Programming note: Our Clubland Q&A is back on its regularly scheduled day. Please join us tomorrow, Wednesday, for an hour of questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - that's 8pm Greenwich Mean Time/9pm Central European. We hope you can swing by.
A brisk survey of the passing scene:
~Hey, guys. Are you ready to start dating again?
Liberal White Women are getting crazier and crazier by the day.... pic.twitter.com/EwLvBFPkF5
— Brandon (@LibOrNormal) January 12, 2026
Où sont les bunny-boilers d'antan?
~Alternatively: Hey, guys. Are you ready to start dating again?
Gov. Walz on how he plans to handle Republicans during his final year:
"Expect for the next 11 months for me to ride you like you've never been ridden." pic.twitter.com/wkOihXuaeP
— Jenna Gloeb (@JennaReports) January 7, 2026
~Everything we do at this here shingle is all of a piece: the poems, the tales, the songs, and the big picture pieces on civilisational collapse. So a listener to our Saturday Sinatra Sextet asked me if I had any audio of Frank live in Tehran that I could play. To the best of my knowledge no such audio exists. And, if the Ayatollah ever came across a bootleg eight-track of the gig, he would doubtless have had it executed. Unlike, say, Mullah Omar, at whose abandoned compound were found CDs of Rod Stewart singing "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?", Khomeini took Islam's strictures very seriously.
So, in the absence of any actual audio, the Internet, being what it is, persists in trying to fake some into being. In the clip below, Empress Farah is genuine but the singing has been edited in from a decade later, a 1985 concert in Tokyo:
It was November 1975. A little over a decade later, I talked about it with longtime Sinatra pianist Bill Miller, who was conducting for Frank that night. Bill spoke of two concerts - the main one, before not quite a capacity crowd (because of long lines to get in) but over 24,000 people, which isn't bad for a peripheral Sinatra market; the second was a smaller show for the Shah and Tehran's smart set. I remember Bill saying the entire orchestra was flown in, mostly from America but with a few from London, such as saxophonist Vic Ash and trombonist Billy Lamb. Being unsure of the Persian dress code, Sinatra eschewed his regular black tie for a rare open-neck performance. But it is the girls in the audience who catch your eye - garbed no differently from their sisters in Vegas or Atlantic City:
Then came the after-show: A mere four years later, those who didn't manage to get out found themselves spending the next forty-six years-and-counting walled up in the Ayatollah's body bags - what the fearless Orianna Fallaci called, when she threw it at him, "this stupid mediaeval rag". And who wants to wear that to a Sinatra gig?
Oh, wait; you can't see Frank or anybody else at that stadium anymore: after 1979 the Islamic Republic banned all musical performances for over a decade, since when they've "relaxed" it if you can convince the relevant revolutionary council that "My Sharia Amour" is Islam-compliant.
Here's a member of the audience that night fifty years ago - Bahman Nassiri, author of The Golden Veil, but then a Tehran student in his early twenties with a too-tight tux who went to the gig by himself because he dug Sinatra. A fabulous looking gal slipped into the seat next to him. Young Bahman was instantly smitten, but the hottie was in fact from Savak, the Shah's security police, because Mr Nassiri was a mere ten yards from the Royal Box and his jacket was so obviously ill-fitting he stuck out suspiciously:
And so Bahman Nassiri began the great love of his life on the staircase of Sinatra's Tehran gig as Frank sang my way. In gratitude, Mr Nassiri now visits Frank's grave every month:
I do not know what awaits in Iran, but I look at those girls in the crowd in November 1975 and none of them conjured a future in which, a mere four years later, they'd be condemned to spend the peak perfection of their beauty under those "stupid mediaeval rags".
Do you prefer the Fab Four to Frank? To modify Paul McCartney, tomorrow came suddenly. This website is your one-stop shop for Sharia and Sinatra, because it's all connected.
~Speaking of "suddenly", as I noted yesterday:
Every organ of the British state - including some of the most famous institutions on the planet: Scotland Yard, the BBC, Buckingham Palace - has been captured by the enemies of England.
Indeed, they're so thoroughly captured that they're moving on to take the so-called "far-right" outposts such as Reform UK. Me just the day before yesterday:
Garton Ash's line is a good summation of the course the European political class has set: Steyn-type demographic wankery is a conspiracy theory ...but it's too late to do anything about it ...so a Euro-Muslim 'arc of partnership' is the 2025 future 'at its possible best'.
And here we are, with all his fellow members of the political class apparently signed on - from the leftie Starmer to the far-right fascist racist Farage, who in his own 'arc of partnership' has just picked a Muslim woman as his London mayoral candidate. There isn't really a lot of left vs right about any of this: Sir Paul Marshall, the bloke who owns almost all so-called 'conservative' institutions in the UK (The Spectator, Unherd, half of GB News, Jordan Peterson's ARC), is also the chap who introduced Farage to Zia Yusuf, who instantly became Nigel's anointed successor. Everyone seems to be on board with the Garton Ash plan. Which is why we are now in the last fifteen years (if that) of anything recognisable as 'the western world'.
Hence Nigel Farage's latest signing, the open-borders Muslim vax-fanatic Nadhim Zahawi, because that three-course set-menu is pretty much your future:
Another high profile Muslim & ex-Boriswave Tory Nadhim Zahawi defects to Reform UK.
— Dan Wootton (@danwootton) January 12, 2026
Please do not tell me this is not deliberate now.
Zahawi was also chief Covid vaccine pusher.
In July 2022 Farage slammed Zahawi to me on GB News for "climbing greasy pole" & lacking principles. pic.twitter.com/CUM1GgbBzR
So Farage, who is nothing if not flexible in all matters, has now turned on Steyn Show guest and his own Reform conference speaker Dr Aseem Malhotra:
No retreat, NO surrender in exposing the mass media incompetence, wilful blindness, cover up and downright lies. https://t.co/zCAuK2BcPK
— Dr Aseem Malhotra (@DrAseemMalhotra) January 12, 2026
As delineated in Nineteen Eighty-Four, managing the "news" in such an environment can sometimes require a touch of the ayatollah-esque. Before Elon Musk, "social media" insisted that even state-acknowledged "vaccine widows" such as Steyn Show guests Vikki Spit and Charlotte Wright be banned for peddling "disinformation" - that's to say, Twitter, Facebook et al can determine better than you whether or not you're a widow. After Elon Musk, things changed - which was not helpful to the government narrative, either on the Covid or the gang-rape.
As we have observed many times, in order to appease its ever more assertive Muslim constituency, His Britannic Majesty's Government at all levels is objectively pro-rape. You'll recall that a year ago there was a brief flurry of attention on the ruined lives of white working-class victims of Pakistani paedo rape gangs up and down what passes for the spine of England. That was because Mr Musk decided to Tweet about it. So Keir Starmer has now asked "Lord" Grade and Dame Melanie Dawes of Ofcom to ban X from the UK - ie, do to Elon what his "lordship" did to a certain "niche Canadian".
The pretext for this is that you can apparently use AI to create computer images of your favourite celebs in an underdressed state - Sidney Sweeney, Nancy Pelosi, whoever. So the PM has decided to act instantly to defend England's maidenhood from unwanted Grok bikini shots in order that he won't have to act at all to defend them from Pakistani rape clans. But the good news is that, under Sir Keir, these girls can go on being gang-sodomised, doused in petrol, dangled off balconies and fed into kebab mincers without having to worry about any embarrassing Tweets turning up on the Internet.
And the good news for England's depraved elite is that now there'll be an even more constricted and throttled London media - and even fewer stories about why Starmer is known throughout the extensive Mayfair escort community as the lousiest tipper of Ukrainian rent-boys:
Keir Starmer is a duplicitous bastard.
— Dan Wootton (@danwootton) January 9, 2026
He is attempting to shut down X for political reasons and because of his personal hatred of Elon Musk for exposing him.
Every person on the right must fight this with everything we've got.
What's left of our free speech is nearly gone.
Could be worse, Dan. In Australia it's not "nearly gone", it's over:
Australia will pass the "Toughest Hate Law ever seen" on Tuesday.
It's called the, "Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026".
Obviously this was always intended to target White Australians from discussing mass immigration.
TREASON❗️pic.twitter.com/QZ494LUKJy
— Dr Russell McGregor (@KillAuDeepState) January 12, 2026
So two Isis-affiliated Muslims shoot up Bondi Beach with guns licensed to them by Albanese's incompetent boobs ...and Albo's response is to pass a law making it illegal for Australians to call for the deportation of Islamic terrorists.
Tomorrow comes suddenly.
~Thank you to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club in this our ninth year, and thank you to those old members who signed up a chum for a Christmas Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
