Programming note: Tonight, Mark will be back here with another episode in our current Tales for Our Time for Mark Steyn Club members: The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie.
~Okay, it's official now. When the Next Thing hits, they're gonna do to you what they did five years ago, only harder and faster:
Evidence from a 'modelling study'
— Dr Aseem Malhotra (@DrAseemMalhotra) November 20, 2025
Is this a joke ? Such models aren't even in the hierarchy of evidence based medicine. Also what about the infinitely more harmful collateral damage of lockdowns?
'Shame on you and your inquiry Lady Hallett' https://t.co/mxpIXSPUic https://t.co/nSfDMoYu2v
So, per "Baroness" Hallett, the Lockdown Model is now and forever. I am not (yet) saying that baronesses should be hunted down in the street and hanged from lampposts, but I am saying that, when I take office as prime minister, my ministry's first action will be to repeal the 1958 Peerages Act.
~Elsewhere, all is demography:
This broke my brain.
From $3 million to $399 million in 5 years and nobody flagged it until now? https://t.co/EgjlcPK4xm
— Undead FOIA 3.0 (@UndeadFoia) November 20, 2025
The Wanker Right thinks that, simply by setting foot on American soil, a Somali clitoridectomist becomes a devotee of the Federalist papers. The Somali clitoridectomist thinks that, au contraire, simply by setting foot on American soil in sufficient numbers, America becomes more Somali. Which would you bet on? From City Journal:
Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone...
In many cases, the fraud has allegedly been perpetrated by members of Minnesota's sizeable Somali community. Federal counterterrorism sources confirm that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab. As one confidential source put it: "The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer."
Al-Shabaab is the biggest Islamic terrorist group in East Africa, which would seem an odd priority for the famously nice Minnesotans. SteynOnline has at least one reader in Kenya who is the survivor of a cross-border al-Shabaab terror attack. I am not sure what I am supposed to do about such provocations, other than form a paramilitary wing and blow up everyone in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. In the alternative, perhaps Garrison Keillor could introduce a firebreathing imam or two to the cast of Lake Wobegon.
~More demography. Commentary's Seth Mandel writes:
Yesterday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott took it a step further by designatingCAIR, which had been named an unindicted coconspirator in a 2007 terrorism-financing case, as a terrorist organization. CAIR respondedon X with a post that paraded the morally degraded hallmarks of the organization for all to see:
"Greg Abbott is an Israel First politician who has spent months stoking anti-Muslim hysteria to smear American Muslims critical of the Israeli government... Unlike Mr. Abbott—who unleashed violence against Texas students protesting the Gaza genocide to satisfy his AIPAC donors—our civil rights organization is an independent voice that answers to the American people."
CAIR doing its best Nick Fuentes impression is as good an example of the "horseshoe effect" as one will find.
Not quite. It's not really a "horseshoe effect": it's an entirely rational alliance between the "progressive" left and the incoming demographic reality. The ADL and the Rest of the West's Official Jews supported the importation of large numbers of people who are somewhat antipathetic to Jews, to put it at its mildest - or, to put it more realistically, hate Jews for being Jews. And now you're surprised that the Jews' demographic eclipse in the west has not been accompanied by millions of "assimilated" Muslims pining for a revival of Fiddler on the Roof? It has been obvious to any creature more sentient than an earthworm that this is the last generation of Jewish life in London, Paris, Montreal and elsewhere. But the loss of the planet's most Jewish city outside Israel still seems to baffle people who can't understand why Ed Koch is no longer mayor.
From the widely cancelled music-biz Jewess Eve Barlow:
At the historic Park East synagogue, an orthodox place of worship, a center for Jewish life, and a day school, a group of 200 keffiyeh-wearing, placard holding, blood-libel screaming ghouls turned up last night to intimidate and terrorize Jewish civilians attending an event inside. They showed up at a Jewish house of worship in 2025 to scream obscenities at attendants and heckle them. They promised to "take another settler out." Urging to globalize the intifada, and pump up "resistance", the violent mob of hundreds of "anti-Israel activists" (bitch, please) brought their Palestine flags and their tribal drums to warn the Jews not to gather. "We need to make them scared!!!" they repeated.
As a leader of the protest instructed his followers: "It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events."
Them. Who is them? Them is us. Primarily, them is the Jewish people. But them is also the people who won't tolerate this hate.
That made sense forty years ago. But in the new America "us" is old and demographically fading, and "them" is fleecing you to fund al-Shabaab.
~More demography. From Statistics Canada:
- In 2024, more than two in five newborns (42.3%) in Canada had a foreign-born mother ...a proportion that has nearly doubled in just over a quarter of a century (22.5% in 1997).
- The adjusted proportion of foreign-born women among women of childbearing age was estimated at 32.3% in the 2021 Census, slightly lower than the percentage of births to foreign-born mothers, which was 33.0% the same year. This trend has been observed in the last five censuses, suggesting that foreign-born women are more likely to give birth in Canada than Canadian-born women of the same age.
- Without the contribution of foreign-born mothers, the total number of births in Canada would have declined faster since 2010.
- Without the contribution of foreign-born individuals to births and deaths, natural increase in Canada would have been negative since 2022.
On those numbers, there is no Canada. It is not normal, five-hundred-and-twenty-eight years after Cabot landed on Henry VII's behalf in Newfoundland, to be dependent on what Statistics Canada euphemises as the "contribution" of foreign women. Whatever it is those mothers are "contributing" to, it's not anything recognisable as Canada.
~Yet more demography. In Germany, they're cancelling Christmas - because of the security costs:
Consider what is happening with Germany's Christmas markets. Known as Weihnachtsmärkte or Christkindlemarkt, these season-long festivals became an official German tradition in 1434. They run throughout the Advent season and are an intrinsic part of German culture and tourism, as tens of millions of tourists travel to Dresden, Munich, and numerous small towns to view ornate Nativity scenes and lights; enjoy mulled wine, fruitcake, candied almonds, and other regional food specialties; and shop for the wooden nutcrackers made famous by German artists.
But this year, the town of Overath cancelled its Christmas market. So did Kerpen. Dresden shuttered several of its smaller markets. These are not isolated decisions driven by declining interest. These cancellations represent something far more ominous: Western civilization surrendering public expressions of Christianity because the price of protecting citizens from Islamic terror has become prohibitive.
In Overath, organizers spent 18 months negotiating with city officials over who would cover security costs. The requirements were extensive — concrete barriers to stop vehicle attacks, surveillance systems, and armed guards stationed throughout the market. The city refused to contribute a single euro. Without funding for mandatory counter-terrorism measures, the organizers faced an impossible choice.
So, Christmas was cancelled.
Oddly enough, there was a time not so long ago when it was possible to hold a Christmas market without ten million euros' worth of Diversity bollards. Have they got them outside the other heritage sites yet? That mediaeval village church you never go to but find vaguely scenic when you drive past it once in a while? Enjoy it while you can. From a new report on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe:
Church arson attacks across Europe nearly doubled in 2024, part of a broader surge in anti-Christian hate crimes...
The spike in arson attacks is particularly prominent: A total of 94 arson incidents targeted churches and other Christian sites — one-third of which occurred in Germany.
France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and Austria recorded the highest number of anti-Christian incidents overall. While most attacks were directed at places of worship, OIDAC Europe recorded 274 personal attacks against Christians in 2024, including assaults and threats.
Among the report's findings are several severe cases, including the killing of a 76-year-old monk in Spain in November 2024 and the near-destruction of a historic church in Saint-Omer, France, by fire in September 2024...
To reprise an old line of mine, when you lose your future, you also lose your past.
~Stop me if you've heard this one before, but from The Asia Sentinel:
China's leaders have known for some time that they have a demographics problem, with their concern growing at the threat to future prosperity and dynamism. The population decline is set to accelerate, with China's male-female imbalance presenting limiting factors not faced by the rest of Asia.
The median age is already 40.2, nearly the same as older developed countries such as the UK (40.8) and higher than the United States at 38.5. China's fertility rate appears to be about 1.1, or half the population replacement level.
Don't you love these experts? Alternatively, you could have read a certain "niche Canadian" two sodding decades ago:
Will China be the hyperpower of the 21st century? Answer: No. Its population will get old before it's got rich.
As to "China's male-female imbalance", the "niche Canadian" was likewise on top of that twenty sod-bollocking years ago:
Since China introduced its 'one child' policy in 1978, the imbalance between the sexes has increased to the point where in today's generation there are 119 boys for every 100 girls. The pioneer generation of that male surplus are now adults. Unless China's planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what's going to happen to those young men?
Since I wrote that paragraph, an entire generation of young Chinese has grown up. Among Chinamen (I use the term advisedly) under thirty, there are thirty-four million more men than women.
Is China's demographic decline good news for the west? No. As I also wrote all those bloody years ago, it means it has a compelling incentive to act sooner rather than later - with respect to Taiwan and much else.
~In a democratic age, how do you buck demography? The options aren't pleasant. But I notice that, in a British context, the two principal beneficiaries of public policy these last thirty years are the IRA and Islam - because the state fears them both. There's a lesson there.
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