As a promotional tie-in for The Mark Steyn Show's demographic whirlwind special, the Italian government very kindly arranged for the island of Lampedusa to be swamped by sub-Saharan Africans who in a couple of days wound up outnumbering the locals three-to-one. On the crude arithmetic my guests were explaining, what's to stop that becoming the ratio of the entire continent?
But hey, what's the big deal? The hack pontiff was in Marseilles to finger-wag:
"Those who risk their lives at sea do not invade, they look for welcome, for life" he said. "As for the emergency, the phenomenon of migration is not so much a short-term urgency, always good for fueling alarmist propaganda, but a reality of our times."
"Alarmist propaganda"? Pro-tip to the lads on Lampedusa: As soon as you're admitted to the European mainland, make your way to this tiny statelet called "the Vatican" and invite Il Papa to implement a Lampedusa-style pilot programme on his own turf.
~By the way, this was the first papal visit to France's second largest city in half-a-century. What's changed in that time? Well, the "eldest daughter of the church" has all but entirely abandoned Catholicism. Thousands of beautiful medieval churches are reduced to unused state mausoleums emptied of their faith. Every day at least two of those churches are vandalised - smashed, burned, the holy statuary very purposefully decapitated. Every fortnight one of these houses of (increasingly occasional) worship is destroyed.
Why don't you do something about that, Your Holiness?
Because the death of the Church, unlike European immigration policy, is on you. And, if you get your way on your alleged all-male "refugees", those vandalism numbers are going to soar, and that epidemic of church desecration will accelerate. But no doubt a resurgent Islam will be as grateful to you for paving its way as it is to those pathetic headless statues.
I apologise for calling the useless wanker pontiff a useless wanker pontiff, but it is hard to have anything but utter contempt for a man who thinks it groovy to assist in the suicide of Christendom rather than defend his faith.
An alternative take from our friend Eva:
Europe is being invaded and it won't end well. pic.twitter.com/0XWwttO8dQ
— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) September 24, 2023
Eva converted to Catholicism last year, but I'm not sure she's eligible to run for Pope.
~As you know, I'm suing the UK state censor Ofcom in the English High Court for their "findings" against my coverage of the Covid vaccines and their victims - in part because they can't make those "findings" stand up in court according to the rules of evidence. All Lord Grade, Dame Melanie Dawes and their anonymous commissars are doing is enforcing the official propaganda - no matter how risible it becomes.
Still, the world kinda sorta moves on. Here is Megyn Kelly, who hosts one of the best shows in America, saying something that got Jules Serkin, Wayne Cunnington and so many Steyn Show friends vaporized on social media just a year or two back - and, in fact, just the other day vax victim Steve Bowie got eighty-sixed by the totalitarian sickos at YouTube for posting footage of an impeccably respectable King's Counsel speaking at the UK's official Covid inquiry.
Nevertheless, here is Megyn adding her name to the ranks of those injured by the "vaccines":
As she says, she was of an age and in a state of health that the Covid was no threat to her - and, even if it was, these lousy "boosters" wouldn't protect her anyway. These things should be withdrawn from the market, but, even if they're not, nobody should be taking them. From my Euro-sickbed, I wish Megyn all the best.
~Perhaps it's because I'm a little poorly myself that I take more interest in health stories than I used to. Quite a lot of the chaps Joe Biden admits at the Rio Grande every night are loosed upon the land to kill Americans via Fentanyl. The Attorney-General of my own beloved New Hampshire recently said:
Families here in the Granite State and across our country are being devastated by fentanyl. This deadly synthetic opioid has been fueling a national opioid crisis for nearly a decade, and fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49.
That sounds pretty bloody serious. On the other hand, the court eunuchs of America's grisly Associated Press say relax, there's nothing to worry about, you're at more risk of dying by "accident". On the other other hand, the accident category - "unintentional injuries" - includes Fentanyl. Golly, a cynic might almost get the idea they're trying to submerge the overdose numbers among those who slip while re-shingling the roof.
Bottom line: For whatever reason, close to three decades of gains in American life expectancy has been wiped out in the last couple of years. And, if you think that's all the Covid, how come nothing on any similar scale has hit other developed nations?
US life expectancy by race:
Asian life expectancy down two years; white life expectancy down two-and-a-half years; Hispanics down four years; "AIAN" (Inuit and Indians) down six-and-a-half. And, if Black Lives Matter, how come Al Sharpton and his fellow grievance hucksters have nothing to say about the four years just lopped off them?
As I used to say on GB News, a big pile of premature corpses is about as basic as it gets. Does this question ever come up at any of those awful unwatchable GOP debates?
~This Tweet from Caleb Taylor caught my eye:
Mark Steyn used to always remark about the number of staffers some no name congressman required in America. Meanwhile, the king of England goes out for a stroll alone apparently... https://t.co/pJyJ8pOcvW
— Caleb Taylor (@CalebTTaylor) September 22, 2023
It's a rather bizarre encounter between HM The King and his bicycling subjects, who, one can't help feeling, ever so slightly outstay their welcome with His Maj. But at least they weren't tased into submission, as they would be if they got within sight of Joe Biden without a background check.
As for Mr Taylor's point, it's one I've been making for over a decade:
The whole entouragification of American politics doesn't do it any favors. As I wrote in the Speccie during my Australian tour two years ago:
I introduced my American manager, a former staffer for a US senator, to Julie Bishop. She asked the Deputy Opposition Leader, Shadow Foreign Minister and Shadow Trade Minister, how many staff she had. "Three," said Julie.
I could see my manager thinking, "Loo-zurr."
Julie asked how many staff her senator had had. "About fifty," said my manager.
I could see Julie thinking, "Loo-zurr."
America is the Brokest Nation in History. Getting citizen-legislators to cut back on their Gulf-emir-sized entourages would be a good place to start turning things around: you can't have small government with big retinues.
That's true. My old chum Boris Johnson is a minor example of that. He used to be, warts and all, vaguely normal, at least in his interactions with the citizenry. But his desire for a Yank-sized entourage helped destroy that.
I don't think this is a minor point. The artificiality of the upper tier of American politics - its detachment and insulation from real life - distorts the kind of people attracted to it: at the presidential level, one gets the weird feeling that the job is now designed to appeal only to those unfit to do it.
See that presidential debate.
~As I mentioned above, last month I filed my second Statement of Claim against the UK media censor Ofcom in the King's Bench Division of the English High Court. Many readers, listeners and viewers have inquired about how to support my landmark lawsuit against Lord Grade and his goons over their throttling of honest discussion of the Covid and the vaccines. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a chum a SteynOnline gift certificate; or
c) ordering a copy of my latest book The Prisoner of Windsor. You won't regret it.
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds and, in the last, a significant chunk thereof go to a grand cause - and you or your loved one gets something, too.
~Notwithstanding Mark's one-step-forward-three-steps-back health, we had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Andrew Lawton's return to the anchor seat of our Clubland Q&A. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date was Powell & Pressburger's One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, and Mark's Sunday Song of the Week found him looking back four decades to one of his very first radio collaborations with his longtime producer Brian Savin, who sadly left us on Wednesday morning.
Don't forget our summer Tale for Our Time, Steyn's variation on H G Wells's theme of time travel. If you've yet to hear it, you can start with Part One here.
If you were too busy spending the weekend wondering why you can't get a table in a Lampedusa restaurant, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
