The Mark Steyn Club has just celebrated its eighth birthday. We thank all the First Week Founding Members who've decided to re-up for a ninth season with us - and we hope our First Fortnight members will want to do the same as the week proceeds. I'll be back this evening, Tuesday, with the latest episode of our eighth-birthday Tale for Our Time, Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome - and also here tomorrow, Wednesday, at 3pm North American Eastern (8pm British Summer Time) for our latest Clubland Q&A, taking questions from Mark Steyn Club listeners around the world. Hope you can swing by.
Here is a quintet of random news stories from around the world:
~In America, the same people who spent four years loving the open-borders Biden regime and its legions of Haitian cat-eaters and MS-13 gangbangers have gone bananas over the arrival of fifty-nine white South Africans;
~In Britain, Sir Keir Starmer is pledging a super-butch crackdown on immigration lest the country become, in his words, "an island of strangers";
~In Canada, an "edible crickets" farm that owes the sugar-daddy government over forty million bucks in unreimbursed federal start-up funding, has gone into receivership;
~In Turkey, a new study has found that Covid mRNA shots destroy sixty per cent of the ovaries' "non-renewable egg supply";
and finally...
~In France, a gang of youths interrupted evening mass in Avignon yelling "Allahu akbar!" and telling the priest "we're going to f*** Jesus".
These are all tiny, varying details of the same Big Picture - the same story that has been the priority of this website for over two decades now. Absent severe course correction immediately (or, better yet, twenty years ago) the entire western world is sliding off the cliff - and sooner than you think. There are slight variations in outcome - Western Europe will be just another of Islam's cookie-cutter Krappistans, while the US will be a giant-sized Latin-American favela of crime and violence. But, if you're someone who was raised in the peaceable west of the day before yesterday, these are mere nuances.
The good news is that people are beginning to notice. As longtime readers will recall, I am a great believer in Milton Friedman's dictum - that you don't wait for the right people to show up and do the right things, you create the conditions on the ground that force the wrong people to do the right things. Keir Starmer is, by any definition, the wrong person, and the actual policy proposals of his "immigration crackdown" are riddled with more holes than an overloaded dinghy of machete-brandishing Somalis. But the fact that a socialist prime minister feels it electorally necessary to butch up on the subject is still significant.
As recent elections from the US to Germany have made plain, more and more citizens are beginning to figure out why nothing works anymore: you can't get in to see a doctor; you're thirty-seven and you're still sleeping in your childhood bedroom; the local school is one big English-as-a-second-language remedial facility, save for the second-floor biology lab where they transition the last three native-born girls into native-born boys... That's because mass migration without end means that everything - health care, education, affordable housing - is now set up to prioritise aliens over the actual citizenry.
The media and Wikipedia may still label le Grand Remplacement a "conspiracy theory" but, down on the dysfunctional streets, more and more not-terribly-political "normies" are beginning to spot that their societies are increasingly abnormie. If you walk down the Main Street of any major western city, you can't help noticing that everybody under, say, fifty appears to be from somewhere else. Birmingham, for example, was never the most aesthetically appealing municipality, but it functioned and it created great civic institutions. Now it's a cacophonous garbage dump. Under Sir Simon Rattle, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra became critically acclaimed as one of the great orchestras of the world. Yet during the same period its paying customers declined precipitously: old attendees died off, and young Brummies declined to show up. The moron management embraced all the usual modish twerpery - bring your booze into the auditorium, clap in the middle of the second movement if you're so minded - but didn't seem to be aware of the most salient fact: the city is now one-third Muslim. They're very young, and in the evenings the lads are out on the streets - and yet the management is completely bewildered as to why classical fans out in the posher suburbs and leafy villages no longer want to drive into town for an evening of Brahms or Bizet. Soon enough there will be no symphony orchestra in Birmingham. It's not difficult: under "diversity", you lose not only your future but your past.
We are told, relentlessly, that "diversity is our strength". But it's a delicate balance, isn't it? After Biden's untold millions of drug mules and sex fiends, just fifty-nine whites from South Africa could completely destroy all the multiculti harmony:
🚨 NBC News: "South Africa says that the allegations about persecution of these people — The allegations are false, according to the South Africans." pic.twitter.com/OqGQ53zOpD
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) May 12, 2025
I confess to mixed feelings about those scenes myself. When I was a kid, the Boers had a reputation, unlovely as they might be in certain aspects, as the toughest buggers on the planet. In Britain and Canada, it was not uncommon to hear fellows, depressed at how their own countries were going, talk breezily about emigrating to South Africa. Yet in the end they folded in nothing flat - and the country's new masters don't want them and they have to find somewhere to go. Gee, it's almost like that might be a lesson of more general application in the year ahead.
So it's interesting to see the American left tiptoe all the way up to making the real purpose of "diversity" explicit: We're in favour of open borders ...except for whites. Rather than sully their hands with fifty-nine Afrikaners, the Episcopal Church has declared it's willing to forego the moolah from the federal "refugee resettlement" racket. The spousal-abusing MS-13 gangbanger may be the quintessential "Maryland man", but these white guys never can be.
Watching hoity-toity upper-class whites like NBC's Andrea Mitchell finger-wagging from the anchor chair about their anti-whiteness is instructive. They assume that they will never have to face the consequences of their virtue-signalling. But the chasm between Eliteworld and Reality yawns wider with every day, and it will one day consume most of the west's high-status "progressives" too. There are limits to kingly power. That's the lesson Canute tried to teach his courtiers when he took them to the water's edge and commanded the tide to lay off his loafers. But King Canute would never have ordered his staff to tell the peasantry to eat crickets on a bed of cockroach coulis. Because that would be too ridiculous.
For that we had to wait until Justin Trudeau, sinking bazillions of dollars into bug farms as part of the masterplan: that's not just a bug, it's an indispensable feature. Because at the World Economic Forum all the clever guys decided that, in the interests of saving the world from "climate change", our rulers had to do to our own farmers what the mob is doing to white South Africans: destroy their farms, kill all the cows and sheep, and ensure that nothing grazes there ever again.
There are few things sadder than a post-developed society. If you walk around South African towns at the end of the day, you will notice in high-rise buildings the absence of lights on the upper floors: the inability to maintain skyscrapers is one of the first signs of a society in decline. It starts at the heights and then sinks to the basement, whether those heights are Boeing or bug farms. If you're in on the racket, you can still live high off the hog-simulating scorpions ...for a while. But the people who make the running in the western world are mad, and their fever dreams are boundless.
The most pressing crisis in what we used to call Christendom is the collapsed fertility rates across Europe, and now America, too. As a "niche Canadian" wrote a long time ago, the future belongs to those who show up ...and we chose not to. Not so long ago, in the days of Covid lockdowns, Klaus Schwab informed us that no one would be safe until everyone was vaccinated. Now we discover, from a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Vaccines, that "COVID-19 mRNA Shots Destroy Over 60% of Women's Non-Renewable Egg Supply". To be fair, this study is in lady rats. Possibly human women's ovaries are more resilient. But on The Mark Steyn Show Naomi Wolf and others have been talking about the cratering fertility rate for three years now.
It seems an odd coincidence that Klaus Schwab's first universal vaccine would have the effect of making the western world's most pressing problem even worse. Fortunately, most of the globe ignored Herr Schwab's advice, but not the countries that could least afford to. As I say: a striking coincidence. In fact, given that the jabba-jabba does little or nothing for its intended purpose, it might be more accurate to call the ovarian wasteland not a side- but the effect. Like I said: odd.
Which brings us to that French church: Since the age of Big Government got going a century ago, the west has gotten used to their masters bureaucratically managing problems in perpetuity rather than solving and ending them. See "the war on drugs" or your local grade-school, the Good Friday Agreement or the dreary fulminations of the Bloc Québécois over the King opening the Canadian Parliament this month.
But more primal cultures do not think like that. In their homelands, somebody loses and somebody wins. So the joys of "diversity" - of multiple cultures rubbing along side by side - is only an interim phase. They do not intend to be Quebec or Ulster. They intend to win.
~We thank you for all your kind comments on The Mark Steyn Club's eighth birthday - and especially thank those new members, 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.
