Today is the eighth birthday of The Mark Steyn Club, launched on May 6th 2017. In honour of the occasion, the Supreme Court of Minnesota has decided to legalise women perambulating topless through the streets. Great news for the Twin Titties Cities, especially if they mandate it for the Muslim neighbourhoods: Nothing says "Diversity is our strength!" like a peephole burqa. From the actual ruling:
A binary approach to breasts fails to recognize the more nuanced physical realities of human bodies, whether they are intersex, transgender, nonbinary, or breast cancer survivors. Would a transgender man be prohibited from exposing his chest? What about a transgender woman who has had top surgery? Where do the chests of intersex and nonbinary persons fit within this dichotomy?
I'm so tired of having to fit my intersex chest into your dichotomy. So now, in the ultimate American jurisprudence, the court has struck down "a binary approach to breasts". Behold the awesome unbounded power of Minnesota "judges": In the Land of Ten Million Boobs, breasts are no longer binary. As my late chum Sammy Cahn liked to sing, "She had just three of those things..."
~Aside from that landmark ruling, on this anniversary The Mark Steyn Club is thrilled to have made it thus far, and to find our First Day Founding Members are so eager to re-up for a ninth season. Tales for Our Time is back in business with my serialisation of Jerome K Jerome's second most famous book, and in celebration of our birthday we have a sampler of music from our monthly audio adventures.
Much as we love our First Day foot soldiers, we're always happy to welcome new recruits. No pressure: we seek no unwilling members. But, if you've been mulling it over for eight years and think you're just about ready to take the plunge, come on in, the water's fine.
~It has been a fairly brutal couple of years for me personally on the health front, and, in combination with ongoing litigation, that may yet prove fatal. But I am absolutely thrilled that so many remarkable talents that Steyn Clubbers around the world first got to know at this here shingle have gone on to great things:
*Just last week, Andrew Lawton, longtime guest-host of our Clubland Q&A, was elected to the Canadian House of Commons as the new Member for Elgin-St Thomas-London South.
*In America, Steyn Show favourite Natalie Winters is now a Trump 47 White House correspondent profiled in The New York Times and attacked by weird obsessives for her fashion choices.
*Across the Atlantic, Sammy Woodhouse - whom I first met in a Rotherham hotel in which she'd been raped - is a decade later followed on Twitter by Elon Musk and a member of Rupert Lowe's "grooming gangs" inquiry.
*Our show's hugely popular Australian correspondent, the great Alexandra Marshall, became a big telly star Down Under and then one of the main reasons why the Aussie Speccie is so much better than its increasingly feeble London original. She certainly provided the best coverage of the just-concluded hideous election campaign:
Nothing is happening, and if does happen, Dutton spends the afternoon apologising while Albo fabricates an alternate version of reality in which it didn't happen.
I could go on. Suffice to say that, in my present crepuscular state, it has been immensely gratifying to see so many younger and healthier chums advance to greatness around the planet. They will be key players for many decades to come.
~As to the reasons SteynOnline and The Mark Steyn Club exist: for twenty years, my overriding issue has been that mass migration - in the US, from Latin America; in Europe, from remorseless Islamisation - is an existential threat to the western world, and to freedom more generally. Back when I wrote my international bestseller on the subject, I was a rather lonely voice. Two decades on, opposition to mass migration is the central issue for an ever increasing percentage of the citizenry on both sides of the Atlantic.
One might wish that their leaders had got with the programme a decade or two earlier, but it's now the one issue that the disparate factions grouped together under the label "populist" have in common. In America, the Republican right wants mass deportations and traditionally understood individual liberty: gun rights, fewer regulations, etc. In Europe, the so-called "far right" wants mass deportations and traditional Continental-style economic protectionism: see Mme Le Pen et al. In a sense, they both grasp something very basic: that their customary local variants of left/right politics cannot resume until you've put an end to legions of MS-13 gangbangers/Albanian sex traffickers/Sudanese clitoridectomists walking into your country every night.
That's the good news. In the US, there are no takers for the Jeb/Dubya bollocks of Conservative Inc about needing immigrants to "do the jobs Americans won't do"; in Europe, even useless uniparty types like Starmer feel obliged to talk about "smashing the gangs", even if, as German voters have just learned from Fred Merz, these mostly prove to be outright lies whose expiry date is twenty minutes after polls close on election night. Still, the fact that these guys feel the need to dissemble to their voters tells us something about where the conversation's headed.
On the other hand, the uniparty remains determined to hold the line one way or another. Say what you will about Biden's dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt justice system and the attempt to criminalise its political opposition or the French state's efforts to do the same to Marine Le Pen, but at least they took place in more or less open court.
By contrast, the failed German establishment is inching closer to a formal ban on the AfD - which right now happens to be the most popular political party in the country:
*Oft gesehen* RTL/ntv-Trendbarometer: Union fällt weiter hinter AfD zurück - auch SPD verliert https://t.co/Fk6RPZWtVr [Video] pic.twitter.com/UXiOqgHQ2a
— ntv Nachrichten (@ntvde) April 30, 2025
The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz is in English the "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution" - which is a somewhat misleading name for the domestic intelligence service, the equivalent of MI5 or the FBI. The BfV has declared the only political alternative to uniparty groupthink to be "right-wing extremists". The German state surveils its opponents and seeks to ban them, but it's the AfD who are the ones "against the free democratic order".
In support of their decision, the BfV has compiled a thousand-page report and submitted it to the Minister of the Interior. It will not be made public, but it will permit the BfV to tap the telephones of AfD types and deny them the taxpayer funds the non-"right-wing" parties get.
Presumably the "mainstream" parties understand that the criminalisation of opposition risks incentivising political violence as the only alternative. And presumably they're pretty confident that in the modern 24/7 panopticon state they can crush that like a bug. We shall see.
~In the anglo world, the "respectable right" is still more concerned about "distancing" itself - from the unrespectable types like Trump or Orbán or even Signorina Meloni. It doesn't seem to realise that increasingly it's distancing itself from people who actually win elections, as opposed to losing politely and giving critically admired concession speeches.
There were votes in His Majesty's three senior dominions last week. As noted above, the biggest waste of time and money was the Australian election. From Rowan Dean at the Aussie Spectator:
When Peter Dutton was Trump-like, strong, powerful and fighting the Woke orthodoxy, he won the unwinnable referendum, the Voice, turning an 80-20 'Yes' vote into a 60-40 'No' vote.
An astonishing achievement that defied all the pollsters and pundits. And he did it by being fiercely anti-Woke and single-minded.
Then, when Peter Dutton went anti-Trump, didn't attack Woke, went Labor-lite, he lost not only the election but also his seat.
I can't stand these so-called "conservative" leaders who accept the left's framing on everything. Aside from everything else, they're telling you that, even if they win, it will make no difference. So who cares? Good riddance to the contemptible TweedleDutton.
~By contrast, a representative tranche of England held local elections. As readers well know, I - like almost everyone else who's ever had any dealings with him - have a low regard for Nigel Farage. If I saw him crossing the road in front of me, I would have no hesitation in flooring it and ploughing him into the asphalt.
But credit where it's due: on Thursday, he inflicted a brutal beatdown on the sub-Dutton Tory party. Both Conservatives and Labour lost two-thirds of their seats. In response to the latter, Keir Starmer retreated to his tedious codswallop about his commitment to "delivering change". Sir Keir, like his Tory predecessors, has delivered plenty of change, starting with a thousand migrant sex predators at the local country-house hotel. Turning your daughter into your son is also quite a change. The problem is not the lack of change; it's that the particular nature of uniparty change is destroying your country.
The "Leader of the Official Opposition" remains Kemi Badenoch. But let's face it, she's looking like just another Tory dud. I never quite got it when Toby Young started talking her up on GB News, but she gave him an ersatz-peerage and stuck him in the House of Lords, so it worked out okay for him. Mrs Badenoch seems a pleasant enough lady, but she's not the answer to fourteen years of comprehensive Conservative Party betrayal of its base.
It's hilarious to see establishment UK Tories now talking, as their Canadian cousins did a generation ago, about the need to "unite the right" - by merging Kemi's and Nigel's parties. No. The need is to continue doing what Farage began doing last week - that is, to destroy the Conservative and Unionist Party, which is neither, and to inflict additionally as much damage on Labour as possible. I doubt Nigel is the chap to save Britain, but killing the uniparty is a worthwhile end in itself. If he pulls it off, they should give him a real peerage, not like Toby's worthless bauble. Because it is necessary for the old order to die ...to free up space for something new to arise. So, in that sense, last week was good news.
Of course, Farage reacted to the results with his usual Churchillian magnanimity in victory:
Farage can be quite loathsome at times. Using VE Day celebrations to attack @benhabib6 and @RupertLowe10 is despicable. pic.twitter.com/RTkSvR7azL
— David Vance (@DVATW) May 5, 2025
So, as we begin our ninth year, the news is mixed, but the central concern of SteynOnline since its inception is now the central concern of more and more voters across the west. On we go.
~We thank you for all your kind comments on our eighth birthday - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up for a ninth season. 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.
