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.
~As I was saying yesterday, it's Queers for Palestine all the way down - or, even more bizarrely, NPR Ladies d'un Certain Âge for Somali Daycare Fraudsters. Traditionally, the Chinese curse you to live in interesting times. On my first long-ago acquaintance with the Land of 10,000 Quality Learing Centers, Minnesota - like my neighbours across the Connecticut River in Vermont - appeared cursed to live in irredeemably boring times. If you were as skilled as the respective creators of the Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart sitcoms, you could parlay that into big bucks. But in neither state was it enough for the NPR types. So they decided to make their states "interesting" - and once "Somali daycare" becomes a common or garden expression there are no easy routes back.
Minneapolis in that sense can stand for almost the entire west. One expects what Sir Sadiq Khan calls a "great world city" such as London, or New York or Paris, to be vulnerable to a surfeit of diversity, but not Minneapolis or, a little east of me in Maine, Lewiston-Auburn. Yet it happened - and, as evidenced by the scenes on the streets, half your neighbours are willing to take a bullet to keep it happening.
If we could reduce, urgently, that deluded half to, say, a third, there might be a sporting chance of saving the western world. That is the existential question for all of us - whether enough of our kith will abandon enough of their fever dreams in enough time to enable enough of a course-correction. Speaking for myself, I hold the same views on public policy I held back in the disco era - except in two significant respects: a) flared trousers; b) the US military. As a foreigner, I had no grasp of quite how captured and corrupted was the Pentagon. So I am now in favour of not permitting America's soldiery to leave barracks except on day release - for three-hour dictator-kidnapping raids or a bit of nuclear bunker-busting. But I would not support any lengthier foreign warmaking until every single beribboned US commander from Victory Over Japan Day to Non-Victory Over Pushtun Goatherds Day is six feet under. For that reason, I view with grave misgivings this month's decision to increase the Pentagon's already bloated budget by over fifty per cent: insufficient of the folding stuff is not the reason why America's money-no-object military can't win a war.
And, in any case, the real battle is for the home front.
Yet, granted that exception, the reason I've become such a sod-bollocking bore is that I still believe the things I believed way back when. The same cannot be said for many of my former colleagues, and indeed sometime editors, from Max Boot, Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg in America to David Frum and Michael Coren in Canada and Boris Johnson and Charles Moore in Britain. Mr Kristol enjoyed my book so much he started teaching it to his college students - and then he and his chums decided to spend the last decade voting for Hillary, Kamala and the intervening Dead Husk of a Moth-Eaten Sock-Puppet. In fairness to Jonah Goldberg, he wrote a column declaring that he would not be voting for Kamala Harris because, as a resident of the District of Columbia, his ballot was superfluous to her requirements so he could afford to write in "Paul Ryan". But, warming to his theme, he said that, had he lived in a more evenly divided jurisdiction, he would have done as New Hampshire's most famous conservative did a cycle ot two earlier.
As PJ O'Rourke said when endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016, 'She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters.'
Which might make sense were it not for the fact that, as that book admired by Bill Kristol argued to no apparent avail, our world is no longer "within normal parameters". By mid-century, the peoples of most of the rest of the west face demographic dispossession in some of the oldest nation-states on the planet. America has a different history - or at any rate a different mythology - yet even here, in 1950, New York City was ninety per cent white; now it's thirty-three per cent and falling. Such a population evolution in the span of a single lifetime is not "within normal parameters" ouside of plague or conquest, and yet it has happened, to America's biggest city, to America's biggest state, and to a zillion less glittering jurisdictions in between.
So now the country's most famous "conservatives" have effortlessly expanded the norms of their parameters from Hillary to Kamala to Zohran:
Even Bill Kristol Says He Would Vote for Zohran Mamdani for NYC Mayor
These norms don't sound very normal to me. Immigration is at the root of pretty much everything everywhere - rising crime, wage stagnation, failing schools, dysfunction in the medical system, the unaffordability of first homes, later family formation if at all, Jew massacres on Bondi Beach, blonde gang-rapes in Sweden, pub closures in England...
In my book, I suggested that, in the old journalistic formula, the "who" was generally a better guide than the "what-when-where-why". Scandinavia has (or had) the least corrupt government on the planet because it is (or was) full of Scandinavians: once the Somali daycare kingpins start standing for parliament, it will be something other. You can just about talk about it in public - if you're the richest man in the world and you own your own global platform:
He's not hiding it . . . https://t.co/uXgFYsMmCX
— Andrew P. Bakaj 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 (@AndrewBakaj) January 22, 2026
But over on the other half of the Internet the suggestion that the peoples who built the modern world seem to be being "replaced" is still a big no-no. If you even use the word "replacement", the totalitarian wankers who run YouTube will slap a warning on your video. Just a fortnight back, the Lotus Eaters in the UK did a show on the dying Conservative Party, whose senior members are defecting to Nigel Farage's Reform UK almost daily. So they headlined their video:
The Great Tory Replacement
- ie, Reform are gradually replacing the Tories as the de facto opposition party to Sir Keir Starmer's miserable ministry. (Or, alternatively, has-been Tory opportunists are replacing whatever genuine populist impulses Reform might ever have had.)
But the algorithm is simultaneously omnipotent and moronic. So because the Lotus Eaters used a hitherto common word of wide application - "replacement" - YouTube (as I write) has appended to the video the following warning:
The Great Replacement, also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory, is a debunked white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory coined by French author Renaud Camus.
So one can no longer use the word "replacement" even if talking about Kemi Badenoch having to find a replacement for someone who briefly served as Lord Privy Seal under Rishi Sunak...
As some "niche Canadian" once said, sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive.
Speaking of the Reform Party, Nigel Farage has now announced his soi-disant "shadow cabinet". The three "Great Offices of State" have been parcelled out as follows: Shadow Foreign Secretary is Nadhim Zahawi; Shadow Home Secretary is Zia Yusuf; the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer is not (yet) a Muslim but a new "great office" combining business, industry and energy is to be created for Deputy Leader Richard Tice. Mr Tice is also not (yet) a Muslim, but per The Guardian:
Reform deputy leader Richard Tice splitting time between Skegness and Dubai
...because his bird's a "tax exile" there. In the aforementioned disco era, that phrase meant Roger Moore decamping to Switzerland; today it means key figures of the alleged populist far-right white-nationalist neo-Fascist party moving to the United Arab Emirates to avoid VAT on school fees.
Gee, it's almost like the widely debunked conspiracy theory has already happened.
Where exactly are these "normal parameters" of which one hears so much from eminent conservatives? It might be nice to move there.
~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've signed up a chum for a Gift Certificate or a 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.