Programming note: Tonight we shall begin a brand new Tale for Our Time - our seventy-second. Tomorrow, Saturday, please join me for a Bastille Day edition of my weekend music show, Mark Steyn on the Town at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
Need a few last-minute vacation suggestions? Here we go:
~Sharon Stone, a lady famed for her warm welcomes, is among the many Democrats praising this tourism ad for Quebec's Eastern Townships - because of its willingness to offer Americans a consoling hug:
Eastern Townships tourism ad offers hug to Americans travelling to Canada https://t.co/vBIo6NBaAf
— Mala Moragain (@TheMalaMoragain) July 10, 2025
I wonder. This may be one of those ads that's too clever to sell its own product. Half the tweets about it seem to be from cowering Dems saying they'd love to visit Canada but they're terrified Trump's ICE monsters won't let them back into their fascist hellhole. Especially if you're trans.
~Oh, well. There's always a bargain break in Afghanistan. I don't know whether the Taliban contracted with the same Montreal ad agency as the above, but the opening's pretty funny:
شاهد الرسالة القوية التي وجّهها شباب أفغانستان إلى الولايات المتحدة!#أفغانستان_بالعربي#افغانستان pic.twitter.com/W3LrrNJy88
— أفغانستان بالعربي (@afghanarabc) July 5, 2025
Come to Bagram and tour our extensive display of American weaponry!
~But, whatever you do, don't visit London, which, unlike Quebec or Helmand Province, is far too dangerous:
A masked mugger attempted to snatch a pedestrian's gold watch before stabbing him to death in front of his partner outside a high-end London casino when he fought back, witnesses told MailOnline today.
The murder victim, 24, died in broad daylight outside the £1,650-a-night 5-star Park Tower Hotel and Casino, which is directly across the road from the Harvey Nichols department store in Knightsbridge.
Or "Harvey Nicks", as the Sloane Rangers I dated in the Eighties were wont to call it and I used to hurry by en route to Basil Street to visit Don Black and Herbie Kretzmer in what was then Lyricists' Row. But that was before London became Sir Sadiq Khan's Great World City, home to thousands of violent savages to whom he and his co-conspirator Boris Johnson have given the run of the town. The victim above is Blue Stevens, a twenty-six-year-old man whose two young children will now grow up with only a few ever hazier memories of a father they will never know.
The other day I linked to a video of David Betz and Mary Harrington calmly discussing the likelihood of civil war in Britain and elsewhere. As they point out, the obstacle for those of us who are in favour of civil war - or see it, on balance, as the least worst option - is that too many citizens are still invested in the old order: they have pension plans and manor houses in, for the moment, reasonably agreeable Cotswold villages; perhaps, like Rishi Sunak, they have just taken up a little light "advising" work with Goldman Sachs, so he can do for the firm what he did for the UK. As a jobbing author, my own view of impending societal collapse was summed up on the first page of After America fourteen sodding years ago:
Nobody writes a doomsday tome because they want it to come true. From an author's point of view, the apocalypse is not helpful: The bookstores get looted and the collapse of the banking system makes it harder to cash the royalty check. But Cassandra's warnings were cursed to go unheeded, and so it seems are mine.
The pool of persons able to insulate themselves from the dark pathologies Rishi, Sadiq and Boris have loosed upon the land shrinks remorselessly day by day. Blue Stevens came from a well-to-do family with a long boxing tradition: his grandfather won a bronze medal at the 1970 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh, back in a land where fisticuffs was a sport and not the fatal conclusion to a romantic night out in Knightsbridge. Mr Stevens resided in Hart, the UK's "most desirable place to live", but, alas, dinner for two up in town required him to survive the few yards between his "posh restaurant" and his BMW. And he didn't.
Just a few days ago, Selina Scott, who was as famous as anybody in the Britain of the 1980s (star of breakfast telly, asked on dates by princes Charles and Andrew, on the receiving end of Jimmy Savile), was attacked and robbed in broad daylight in Piccadilly and forced to take shelter in Fortnum & Mason's, before trudging three miles back to her doubtless phenomenally valuable abode because her assailants had left her without thruppence-ha'penny for 'bus fare. This struck home with me, not just because I met Miss Scott back in the Eighties and was in the habit of breakfasting with West End producers across the street on the glassed-in terrace at the Meridien (I am auditioning my upcoming and even more obnoxious feature: "As I said forty years ago...") but because more recently I made the mistake of taking to dinner, in the restaurant below Fortnum's, Toby Young (since ennobled as Viscount Duplicitous-F**ker). By the time of my GB News stint, my London had shrunk to the short walk between my accommodations in St James's and the Steyn Show studio across from the Palace of Westminster. The rest of Sir Sadiq's Great World City I regarded as a craphole, and was slightly perplexed that others could not see it.
And, as Miss Scott and the family of poor Blue Stevens have learned, even the non-craphole part of London is mere illusion. As I first wrote twenty thirty years ago, the measure of a civilised society is how easily one can insulate oneself from its worst pathologies. In Britain, that gets harder and harder by the day. The political class that did this to you will not rescue you from it. And, from Selina Scott to the streets of Ballymena, people are beginning to figure that out. In Dungannon and Portadown, one discerns an evolution even in the centuries-old Irish Question: on the eve of the Glorious Twelfth, they're burning not Republican symbols but effigies of migrants.
~As The Mark Steyn Club settles into its ninth year, 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 thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.