Programming note: Our Clubland Q&A returns tomorrow. Please join me on 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:
~Political experts assure us that "normie" voters dislike chaos and disorder - such as seeing your city aflame every night or washed-up cable hosts busting into your church service to plug their "subscribe" buttons:
It's hard to narrow down the worst thing that Don Lemon did yesterday. But it might be this moment, when after the church pastor asked Lemon to leave -- he asks for "likes" and "subscribes" to his monetized YouTube channel from inside the church. https://t.co/Qu8vSyFDsa
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) January 19, 2026
Mr Lemon says it's okay to smash up your Christian observances if he thinks you're "entitled":
— EducatëdHillbilly™ (@RobProvince) January 19, 2026
Voters dislike chaos that continues unpunished, and will blame the politicians they regard as responsible. In a highly centralised system such as France's, that would be the president. In a federal system, the public has a choice: is it the president's fault? or is it the insurrectionist governor's and mayor's? I hope Trump calculates the disposition of this question correctly. In 2020 he did not, contenting himself with lamely tweeting scenes of horror followed by the words "Law and order!" in all-caps.
~Speaking of law and the prevailing order, Truman in 1948 excoriated the "do-nothing Congress", which in fact passed over nine hundred bills. This last year the Republican Party has controlled both the House and the Senate and its do-nothing Congress has given us a total of sixty-nine laws, such as the Alaska Native Village Municipal Lands Restoration Act and the Salem Maritime National Historical Park Redesignation and Boundary Study Act - both of which, as you'll surely recall, Trump spent 2024 campaigning very heavily on. This is the point at which I usually say "When Democrats win, they're in power; when Republicans win, they're in office", but I'm not sure the Salem Native Village Historical Boundary Redesignation Restoration Study Act rises even to that level. The thoroughly Mitch McConnellised Congressional GOP has spent the last year sitting on its hands, and refused to enact into law the Trump agenda, which is why we have domestic policy by executive order and foreign policy by tariffs.
~I have talked on and off over the years about the outrageous targeting by the state and its corporate allies of Peter Brimelow's now deceased VDare website. So I was interested to watch this appearance by Peter on Tucker's show (following hard on the heels of his interview with dear Eva of "Generation Remigration"). The broadcast is principally about immigration, of course, but Mr Brimelow's discussion of how Conservative Inc operates is not unrelated to the GOP's current "do-nothing Congress":
Thirty years ago William F. Buckley banished Peter Brimelow from Con Inc. for saying that immigration was destroying the country. Turns out Brimelow was right.
Chapters:
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) January 19, 2026
(0:00) It's Time to Rethink Immigration
(4:11) How William Buckley Jr. Stabbed Brimelow in the Back
(13:44)... pic.twitter.com/TWz7up1qBz
~Above, Tucker blithely remarks en passant that white people are in danger of becoming "virtually extinct". That is, as a point of fact, statistically unarguable: as a certain "niche Canadian" wrote two sodding decades ago, forget the three-toed Latin-American tree sloth; whites should be on the endangered-species list. Some readers regard my demographic maunderings as faintly depressing, but, actually, my demonisation of Islam is less pessimistic than the alternative, which is to demonise whitey. Courtesy of the UK Office of National Statistics:
Around one in three pregnancies now ends in abortion.
That would give Britain the highest abortion rate in ...the P5 of the UN Security Council? Yeah. The G7? Ditto. Nato? You got it. In fact, it's the highest abortion rate in the developed world, up there with South Africa, which is rapidly undeveloping, and Burkina Faso, which has always been what the former Aussie Foreign Minister Alexander Downer described to me as "a busted-arse country".
In entirely unrelated news, the fertility rate has fallen to a record low. In England and Wales it's now 1.41 births per woman, which is well below the demographic stability rate of 2.1. So the Wanker Class continue to insist that's why we need "migrants" to prop up the economy, because to the geniuses of Davos great nations are no more than cookie-cutter GDPistans.
However, if one were to add the one-in-three aborted babies to that 1.41, you'd get a fertility rate of, er ...2.15! Hey presto! Problem solved, and without the need for a single Afghan translator or Sudanese clitoridectomist. Let's try and keep the abortion question morally neutral for a moment, because, as Don Lemon would say, all you God-botherers who believe life begins at conception are just entitled white supremacists. As that very same niche Canadian wrote twenty-three sod-bollocking years ago, even if you believe in "a woman's right to choose"...
The state has no interest in promoting it generally.
And yet they still do. Gee, it's almost as if the the master plan all along was to drive the races that built the modern world to extinction.
I don't suppose the women of England and Wales game it out terribly rationally, but cumulatively they seem to be having difficulty coming up with an answer to: Why would you want to bring a baby into today's United Kingdom? And so they're all voting with their foetus - a cheap gag I first used the usual two sodding decades ago, but back then it was about Russia.
I shall say more about this in the days ahead. It'll make America Alone look like The Morecamne & Wise Christmas Show.
~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.
