Programming note: Tonight, Tuesday, I'll be here with another episode of our latest Tale for Our Time. Tomorrow, Wednesday, we'll have our regular Clubland Q&A with questions from Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm Greenwich Mean Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~I never quite bought into that Churchill line about how nothing in life is as exhilarating as being shot at without result. But Trump is living it, day after day after day. Are you, like legions of NPR and Washington Post reporters, still trying to peel what's left of USAid from off the asphalt? Ha! The Administration has already moved on to its next target:
Trump order to dismantle the education department in the works, sources say
Good. The US Department of Education was set up by Jimmy Carter in 1979, and the official position of the GOP ever since has been to abolish it. But, as with so much else they're supposedly committed to, Republicans have done not a thing about it - because Frank Luntz ran a "Words that Work" focus group showing that when a GOP squishpants so much as mentions this malign boondoggle swing-state independents hear it as an attack on "teachers" and recoil in terror. After forty years, American public education is worse than ever, and taxpayers pay more per pupil than anywhere else but Luxembourg - and Luxembourg at least has something to show for it. If that line sounds familiar, it's because I first used it in the Nineties.
It's almost as if, over the same four decades, Conservative Inc has just been a giant self-enrichment racket.
~Speaking of which, there is a lot of truth in this:
I always assumed that most of the foreign aid went to African warlords and Hamas, who would take their cut before a starving child was fed.
I'm actually more offended to find out that the money instead went to all of the worst people in DC.
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) February 3, 2025
Like most cynical right-wingers, I once thought that USAid existed so that American taxpayers could subsidise "Take Your Child-Bride to Work" Day in Hoogivsastan. Then it emerged that it was more deluded than that - and US bureaucrats were trying to trannify overseas middle-schoolers as they've successfully trannified American middle-schoolers: "Queering the Donbass," as Rod Dreher amusingly called it ...because Pride Month 2021 in Kabul went down so well:
Finding USAID gender sensitivity training in the trash after the Taliban took over Afghanistan: https://t.co/iYFKjcr42b pic.twitter.com/GM3BEnyAck
— Callum (@AkkadSecretary) February 2, 2025
But, as noted above, it's more basic than that. Under the prevailing conditions of the broke-brokey-brokiest nation in history, the United States Agency for International Development generously funds (via a couple of cutouts) rock-ribbed "conservatives" Bill Kristol and Mona Charen to maintain their Never Trump lifestyle.
I assumed this must be an error - that some tweeter had gotten too far out beyond his skies and confused Bill Kristol with the Pakistani frontier province of Billkristolstan and leapt to conclusions. But no: Kristol's "non-profit" (which is what other countries would call a "registered charity") doesn't appear to do anything, international or domestic development-wise: its website has not been updated since 2021. But it does bear the inspired name of "Defending Democracy Together", which is pretty hilarious from a chap who boasted just on Sunday that "the deep state is far preferable to the Trump state".
Some of you reading this will have met, on the 2019 Mark Steyn Cruise, various refugees from the cancelled Weekly Standard Cruise, offered the opportunity to transfer to mine after Mr Kristol had shipwrecked his magazine onto the rocks over his Never Trumpery. Not sure how many of those we'd fished out of the briny enjoyed the Steyn cruise, but I remember one telling me he disagreed with Bill over the Trump thing but he respected it as a principled stand.
In America, it's easy for a "conservative" to take a "principled" stand when your "principles" are funded by taxpayers.
~TRANNY OF THE WEEK: Are you excited about the Oscars? Emilia Pérez has been nominated for thirteen Academy Awards, which is as many as Gone with the Wind. The latter had actually been seen by gazillions of real-life moviegoers - unlike Emilia, which has no statistically detectable audience. But it's a transgender musical, so you don't need to see it: just give 'em the Oscars already, especially Karla Sofía Gascón, the first transwoman to be nominated for Best Actress - which, in a certain sense, is true, is it not?
Unfortunately for Señora Gascón, a Muslim journalist then dredged up various ancient Tweets that set back her upcoming glass-ceiling-shattering. Not having a dog in this fight, I was looking forward to a couple of rounds of Muslima-on-tranny action. But the tranny folded like a cheap tucking-pouch and deleted her Twitter account.
Which is a pity. Because the Tweets were allegedly "Islamophobic" ("Next year instead of English we'll have to teach Arabic") and anti-BLM (the 2021 Oscars looked like "a Black Lives Matter demonstration... an ugly, ugly gala").
Talk about your Straight Talk express! I don't want to "deadname" Señora Gascón, but it wasn't "Mark Steyn", was it? My kind of tranny! Alas, the Muslima appears to have won this round.
The hierarchy of the Rainbow Utopia becomes ever clearer: Trans trumps woman ...but Muslim trumps all.
~THEY WANT YOU DEAD: Two-Tier Britain degenerates day on day. We know Greater Manchester is a corrupt craphole, because, as reported on The Mark Steyn Show three years ago, Muslim paedo Shamir Ahmed ran his "grooming gang" out of the Oldham council welfare office - and then had his chums in the paedo-enabling constabulary pseudo-criminalise his victims by issuing them with ASBOs ("Anti-Social Behaviour Order").
Even so, Assistant Chief Constable Stephanie Parker feels it's time to take it to the next level.
As we reported yesterday, Koran-burner Salwan Momika was murdered during a livestream from Sweden, and so, in solidarity with the deceased, a Manchester man decided to burn a Koran of his own. Assistant Chief Constable Parker swiftly had her goons take him into custody and then leaned on him to cop a plea. However, as some commenters noticed yesterday, she then decided that the Islamophobic whippersnapper could use a bloody good doxxing:
#CHARGED | Martin Frost (10/03/1977) from Trafford has been charged with causing racially & religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm, distress
He's been remanded in custody & will appear at Manchester Magistrates Court today (03/02/25)
More: https://t.co/TTgTwRTxT8 pic.twitter.com/V4hmx6UYNc
— Greater Manchester Police (@gmpolice) February 3, 2025
Is that inclusion of the accused's date of birth standard procedure for GMP? Or just for "Islamophobes" that Assistant Chief Wanker Parker wants to teach a lesson? At any rate, it enables any colleagues of the above-mentioned Muslim paedo Shamir Ahmed to find where the perp lives and go get him, as they did Mr Momika in Sweden.
Like the army in some coup-ridden basket-case, the English constabulary has seen which way the wind is blowing and crossed over to what it perceives as the winning side. Almost every other institution of the British state has done likewise.
Treat them accordingly.
~We thank you for all your kind comments about SteynOnline - and especially thank 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 this coming year.
