ your principles and trying to defend your own.”
“I imagine it is exhausting, sure. But you didn’t answer my question. Are you discredited?”
“We’ll find out, innit? I’m leavin’ the country today, but I’m comin’ back in October. Gonna face the music on that charge on the fourteenth. The day before, and I’m announcin’ it now, breakin’ the news on your podcast, we’ll have a mass demonstration — peaceful, you understand, no violence — in front of Number 10 to show Stormer just how ‘discredited’ the English are in our own country.”
“Well, that’s certainly big news. What do you think will happen?”
“To me, or to…”
“To everybody who shows up.”
“Who can say? If enough of us are there, Stormer can’t just arrest us all. All we have is numbers and will. When we show that this is the voice of the English people and that it can’t be silenced, things will change.”
“In the meantime, though, what you clearly have in the streets now isn’t peaceful.”
“You’re right. But it’s nothing to do with me.”
Mike and I looked at each other and smiled. His is a lot better than yours, I mouthed at him. Thomason gave a confused look and Mike shook him off.
“Then what do you have to say about the unrest?”
“I can say I understand it. I can say it’s what you inevitably get when you rob people of their voice. I can say that the working class in this country are an oppressed majority, that we’ve been tryin’ to stop the loss of our culture for years and years and both parties aren’t listenin’. So what else do you expect the people to do?
“I don’t want violence. I hate it. My activism has resulted in my mum’s house burnin’ down, my house getting bombed, my car … bloody hell, it’s three times they’ve bombed my car. The time I spent in prison, I’m in a wing dominated by Muslims more often than not, because it’s Muslim gangs that run the prisons. I’ve seen plenty violence there; I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Did you expect this would be your life when you first got started?”
“Bugger all! Of course not. But we want to hold on to our country, it takes facing this lot, yeah? Do you know that native, ethnic British have gone from 87 percent of the UK population to 74 percent? In twenty years! It’s the greatest demographic retreat in the history of Europe, wars and conquest notwithstanding. And that change, nobody voted for it. It’s imposed on us by an elite class that hates us.”
“I can understand the concern,” said Mike, “but I’ve interviewed Savage on this, and I understand that you and he have a somewhat complicated relationship…”
“Yeah,” Thomason said with a chuckle. “You could say that.”
“OK, well, Savage says he’s not concerned with the racial component of this so much as the cultural component. That the people making up that 26 percent are increasingly unassimilable into British culture.”
Thomason paused. He shut his eyes for a second.
“What I’d say is this,” he began his answer. “And it may not make sense to you, because you’re a Yank. You say your line is Holmans from Dorset, but that’s just half your line, if that. What’s the other half?”
“Oh, I’ve got tons. Some Swedes, some Germans, I think there’s a bit of Scottish. PJ probably knows more about it than I do.”
“That’s America,” said Thomason. “You’re all mutts, if you don’t mind me saying it. And for you it’s not a bad thing; you’re proud of it. Your American heritage comes from your ideas, yeah? And for the most part those ideas are the best in the world.”
“Thanks for saying that.”
“Yeah, but only for the most part.”
“Oh? What’s the not-most part?”
“You think you can take people from anywhere in the world and make them Americans. The huddled masses yearnin’ to breathe free, innit? But there are cultures that don’t mix. You can’t assimilate ‘em.”
“Some are more difficult than others. There’s no doubt about that.”
“And what you did, after the Second World War when you got to be a superpower, you spread those values all over Europe. And I’m no Nazi. I hate all forms of socialism, yeah? Hitler was f**kin’ mental. I got nothing good to say about him. But what you done is demonize anything anybody could say about nationalism as too close to the Nazis. You’re a nationalist, you’re a fascist.”
“That’s something which is changing now in the States, I think.”
“Sure. Seventy years on. But the damage! Every country in Europe has traded its culture for this multi-culti bollocks and it’s shite, yeah?”
“Wait, you think this is America’s fault?”
“Sure it is.”
“OK, I’m going to give you a little credit in that a European country founded as, basically, a tribal homeland for the Dutch or Danes or Czechs or Poles is bound to function differently than America would. That’s valid, and I’m not arguing the point.”
“Right,” said Thomason, a satisfied look on his face.
“But that’s only valid as far as it goes. Let’s not go too far with this Great Satan thing.”
Thomason started to protest, but Mike held up his hand.
“Your country was an empire, you know. My country was part of that empire, and we were the first ones to come to the conclusion we could do better. But you subjugated all those people from the ethnic groups who have showed up here. You don’t like Pakistanis coming here and taking over your towns? OK, fine. They probably didn’t like it 150 years ago when your troops conquered the place.”
“So that’s Michel Houllebecq. You ever read Soumission?”
“I have not.”
“Yeah. Reverse colonization, and we deserve it. That bollocks is actually part of what they teach the elites here and elsewhere.”
“That’s not really where I’m going with this.”
“OK, then.”
“What I’m trying to say is that you created a commonwealth with all of these countries and very, very different cultures, and it’s the people from those commonwealth countries who are most of your immigrants you can’t assimilate. America never had an empire.”
“Bruv, the whole world is your empire now! And just like we’ve done, you’re breakin’ yourselves trying to hang on.”
“I’d say ours is different, but there’s some validity to that.”
“The other thing, and you touched on it some, is that your happy bollocks about assimilation don’t appreciate the value of permanence. This is my homeland. Thousands of years my people been here. Others left — America, Australia, South Africa, wherever. We stayed! Now you tell me we get nothing for that? This is our land.”
“I get that.”
“The Japanese got no interest in non-Japanese movin’ in. They call you gaijin there and they don’t want nothing to do with you. Nobody calls them racist for that.”
“I agree there’s a different standard.”
“Why is British culture not as worthy of preservation as Japanese culture? Japan went toxic in the last century and had to eat the bomb. Mind you, I got nothing against Japanese. I admire ‘em. Every country is gonna go bad sooner or later, yeah? But I’m sayin’ they should have the right to keep their heritage and so should we. You Yanks think it’s malleable, and it ain’t. Or maybe some of it is, but the rest is permanent.“
“Well, fine, but that dividing line is going to slide some. This is a lot more connected world than it used to be. Both our countries contributed to that, you know.”
“That ain’t altogether a good thing, Mike. It’s globalism. It’s the death of our countries.”
“On that we can agree.”
There was more to the interview, but it ended a little while later. Tommy said he was leaving for Cyprus and that he was going to get his family out of Britain as soon as he knew he could provide for them. He said he didn’t think he and his wife would ever reconcile, at least while he was Robby Thomason the activist. She’d been traumatized too much to be around it anymore.
It was really sad.
I got the impression he was in way over his head and sort of flailing away at a monster that was eating him chunk by chunk. I didn’t think he was a racist or a hater. I thought he was the opposite and Lucy was right.
But I couldn’t help but see him as a tragic figure. And the elite he was railing against were never going to let somebody like Robby Thomason beat them. Even though I thought Mike was right in thinking he was better than all of them.
Including Neville, whom I liked.
When Robby and his group left, we packed up our stuff and found an Uber heading back to the hotel.
But we never made it.
Along the A4, August 30, 2024
I mentioned before that Mike is a worrier, but not in a negative way. Here’s an example of what I mean.
When we finished the Robby Thomason interview and we were walking through the concourse to get to the ground transportation area where we’d find an Uber back to the hotel, I was bubbling over about what a great interview it was and how it was bound to get an amazing amount of traffic once we put it up at the Holman Media site, and he lightly grabbed my wrist and shut me up.
In that super-polite way he has.
You already know Mike as a great verbal and written communicator, but the thing that makes me so crazy about him is I’ve never been around anybody who was in his league as a nonverbal communicator. He reached out and gently clamped down on my wrist and I immediately knew he had something important to say.
“Look, PJ, as soon as we get in the car you’re going to want to download the video and sound files from the interview onto your thumb drive, OK?” he said.
“You think we’re in danger?”
“I just want to be prepared, that’s all.”
“Well, then let’s stop and do it now.”
“Not here. It’s too easy to get us here. We need to be on the move.”
I just gave him a little scowl, because all this time he was the happy-go-lucky one and I was the one with a pit in my stomach and now Mike was turning into Ethan Hunt on me just as I’d gotten excited about what we were doing.
And now I was scanning our surroundings like a frightened gazelle, expecting a SWAT team to descend on us as we walked swiftly through the Heathrow concourse.
Then we hailed an Uber and I immediately opened up the laptop, pulled my thumb drive from the little compartment in my purse and started downloading the files onto it.
Meanwhile the Uber driver was chatting it up with Mike. He recognized him, because of course he did, and he was giving him all kinds of compliments in an accent that was…
Irish.
The driver was telling Mike that he really needed to stop in Dublin while he was on this side of the Atlantic and do some interviews about the woke Irish government and what it was doing to the Irish people with the flood of immigrants heading there.
“I’m up to my eyeballs with this one,” Mike was saying. “We’re actually here on our honeymoon and we got sucked into all of this craziness. We were going to eat and drink and sightsee our way through this week and look at us.”
“Aye,” said the driver, who said his name was Seamus, because of course it was. “Well, that little talk you had with Missus Bridgetson certainly kicked up a fuss. Boys in skirts, indeed! D’you know there’s talk she’ll be forced to resign now? It must be something to know you have that kind of power! Big demonstration planned tomorrow for outside Ofsted.”
“That’s not good,” I muttered. Mike squeezed my hand a little. But outwardly he was as sunny as he could be toward the driver.
“Yeah,” said Mike, “I don’t know that they’d fully vetted that idea, and I think she might have just run it out there as a personal project. Maybe she was a little too far over her skis. It’s scary enough that this government would even think about a policy like that, though.”
They were chit-chatting away, while I was watching the slow-moving file transfer. Mike leaned in to check on my progress.
“It’s taking a while,” I said. “They’re big files.”
He sighed.
“You really think we’re going to get arrested?” I asked him. “For doing an interview?”
“You wouldn’t think so, but…”
“But what?”
I looked up at him, and he was staring out of the rear window. So I turned to get a look myself.
And there was a police car just behind us.
“Hey Seamus?” Mike said.
“Aye, Mr. Holman.”
“In case the cops behind us turn their lights on, can you do me a favor and don’t pull over until I tell you?”
“Are you in trouble, sir?”
“I don’t really understand how, but it’s possible. They really didn’t want us to interview the guy we just interviewed.”
Seamus nodded. “I’ve got you covered.”
Mike pulled out his phone and dialed his office in Atlanta.
“Hey Cindy,” he said when the call was answered. “It’s Mike. Get me Tom, will you?”
Tom LeClair was the chief operating officer for Holman Media.
“He’s not in the office yet? All right, is Megan there?”
Megan Rivers headed up ad sales and the company public-relations consulting side. Other than Cindy Lassiter, who was the office manager, Megan was pretty much always first into the office.
“Hey Megan,” said Mike, as the cop car behind us started flashing its lights. “Look, we’re coming back from the Thomason interview and it looks like we’re going to run into some trouble. So I’ve got to be quick.”
I could tell that Megan was asking what kind of trouble.
Mike turned to look at the cop car behind us.
“Like getting arrested trouble. Listen, I don’t have much time, so let me talk and you listen and write this down, OK?”
Then he started rattling off things. He said she needed to get a new laptop and iPhone sent to the Savoy in London ASAP for Room 844. He told her to contact Casey Crane, who was our contact at Sentinel Network Security, and tell him that Mike’s laptop needed a remote cleanup immediately. He said he was going to need the best criminal defense lawyer in London, and the sooner the better. He told her it was probably a good idea to call the U.S. embassy in London and let them know about this, and if I wasn’t getting arrested with him that I’d be in touch with them as well; maybe Megan could let them know I’d be calling. If I was available.
“And call Pierce,” Mike said. “He’s got much better contacts with the Brits than I do. Maybe he can use some influence to get me sprung if this turns into a sticky situation.”
“Mr. Holman,” Seamus was saying from the front seat, “I’m going to need to pull over soon.”
“OK, I understand,” Mike said. Then he looked at me.
“Tell me you’ve got those files transferred.”
“Almost there.”
“PJ, we’re running out of time. And they will take that laptop. We need that interview in Atlanta’s hands, girl.”
“Yeah, I know, OK? I can’t make it go any faster.”
The meter on the little file transfer window was showing 92 percent and it was just so painfully s-l-o-w.
“Mr. Holman?” said Seamus.
“Just another 30 seconds or so. Is that OK?”
“Ahh, yes. Hang on.”
We were about to cross over the River Brent, and just past that the A4 we were driving on was going to intersect with the M4, one of the major highways from the northwest into London.
Mike noticed there were now three police cars behind us.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “They’re definitely serious now.”
“It’s done,” I said, removing the thumb drive from the laptop and reaching into my purse.
“No,” said Mike. “They’ll find it if it’s in your purse.”
“Can I pull over now, Mr. Holman?”
“Yeah, Seamus. Thank you.”
Mike looked at me as I frantically tried to figure out how to hide the thumb drive.
“You know, they might arrest me too,” I said.
“If they do, I can get that drive out to whoever,” said Seamus.
Mike reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. He tossed it on the front passenger seat.
“I appreciate it,” he said. “If they arrest PJ here, can you FedEx it to the address on that card? She’ll hide the drive under your seat.”
“No worries,” said Seamus as he finally pulled over.
And I reached down and hid the thumb drive under the driver’s seat in front of me, praying that I’d be able to retrieve it.
They were on us as soon as we stopped the car, and that’s when I had an idea. I pulled out my phone and I opened up Facebook and started recording live.
“Hey guys,” I said, “this is PJ Holman, and I’m recording this because we’re in London, and we just did an interview with somebody super controversial, and while this is going to sound really strange, there’s like three police cars that just pulled us over on the way back from the interview. I think they’re going to arrest us.”
I pointed my phone’s camera toward Mike, and I caught the cops opening his door.
“Mr. Holman, sir?” the officer said. “London Metropolitan Police, Counter Terrorism Command. We’re going to need you to come with us, sir.”
“Counter Terrorism Command?” said Mike. “You don’t think I’m a terrorist, do you? I’m more of a journalist. Sometimes my interviews get a little aggressive, but I don’t think that’s in the ballpark with…”
“All the same, sir, you need to step out of the vehicle.”
He gave me a glance, and the expression on his face was hard to read. It seemed like it was a mixture of sadness and … excitement, maybe?
But that wasn’t crazy or anything. When I was in the Secret Service I was in some dangerous situations, and it sort of felt like I was living twice as fast at those times. The adrenaline flows and everything takes on a surreal character. Time seems to stop even though everything’s going by at light speed.
I’m pretty sure that’s what was happening to Mike. I could see, and I recorded, one of the police officers pointing a gun at him as he got up out of the car.
Then there was a knock on my window.
I swung the phone around and caught another policeman in my shot as he opened my door.
“Stop recording, ma’am,” he said.
“I’m sorry — am I under arrest?”
“Not yet, but that could change. Stop recording and step out of the vehicle.”
“It’s all right, love,” said Seamus quietly enough that I’m not sure the cop could hear. “The dash cam is working.”
And he winked at me.
“OK,” I sighed, and turned the iPhone camera back to me. “I don’t know if I’m getting arrested but Mike is, and they’re making me stop recording. So that’s what’s happening. Pray for us!”
And I shut off the phone and stepped out of the vehicle.
Mike was being hustled into the back of a police car, his hands cuffed behind his back. I gave him the bravest look I could, and then I wiped the tears from my eyes.
“Your phone, ma’am,” said the policeman. “It’s evidence. And I’ll see your purse as well.”
“Evidence of what?”
“Conspiracy.”
“I’ll ask you again. Am I being arrested?”
“Not at this time. We know where you are staying, though, and you’ll need to remain at the Savoy. And I’ll have your recording equipment and your computers. Do I have your permission to look through your handbag?”
“You’re taking all of our communications?”
“Again, ma’am, evidence.”
He held my purse up. I gave him a nasty look and nodded my consent, and he brought the bag to the hood of the vehicle and began searching it.
Two other policemen were going through the back seat, gathering up all of our other bags. I tried to make a poker face and not give away my concern that they’d find the thumb drive, which got really hard to do when I saw one of them reach on the floor in front of my seat.
I’d wedged the thumb drive next to the seat-post, so a casual sweep of the hand probably wouldn’t turn it up. Still, it was pretty terrifying.
Seamus was protesting the search. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he was saying. “These are not terrorists, and my car is an Uber, not a manky horror, ya eejit.”
“Shut it,” said the policeman. Seamus did.
And I tried to think of what had been said in the interview that would make the cops want to arrest us before we could publish it.
Or was that what this was about at all?
Was there something else? Did Mike do something I didn’t know about?
That was doubtful. I’d been with him for pretty much every minute of this trip, and he’d really only just done the three interviews. Nothing else that the police would be interested in.
But I knew the British government was arresting people left and right for posting things online they didn’t like. Some college kid from Liverpool had just pled guilty to “racial incitement” for posting a meme that was an old cartoon from the 1930s depicting Arabs as sword-wielding devils in turbans with a caption saying “Now they’re here; hide your wives and daughters.”
That was impolite enough, I guess, but he’d gotten sentenced to eight months in jail. There had been a big demonstration in Liverpool in July that had turned into a brawl, and this kid was somehow being blamed for it.
Still, I was having trouble believing that my husband, Mike Holman, the internationally famous podcaster who regularly got millions of views for interviews and reports he was doing multiple times a week, was being dragged away to a police station.
And, it hit me, this was my fault.
Really, it was.
I started freaking out as soon as the plane landed in London because of the fires we could see from the air, I wouldn’t shut up about how nervous everything in the U.K. was making me, and yet the minute Mike changed his attitude toward making this a working honeymoon, what was my response?
Was it, “Honey, we’re here on vacation. We should stick to that plan…”?
No, it was not. I volunteered that we had recording equipment with us. Why? Because despite Mike swearing we were not going to work on this trip, I’d brought all of that stuff.
Oh my God, I thought. I did this!
I could feel my blood rushing to my head, and I was fighting the urge to start hyperventilating.
“Excuse me,” I said to the policeman who’d taken my phone and was rifling through my purse. “Can you tell me where my husband is being taken?”
“He’ll be at High Street Kensington, mum,” came the response.
“It’s clear,” said the policeman searching the car.
“You are free to go, mum,” said my interlocutor as he handed my purse back to me.
And then, almost in a flash, they were gone, leaving me on the side of the road.
Look, I’m a tough chick. I was a college athlete, and I broke an ankle in a meet my sophomore year and actually managed to make a successful vault on it before it completely gave out. I made it through Secret Service training and did almost ten years on the job, seeing all kinds of horrible things. I had a presidential candidate shot on my watch thanks to a plot against him that went way above my pay grade — and still hasn’t been resolved, by the way, and after I was told to keep my mouth shut and I’d be taken care of, I turned whistleblower instead.
And I got shot saving the life of that same presidential candidate when the Iranians and Venezuelans tried to take him out that day in Guyana.
I think I proved my bona fides. I’m not some wilting flower.
But seeing Mike get cuffed and stuffed, and watching those police cars speed off, I went to pieces right then and there. I started crying and I couldn’t stop. I was leaning on the car blubbering, and Seamus got out.
“Do you need a hug, Mrs. Holman?” he asked. I nodded, and I hugged him back.
A total stranger. On the side of the road, with cars racing past and people rubber-necking after the scene the cops had caused.
I’ve had some rough moments in my life. This was the worst.
Finally, though, I composed myself enough to get back in the car.
“I don’t know where we should go,” I said as we merged back into traffic.
“I’ll suggest the Savoy,” said Seamus. “You have access to the hotel room phone and people will know to reach you there. At the police station they’ll simply make you wait and they’ll tell you faic.”
“Faic?”
“It means nothing, mum. You need to focus on getting a solicitor for Mike, and you can’t do that at the police station.”
“All right,” I said.
“It’s going to be grand,” he said. “You’ll see. Your man has done nothing wrong, and they’re bound to kick him back to you.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said, the tears fighting their way out of my eyes again.
The post A Turn for the Worse: <i>From Hellmarsh With Love</i> Ep. 4 appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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