Greetings from Provence, where my doctors are still trying to "stabilise" me. You'll be glad to hear that I remain profoundly unstable - possibly because, whenever I briefly emerge from the haze of medication, I find my in-box full of urgent requests to know what I make of what Mark Levin said about what Candace Owens said about what Ben Shapiro said about what Megyn Kelly said about what Josh Hammer said about what Tucker Carlson said to Nick Fuentes.
I haven't appeared on American TV or radio in over four years and, aside from random three-in-the-morning PBS reruns of BBC music specials I made forty years ago, doubt I ever will again. So I don't regard my correspondents' demands as a profitable use of my time.
However, I will say this. It should be stark staring obvious why Nick Fuentes has salience among millions of young white men. I will try not to over-nuance things. So here it is in an upcoming SteynOnline T-shirt slogan:
Everything is crap.
Yeah, yeah, I know it's not so crap if, like Kevin Roberts, you've got a million-bucks-a-year gig at a think-tank with "heritage" in the name. But, (to modify the current sneer) if you're pale and male yet not so stale in New York or California or some once-functional nowheresville like Dead Moose Junction and you're wondering where all the actual heritage went, the crapness of everything is pretty omnipresent.
What has this to do with Nick Fuentes' deep thoughts on how "f**king cool" Hitler is? I have no great insights into the cool of Der Führer. My mother didn't think Hitler was f**king cool, because, in the early months of the war, he bombed her girls' elementary school and, shortly thereafter, occupied her unimportant Flemish town for the next five years, condemning her to a childhood policed by the Gestapo.
But that's all a long time ago, isn't it?
Mr Fuentes is a fifth of my age, but even I find it odd to hear Mark Levin at the Republican Jewish Coalition roaring on about how well Churchill and Roosevelt worked together - as I would have found it odd in the 1940s to hear him roaring on about how well Andrew Johnson and the fourteenth Earl of Derby worked together, if indeed they did. With the best will in the world, you can't keep the World War Two victory parade marching on forever.
Yet VE Day remains what comic-book fans call the "origin story" of the modern world. The lessons allegedly learned from that conflict led, abroad, to the creation of the transnational institutions - the UN, EU, Nato - and, at home, to the massive expansion of the welfare state and the opening of the west's borders to anyone who could get here. To demonstrate how much we'd learned the lessons of the Holocaust, Christendom invited in millions of people whose only problem with the Holocaust is that the Germans didn't get to finish it. Which is why today Jews can't attend a tennis match in Malmö or a footie match in Birmingham or, increasingly, a regular state school in France and Denmark.
That seems an odd consequence of our tremendous victory in World War Two, don't you think? But wait: maybe what's true for European Jews is true for the winners more generally. To the victor the spoils? Alas, no: To the victors all is spoilt. When I was a kid, every middle-aged man in the pub had fought in "the war" and every old man had fought in the First War. The latter are all gone now, and the former are very few in number, and a striking percentage - maybe a majority - of those left seem to regard their comrades' sacrifice as a waste of time:
'What we fought for was our freedom, even now [the country] is worse than it was when I fought for it,' says 100-year-old World War II Veteran Alec Penstone. pic.twitter.com/M9HSsS5sIW
— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) November 7, 2025
The presenters' panicked reaction to Mr Penstone wandering off-script is very noticeable: he was supposed to be there just for a slice of heartwarming old cootery before bringing on the D-Day Darlings to sing "(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) the White Cliffs of Dover". True, he didn't explicitly state "There'll be firebreathing imams over the White Cliffs of Dover" or "There'll be trannified schoolgirls over the White Cliffs of Dover", but, whatever was on his mind as his nineteen-year-old self was minesweeping off the coast of Normandy on D-Day, it seems unlikely it could have conjured a vision of the future as wretched and worthless as the rapey-stabby England of 2025.
To reprise: everything is crap. And, whether you're a centenarian who fought Hitler or a Zoomer who digs Hitler, everyone can see it.
So, if the World War Two victory parade is the origin story of the modern world, to the point where Churchill and Hitler are the only historical figures anybody's ever heard of, how's that working out?
Well, oddly enough, the "post-war era" turns out to be the end-phase of western civilisation.
That's to say, absent a course-correction that will be more violent and convulsive the longer it is postponed (and, in the American context, assuming that the post-constitutional judiciary will permit the footling representatives of the even more footling people to take any such course) the entire western world is about to slide off the cliff. As I wrote eight sodding years ago in my review of Dunkirk:
They won the war, and lost their country anyway. Britain's new invaders arrive at Dover, and Heathrow and Gatwick, every day of the week, annexing territory and incubating therein the men who run you down on London bridges, and stab you in restaurants, and blow you up at pop concerts, and decapitate you in the streets. A little after mid-century, there'll still be bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover, but the 'white British' - ie, the men and women seen in this film - will be a minority in their own islands.
We now have chapter-and-verse on that: in the United Kingdom, it's estimated that Anglo-Celts will become a minority by 2063; in England it will be long before that; in London, Birmingham and Manchester, it's already happened. Across Christendom, France, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden are all in the same ballpark. The exceptions, curiously enough, are all on the other side of the Iron Curtain - Poland, Hungary, Croatia... Which may or may not explain Nick Fuentes' admiration for Stalin. But it certainly helps explain why mocking Fuentes for his Stalin fetish has proved such a weak attack line. It turns out it's easier to survive the Warsaw Pact than to survive the so-called "Free World".
If the death of western civilisation occurs on America's watch - indeed, during a period of supposed US global hegemony - that is the only thing anyone will remember about the American republic, not the brilliant constitution that district-court judges so enjoy driving a coach and horses through. As I had cause to ponder during my medical confinement in Trieste, the Venetian Republic lasted 1,100 years - and ninety-nine per cent of Americans have never heard of it. But, on present demographic and fiscal trends, that's four times longer than the United States is likely to make it. Here, for example, is New York City's first Muslim mayor acknowledging his winning coalition:
Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni Bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.
Are you one of those pale and male yet not so stale twentysomethings? Walk around New York: The Yemeni-Mexican-Senegalese-Uzbek-Trinidadian-Ethiopians are the future. And you're not.
It is interesting to hear the geniuses of Conservative Inc write off both the largest state and the largest city in the country as peripheral blue districts of no import. In reality, Mayor Mamdani's triumphant rainbow coalition of Uzbek bodega owners, Senegalese abuelas and Yemeni line cooks runs deep into the red zones too. But, if the imminent death of the west is too much of a late-season plot-twist for you, let's keep it all in the Con Inc-approved realm of homo economicus. From The New York Times:
First-Time Home-Buyers are Older Than Ever
That's to say, the median age of first-time property purchasers in the United States is at an all-time high: forty years old. On that statistic alone, there can be no "American Dream" - which is merely a romanticisation of the more mundane if fast vanishing concept of social mobility. Ultimately, it leads not just to no American Dream but to no Americans. A land of forty-year-old first-time home buyers is not good news for what VDare's Steve Sailer calls "affordable family formation". Indeed, it leads to smaller family formation: instead of three kids, you have two, or one ...or none, increasing what The Wall Street Journal and other "conservatives" will assure you is America's "need" for mass immigration.
So you will, like Alec Penstone, end your days in a wholly foreign land denied even the consolations of culture.
Like I said: everything is crap.
Oh, to be sure, many young persons - or, in fact, early middle-aged persons - are putting off first-home buying because they're staying in school until Grade Thirty-Three in order to make sure they're sufficiently qualified to get a job at the Heritage Foundation. Of course, millions of others are only going to college because a bachelor's degree is now the minimum entry-qualification regarded by prospective employers as stamping you safe to be hired for a pseudo-middle-class cubicle job. Absent a BA in Transgender and Colonialism Studies, you're condemned to labouring in the cheap service economy to which the Chamber of Commerce right has reduced a once great nation. And in which market one can always be effortlessly underbid, as Mr Mamdani's grim victory roll-call revels in.
"They won the war, and lost their country anyway."
I feel sorry for Alec Penstone. But he is a hundred years old and, while I wish him many happy returns, he is unlikely to outlive the Fuentes generation - the young men who are expected to sit and fester in the post-western craphole their elites have built for them. Some of them will blame Jews, just because throughout history that's what a percentage of people have always done. More of them will do Hitler shtick, just because the modern world's origin story - that young men stormed the beaches of Normandy in order to transform their countries into diversity dumps of stabbers and rapists - will become too obviously risible. It already is: Winston Churchill said we shall fight them on the beaches; his grandson Rupert Soames set up the highly lucrative business model whereby we welcome them on the beaches ...and then usher them to taxpayer-funded four-star hotels with three meals a day and complimentary cellphone. That's the story of the post-war west in three generations of one family.
Everything is crap. The Gatekeeper Right will not be able to hold the line on this.
~We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with recent developments in England's second (and ever more Islamised) city. On Saturday the latest edition of Mark's weekend music show started big and finished bigger, while Mark at the Movies considered Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk. Our Sunday Song of the Week marked the fiftieth anniversary of a famous shipwreck, and we also aired Part Ten of Mark's special twentieth-anniversary audio serialisation of his highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone. Our marquee presentation was our seventy-fourth Tale for Our Time, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Links: Click for Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten. Part Eleven airs tonight at SteynOnline.
If you were too busy this weekend wondering if Nick Fuentes finds the Kaiser cool and wondering why Mark Levin never calls out the Emperor Franz-Josef, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
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