Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~Yesterday was The Mark Steyn Club's seventh birthday, and I thank profoundly all those First Day Founding Members who opted to sign on for an eighth year. We hope, as this se'nnight proceeds, that our First Week Founding Members will want to do the same.
If you're wondering what we were talking about in the first days of the Club, well, here I am on May 9th 2017:
If you're in the first-class cabin to the executive suite at Davos, the elites you meet from elsewhere around the globe are not surly and self-segregating like the resentful 'youths' of les banlieues, but urbane and charming chaps just like you - fellows for whom this really is a borderless world, in which one is wafted effortlessly from Harvard or Oxford to Goldman Sachs' Hong Kong office to a hedge fund in Dubai to a cosy sinecure at a UN agency in Vienna or Geneva... Who could possibly object to such an agreeable planet? What are all these ghastly unwashed masses on about? Can't they see all the benefits of the world we've ushered in?
Thus the paradox of "globalism": A "borderless world" for the elite but ever more shrunken horizons for you. Since then, Covid and the Great Reset have made it explicit: in the interests of a "globalised world", you'll be confined to a "fifteen-minute city" - and the abolition of the internal combustion engine by 2030 (per California and other ambitious jurisdictions) will usher in not an EV utopia but a world increasingly without individual vehicle ownership. If you walk with a limp, make do with a five-minute city.
Besides, after those victory jubilations in the UK elections, you may find it prudent to keep a wide berth of, say, nine of those neighbouring minutes, particularly the more vibrantly "diverse" ones:
A new Ipsos Mori poll on "global trends" notes the following:
'55% of respondents [worldwide] think globalisation is good for their country, but western Europe, including Britain, France and Spain, are the most pessimistic about globalisation.'
Indeed. India and China are the most gung-ho for globalization, while the bottom four are Spain, Italy, France and Belgium. That would seem to be a statement of the obvious: to India and China, globalization brings huge economic benefits with minimal cultural disruption. For the French working class flocking to Le Pen rallies, it's the other way round: economic sclerosis and cultural transformation. You're poorer than your dad was, but without even the consolations of culture.
I wrote the above in the context of the 2017 French presidential election - that's the one that gave the world the globalist toyboy Macron:
A cypher (literally, if you know your macrons) has been handed a landslide simply for not being Mme Le Pen...
So we seem pretty set up for another failed presidency.
And so it has proved. But, in France as in America, failure is respectable and the alternatives to it aren't:
Two weeks ago, I predicted:
'Even if the polls are right and M Macron is on course to win by 20 points, that would still mean Mme Le Pen had doubled her father's share of the vote from 15 years ago.'
2002 was the vote-for-the-crook-not-the-fascist election: The crook, M Chirac, got 80.2 per cent of the vote, leaving Jean-Marie Le Pen with 17.8 per cent.
Two times 17.8 equals 35.6 per cent. Yesterday, Marine Le Pen got 33.94 per cent. So my prediction was a little off.
Where are we now, another seven years on? In the latest poll for this year's European elections, Mme Le Pen's party is at thirty-two per cent with her rival "far-rightists" in Reconquête chipping in another six per cent. The head-to-head numbers have been better - Le Pen 47%, Macron 42% - but the latter will not be running in the 2027 presidential election and you can be sure that a lot of thought is being given to the next soon-to-be failed respectabilist.
In Belloc's cautionary tale, we are advised:
Always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.
But it is the depraved nurses of the political class who are feeding their charges to the lions - and two-thirds of the electorate persist in clinging on, and voting for their tormentors:
Only 31 per cent of Frenchmen think globalization is good for their country. One in two think there are too many immigrants. Yet large numbers of anti-globalization anti-immigrant voters preferred Macron over Le Pen. They will not be getting their country back anytime soon - and, if they keep postponing the choices, they'll lose even the possibility. The sigh of midnight trains, readying to leave the station...
~Our friends at The Conservative Woman have a good round-up of how the peer-review wallahs are belatedly catching up to the conspiracy nutters re the Covid vaccines:
In addition, a preprint of a new study among nearly 50,000 employees at an Ohio clinic, posted last month, says that those who received more than one dose of the covid jab were found to be more rather than less likely to contract the illness.
Oh my. But is it really wise to defy all those experts recommending you book now for your twelfth booster?
"An Ohio clinic" is a bit of an undersell, I think. My broken-down health-care facility - with its single doctor, one nurse-practitioner and (on understaffed days) a receptionist-practitioner - just about meets the definition of "a New Hampshire clinic", but the Cleveland Clinic is one of the most prestigious medical institutions on the planet, and its conclusions are strikingly at odds with the media pom-pom girls:
The 2023-2024 formula COVID-19 vaccine given to working-aged adults afforded a low level of protection [23%] against the JN.1 lineage of SARS-CoV-2, but a higher number of prior vaccine doses was associated with a higher risk of COVID-19.
So the more jabs you get the more you're likely to come down with the Covid. Good to know.
Actually, I vaguely recall some chap saying that on Brit telly over two years ago. Ah, but he fell afoul of Ofcom and the wimp management caved, and he'll never been seen on UK TV again.
~How's that working out for the soi-disant "free speech channel" GB News? Last week, Farage was down to 31,200 viewers by the end of the seven o'clock hour, Rees-Mogadon tanked it further to 23,600 by the end of the eight o'clock, and Patrick Christys rallied to 29,700 by 9.15pm. To the surprise of no one, a Tories'n'trivia channel has minimal appeal - although perhaps more perplexing is the willingness of Sir Paul Marshall and the Dubai guys to continue indulging GB honcho Floppadopoulos as he redoubles his efforts to cut that 23,600 in half.
It's hilarious - unless you think that, after the media groupthink on Brexit, Covid and everything else, if there's one market that could really use an alternative it's the UK.
~We thank you for all your kind comments upon the occasion of our seventh birthday - and thank you both to all those brand new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and to 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 we look forward to bringing the UK state censor Ofcom into court next month.