Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, at 3pm North American Eastern (7pm Greenwich Mean Time), we shall have a guest-hosted edition of our regular midweek Clubland Q&A, as Mark is a little under the weather and needs to focus on getting up to full strength for next month's Mark Steyn Cruise.
However, he did file this column:
~Setting aside any "national security" concerns arising from letting The Atlantic's Russia-hoaxer Jeffrey Goldberg in on the Administration's Houthi-bombing call, I doubt that any creature more sentient than an amoeba can have been surprised to learn that US cabinet members "loathe" European "freeloading". If you're paying attention, you'll know that total contempt for the Euros appears to be entirely bipartisan. Are you shocked by Hegseth dismissing the Continent as "pathetic"? Well, you should have been around in the Obama era, when Victoria Nuland, She-Wolf of the Donbass, was rather pithier:
F**k the EU!
Or in the Bush era, when Ms Nuland's house-husband Robert Kagan summed up the relationship as:
Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.
Or a generation earlier, in the first Bush era. From General Norman Schwarzkopf, who certainly wore the uniform better than Admiral Levine, even if in terms of accomplishing strategic goals in the national interest it didn't ultimately make much difference:
Going to war without the French is like going hunting without an accordion.
I hasten to add that, when it comes to expeditionary soldiering in faraway countries of which we know little, I take neither side and nor should you. Pace Mr Kagan's butch-boy banter, US victory in war is slipping beyond living memory. Pace Stormin' Norman, American inability to use forty per cent of the planet's military budget to any strategic purpose is now so deeply ingrained that I'm seriously minded to try hunting with an accordion.
So forget foreign warmongering. As readers of my big-picture piece in the current issue of Quadrant Down Under will be aware, the entire west (America included) is now so demographically enfeebled, economically kaput and culturally self-loathing that it is no longer about Take Your Child-Bride To Work Day in Jalalabad or making a world safe for non-binary Houthis; it is about saving ourselves – and in that respect the old sneers still have some relevance.
In the last two months the forty-seventh presidency has shown such tremendous energy in the executive that illegal crossings of the southern border are down ninety-four per cent and – even more remarkably – NeverTrumper Bill Kristol's share of the "foreign aid" budget is down one hundred per cent. To be sure, the filthy corruptocrats of the District of Columbia are pushing back, using any old rinky-dink district judge to force a government that hasn't won anything since VJ Day to prioritise the further trannification of the Pentagon. So for those who didn't think Thoroughly Modern Milley was sufficiently gender-ambiguous there's new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs "Judge" Reyes:
Since "Judge" Reyes is now a top military planner, she/they can report to Fort Benning at 0600 to instruct our Army Rangers on how to execute High Value Target Raids...after that, Commander Reyes can dispatch to Fort Bragg to train our Green Berets on counterinsurgency warfare. https://t.co/CNrl252Irs
— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) March 22, 2025
Chief Justice Roberts, the designated non-binary voter on the Supreme Court, has demanded, re the ongoing judicial coup, that Trump allow the lethargic appellate process to play itself out. The problem with that is, if the Roberts court permits these "temporary" restraining orders to remain in place until, say, the end of the year, it's over:
We need to move as if we have two years, not four, and as much of that as possible needs to happen between now and December https://t.co/u5X4FRaJPr
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) March 24, 2025
That's the political reality: if you're wondering about all the energy of these last two months, well, a year isn't a lot of time to turn around a continent-sized Titanic.
Meanwhile, up north, the big political news this weekend was supposedly that the globalist apparatchik installed as PM by Tony Blair and his Davos chums has called a Canadian election for April 28th. That's the shortest possible campaign, because Mark Carney has a bit of a Kamala problem: he's not as stupid as she is, but he has to win before the voters wise up to how unlikeable he is. The opposition leader whose strategy was to sit on his lead and munch an apple while not being Justin Trudeau now has to figure out something different to do for the next month.
After prolonged study of the apple-muncher's manifesto, it seems clear that, even if he manages to reverse the poll slippage and secure a stonking Starmer-sized majority in the House of Commons, there is no prospect of Trump-scale pushback from the Canadian Tories. Albeit not on the ballot, the real choice for Canadian voters is whether to join Trump, Vance and their senior colleagues in a last-ditch effort to save their societies – or go down the Eurinal of history with the Continentals. Canada's "natural governing party" has made its choice: Justin's final act as PM was to fly to London as the token non-European in Sir Keir's "coalition of the willing", and Carney's first act as PM was to announce that he has no plans to meet with the orange bloke next door.
But they're the alternatives on offer when it comes to the future of the west: Trumpian energy or Euro-passivity. If it is true that the King has offered the United States something called "associate membership" in the British Commonwealth, maybe Cruella von der Leyen could offer Canada associate membership of the European Union. Or maybe an artful straddle is possible. You pretend to be the forty-seventh president's best and butchest pal (which would be news to Trump) while as a practical matter being a sopping wet, hand-wringing, nothing-can-be-done Princess Pouffy-Pants parody of a Uniparty Euro-pol:
It's unclear what Nigel Farage thinks mass deportations means.
"People will always come and go..."
Well, obviously, but what does that have to do with the 200,000 young men who are sitting in hotels at taxpayer expense? They need to go. pic.twitter.com/pMV7l1obJG
— Carl Benjamin (@Sargon_of_Akkad) March 9, 2025
If you want the perfect contrast between the new US administration's energy and wimpy suicidal Euro-passivity, skip the French and the Belgians and the Germans and go straight to "Trump's best friend": Trump is from Mars, Farage is from Uranus.
As my compatriot Ezra Levant pointed out on Dan Wootton's show, Nigel is talking bollocks: instead of paying to house "migrants" in four-star country-house hotels up and down the land, you could requisition ten medium-size jets and send 2,500 illegal aliens per day on one-way tickets out of Heathrow. That would be just shy of a million gone in the first year – not to mention the deterrent effect on millions more, as America's instant ninety-four per cent drop-off in illegal southern-border crossings demonstrates. And it would be considerably cheaper than what London and Dublin et al are doing now.
But that would require Farage to be emotionally secure enough to have someone as effective as Tom Homan, and not report him to the coppers by claiming he put his hand on Nigel's knee over dinner at Boisdale six months ago. Ezra's plan is practically very do-able, but not politically do-able, not for Farage, the faux-Populist branch of the faux-Conservative/faux-Labour Uniparty.
So I'll make a general observation you can hold me or my shade to in the 2030s: this next half-decade is much of the west's last meaningful election cycle. Indeed, if the present UK government and incoming German government serve their full terms, the last real-ish elections have already been held. As Trump and Vance and their senior colleagues all grasp, the times call for urgency. If 47 succeeds, the western world will be getting a lot smaller - unless the Europeans and the Canadians can rouse themselves from their Faragian passivity. And John Roberts and his chums have been forced to deploy five "temporary restraining orders" per day in order to ensure that 47 will not succeed - and that America's corrupt judiciary can stall the administration into the same torpor as Canada and Europe.
By contrast to 47's energy, most of the Continental political class is happy to go quietly into a long Eurabian night, as I wrote (here we go – first of the week) twenty years ago - in my boffo international bestseller America Alone (2006):
As Kofi Annan [the then UN Secretary-General] framed it, rather more soothingly:
'The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it.'
If you've also 'recently acquired' a significant Muslim population and you're not sure how to 'adjust' to it, well, here's the difference: Back when my Belgian grandparents emigrated to Canada, the idea was that the immigrants assimilated with the host country. As Kofi & Co see it, today the host country has to assimilate with the immigrants.
And so it goes two decades on.
Over the weekend, I read a piece at the excellent Conservative Woman website headlined:
Instead of migrants integrating with us, we have integrated with them
Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack is a sound fellow and I disagree with nary a word he wrote. But I am slightly amazed that in 2025 this is still news to anyone. It was obvious even in 2006 that the citizens of the west were doing a lot more "adjusting" to the incomers than the incomers were ever going to do to "adjust" to the west. So it is mildly dispiriting to me that nineteen years later the subject can still only be broached in The Conservative Woman and not in The Daily Telegraph or on the BBC. Also from America Alone:
In defiance of normal immigration patterns, the host country winds up assimilating with Islam: French municipal swimming baths introduce 'gender'-segregated bathing sessions; Australian hospitals remove pork from the cafeteria menu.
Just small things. But the way to look at it is like this: Are this year's "small things" likely a decade hence to be smaller? Or bigger? We all know the answer to that. So in Paris, almost two decades after the above, "the world's best pastry chef" Pierre Hermé offers his "Ramadan collection" of upscale macarons and bonbons; in London Piccadilly Circus will remain bedecked in municipal Ramadan lights and decorations enjoining one to have a "Happy Ramadan" until March 30th, at which point the authorities will switch to wishing Britons a "Happy Eid". Up and down the United Kingdom's provincial high streets, mainstream retailers seem to have decided that Ramadan is now universally observed: in branches of the grocery chain Sainsbury's, faintly hectoring banners demand to know, "Are you Ramadan ready?" At Windsor Castle, the King (and Defender of the Faith, such as it is, of the Church of England) hosts an "iftar" in St George's Hall (named for the patron saint of England under whose flag the Crusader knights rode into battle).
So, to return to the question posed above, next Ramadan is there going to no Royal iftar and less supermarket propagandising? Or will there be even more institutional Islamisation? Demography is destiny when your politico-media culture has already decided to join the incomers. How Muslim do you want your society to be? How Muslim do you want your children and grandchildren to be? Whatever Islamo-lite Ramadan-macaron Windsor-iftar level of Islam you reckon you could live with, they're already galloping way beyond. As JD Vance has reminded them (to their faces), in order to ease assimilation with their fastest-growing demographic, the Europeans are already abandoning all those core "values" we hear so much about, like freedom of speech.
And it was all perfectly obvious two decades ago, when a few of us stated the obvious:
The host country has to assimilate with the immigrants.
See France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Canada, Ireland...
America is, for the moment, a partial exception to the rule – and it's certainly fun to see JD Vance rubbing the Europeans' noses in it. But, if you're wondering what I mean by "partial", see Patterson, New Jersey:
I'm sorry what? This is Patterson, NJ. pic.twitter.com/TxSP0q95yh
— Michelle Maxwell (@MichelleMaxwell) March 22, 2025
As I've mentioned before, upon the publication of America Alone, large numbers of princes, presidents and prime ministers called me in to chew over the general thesis ...and then they did nothing. So any political solution is a lot more difficult than it was twenty years ago – while the politico-media class is, especially across His Majesty's dominions, even squishier than it was.
And yet the last two months has been kind of inspiring. From Snow White to Adolescence, the corporate storytellers of Big Woke peddle the same cobwebbed drivel. Polls on either side of the Atlantic show that - after two decades of being force-fed the demonisation of straight white men - the young are moving rightward, if only because over on that side they're not outright hated. In America, a majority of young guys now identify with Trump and his determined pushback. Faced with picking and choosing from the suicidally passive Euro-Canadian establishment, where does that youthful energy go?
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