Programming note: Tonight, Monday, I'll be here with Part Eleven of our current Tale for Our Time, Sax Rohmer's Mohammedan caper The Quest of the Sacred Slipper.
~I was out of it for most of last week, due to a car accident and another heart attack within seconds of each other, both pretty serious. So I was hoping to emerge to a reasonably relaxed environment with plenty of time to get myself up to speed on what I've missed. Alas, the news cycle had other plans.
One worries in such circumstances that one is projecting outward one's own intimations of mortality. As I have maintained for God knows how many sodding decades, in a certain sense the Iranian revolution is where our present era began, and not only because Sinatra played Tehran under the Shah and never got a look-in under the late Ayatollah. The immediate post-revolutionary era was a new low for the United States, with the embassy hostages, and then the mullahs poking the corpses of American soldiers on TV after the helicopters-in-the-desert fiasco, and the wretched Jimmy Carter embodying "the free world" as a smiling eunuch. The Shah died in Egypt, because the eunuch was too cowardly to admit him to the US for medical treatment. I wish Carter had lived long enough to be droned while paying a courtesy call on the Supreme Leader.
But so it has gone for for forty-seven sod-bollocking years...
On this third day of a war whose aim is "regime change", the American toll so far is:
1) four dead US servicemen officially announced by Centcom;
2) but also two dead, another three in critical condition, and eleven others injured in a shooting at a bar in Austin, Texas;
3) and a 39-year-old woman and a dog dead, plus three others injured, after a stabbing incident on the highway in Fairfax, Virginia;
...and, just to pan out for a moment to the wider west, despite Sir Keir Starmer taking time out of his hectic schedule of under-tipping Ukrainian rent-boys to announce ostentatiously to the world that this Yank bellicosity is nothing to do with him and the UK wants no part of it, a knifeperson put two Scots in the Royal Infirmary and is, as I write, on the lam near a primary school in Edinburgh.
The sacrifice of America's volunteer soldiery was acknowleged by the President and other officials. The dead of Texas and Virginia went mostly unacknowledged, save for the usual expressions of police bewilderment as to "motive". The "Austin man" who shot up the bar is a Texan by way of Senegal (population 97.2 per cent Muslim) who perpetrated the crime while wearing a hoodie emblazoned with "PROPERTY OF ALLAH". But yeah, the motive is all very mystifying. Unlike the US military, none of the dead or injured volunteered for anything. In the fin de civilisation west you don't have to; all you have to do is set off for work or catch a 'bus or go for a drink - and you die.
This would appear to be at odds with the assurances of Tom DeLay, whom older readers may dimly recall as someone briefly important in the Republican Party. As the then House Majority Whip put it a month after 9/11:
The American people need to know that these terrorists are going after specific people... Somebody in Sugar Land, Texas, shouldn't worry...
Golly, this Sugar Land, Texas sounds so nice and safe, doesn't it? From last month's court filings in State of Texas vs the Muslim Brotherhood:
On October 10, 2023, Warren Christopher Clark, a resident of Sugar Land, TX, pleaded guilty to traveling overseas to receive military training from ISIS.
To be rather more precise than a State of Texas court filing, Mr Clark received "mandatory religious and military training".
Perhaps this is a rare sighting of one of those "terror cells" supposedly in highly sophisticated deep cover and waiting to be activated by Iran, possibly by means of a dead-drop left under a rock in a Suger Land municipal park.
But the general run of the stabby-shooty-rapey community don't seem to require activation at all. They're hiding in plain sight, from their Korans to their sweatshirt slogans, just chugging along ticketty-boo until one morning they wake up and decide to go all Allahu Akbar on the local bar scene or kindergarten.
So, with all due respect to Majority Whip DeLay, Sir Sadiq Kahn was perhaps closer to the mark when he said that being blown up, run down, stabbed, shot or gang-raped is now just "part and parcel of living in a great global city" - if, by "great global city", you mean Fairfax, Virginia. Most cast members of the west's ongoing sitcom of civilisational suicide will still return in late afternoon to yelp, "Hi, honey, I'm home!", but now and again a few peripheral characters will have to be written out by machete or SUV or all-night child-sodomy by the local biraderi.
The decision to frame the last quarter-century as a "war on terror" - to be fought far away in the sands of Araby, the Khyber Pass and the Straits of Hormuz, while transformative mass migration to your home town continued uninterrupted - was the greatest strategic error of our time. Indeed, it has brought the oldest continuous nation-state on earth - England - to the point of self-extinction, shortly to be followed by the rest of the British Isles, western Europe, the anglo settler nations, and eventually the hyperpower itself. In Texas "PROPERTY OF ALLAH" is for the moment confined to a few incendiary "Austin men", but Allah's property portfolio is about to undergo massive expansion. That this contradiction between playing precision Whac-A-Mullah halfway round the world and shrugging along with the "part and parcel" of the home front still persists a quarter-century after Tom DeLay's fatuous bollocks is remarkable. Our old friend Geert Wilders would like us to get serious about both fronts:
Now the next step must be that we finally act ourselves too, defend our own nation + culture and do all we can to stop and reverse the Islamization of Europe, USA + Australia. It will not be easy and there'll be a lot of protest but is has to be done without delay. #stopislam
— Geert Wilders (@geertwilderspvv) March 1, 2026
As I wrote yesterday:
Even if one accepts that the mullahs are itching to nuke the capitals of the west, they could not inflict as much existential damage on Europe as such rock-ribbed conservatives as Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson have done, and on America as Joe Biden has done.
Remember that rather tedious joke doing the rounds in the months after 9/11? It was back when Americans first heard that suicide-bombers believed they would be getting seventy-two virgins upon check-in in Paradise. And the gag was that it was a clerical error, and in fact on arrival in heaven they would be facing "seventy-two Virginians" - ie, tough all-American hard men from what was then still a red state, and not happy about the events of that Tuesday morning.
This is Virginia today:
If you're wondering what mass third world migration looks like in practice, this happened on Sunday in MANASSAS pic.twitter.com/fKjm4DSLl5
— Brianna Lyman (@briannalyman2) March 2, 2026
Seventy-two Virginians honouring their leader.
The west's political class did this to their citizens. The men who stab, shoot, rape and run over do not have to have a uranium-enrichment programme. They just have to be - in increasing numbers, day on day - and they will win everything. Is there an "Epic Fury" to attend to that?
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, beginning with Mark's initial reaction to Operation Epic Fury. Our weekend music show started with spelling and ended with waltzing, while Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date took to the post-apocalyptic beach. On Sunday we offered a song for St David's Day and considered the second day of the new war through the lens of Part Twenty-Six of Steyn's highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone. Our marquee presentation was Mark's serialisation of The Quest of the Sacred Slipper, a Sax Rohmer caper about murderous Mohammedans on the loose in the London of 1914. Click for Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten. Part Eleven airs tonight at SteynOnline.
If you were too busy this weekend putting in your application for Interim Interim Supreme Leader, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.