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.
~Well, nothing much seems to be happening in America to judge from the alleged president's beach vacation and the purported acting president's hilarious Veep reunion-show cameo with the blank piece of paper and unplugged telephone. There is supposedly a vice-presidential debate tonight for which expectations have been so dramatically lowered that Kamala is now saying she only picked the guy because she was sleep-deprived that morning. So we're all set for a tremendous Walz victory!
Still, and granted that I'm a famously unlikeable foreigner, this bloke continues to give off a weird and creepy vibe, and is almost certainly harbouring a Keir Starmer-sized secret.
~Speaking of Sir Keir, Liz Truss, as two or three of you may recall, was the shortest-serving prime minister in UK history. Yet, a mere three months into his ministry, Starmer has earned a far more unique distinction: he is the first PM - anywhere in the Commonwealth, I believe - to misgender his own children:
Sir Keir Starmer made a slip up on national television yesterday, forgetting his own children's gender by accidentally declaring he has two sons instead of a boy and a girl.
Isn't that a crime in the United Kingdom? It would be if you did it on Twitter. But under Two-Tier Keir's two-tier policing, HM Constabulary has not yet gone round and kicked down the door of Number Ten.
Still, one gets the impression from Sir Keir, from Kamala unplugged, from Justin's gay-bathtub meltdown in the Commons, that whichever factory in Wuhan has the contract for building animatronic western leaders is seriously malfunctioning.
~DIVERSITY STABBING OF THE DAY: Meanwhile, in the biggest and most unreported story of our time, life death goes on:
Un jeune homme poignardé à mort par un Algérien à la sortie d'une discothèque en Normandie
Un jeune homme de 17 ans a été poignardé à mort, ce dimanche, alors qu'il quittait une boîte de nuit à Subles (Calvados), près de Bayeux. Selon les informations de Frontières, le suspect, Nasser Bekaddour, 24 ans, est de nationalité algérienne. Il a été interpellé et placé en garde à vue.
The alleged perp is an Algerian migrant, Nasser Bekaddour; his victim is Kylian Binard, a seventeen-year-old Normandy boxing champ who was fatally stabbed in the back and throat. M Binard didn't realise that, for the likes of Mr Bekaddour, there are no Queensberry Rules on the streets of France.
Subles is five kilometers from Bayeux, home of the Bayeux Tapestry, a near contemporaneous depiction of the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Is anyone working on a new Bayeux Tapestry depicting the ongoing conquest of France? There's no shortage of potential panels: Nasser Bekaddour is "Algerian", but last week it was a "Moroccan" migrant, who raped and murdered a nineteen-year-old. In Essen, Germany, a day of stabbings, fires and attempted vehicular homicide that left thirty injured was the work of a "Syrian" migrant. You get the feeling that, despite all the vibrant diversity of passports, there might be something that all these chappies have in common - if only someone in the evasive and dissembling media could summon up the courage to talk about it.
~In not-unrelated news:
Austria's far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) has opened the door to a new era, its leader Herbert Kickl has told supporters, as they celebrated an unprecedented election victory.
Kickl's party won 28.9% of the vote according to official tallies - almost three points ahead of the conservative People's Party (ÖVP) on 26.3%, but far short of a majority.
Indeed. Across the Continent, the "far right" keeps inching nearer, and the "mainstream" parties recede further to the fringes. So western "democracy" is evolving to meet the challenge: in Austria, in France, in the German state of Thuringia, even in the Netherlands (where Geert Wilders led his party to victory, but an unelected technocrat wound up as PM), an election now means that the "far right" win the vote - but the mainstream losers then refuse to work with the largest party and thereby exclude them from power, every time.
This does not say anything good about Continental democracy, and the longer it goes on the more convulsive the eventual resolution of the problem will be.
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly months - and especially 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.
