Programming note: Please join us tomorrow, Wednesday, for another midweeek Clubland Q&A, featuring questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet. The fun starts at 3pm Deep State Standard Time - which is 8pm Greenwich Mean Look Time.
Following The Mark Steyn Caribbean Cruise, I am now on terra firma - as are Trump's poll numbers, to a degree not seen either in 2020 or 2016. Super Tuesday is tonight, and Nikki Haley may yet sweep the board, although so far her "War on Every Continent!" platform has resonated only in the depraved precincts of the District of Columbia.
On the other hand, given the Deep State thumb on the scale in both 2016 ("Crossfire Hurricane") and 2020 (fifty-seven heads of the "intelligence community" assure us that Hunter Biden's laptop is "Russian disinformation"), no prudent person would bet on a free and fair election in November - especially after yesterday's Supreme Court intervention. As I always say: There's no point having the greatest constitution in the world if you've got the crappiest election system in the world.
Yet, for the sake of argument, let us assume that a change in government will be permitted in America. The question then arises: will the permanent state embedded in every agency throughout Washington also permit a change of policy?
For example, the United States accounts for forty per cent of the planet's military spending, and in return produces the world's worst general staff. By way of example, here from a recent address to the Air Force Academy is Lieutenant-Colonel Bree Fram, who leads "space acquisition policy development for the Department of the Air Force" and "focuses on policy and advocacy work to develop a more inclusive military":
WATCH🎥: The U.S. Air Force Academy hosted a transgender Pentagon official for a symposium on inclusion. Our military is focused on transgender dogma while wars rage on two continents.
Here he is at a pride celebration calling for "intentional inclusivity" in the military 🧵 pic.twitter.com/6BAbEwrS4j
— Spencer Lindquist 🇺🇸 (@SpencerLndqst) February 29, 2024
"Dignity and respect is the bare minimum," instructs Lieutenant-Colonel Fram. No, it isn't. Not when you're blowing through close to a trillion dollars per annum and you haven't won anything that matters since 1945. Why should any such institution command any "respect"? After the endless unwon wars of the twenty-first century, Ms Fram's only concern is which pronouns we use to lose the next one - because "inclusion is a national-security imperative":
"Inclusion is a national security imperative," @SpaceForceDoD's Lt. Col. Bree Fram (@BFram3) tells #FortuneMPW.
"We can't leave that talent that's going to revolutionize business behind." https://t.co/hAdZBAPjCx pic.twitter.com/z8a7lZqKYZ
— Fortune MPW (@FortuneMPW) October 11, 2023
Really? The Taliban may be the least inclusive military on earth, and they kicked your pert transitioned butts. The short history of the Pentagon 1943-2024 is that it's an unlimited-budget version of Monty Python's "Lumberjack Song" - so butch in the first verse, and totally tranny by the end:
The decadence and unseriousness revealed by Lieutenant-Colonel Dram ought to be deeply disturbing. The planet's most lavishly funded fighting force took twenty years to lose to goatherds with fertiliser, and on the way out the door gifted them with enough hardware to make them the world's eighth or ninth most powerful military. That should surely occasion a certain circumspection. Instead, the Pentagon doubled-down on the wokery and the wankery - and, after a twenty-minute tea-break, started up the usual racket all over again, this time in Ukraine.
How's that working out for the Ukrainians? Unlike Afghanistan, it's a demographic wasteland. In 2001, the census counted 48.5 million people in the country. A year ago, it was headed down toward half that - just 29 million. Lindsey Graham and Boris Johnson may be standing shoulder to shoulder with the Ukrainian people, but even they must have noticed there are fewer and fewer Ukrainian shoulders to stand around with, at least if you go to Kiev rather than Poland or Hungary, Germany or Ireland. On the present rate of population decline, after the war there will be insufficient Ukrainians left to rebuild the economy - or, indeed, maintain basic demographic viability. Right now, thanks to Washington, Ukraine is flush with cash and weapons, but all out of fighting-age men. From ABC News, just the other day:
The average Ukrainian servicemen [sic] is in their 40s, according to Western officials. Commanders say the older the soldiers, the more they experience chronic illness, such as ulcers, hernias and pinched nerves.
Dima's assault company recently received seven new recruits ages 55 to 58.
"What positions are they going to storm?" he asked sarcastically. "If he walks 4 kilometers with a backpack full of gear and weapons, he will fall down in the middle of the road."
Well, that's what happens when you have the honour to be made the site of the Pentagon's next Designated Fiasco. And yet back at home, thanks to the likes of Lieutenant-Colonel Dram and without benefit of Russian invasion, the US military is trending in the same direction:
Critical Staffing Shortage Prompts Air Force to Recruit Retirees
As goes the Air Force, so goes the Army and the Navy. Apparently, out in Flyoverland, there are few takers for a woke military that enriches generals-turned-lobbyists while you get blown up by Ahmed the "translator". "Walk a mile in my heels" doesn't really work when you've lost a leg in Helmand.
Almost twenty years ago, on page one of my boffo bestseller, I quoted the pithy insight of the historian Arnold Toynbee: "Civilisations die from suicide, not murder." Since then, the suicidal tendency has accelerated and captured every American institution of consequence, down to the local grade school.
Some readers may recall that last year, during my convalescence in Trieste, I read a memoir of that town by Jan Morris, the author and (as we said back then) transsexual:
Nevertheless, as Jan or James, he/she was an insightful and fair-minded historian of the British Empire ...oh, and of the Venetian Republic too, which I don't suppose many readers give much thought to, but it lasted 1,100 pretty good years from AD 697 to May 12th 1797. Which is over four times as long as the American republic has lasted - or, absent profound course-correction, is likely to.
So I regard Ms Morris as a serious person who happened to have a fairly fundamental point of confusion on a critical aspect of life. Yet it was a serious life. As a young man not yet twenty, James Morris served in the 9th Queen's Royal Lancers in the Second World War. So, unlike higher-ranking trannies such as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs 'Thoroughly Modern' Milley, Admiral Rachel Levine (America - where being a transgender bureaucrat gets you promoted to 'admiral'!), Rear-Admiral John Kirby (America - where being a press officer gets you promoted to 'rear-admiral'!), Colonel Mark Wooten (America - where pledging to 'stop hiring middle-aged white dudes' gets you promoted only to 'colonel' - so far!) ...so unlike those four-star trannies and the rest of the stellar officer class of the planet's biggest laughingstock, Jan Morris knows what it's like to serve in a won war.
We are in the end-stage of a bad soap opera, when characters and plot have jumped the tracks, and there is no Bobby Ewing waiting in the shower. Three decades ago, it was pointed out that in the end Soviet Communism proved no more lasting than the span of one human lifetime: 1917-1991. Yet America's blip of global dominance is looking just as fleeting: 1950-2020something - that last date being whenever the ever metastasizing brokeness causes total implosion. And, as things stand, the only thing the great republic (in Churchill's affectionate designation) will be remembered for is that the entirety of western civilisation slid off the cliff on America's watch. All the rest is details.
The polls today suggest that the Deep State, to get its way, will have to do far more than it did in 2016 and 2020 combined. I don't doubt that they're prepared to do that, and their plans are already in place. The question is whether those on the other side - gleefully retailing the poll numbers and reposting the latest video of the slack-mouthed drooler in the Oval Office claiming to have met with Bismarck and Napoleon at the last G7 - have plans not only to counter it but, in the event of victory, for that "profound course-correction".
UPDATE! More bollocks from America's everything-must-go storewide-clearance sale.
~Like Trump, Steyn staggers on to the next case, and the next appeal. We thank everyone for their messages of encouragement this last grim month. And we especially thank all those who've opted to treat a chum to a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Mark Steyn Club Gift Membership.
