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 just the other day:
On our present course, within the next generation the two most valuable continents on earth plus a third 'island-continent' in the South Pacific are about to be surrendered to ...something other.
And all without a shot being fired - save (in America) the occasional psychotranny, (in Australia) Isis associates armed to the hilt by His Majesty's Government, and (in Europe) a demographically catastrophic war Lindsey Graham and Victoria Nuland want to fight till the last Ukrainian under seventy is either dead or redeployed to Keir Starmer's favourite male 'modelling' agency.
Reversing that trajectory has been the priority of this l'il ol' website for a quarter-century ...since I chanced to be in Vienna, waiting for a friend across the street from a maternity shop and was struck by the particular character of the expectant mums going in and out.
As we have long said, diversity is where nations go to die. But don't take my word for it:
Rep. Gene Wu (D) goes mask off:
"Non-whites share the same oppressor and we are the majority now. We can take over this country." pic.twitter.com/CrxsPqlkLI
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 8, 2026
Gene Wu is not just another Transgender Studies professor from one of the nuttier universities. He's the leader of the Democrat Party in the Texas House of Representatives. This is not your father's Texas Democrat - LBJ, say, or even Ann Richards. Unlike Lyndon Johnson, he was born not in Stonewall, Texas but in Guangzhou, China and came to America in the Eighties when his family "fled" Communism. After forty years, judging from his public policy positions, he rather misses it. "Don't mess with Texas": Leave that to the ChiComs.
This is what they call, in the tedious vernacular of the day, saying the quiet part out loud. Except that the quiet part is being screamed in our faces all around, and the official position remains that it's all just a conspiracy theory. One is reminded of an old joke I first cited twenty sodding years ago:
One day the U.N. Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world's soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.
"Great idea," says his deputy. "Er, but who would we play?"
"Israel, of course."
For Israel, read whitey, says Minority Leader Wu. If you prefer it in all-American sports, picture the Super Bowl a generation hence: the PanAmerican Multicultis vs the Upcountry Rednecks. If you think that's unlikely, consider that the half-time show took only a couple of generations to go from The Sound of Music, Al Hirt, Lionel Hampton, Carol Channing and Ella Fitzgerald to Bad Bonnie Blue or whoever the sod-bollock that was on Sunday...
As I did two decades ago in America Alone, I am interested in delineating the world of twenty years from now - after our Civilisational Deathwatch clock has run down. This is part of an ongoing series. The future it posits is not inevitable, but it is a certainty absent a course-correction our fast-shrivelling democratic "norms" make increasingly impossible.
So what will "the west" look like in the 2040s? First, and most obviously, there will be nothing remotely recognisable as "free" speech. Me just a month back:
Chris Minns, the woeful Premier of New South Wales, gave the game away in his reaction to the Bondi Beach massacre. Muslims open fire on ten-year-old girls? Shut up, he explained:
'I acknowledge that we don't have the same free speech rules that they have in the United States and I make no apologies for that. We have got a responsibility to knit together our community, that comes from different races and religions.'
Or as the Daily Telegraph headline writer summarised it:
'Free speech will have to go to preserve multiculturalism'
Oh, well. Mr Minns, Sir Keir, Cruella von der Leyen and most other western leaders now define "free speech" the way, as Rush used to say, the Soviets defined "peace": the absence of opposition. That is why the French courts have removed Marine Le Pen from the presidential ballot, and Germany's Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (the "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution") has officially designated the country's most popular political party, the AfD, a "confirmed right-wing extremist endeavour", which enables it to be subject to the same levels of surveillance and communications-monitoring as apply to Isis.
In America, things are somewhat subtler: Attempts to remove Trump from the ballot might fail at appeals-court level, but, post-inauguration, every policy on which he was elected will be struck down by the district judge of Dead Moose Junction, invariably a "wise Latina" or some such born in the same Deep Cover Multiculti General Hospital behind the Wuhan Institute of Virology as gave us Gene Wu. Fascinated as I am to follow the ins-and-outs of a multi-million-dollar ten-year individual deportation of a career MS-13 member, I do not think there will be many "constitutional conservatives" come mid-century: the Constitution, one notes, has enabled your demographic dispossession. It doesn't get more basic than that. But good luck talking about it on CNN.
So those are our first two trends of tomorrow:
i) the absence of free speech;
ii) the criminalisation of opposition.
Of course, the logic of criminalising opposition is fairly elementary: if you cannot argue against your government, all you can do is reach for the Molotov cocktail. But the political class is confident, after January 6th and the Ottawa truckers and the Southport "riots", that, in a world of controlled and corrupted media, it can play even the mildest political protest to its own advantage. The state crackdown on the three events above were all accomplished with crude old-school technology: English coppers monitoring "far-right" tweeters, the Feds using cellular telephone records to place your device in the District of Columbia, HM Revenue freezing Canadian accounts through forty-year-old computerised banking systems... Since then AI has galloped ahead to deliver tools beyond the average citizen's imagination.
,As with the UN soccer team above, I hear echoes of ancient shtick. A sod-bollocking quarter of a bollock-sodden century ago, after the introduction of the self-evidently risible phrase "undocumented immigrants", I started referring to illegal aliens as "fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community" - only to find that the late Senator Harry Reid thought, "Gee, that's a great way of putting it", and by 2007 was pledging on the Senate floor to "bring the twelve million undocumented Americans out of the shadows". Decades before that, both the composer Jule Styne and the dean of Broadway directors George Abbott had advised my younger self that the quickest way to make a million dollars was to take your most ingenious joke and play it for real. In 1927 Abbott was in trouble in previews with what was supposed to be a comedy mocking the morals of the old South - shotgun marriages and so forth. Try as he might, he couldn't get the gags to click with the audience. So, one morning, he woke up and decided to forget about the comedy and do Coquette as straightforward tear-jerking melodrama. "You've never heard such sobbing in a theatre in your life," he told me. Two years later, the film version won Mary Pickford the Academy Award. "I've always wanted to find another like it," said Abbott - ie, a comedy he could play straight.
That's the world we live in today: the right has the funniest "memes", while the left plays it for real. How's that working out? For over a decade, I've been writing airily of "the panopticon state" - on the assumption that most readers were vaguely familiar with Jeremy Bentham and his conception of a prison where one is never out of sight of one's gaoler. On the other hand, I had carelessly assumed that, for those unfamiliar with the notion, it would obviously sound like a bad thing. Random sample from the Steyn archives:
Perhaps this is just the way it is in the panopticon state. Tocqueville foresaw this, as he did most things. Although absolute monarchy 'clothed kings with a power almost without limits' in practice 'the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.' What would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to bring 'the details of social life and of individual existence' within the King's oversight? Eric Holder and Lois Lerner now have that power. My comrade John Podhoretz, doughty warrior of the New York Post, says relax, there's nothing to worry about. But how do I know he's not just saying that because Eric Holder's monitoring his OnStar account and knows that when he lost his car keys last Tuesday he was in the parking lot of Madam Whiplash's Bondage Dungeon?
A generation on, the panopticon state is not a dystopian future but Tony Blair and Larry Ellison's urgent priority. Monitoring "the details of social life and of individual existence" is necessary in order to "keep you safe". So "panopticon" is no longer a scary word, but an entirely benign concept:
UK home secretary dreams of AI-powered 'panopticon'
That would be Shabana Mahmoud, Sir Tony's choice to succeed Sir Keir as prime minister - next month, next week, tomorrow, whenever. As she told the BBC:
What I would say to people that are very motivated by sort of campaigning on civil liberties is that you can't enjoy any of your liberties in any country if you're not safe.
So, if you can't be safe because your country admits legions of MS-13 gangbangers, Pushtun sex-fiends and Sudanese clitoridectomists every day of the week, it will be necessary for the state panopticon to make you safe. Fortunately, the new technology means that, even if you go out and about in a full face mask, the surveillance cameras will be able to identify you through the merest glimpse of your eyeballs, so everyone back at HQ will be scoffing: "Oh, God, Dick Grayson's going out in that campy Boy Wonder outfit again..."
Even Orwell did not foresee a surveillance system that can see round corners: as our recent adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four made plain, there were nooks and crannies in one's bedsit where it was possible to be un-monitored. There will be no such respite from the New Panopticon.
So to recap: "Diversity" turns formerly socially tranquil, high-trust societies into violent bleephole no-trust societies, even before Texas Minority Leader Doug Wu has put a target on your back. That in turn necessitates:
i) the end of free speech;
ii) the criminalisation of opposition;
iii) the corruption of the law; and
iv) the creation of a 24/7 techno-surveillance state.
Good luck with the next Boston Tea Party or Storming of the Bastille. To avert this dystopia requires action now. More to come.
~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.