I hope our American and Canadian readers had a good Labor/Labour Day weekend. Herewith, a brisk survey of the passing scene:
~Today the 47th president appeared, finally, to break with the 45th president on what he had continued to insist was his great achievement - the Covid vaccines:
This makes me want to cry. Thank you @POTUS.
— Mary Talley Bowden MD (@MdBreathe) September 1, 2025
Finally. pic.twitter.com/eUPOLnZZQ0
As RFK Jr and I have discussed, Americans are the most medicated population on earth: it seems to be pretty lousy for, among others, life expectancy, childhood obesity, and ameliorating the homicidal urges of the transgender community. Yet the Covid vaccine then took universal unneeded medication to the next level, brilliantly distilled by the sinister Teutonic happy-ending aficionado Klaus Schwab:
Until everyone is jabbed, no one is safe. There has to be a reckoning for that kind of madness. Otherwise, they'll do it again. And sooner than you think.
~A useful tip re the rapidly shifting Overton window on the dispossession of European peoples in their native lands: If someone uses the word "integration" with a straight face, he's a wanker and you need pay him no further heed. If he's a dinner guest, call an Uber and show him the door. "Integration" might have been a swell idea in, oh, 1972, 1968, but we are way beyond that now. If Muslims were disinclined to "integrate" when they were 0.0001 per cent of the population, they're certainly not going to feel any pressure to do so when, as in Brussels, they're just shy of half the population. As has been obvious to any creature more sentient than an earthworm for two decades, on that demographic trajectory you'll wind up "integrating" with them. Me fourteen sodding years ago:
A society that becomes more Muslim will have fewer homosexuals. In 2009, the Rainbow Palace, formerly Amsterdam's most popular 'homo-hotel' (in the Dutch vernacular), had announced it was renaming itself the Sharm and reorienting itself to Islamic tourism. Or as the felicitously named website allah.eu put it: 'Gay Hotel Turns Muslim.'
That's simple arithmetic: Gay hotel turns Muslim. Munich beer garden turns Muslim. Abba tribute band turns Muslim. And yet, even as the brave ladies on the streets of Epping have moved the meter, the pseudo-conservatives of the so-called mainstream insist on trying to move it back: see the allegedly eminent historian Robert Tombs cooing in the Telegraph over hijabbed schoolgirls reciting Kipling as a triumph of "integration". The loser right still bleating about "values" and "integration" in 2025 are buying their societies a one-way ticket on the oblivion express.
Tombs's argument that anyone can be English rang a bell with me. When I was still in short trousers, a condescending schoolmaster inquired about my ethnic composition, so I told him. "Well," he said, "you can be British but you can never be English."
Which seemed little more to me than a statement of the obvious. At that time, a quarter of the world were nominally British subjects; page three of my passport declared in bold face "A Canadian citizen is a British subject"; the Aussies couldn't wait till page three and stuck it on the front cover: "BRITISH PASSPORT: Australia." But Englishness is perforce more specific. In that sense, Tombs's example of integration is an odd one: Kipling was born in Bombay, launched his career in Lahore, married an American and spent half his life outside England, living in Vermont and what are now India and Pakistan. All that makes him English is that he is of English stock, born to Yorkshire parents who conducted their courtship at Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire: it's an ethnic identity.
But then Tombs is the quintessential English bluffer, so I doubt he reads much - if any - Kipling. Since I linked to our show on Recessional, many readers have emailed to suggest we do this one next. Perhaps Robert Tombs could teach it to the covered women:
The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk—
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell.
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control—
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf—
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.
Right now across England the great-grandchildren's teeth are set on edge, and yet the loser right still can't hear the grinding. They have nothing useful to contribute, alas.
The picture above is my second favourite photograph of the great Leilani Dowding flaunting the flag of England. It's not just Leilani:
An official press statement from the local residents of Epping and the message reads SAVE OUR CHILDREN and maybe @elonmusk could help #sendthemhome pic.twitter.com/xY6KDYlwES
— Young Bob (@YoungBobTPUK) August 31, 2025
The assertion of a specifically English identity is one of the most heartening phenomena of the summer, which is why Sir Keir is taking time out of his generous patronage of fetching Ukrainian twinks to crush the Cross of St George. The state's hostility to the English flag (town and county authorities are now offering free counselling to those traumatised by its sudden re-emergence) is like nothing seen in the British Isles since the 1954 Flags and Emblems (Display) Act at Stormont. And we know how that worked out.
~Last week a disaffected transgender opened fire on a Minneapolis Catholic school. The psychotranny is one of the many new exciting identities of our age, but the somnolent American media appear to have no interest in covering the subject. They persist, quite fraudulently, in referring to Robin Westman as "she", even though Mr Westman himself renounced his trannification pre-bloodbath:
Minneapolis school shooter Robin Westman confessed he was 'tired of being trans': 'I wish I never brain-washed myself'
True, he wanted to be a girl, but he came to understand that he wasn't: "I just know I cannot achieve that."
Ah, but what does he know? "Self-identifying" is all very well, until you decide you'd like to self-identify back to where you were. So, at The New York Times, NPR et al, Mr Westman is she-her through all eternity.
If I were a Minnesota reporter, I would be interested to know what irreversible procedures Mr Westman had been signed up for (to bring us back to my opening point about over-medicalisation) because the realisation that one is now, say, impotent for life because of a passing adolescent phase would be tough for any young man or woman. "Gender-affirming care" turned out to be not so affirming.
~We had a busy Labor Day/Labour Day weekend at SteynOnline, starting with our observances on the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. On Saturday there was the latest edition of Mark's weekend music show, while Rick McGinnis's movie date was Mommie Dearest. For the holiday itself, Steyn presented a special edition of The Mark Steyn Show - including a brand new episode of The Hundred Years Ago Show.
If you were too busy this weekend trying to recite Kipling in a burqa, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
