Programming note: Tonight at SteynOnline join me for Episode Eleven of our current and very pertinent Tale for Our Time - up the Congo with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
~Ladies and gentlemen, the next mayor of Minneapolis...
Mogadishu?
Nope - Minneapolis victory party of Omar Fateh after he won the MN Democratic endorsement pic.twitter.com/QzBwVWPbC2
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 20, 2025
Minnesota Nice is looking more and more like Minnesota Suicidal. Whatever else may be said of it, in Mogadishu it would be considered weird - and kind of pathetic - to make, say, Garrison Keillor the mayor. In that sense, notwithstanding an IQ down at Congressional-approval level, Somalis are smarter than western progressives.
Which brings me to our regular, if increasingly obnoxious, "As I was saying twenty years ago..." feature. This is from my boffo demographic bestseller of 2006 and was prompted by a melancholy visit to the final resting place (in St Denis) of Charles Martel, hammer of the Mohammedans at the Battle of Tours/Poitiers in 732:
Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but, if they'd won, they'd have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. 'Perhaps,' wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, 'the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford...'
Hold that thought. A millennium-and-a-third later, "the interpretation of the Koran" is being taught in the schools of Oxford. Here is the Sovereign of the United Emirate of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, opening the new King Charles III wing of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies:
King Charles inaugurates a new Islamic center in Oxford, UK. pic.twitter.com/1D11FGMw44
— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) July 20, 2025
The King is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, but that's not a job that takes up much time these days. The Anglican Communion, one notes, has been without an Archbishop of Canterbury since before the death of Pope Francis - and no one cares. Not least the King who's supposed to appoint a new one. So, as His Majesty says, it's time to "broaden our understanding of the Islamic world" - because otherwise you won't be able to function in the new Britain:
The chap accompanying His Majesty seemed vaguely familiar, and eventually I realised that he was William Hague, a former "Conservative" party leader once famous for warning that immigration was making Britain a "foreign land". A generation later, he's been endowed with one of those awful ersatz peerages and a cushy sinecure as Chancellor of Oxford University - and he's figured out which side his bread is buttered.
So evidently has the King.
But Gibbon is not wrong. Without Charles Martel, as my book continues, "there would be no Christian Europe. The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers, said Gibbon, was 'an encounter which would change the history of the whole world'":
Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But Europe is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They're in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmö, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It's way too late to re-run the Battle of Poitiers. When Martine Aubry, the Mayor of Lille, daughter of former Prime Minister and EU bigwig Jacques Delors and likely Presidential candidate in the post-Chirac era, held a meeting with an imam in Roubaix, he demanded that it take place on the edge of the neighborhood in recognition that his turf was Muslim territory which she was bound not to enter. Mme Aubry conceded the point, as more and more politicians will in the years ahead.
Yet none of those post-Poitiers examples from Belgium, Sweden and France as abject in their prostration as an English king lending his name and ribbon-cutting skills to the Islamic Centre at Oxford. This is not just old-school ecumenical wankery. In the land over which he reigns, from Epping to Moygashel, the very presence of Islam in the UK is the most fractious political issue of the age, and getting more so. So the King has chosen to put his Royal thumb on the scale: he has picked a side in the upcoming Second English Civil War, and his subjects should take the fool at his word.
By the way, revisiting those long-ago examples from Brussels, Malmö and Lille, one is struck by their comparative triviality. But, because nothing was done when the provocations were trivial, they are now rather less so. A man has lost his hand and a teenager is in critical condition after two machete attacks in Melbourne shopping centres; a twelve-year-old girl was raped repeatedly in the flat above a Birmingham supermarket where he was working illegally by a chap called (go on, take a wild guess) Mohammed Wahid Mohammed; and an American woman is on trial in Germany because, after an Eritrean migrant began groping her buttocks, she exercised what she carelessly assumed to be her right to self-defence.
But the good news is that Minneapolis will be getting a Somali mayor and Oxford has an Islamic Centre opened by the King.
The political class has repealed the Battle of Poitiers. If you want some actual good news, try Poland, where over the weekend mass demonstrations against immigration took place in eighty cities. Because they don't want to be like Oxford, or Minneapolis or Melbourne or Your Town Here... Even in beleaguered England, something is changing - because his rudest subjects grasp something their moron monarch doesn't: they don't have to "broaden their understanding" of Islam because they live with it every day, in the filth and squalor of their cities, in their diminished status in their own ancient communities, in the state's indifference to the sexual assaults on their daughters... The King, his ministers and his judges did this to you: It is time to draw the logical conclusion, and act accordingly.
There is nothing unpredictable about any of this. The clan and the tribe are the oldest societal organising principles on the planet. They pre-date democracy, and they will outlast it. Indeed, where polities have competing identity groups, democracy inevitably degenerates into tribalism: see Ulster, Quebec, Fiji - all of which are relatively benign examples compared to what lies ahead for Minnesota, Sweden and Austria.
Eventually, even Minnesota, where every white liberal is below average, will figure it out. The only question is whether it will be too late.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with my column on the pushback against migrant predators. On Saturday my weekend music show leaned heavily to the distaff, remembering three great female singers plus Mauritius's all-time great sister-act. Rick McGinnis's movie date offered The Day The Earth Stood Still, while my Sunday Song of the Week remembered the early work of Alan Bergman, who died on Thursday. Our marquee presentation was our seventy-second Tale for Our Time, Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness. Click for Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten. Part Eleven airs tonight at SteynOnline.
If you were too busy this weekend opening the new Islamic centre in Dead Moose Junction, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.