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.
~I believe there's only another seven or twelve weeks till "Pride Month" ends, so I trust readers will forgive me for belatedly attending to a story I didn't get to because of my legal travails. In Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, the festivities began with the Pride Parade being disrupted by pro-Hamas protestors chanting "No Pride in Genocide". The American right mostly played it as just another pass-the-popcorn I-don't-have-a-dog-in-this-fight moment:
Pro Palestine protesters blocking the Philly pride parade from continuing is a perfect distillation of left wing politics. This is where it inevitably ends: with two left wing interest groups colliding in an oppression Olympics standoff: pic.twitter.com/bP8BGxEWaE
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) June 2, 2024
But, in fact, it was rather more interesting than that. It wasn't just any old members of the rapidly Islamising western left shutting down the LGBTQWERTY crowd, but the local chapter of Queers4Palestine. That's another phenomenon the right played for laughs - Turkeys4Thanksgiving, etc. The dominant figure in the Philly scenes was apparently the biker from the Village People:
I assumed, naturally, that he was an old-school gay who'd polished up his best leathers and resented these Ahmed-come-latelies from the Hamas set raining on his parade.
But no: upon closer inspection of the photographs he was on the side of the keffiyeh crowd, facing down a phalanx of rainbow-hued lesbians and declaring, like the East End Jews and dockers to Sir Oswald Mosley's Fascists in Cable Street, that they shall not pass. The Sapphists seemed befuddled at being thwarted by a guy who appeared to have stepped out of Uniforms Night at a Greenwich Village leather bar. As Barack Obama would say, "The Eighties called. They want their gay clichés back - and they don't quite understand how they got mixed up with American foreign policy."
But that's how bad it is: at least in Philadelphia, the Islamophile queers turn out to be heavier on the Islamophile and rather lighter on the queer. I have no idea how representative they are of the broader movement, but the symbolism is arresting: Gay catchers crossing over to join the Islamic pitchers. The ever-proliferating array of sexual identities doesn't seem to be doing all that much for actual sex: the fastest growing boutique sexuality is "aces" - or asexuals. For LGBTQWERTY Pennsylvanians, Palestine is more of a turn-on than gay sex.That may have a broader appeal than you think.
Meanwhile, The Daily Sceptic asks this morning:
Has the Pro-Trans Side Lost the Culture War in Britain?
I answered that one a week ago:
In the end, it's all demography... You can change all the boys into girls and all the girls into boys but in the end there aren't enough of either to alter the outcome. You're merely arguing about who'll be using which bathroom on the Oblivion Express.
Whatever one feels about it, Islam is real in a way that chestfeeders and persons with "bonus holes" aren't. Or as I wrote on page twelve of America Alone almost two decades ago:
In demographic terms, the salient feature of much of the 'progressive agenda' – abortion, gay marriage, endlessly deferred adulthood – is that, whatever the charms of any individual item, cumulatively it's a literal dead end.
As fertility dries up, so do societies.
Oh, to be sure, we have come up with some ingenious workarounds like "pregnant men", and - coming soon - "uterus transplants":
Could transgender women, or others born without a womb, experience pregnancy..?
The operation has never been performed successfully yet in people assigned male at birth...
Terrific! But, short of mandating uterus transplants in every mewling baby unfortunate enough to be assigned male at birth, it's never going to be enough. Indeed, the reduction by purportedly serious persons of the only known female reproductive system to a "bonus hole" is telling. It's not a mere "bonus" to Islam. Whereas America is now such a fundamentally unserious country that, just as its fertility rates slip down the Eurinal of history toward Continental deathbed territory, it decides to prioritise transitioning middle-school girls into infertile "boys".
There is no future in any of it: it's just a death-spasm.
It's coming.
Resist it while you can. pic.twitter.com/fjSMhmN74g
— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) June 17, 2024
As longtime readers will recall, my demographic thesis was dismissed by all the smartiepants types like The Economist as "alarmist", so I wish Louise Perry, a former Steyn Show guest on this subject, better luck in getting it past them. In a clearsighted essay, Miss Perry notes that not all "identity groups" are equal:
The reason for this is demographics. Put simply, the people who are into woke ideas about gender and race are not the same as the people who are into woke ideas just about race, even if their political aims sometimes overlap. And these two groups have wildly different migration and fertility patterns. Gender wokeness is on the way out because the people who are attracted to gender wokeness are on the way out, given that their birth rates are so far below replacement. Meanwhile, race wokeness (of a kind) is on the rise because of the large and rapid demographic changes currently taking place in the West.
Indeed. "Large and rapid demographic changes" are remorseless and ongoing: unless reversed, the United States will die as a vast violent tribalised Latin-American favela, and Britain as "Somalia with chip shops". The last American "conservative" will be wondering why the Federalist Papers are no longer available on Amazon, and the last Brit "progressive" will be showing off her wedding tackle in the ladies' changing room and wondering why all the cis-chicks are wearing burqas.
I know self-quoting is vulgar and tedious, but here's another throwaway line from my ancient bestseller:
Given the growing Muslim populations in Europe and the remarkable success hitherto obscure Muslim lobby groups have had in constraining certain aspects of the war on terror, it seems almost certain that Islamist political parties will arise on the Continent within the next decade.
Well, it took a little more than a decade, but here we are. From last month's local elections in "England":
The reason they're going full "Allahu Akbar" on the hustings is because they can. That's oop north, so let's turn south. For non-UK readers, Slough is next door to Windsor Castle (and Eton). Richard North writes:
Slough is an interesting constituency. One of the most ethnically diverse areas in England, 47 percent of the population of Asian origin, split between Indians and Pakistanis. At the 2011 census, the Indians held the majority, reflecting Indian-heritage Dhesi holding the parliamentary seat.
In the last decade, though, there has been an influx of Pakistanis putting them at 22 percent of the population against the largely Sikh Indians at 19 percent – giving the Muslims the largest single ethnic group.
At the 2019 general election, Labour fielded Tan Dhesi who took 29,421 votes, with the Tories also fielding an Indian heritage candidate, Kanwal Gill, who gained 15,781 votes, giving Dhesi a 13,640 majority (much of it comprising the Muslim, Labour-supporting vote).
Now that the Muslims are putting up an independent candidate, Azhar Chohan, they have enough voting strength, from a population of over 28,000, to take the seat. The only way this could be stopped is for the Indian-heritage community to unite behind the Conservative Indian-heritage Moni Nanda.
In that case, we could see one of the first, if not the first, direct Sikh versus Muslims sectarian election...
Great. Just what "England" needs. Here's Mr Chohan's latest campaign video:
✨ *Eid Mubarak* to all celebrating today and tomorrow from Azhar Chohan 🤲🏽
🙌🏽 Keep the support coming
— Azhar (@AzharChohan4MP) June 16, 2024
📋 Don't forget to register to vote and make your voice count! https://t.co/37XJ0vylNK (deadline 18 Jun!)
🗣️ Spread the word with friends and family pic.twitter.com/mcaLGtxCiG
Doesn't seem like he's much interested in Sikh outreach, does it? Why is Mr Chohan not doing as Labour's (and the Democrats') house-trained identity-group poodles are meant to do and operating within the main leftie party? Well, Labour's poll numbers have fallen eight points since last October. Anything happen last October? Not in Slough or the British Isles, obviously, but down the far end of the Mediterranean?
Keir Starmer, poor chap, is insufficiently pro-Hamas for the tastes of his voting bloc in Slough and elsewhere. I say "poor chap" because it's not just geopolitics, it has implications for his home life. Sir Keir, like most Euro-lefties, is an atheist, but Lady Starmer is Jewish and is raising their children in her faith. So, if you're wondering why the Labour leader is campaigning as a confirmed bachelor, well...:
Starmer's Jewish wife 'forced out of home' by anti-Israel protesters
That's from The Jewish Chronicle. The rest of the press has decided the Jewess at the top of an Islamo-dependent party is one of those complicating factors that might discombobulate the agreeable torpor of this election.
The future has shown up: the Muslim disengagement from Sir Keir's Labour Party was one of the most significant developments in last month's local elections, although it too attracted little media attention. If that trend were to accelerate, it would cause problems beyond Slough.
Numbers numbers numbers... In case you needed any further proof of the utter pointlessness of Irish nationalism in the age of multiculti delusion, the Shinners are celebrating Eid:
DUBLIN
Sinn Fein's Daithi Doolan has attended Eid celebrations at Croke Park.
In 2021, Doolan picketed a Catholic Church in Dublin because it took down a Pride Flag.
SF have recently referred to Catholics who pray the Rosary in public as 'fascists'. pic.twitter.com/KfyIVfTaDq
— Catholic Arena (@CatholicArena) June 16, 2024
Interesting that Eid in Dublin now requires Croke Park - the fourth-largest sports facility in Europe.
The transanity is just the lurid front window of the west's going-out-of-business sale. The Village People leather guy will not be the first LGBTQWERTY aficionado to figure out who's gonna come out on top.
~Many readers have asked how to support Mark's transatlantic free-speech lawsuits on Covid and the climate. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a near-and-dear one a SteynOnline gift certificate; or
c) ordering a copy of Mark's latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it - ask Kathy Gyngell).
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause - and, in the third, a significant chunk thereof save for shipping costs. And, in all cases, you or your loved one gets something, too.
