Programming note: Please join Mark later today for a brand new Tale for Our Time. If you missed last month's airing of The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie, that can be found here.
~The quality of western leadership on display at the D-Day observances was not impressive. Biden was more enfeebled than veterans two decades older than him. The King, for reasons not clear, delegated all but one of the big ceremonies to the Prince of Wales. Rishi Sunak, for reasons even less clear, delegated the main international heads-of-government beano to "Lord" Cameron, which doesn't bear thinking about. (The tin-eared tosspot has now been forced to apologise for ducking out early.)
So what does that leave? Macron, Justin ...oh, and "guest of honour" Zelenskyy, still doing his Lana Turner sweater-girl routine. Churchill enjoyed his dress-up games, too: His "romper suits" were hand-made by Turnbull & Asser. (They have one on display in the basement.) But he managed to put on a tie to go to the Palace or for formal summits.
~As you know, for two decades I've taken the view that demography explains most things. In Ukraine, the fertility rate on the eve of the conflict in 2021 was 1.16 children per woman. It has since fallen to 0.9 children per woman. So you can't make Saving Private Ryan for this war: Ukrainian mums and dads have lost their only child; that's it - your posterity's gone. For the first time in recorded history, the country's population is lower than Poland's. A generation of the nation's manhood has been sacrificed on the mad ambitions of Lindsey Graham, Victoria Nuland and Boris Johnson. If you're wondering why there's so much chatter in the air about fast-tracking Nato troops to Ukraine (Macron) and the return of conscription (Sunak), it's because all Zelenskyy's chaps are dead or crippled. He may still look cute in the nipple-hugging sweater, but he is increasingly a leader without followers.
So Biden's speechmakers' attempts to appropriate D-Day to rah-rah the Ukraine slaughter were not just vulgar and insulting but very unconvincing. America declared war on Germany on December 11th 1941; D-Day was June 6th 1944. The Ukraine conflict began, formally, on February 24th 2022. Two-and-a-half years on, there is no equivalent of D-Day in the offing. It's just another of America's endless wars, but this time waged by a proxy that's all out of cannon fodder.
~Demography is relentless. Douglas Murray notes that the BBC is always warning that the "far right" is "on the march", but in the west it is demographic transformation that is truly on the march, quietly and unreported, picking up pace every month. By comparison, the wretched Sunak/Starmer dinner-theatre of the UK election campaign is completely irrelevant to Britain's future. So I am glad to see that Nigel Farage has had a change of heart and opted to join the battle. Back in 2016, in the days after the Brexit vote, I said he was the most consequential figure in UK politics since Mrs Thatcher. Which was true. Alas, people most Britons have never heard of then set about subverting Brexit, and very effectively.
So here we are eight years later, with half-a-million Anglo-Celts abandoning the UK each year and a million Pushtun warlords and Sudanese clitoridectomists and Albanian sex-traffickers taking their place. Demography is relentless, and the hour is late.
Over a decade ago - in fact, closer to two, as I estimate it - Nigel Farage said to me that the first thing you have to do when you found a new political party on the right is to accept the burden of being its only member - at least for a while. Because the first 10,000 people who want to join are neo-Nazis and skinheads and the like. It was a clever insight, and he spread it around. So I had it told back to me many times over the years by populist politicians from all over the Continent, Danes and Dutch, Swedes and Spaniards alike.
Nigel took his gatekeeping seriously - and not just on the domestic front, "distancing" himself from Tommy Robinson and Tommy-associated issues such as Islam and the industrial-scale sex-slavery of thousands of English girls. As Gavin Mortimer reminds us, a decade ago Farage also rejected any Euro-collaboration with Marine Le Pen because her party had "anti-Semitism and general prejudice in its DNA". Geert Wilders (for whose fine book I am proud to have written the introduction) was furious with Farage and attempted to broker a rapprochement. Nigel was having none of it.
So here we are a decade later:
*in the Netherlands, Wilders is currently the most powerful politician, leading the most popular party, and has helped move the electorate significantly;
*in France, Mme Le Pen's party will, in just two days' time, win the European elections. She is the de facto leader of the opposition, and her caucus in the National Assembly is the largest and most effective opponent to Macron. She has also helped move the electorate significantly;
*in the United Kingdom, by contrast, voters are about to elect a left-wing government led by a fellow, Sir Vics Starmer, who thinks men can have a cervix.
I think Nigel over-gatekept.
He has been very good at founding personal vehicles (Ukip, the Brexit Party) that deflate like punctured soufflés when he steps down as leader. Yes, he was very watchable in the jungle on "I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here", and, in my GB News days, he certainly handed me a bigger audience at 8pm than any of his guest-hosts. But, as that station's currently Farageless ratings reveal, you can't build a sustained movement on one man. Nigel's advice was clever twenty years ago. Wilders, LePen, Meloni et al were wise to recognise its limitations.
So I'm pleased Farage changed his mind on this election. He should change his mind on the over-gatekeeping, too.
Time and demography march on.
~Same with the "mainstream" right-of-centre media: Norman Fenton has an excellent piece on their atrocious coverage of Tommy Robinson's rally. The respectable right is doing the left's job for them. Yeah, keep fretting about the "far right"'s "football hooligans" as you lose your country.
~One final thought on D-Day, in response to the contrast I drew yesterday between the teenage and early-twenties men storming the beaches and the twenty-eight-year-old deserter Obama brought home from Afghanistan after absolving him as a mere "kid". Michael Seth, a First Quarter Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes:
We spend a lot of time lately analyzing the question, 'What is a woman?' Today's anniversary reminds us we should spend a lot more time asking, 'What makes a man..?'
It's true the young Allied soldiers of WWII weren't children but they weren't post-modern either. That was a great advantage over the young people of today.
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly 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 we look forward to bringing the UK state censor Ofcom into court next Tuesday.
