Welcome to Part Nine in our new audio adaptation of a favourite book among SteynOnline readers: America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. On this weekend's episode, some thoughts from twenty years ago on proximity:
In 2005, I had lunch with someone who'd just bought a photograph of Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural. "There they all are," he said. "Look." And he pointed to a vaguely familiar figure in the crowd just a few feet from the President: John Wilkes Booth. And then his finger zipped over the photo picking out the other conspirators standing around Lincoln and already well advanced in what was then a plot merely to kidnap him. March 4th 1865, a rainy Saturday in Washington, and the chief of state is giving his speech unaware that he's in the last six weeks of his life and that he's surrounded by the group of men who will end it.
Proximity is all. If they can't get to you, they can't get you. Most of us locate our fears on the far horizon – like the old maps where the known world dribbles away and the cartographer scrawls "Here be dragons". Sometimes, as Lincoln learned, the problem's right there standing next to you.
Well, the dragons are no longer at the edge of the map. Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Nine of America Alone simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
"If they can't get to you, they can't get you." But it is the genius of an entire generation of the western uniparty - from Bush and Biden to Chirac and Macron - to have enabled them to get to you, every day of the week. Nineteen years ago, in an otherwise favourable review of America Alone, the late Martin Amis argued that I write "like a madman" - because who else would think it seemly to write of 24/7 jihad in terms of old Dean Martin gags - like Dino staggering blearily onto the stage, staring out at the audience, and wondering, "How did all these people get in my room?"
In fact, that's as pithy a distillation as any of the existential question facing the entire western world:
How did all these people get in my room?
A successful local businessman went to Lloyds Bank in Derby in the English Midlands and got fatally stabbed in a random attack by a Somali "asylum-seeker". For going to a High Street bank. How did Haybe Cabdiraxmaan Nur get in your room? Well, last year he paid 400 euros to some people-smuggler to travel to the UK. He was "known to police" in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, but hey, that's only four sovereign states, so no reason not to let him in, right?
There are thousands upon thousands of Haybe Cabdiraxmaan Nurs that an evil bipartisan leadership class from Heseltine and Blair to Johnson and Starmer let in to stab you and rape your children. Carl Benjamin rounds up a few from recent days:
How did all these people get in my room? Nations are not meant to live like this - for the very obvious reason that they cannot live like this. So the only question is: what's the stage after all the vibrant diversity? Unless you're holed up in "Lord" Heseltine's Banbury estate, it will be bloody and ugly.
For increasing numbers, it already is. Ten people were stabbed on a train in Cambridgeshire last night. The arrested men are said to be "British nationals" - a term of art which can be deployed to suit whatever the needs of the moment, given that the 1948 British Nationality Act made close to a quarter of the world's population "British nationals". Not only Mark Carney, Jacinda Ardern and Sir Anerood Jugneuth but also Barack Obama, Ted Cruz and Kamala Harris were all "born British nationals", as the copper put it at the press conference. Still the BBC's Sima Kotecha is congratulating the constabulary on their transparency:
Police guidance encourages forces to disclose these details, especially after the spread of dangerous misinformation following the 2024 Southport murders.
At the time, a post on social media said the suspect was a Muslim immigrant - a claim that was entirely false and triggered riots.
"Entirely false"? Well, he attends mosque in prison and his parents were immigrants. So that's closer than the BBC and Merseyside Police got.
The increasingly worthless Spectator is now calling for airport security on rural trains. So it's the train's fault. I'll stick with Dean:
How did all these people get in my room?
~If you prefer more fictional fancies of a weekend, we have a brand new Tale for Our Time - from the day before yesterday in a lost Europe: Agatha Christie's Murder on the Links. Not in the mood for Hercule Poirot? Well, there are spy thrillers, comedy classics, tales of horror and historical romance and much more, all over at our Tales for Our Time home page. If you've a friend who might be partial to our six-dozen-plus cracking capers, we have a special Gift Membership that, aside from audio capers, also includes video poetry, live music and more. And I'll be doing a live-performance Tale for Our Time at sea on the next Mark Steyn Cruise - sailing aboard the Queen Mary 2.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to America Alone but to over seventy audio adventures in Tales for Our Time. Please join me next weekend for Part Nine of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
