Today is the seventh birthday of The Mark Steyn Club, launched on May 6th 2017. In honour of the occasion, His Majesty's Government in London has proclaimed today a bank holiday throughout the land. So we trust our UK readers are enjoying the day off.
We're thrilled to have made it this far, and hope that our First Day Founding Members will want to re-up for an eighth season. Tales for Our Time is back in business with my serialisation of an Agatha Christie caper that's proving both popular and pertinent, and in celebration of our anniversary we've inaugurated a new weekend audio show and expanded our traditional cavalcade of Non-Stop Number Ones.
Much as we love our First Day foot soldiers, we're always happy to welcome new recruits. No pressure: we seek no unwilling members. But, if you've been mulling it over for seven years and think you're just about ready to take the plunge, come on in, the water's fine.
~Back in 2017, I was the guest-host for Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson. But Rush died and Tucker got fired, and, with one or two exceptions, the conversation these days on talk-radio and cable-news is nowhere near where it needs to be to effect meaningful change. Seven years ago, the two major anglophone electorates had just voted for such change - Trump and Brexit - and the permanent state on either side of the Atlantic immediately set about subverting the people's will, and teaching the ingrate masses a hard lesson in what happens when you start looking beyond the uniparty consensus on anything that matters.
Nevertheless, meaningful change is happening, and very fast. Thursday saw the UK's local elections. Here's the winner in Burnley, Lancashire:
Aurangzeb Ali celebrates being voted in as a councilman in Burnley in today's local elections.
He will surely work hard on representing all the people living in Burnley, not just his own voters
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) May 4, 2024
Eternal undying England, eh? How about one more? Here is the winning candidate for the Green Party, which I had hitherto thought was something to do with Michael E Mann and global warming, giving his victory speech in Gipton and Harehills:
We will not be silenced. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu Akbar!
Allahu Akbar: It's not just for diving under the table to anymore.
Gipton is a settlement in Yorkshire that goes back at least as far as the Domesday Book in 1086. It had a good run but, like so much of the realm, it is now, to invert Rupert Brooke, a corner of an English field that is forever foreign. See likewise corners of French fields, and German, Austrian, Belgian, Dutch, Swedish...
This is the biggest story of our time - and, two decades after I wrote an "alarmist" bestseller about it, it's still barely discussed. But, just to reduce it to the shallow and parochial political horse-race bollocks the media prefer to obsess on, it seems to me the most important development of last week's elections was not, on the "right", the defection of a respectable chunk of the Tory vote to Farage's Reform Party but, on the left, the defection of a significant chunk of the Muslim vote away from Labour.
Some went to George Galloway's Workers' Party, others to Islamo-Greens such as Mr Ali above or to independent candidates. What all the alternatives have in common is that they're more explicitly Islamic - and at their victory parties there are no women and no non-Islamic men.
From page 119 of my 2006 book America Alone:
Picture a French election circa 2020: the Islamic Republican Coalition wins the most seats in the National Assembly. The Chiraquiste crowd give a fatalistic shrug and M de Villepin starts including crowd-pleasing suras from the Koran at his poetry recitals. But would Jean-Marie Le Pen or (by then) his daughter take it so well?
A few years back, Michel Houellebecq took a modified version of the above scenario as the starting point for his novel Soumission. We are not quite there yet: Labour assumed the loyalty of its Muslim voters as it does the loyalty of its gay voters, but the former seem to grasp that they will soon be strong enough to do without the socialist infidels:
From the industrial Lancastrian town of Blackburn to inner-city Bradford in West Yorkshire, the 'Palestine' effect has seen a surge of independent Muslim councillors elected – largely at the expense of Labour.
But arguably the independent pro-Gaza challenger who has landed the fiercest uppercut to Labour's chin is one who was not even elected: the West Midlands mayoral candidate Akhmed Yakoob. While Labour won the mayoralty from Andy Street, Yakoob managed to gain 69,000 votes across the region...
It has been reported that as votes were counted, the reaction of some local councillors in Birmingham was of shock and horror, with traditional Labour heartlands with high Muslim populations showing mass support for Yakoob. Yakoob is also a prospective parliamentary candidate for Birmingham Ladywood, which has been represented by Labour MP and current shadow justice secretary Shabana Mahmood since 2010. It should worry Labour that Yakoob – who received little mainstream media coverage and simply wouldn't have had the scale of resources available to him that establishment-party candidates usually enjoy – managed to win nearly 43,000 votes in Birmingham (compared to Labour's 80,000 votes).
So in this year's general election, in a constituency in which JRR Tolkien once lived, it will be Yakoob vs Mahmood. The Shire has fallen? Not at all. As Humza Yousaf, the first if short-lived Muslim First Minister of Scotland, said in last week's resignation speech:
But we now live in a UK that has a British-Hindu prime minister, a Muslim mayor of London, a black Welsh first minister and for a little while longer, a Scots Asian first minister of this country. So for those who decry that multiculturalism has failed across the UK, I would suggest that the evidence is quite to the contrary, and that is something we should all celebrate.
This is not how other societies think: The Palestinian Authority has zero interest in electing the first Jewish mayor of Ramallah. The Supreme Ayatollah will eschew the inauguration of the first practising Anglican to become prime minister of Iran. Chairman Xi does not deplore the lack of diversity on the Politburo: Lack of diversity is China's strength.
Perhaps the rest of the planet is wrong, and the demographically exhausted west is right. Or perhaps "multiculturalism" is just a self-flattering cover for the death-spiral of the civilisation that built the modern world.
~The political class has failed the entire west to the point where we now face an existential crisis. And it will require far more than this or that candidate to save us. Nevertheless, on this seventh anniversary, I still get asked why I don't write much about politicians. This is why:
How can one implode so rapidly and so thoroughly -- and so irreversibly for that matter? https://t.co/OemFAxzSlX
— David Limbaugh (@DavidLimbaugh) May 5, 2024
Years ago, I congratulated the legendary songwriter Sammy Cahn on his autobiography. "Thanks," he beamed. "I couldn't be prouder if I'd written it."
That line would have served Kristi Noem better than all the damage-limitation drivel her minders have recommended. It's one thing to be too busy to write your memoir, but rather more perilous to be too busy to read it. I didn't bother commenting on Ms Noem offing her pooch because it didn't seem terribly important when (see above) our civilisation is sliding off the cliff. However, if it's any consolation to the late Cricket, it's the governor that's looking like the untrainable puppy who's just had her face blown off:
"This anecdote shouldn't have been in the book and as soon as it was brought to my attention..."
So bored of the fake-o weirdo political class, but extending the traditional evasion of responsibility to mere anecdotage is impressive:
Mistakes were made. Non-approved anecdotes were told.
UPDATE! From one of our commenters:
Kristi Noem is the narrator of her own audio book. For her to claim that she was unaware of every word that's in it is either a lie, or an indication that she's as dumb as the proverbial bag of hammers.
~According to the polls, when you factor in RFK Jr and Jill Stein and Cornel West, Rasmussen has Trump with a twelve-point lead over Biden, and even CNN has him up nine. Assuming for the sake of argument that these polls are genuine (please, no tittering), at the same point in 2020 Biden was up six points. So at the very minimum whoever's waggling the dead husk of the moth-eaten sock puppet is going to have to work a lot harder than four years ago in arranging a favourable electoral landscape.
To be sure, Trump's widening lead is not matched in the Congressional races. So at least next time round it will be the other party, rather than his own, obstructing the construction of the wall. But, again assuming for the sake of argument that a free and fair election will be permitted (please, no guffawing), that raises the question of whether the head of the executive branch can this time exercise executive authority over that branch.
In 2017, for example, pronouns were not really a thing. Now the right to be called he, she, they or some fancy of your own concocting is, as of last Monday, backed by the full force of the Government of the United States.
As John Murawski writes at Unherd:
The agency said banning misgendering and bathroom restrictions for trans people "logically extends" from the US Supreme Court's 2020 Bostock ruling that added sexual and gender identity as a protected category under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
And who gave us the Bostock decision? Why, that would be rock-ribbed originalist Neil Gorsuch, effortlessly twisting the English language into a supersized pretzel to demonstrate why the framers were totally on board with fifty-seven genders. A land of legalisms is not the same as a land of laws - and the ra-ra right's retreat to the Supreme Court as every hill not to die on was surrendered has proved strategically disastrous.
I think I can claim to be one of the first to have noted, many years back, that this was not your father's sex change - that the left was instead "creating a cool new team". If you're not into it, the notion of a bepenised woman can seem a bit icky, so, if ever I brought up the topic on Rush, I'd get pushback from listeners who felt this was another of the vast Alpine range of hills for "conservatives" not to die on.
You heard that right: objecting to the abolition of biological sex and the attendant and conscious confusion of legions of vulnerable children isn't a conservative hill. So the left proceeded with its demolition of human biology while Paul Ryan worked on his tax cut - and now America leads the world in the mutilation and sterilisation of pre-pubescent schoolgirls.
That's not a hill to die on; that's a hill that's transitioned into a pit of hell. Through all the post-9/11 self-deluding blather about how the axis-of-evil crowd "envied us our freedoms" (as Bush put it), we could at least say that, unlike Islam, we don't slice body parts off little girls. Now we do.
If memory serves, Dante puts Mohammed in the Eighth Circle of Hell. In the remake, Gorsuch will be sitting next to him down there.
In Britain, in the wake of the Cass Report, there has been a hasty retreat from the more absolute transanity by certain finger-in-the-windy politicians and even by the National Health Service. Upon the downfall of Scotland's trans-fanatic First Minister, JK Rowling permitted herself a well-deserved gloat:
They say Karma's a bitch but I hear she's a TERF.
But that's Scotland. America is the soi-disant "Leader of the Free World" and its trans-madness is accelerating. In my own household, a "woman" (not the bepenised kind, the former now largely obsolete type) got a leaflet last week recommending a mammogram for "people assigned female at birth". That's from the "nurse-practitioner" at a small general practice in remote rural northern New England: the madness has penetrated throughout, and at lightning speed.
Would a triumphant GOP roll back this EEOC extension of "misgendering" to the protections of the Civil Rights Act? I've remarked before that, say what you like about Chairman Xi, Tsar Putin and the mullahs, but they all know what a woman is.
Yet it's more basic than that: Hard and ugly as they are, they're not insane. And increasingly we are. Mrs Thatcher used to say that "the facts of life are conservative". But the left has made a bonfire of "the facts of life" - while the right stood by and watched.
~We thank you for all your kind comments this last grisly couple of months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead. And Mark looks forward to bringing the UK state censor Ofcom into court on June 11th.
~We had a very busy pre-birthday weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on the latest outrage against victims of the Covid "vaccines". Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date was John Ford's screen adaptation of Eugene O'Neill, and our latest Tale for Our Time continued Steyn's serialisation of The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie. Click for Part Fifteen, Part Sixteen and Part Seventeen. Part Eighteen airs tonight.
Our marquee presentation was the launch of Mark's new weekly music show, and, in honour of our The Mark Steyn Club's seventh birthday, he talked to pop stars from around the world for a cavalcade of Non-Stop Number Ones.
If you were too busy hunting down the last keffiyeh at Ivy League Outfitters, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.