Welcome to Part Eleven in our ongoing audio adaptation of a favourite book among Steyn readers: America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, in the run-up to its twentieth anniversary.
Last week, I noted the meltdown of the Kevin Roberts regime at the Heritage Foundation. (Since then our friend Michele Bachmann has quit.) So I posted a few moments from my one-and-only appearance at the Heritage Foundation almost two decades ago. Viewers seemed to enjoy it, so we thought we'd dust off a second excerpt. Here I am in Washington DC in January 2007:
Re Russia, the Ukraine war is the first between two nations with deathbed demography. The bad news for Ukraine is that its demographics are somewhat worse, which is why the longer it goes on the less likely it is that that poor country will ever recover. One should also note that, as John Derbyshire used to point out, these are the two most corrupt white nations on earth - which is why stories like this are entirely predictable.
On this weekend's episode of America Alone, we begin a series of episodes on post-Christian Europe and the vacuum in which Islam has incubated. Muslims are a self-segregating segment of the population, and from England to Minnesota are now leveraging that into specifically Muslim political organisations. On the other hand, in certain respects, they are ingeniously assimilated. Here's me twenty years ago:
Muslims have assimilated brilliantly when it comes to mastering the principal discourse of the advanced democratic state – the legalisms, victimology and entitlement culture. Here are two small foot-of-the-page news items: First, a decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court as reported by The Boston Herald:
'The state's highest court has ruled that the state prison system has failed to justify denying a Muslim inmate special feast-day meats, such as oxen and camel...'
The Third Infantry Division has to make do with MREs, but a Muslim prisoner can sue because they're not serving him camel. Meanwhile, in Britain they're rebuilding half the bathrooms in Her Majesty's Prisons because Muslim inmates have complained that the toilets face Mecca and that therefore they're obliged to ride side saddle, which can be very uncomfortable.
(I subsequently put a variant of the latter, en passant, into The Prisoner of Windsor.)
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Eleven of America Alone simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
~If you prefer more fictional fancies of a weekend, we have a 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 Twelve of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.