Programming note: Please join me later today for our weekend music show, Mark Steyn on the Town, which airs on Serenade Radio every Saturday at 5pm GMT - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
The unravelling of the world continues:
~Er, so Arab nations no longer want their children studying at Oxford and Cambridge because England's too full of crazy Muslims...
Absolutely insane headline https://t.co/mZRezpmau8
— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 9, 2026
~Our friend Naomi Wolf - when she's right she's right:
Okay, I'll just say it. I've seen enough videos of the faces of liberal white women in conflict with @ICE, to know what is up. Liberal men at this point (sorry) are disproportionately estrogenized, physically passive, submissive due to woke gender hectoring, or porn-addicted. White liberal women are disproportionately sexually frustrated. Policing others as in the pandemic was an outlet for them, but it was not nearly enough. The smiles you see on their faces now say it all: white women long for all out combat with ICE - who tend to be strong, physically confident, masculine men - because the conflict is a form of physical release for them. They long for actual kinetic battle and it will get even uglier.
For example:
3/ And this: when have you seen that look before? In the first scene of a meet cute rom-com: pic.twitter.com/25sQMmy6Zh
— Dr. Naomi Wolf. 8 NYT Bestsellers. DPhil, Poetry. (@naomirwolf) January 10, 2026
What's playing out on the streets of American cities can't be encompassed by even the broadest definition of politics. As I wearily repeat, we have made a society of men that women don't want, and women that any prudent man would wish to keep at a safe distance. The only "strong, physically confident, masculine men" among the Resistance are the psychotrannies.
This seems sure to end well.
~Iran? I am reluctant to get too excited over the supposedly impending fall of the mullahs, because we have been here too many times before. But, for those old enough to recall the events of forty-seven Januaries ago, it's all weirdly parallel, except with the roles of the principals reversed:
*In early January 1979, there were plans for the Shah's departure; now there are plans for the Ayatollah's;
*In 1979, the mobs were demanding the return of the current Ayatollah's predecessor; now they're demanding the return of the late Shah's son:
Iranian anti-regime protesters have taken over large parts of the city of Yazd tonight.
They can be heard chanting:
"Long Live the Shah" pic.twitter.com/RQ2nXaagAS
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) January 10, 2026
*In January 1979 the Shah's regime thought they could just about hold the lid on things with the appointment of a new PM with sufficient reformist credentials: Shahpour Bakhtiar, nice chap, but he lasted a month and was subsequently murdered in Paris by Khomeini's goons.
Right now the IRGC are surely casting about for their own post-Khamenei figure, and it will work out about as well for the poor boob...
~The Pentagon's current annual budget is $900 billion - which accounts for a third of the entire planet's military spending. Which is now $2.7 trillion, apparently a world record. The US is Number One, of course, and spends more than the rest of the Top Ten combined - that's China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, UK, Japan, Australia, France and Ukraine.
I thought this was ludicrous back in After America, when the Pentagon budget was a mere 600 billion dollars, all of them borrowed: Yeah!!! If you don't got it, flaunt it, baby! And then leave it behind for the Taliban...
Still, at least it's taken a decade-and-a-half for the Pentagon to amp it up by fifty per cent.
Trump proposes massive increase in 2027 defense spending to $1.5T, citing 'dangerous times'
So one year's "increase" is now more than the entire 2010 Pentagon budget. But, then as now, it's 600 billion Washington doesn't have, so some things never change. On the assumption that it will simply be added to the existing global total, the Pentagon will now account for half the planet's entire military spending, and the annual rise will be more than the rest of the Top Five's combined total budgets. If you don't got it, flaunt it even more, baby!!!!!
The commentators tell us that imperialism is expensive. It didn't used to be. Bismarck was so contemptuous of London's military budget that, asked what he'd do if the British Army invaded, he replied that he'd send the Hamburg police to arrest them. Until 1956, the UK governed the Sudan - then the largest country in Africa - with about 300 administrators. For purposes of comparison, that's less than half the administrators of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.
As to "dangerous times", why exactly are they dangerous? Certainly not because the Pentagon has been underfunded this last quarter-century. In Afghanistan, the world's most lavishly funded soldiery took a leisurely twenty years to lose to goatherds with fertiliser. After a twenty-minute tea-break, Thoroughly Modern Milley and the rest of the Joint Buffoons of Staff then launched a proxy war against a supposedly busted-arse loser spending a sixth of what Washington blows through, and four years later, as I write, in sub-zero Kiev half of the apartment houses have no light or heat and Lviv in the far west is being hit by hypersonic missiles.
The problem at the Pentagon is not lack of money but, in part, far too much of it. Which corrodes any clear thinking. Yes, the times are dangerous, and, if you're banking on world war breaking out this August, a $1.5 trillion military budget might conceivably be passed off as sensible and necessary. But not if you fight wars the way the Pentagon does while your principal rival - China - gobbles up real estate all over the map without firing a shot.
On the other hand, the US National Security Strategy argues that pretty much all its allies are facing within a few years what it calls "civilisational erasure". Is the plan to hunker down in Fortress America so we need to invest a big hunk of cash in developing the technology for a continent-sized version of Israel's Iron Dome?
There's a lot we're not being told here. And I'd buy the 9-D chess moves more easily if the President weren't still spending so much time with Lindsey Graham, member of the Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise, albeit with none of the wisdom.
But the fact is that next year's Pentagon budget will be the same size as the whole planet's military spending just a decade ago. For a government that has to pay back forty trillion just to get back to having zero-nada-zip in its pocket, that's madness.
As to "civilisational erasure", I agree. But that can only be reversed, as America Alone argued twenty sod-bollocking years ago, by will and cultural confidence. No sign of that in Europe - and in America a Pentagon budget this bloated is more likely to obstruct it.
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