Programming note: Join me tonight for the latest episode of our current Tale for Our Time - Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, a piece of speculative fiction from 1907 on the world of the early twenty-first century.
~I confess it's a wee bit demoralising to find JD Vance has stunned Europe with a speech that contains nothing that would be remotely surprising to any reader of this website for the last quarter-century. Of course, he's the Vice President of the United States and I'm a "niche Canadian". And in fairness JD was still in high school back when I started boring on about this stuff.
Nevertheless, the German defence minister Herr Großer von Wichser spoke for the entire European establishment when he magisterially pronounced Mr Vance's remarks "not acceptable". Germany, France and the rest of Western Europe are dying before our eyes, but it remains "not acceptable" to notice it.
For one thing, Vance was speaking at the MSC. The Mark Steyn Club? Ah, sadly not. This was supposed to be the "Munich Security Conference", which is the western world's most prestigious beano on "international security", where heads of government and the like are supposed to identify "emerging global threats" so that Bill Kristol and David Milliband can get their updated funding applications in to USAid. Yet, instead of volunteering the next bunch of illiterate goatherds who'll get to spend twenty years kicking Nato's butt, the Vice President argued that the greatest threat to Europe came from Europe's leaders - and thereby totally ruined the weekend for everybody else.
The court eunuchs of the elite "international security" media treated this as the greatest faux pas on the public-speaking circuit since my late Spectator colleague Auberon Waugh, invited to give a speech in Senegal, misheard the desired topic - "press freedom" - and so landed in Dakar and delivered an address on "breast feeding". Decades later, the author of Hillbilly Elegy landed in Munich, and had the effrontery to deliver an elegy to all the non-hillbillies in the room.
They did not take it well. In his concluding remarks, the MSC chairman declared that it's his party and he'll cry if he wants to. You would cry too if Vance happened to you:
The chairman of the Munich Security Conference literally broke down in tears today over JD Vance's speech on Friday criticising European leaders.
Europe is currently being governed by extremely unstable and unserious people. pic.twitter.com/QVsLNlyPQ7
— Cillian (@CilComLFC) February 17, 2025
As you can see, Herr Graf von Muschis und Heulsusen was so distraught he had to be comforted by one of those Aryan hotties who should be on the endangered-species list in the New Germany.
Nevertheless, JD Vance wasn't off-topic, was he? He addressed it more directly than any of the assembled Euro-wankers. Consider, for example, the crude reality of this year's scheduling. The Munich conference opened on Friday. On Thursday the usual excitable Mohammedan had ploughed through a crowd of pedestrians while yelling - go on, take a wild guess - yeah, bingo: "Allahu Akbar!" He injured thirty-seven people. With a Mini Cooper. Imagine if he'd had a Toyota Corolla. A woman and her two-year-old daughter subsequently died of their wounds.
So, at a "security conference" in Munich, hosting the biggest bigshots on the planet, they can't even secure the municipality they're meeting in. And you wanna take lessons in global security from these guys? The gap between the bollocks and the reality grows ever wider.
Among "respectable" German opinion, for example, the dispute is between those who think a mass attack by a psychotic Mini can be officially categorised as terrorism or mental illness. As Vance's speech was vulgar enough to note, it's much more basic than that:
And of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all time high. It's a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone. And of course, it's gotten much higher since.
No serious person thinks a state that cannot prevent a Mini Cooper weaving round a police car is capable of distinguishing a card-carrying member of Isis from some unfortunate Mohammedan with a few treatable mental-health issues. Nobody's interested in why the kiddie-killer went on a killing spree; they want the political class to cease admitting the demographic from which the kiddie-killers are drawn. JD again:
And we know the situation. It didn't materialise in a vacuum. It's the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent... How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilisation in a new direction? No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.
But, unless you're a visiting American vice president, saying such things in Germany gets you moved to the other side of the CDU-CSU-SPD-FDP-Green so-called "firewall". Yes, it's a shame about another dead kid, but c'mon, it's not that many, and, besides, the real worry is that raising the subject risks "empowering the far right". And, as noted by Vance, in the new Europe that danger justifies annulling election results: sometimes, in order to protect democracy, it is necessary to end it. See the faintly passé darling of the oldest established permanent floating transnational yakfest, President Zelenskyyy, now in the sixth year of his five-year term.
Likewise, defending our "values" is so important that sometimes we have to criminalise our "values". As JD noted:
And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs.
He's half-right there. The British state's hostility to believing Christians is part of "the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the established church. But there is also the incoming roar of the new church, not yet formally established but already enjoying the protection of the Bastard Starmer and his apparatchiks. Last Thursday, a man attempted to burn a Koran outside the Turkish Consulate in Knightsbridge. Another fellow then attacked the first chap, getting him on the ground and attempting to stab him.
So how'd that work out? From our friend Sammy Woodhouse:
Two charged after Quran burning incident outside Turkish consulate.
The man that burnt the Quran has been remanded.
The man that attacked him with a knife has been bailed.
Let that sink in. pic.twitter.com/WxidOl69Ii
— S A M M Y woodhouse (@sammywoodhouse1) February 15, 2025
Just to be clear for our non-Britannic readers, the man who physically assaulted an actual human being is out on bail; the man who physically assaulted an inanimate object is "remanded in custody" - ie, sitting in a gaol cell.
This tells us something about where a once great nation is headed: if you were really interested in assimilating the migrants to the "British values" you keep banging on about, you would point out that in free countries people are free to burn books, and, regrettable as that may be, you just have to get used to it - as JK Rowling has, when the psycho-trannies light up Harry Potter on Twitter. Instead, the Koran-burner is in prison awaiting his trial for a "religiously motivated public order offence". Which is wanker-speak for the new blasphemy law.
So the Bastard Starmer is spelling out your future to you: there will be no pressure on Muslims to assimilate to "British values"; instead, you will assimilate to Muslim values - or else.
Yet, even if you do, the corpse-count will mount: that Mohammedan laddie in the picture at top right is smiling even as the Austrian copper approaches because he's just stabbed a fourteen-year-old boy. So he has killed his infidel! What a glorious day! That was in Villach, down near the Italian and Slovene frontiers. But, stabbing-wise, it could have been Dublin, Birmingham, Brussels, Paris ...just from the last couple of days. Check the travel guide: Europe on Thirty Stabbings a Day. Meanwhile, at Bankstown Hospital in the Sydney suburbs, they examined the locker of Ahmad Rashad Nadir, one of those Muslim nurses boasting on video about killing Jews, and found it contained significant quantities of morphine.
This did not just happen. As Mr Vance said, it is a direct consequence of public policy. And yet, in Germany as elsewhere, the political class is insistent that that public policy cannot change. Vance again:
The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within.
He said that to a roomful of people who, as a practical matter, are on the other side: they're working for Europe's demise.
For eighty years the United States has provided the continent's "security umbrella". Because, while the Europeans are a bit slow to reach for their wallets when the waiter brings the check at the Nato black-tie banquet, they do "share our values".
Really? Suella Braverman has been reduced to doing twenty-year-old Steyn gags:
Former UK home secretary Suella Braverman warned that Britain could become an Islamist state with nuclear weapons.
Me in America Alone:
The Quai d'Orsay is relaxed about Iran becoming the second Muslim nuclear power. As things stand, France is on course to be the third.
The difference between Steyn and Braverman is that, back at the dawn of the century, there was still time to change demographic course. Now, absent "remigration", there is not.
Trump and Vance have no desire to follow the rest of the west into a long Eurabian night, and the "values" that entails, from blasphemy laws to child sacrifice. What's disturbing is not that the Vice President said what he did, but that no one else at that stupid pointless "security" summit would dare say anything similar.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with my column on the challenge facing RFK Jr. For Valentine's Day, we offered live music, poetry and the food of love. My weekly Serenade show offered songs from the Netherlands and Kenya and a cavalcade of Non-Stop Number Ones. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date was a dusty monochrome classic, The Last Picture Show, and our Sunday Song of the Week celebrated a great love song from a flop show. Our marquee presentation was our current Tale for Our Time - Robert Hugh Benson's extraordinarily prescient Lord of the World: Click for Part Twenty-Nine, Part Thirty and Part Thirty-One. Part Thirty-Two airs tonight at SteynOnline.
If you were too busy this weekend bemoaning why these American hillbillies couldn't be as sophisticated and nuanced as the Luxembourgish Defence Minister, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We're thrilled by all those across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. We have quite a bit of fun in The Mark Steyn Club, with audio adventures, video poems, planet-wide Q&As, and much more (heart attacks permitting). We appreciate the Club is not to everyone's taste, but, if you're minded to give it a go, either for a full year or a three-month experimental period, we'd love to have you. You can find more details on The Mark Steyn Club here - and, if you've a loved one who'd like something a little different for his or her birthday, don't forget our special Gift Membership.
