A decade of Mark Steyn activities

If you, like I am, are a fan of Mark Steyn, you will enjoy this year-by-year summary of Mark's activities of the last decade here.

Have we become too stupid to survive?

Mark Steyn writes,

I can no longer remember when I first used the line, but, as I've said many times before, sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive.

Back when President Trump was Candidate Trump, he famously proposed a soi-disant "Muslim ban" on entry to the United States "until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on".

Which was a rationale to which I was rather partial - because a failure to "figure out what the hell is going on" is a big part of why we're where we are a generation after 9/11. Mohammed is now in the Top Ten boys' names in America, which means it will sooner than you think be, as it is in Europe, among the Top Five boys' names, and eventually the Number One. [UPDATE: See Michelle Stone's comment below.]

Well, the "Muslim ban" never happened, after being struck down by judges and filleted into meaninglessness by the lawyers of the permanent bureaucracy. But you would think, given the mountain of corpses piled up on 9/11, that at the very minimum Saudi nationals would no longer be being given pilot training in Florida. After all, fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and half of those who flew the planes received their lessons in the Sunshine State.

Yet today Americans pick up their papers to read:

PENSACOLA, Fla. — A Saudi Arabian military pilot training in the United States opened fire Friday morning at Naval Air Station Pensacola, leaving three people dead and several others wounded before Florida sheriff's deputies shot and killed him.

Or as The New York Times headlined it:

Florida Shooting Updates: Authorities Say It's Too Early to Know if It's Terrorism

We know it's a Saudi national gunning down Americans, but it's "too early to know" if it's terrorism. Could be just "mental health issues" or "workplace violence" or "pre-traumatic stress disorder" or "involuntary self-radicalization" or whatever. Nothing to worry about and always remember (to reprise another old line of mine) that "Allahu Akbar" is Arabic for "Nothing to see here".

On "the day that everything changed" nothing changed - except the rate of Muslim immigration to the west, which doubled. A US immigration bureaucracy both cruel and stupid enough to ban a World War Two RAF pilot for life for staying with his wife until her death when she was stricken ill in the US and taken to a New Jersey hospital cannot stop itself admitting Saudi trainee pilots to kill Americans.

Recently, I marked (under the headline "Diversity unto Death") the tenth anniversary of the Fort Hood slaughter - the first mass murder in American history in which the perpetrator gave a PowerPoint presentation on what he intended to do, and to a roomful of military and mental-health professionals to boot. Some of whom felt a little queasy about what they heard, but not enough to prevent him going ahead and murdering everyone. And, in the course of our anniversary observances, I quoted Steyn Club member Kate Smyth's observation that "we'd rather die than be thought of as 'Islamophobic'". Which is, increasingly, literally true. And so it is that we go round in circles, so that this year's atrocities all seem like faded Xeroxes of last year's atrocities - an attack by Saudi pilots trained in Florida, an attack on a US military base, an attack on London Bridge, another attack on London Bridge, another Saudi pilot in Florida, another US military base...

A few days ago Kate Smyth identified another difference between the carbon copies and the originals. On the telly yakfests round about now, there'll be earnest conversations about whether this latest member of Local 347 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves has any "links to Isis". As Kate put it re even "conservative" media outlets:

There's been a very obvious shift - no doubt a confirmation of Islamisation itself. No 'I' and no 'M', with discussions limited to terrorism... What's noticeable is that there's both censorship and self-censorship as part of this shift.

From the aforementioned link: 'As Ayaan Hirsi Ali explained, because of the West's obsession with terror, we have become blind to the broader threat of the dawa (Islamic proselytizing), the ideology behind the terror attacks — and what drives Muslims to Islamize us.'

It follows that, as long as terrorism is contained to an 'Acceptable Level of Violence', we won't hear about Islamic terrorism (let alone Islam).

There is a lot of truth to that. Indeed, it is one of the striking differences between atrocity coverage circa 2019 and atrocity coverage circa 2002. So we will admit more Saudi would-be pilots (for no district judge would countenance an end to the program) but also order up more bollards for US military bases, and longer security lines and more sophisticated latex gloves. And, whatever happens, it won't ever be anything to do with Islam, and not even anything to do with terrorism unless you're going to a dead-drop in the park to collect your orders from Isis High Command.

Oh, and even the "Muslim ban" guy is back to the usual "the Saudis are our friends" bollocks:

The King said that the Saudi people are greatly angered by the barbaric actions of the shooter, and that this person in no way shape or form represents the feelings of the Saudi people who love the American people.

Yeah, sure. Aside from the three other Saudis who filmed the attack as it was in progress.

The flaw in Trump's "Muslim ban" was its conditionality on us "figuring out what the hell is going on". Actually, what the hell's going on isn't so difficult to figure out. But, as events at Fishmongers' Hall and the Pensacola Naval Air Station both underline, most of the western world would rather do anything than confront honestly "what the hell is going on".

And so the hell will go on, and the faded Xeroxes of faded Xeroxes will go on.

As I wrote all those years ago in America Alone, this is an opportunist infection: The likes of today's perp and last Friday's perp are able to do this to us because we're willing to have it done to us. We have not the will to resist even the most absurd provocations.

The long shadows of the Great War

Mark Steyn writes about the importance of this day in history.

...Edward Grey was Britain's longest-serving Foreign Secretary, although, in contrast to contemporary foreign ministers, he had a modest appetite for foreigners: For his first eight years in the job, he never set foot abroad, and then only did so because he was obliged to accompany King George V on a State Visit to Paris in 1914. He served a prime minister, Asquith, who had little interest in foreign affairs and was unengaged by distant events in faraway places until late July of 1914 - by which time it was too late, and the great unraveling of world order had begun. Five years later, the German, Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires lay shattered, and in their ruins incubated Communism, Fascism and a hardcore post-Ottoman Islam. And in a more oblique sense the horrors of the trenches caused the ruling classes of the Great Powers to lose their civilizational confidence - and across a century they have never recovered it.

Read more here and watch a video Mark produced in April.

The process plays itself out lethargically and ruinously

Whether dealing with "scumbag billionaires," "hockey-stick huckster," or "climate mullah," Mark Steyn does not back away from fights. As he says here, the process is the punishment.

Thus American justice in the 21st century: It can ruin a no-name Trump campaign volunteer in nothing flat. But it can't try a guy who murdered three thousand innocents in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, another two hundred in the Bali nightclub bombing, plus Daniel Pearl in Pakistan ...and has confessed to all this and more.

It's all a joke: civilian, military; federal, state; criminal, civil; family, probate. As my old boss Conrad Black likes to point out, the United States has as many lawyers as the rest of the world combined. One entirely inevitable consequence of that malign distortion in the labor market is that far more aspects of life are litigated, and, when they are, the natural tendency of the system is for everything to take far longer than it would anywhere else. So what counts is not plaintiff or defendant, but which party is in the position to inflict the most pain on the other - whether that's a lavishly endowed government or a billionaire scumbag reduced to suing his own company to avoid paying a court judgment. Whatever it takes for as long as it takes.

Rear view mirror punditry, Deferred adolescence, Torture, Quarter-life crisis

Millennials are going through a quarter-life crisis. Adolescence is now being prolonged to about age thirty.

"Lions don't care about the opinions of sheep."

So says the sheriff of Broward County Florida, whose department comes in for some strong criticism by Mark Steyn here.

The tyranny of a hyper present tense

Mark Steyn is thinking today about empathy. The Left now is unable to empathize, as identity politics has consumed them. There is also a sustained war on the past going on.

In demanding the past conform to the pieties of the present, we are saying there is no eternal human nature.

When you surrender your past you are also surrendering your future, because you are breaking the compact between the past, present and future.

Mark Steyn dissects the "Language of Losing"

Mark Steyn writes a fabulous piece entitled The Language of Losing.

...Who's winning what turf? After 16 years of western military occupation, the Taliban control more territory in Afghanistan than at any time since the first US troops went in. On the other hand, after 16 years of accelerating Islamic immigration, Europe has more no-go zones, more sharia courts, more refugees, more covered women, more Muslim-dominated schoolhouses, more radical mosques, more female genital mutilation, more grooming and gang rape, more Muslim Brotherhood front groups, more Muslim mayors and legislators, more Muslim-funded Middle East Studies programs at universities ...and fewer churches, fewer Jews in Toulouse, fewer gays in Amsterdam, fewer unaccompanied women out after dark in German and Swedish cities, fewer historical representations of Mohammed in Continental museums, art galleries and scholarly books, fewer mixed bathing sessions at municipal swimming pools, fewer lessons on the Crusades and the Holocaust in European schools ...and less and less free speech in some of the oldest democracies on earth.

Read the whole thing here.

Right under their noses!

"The Saudis are our friends."

Mark Steyn educates us today about Ibn Saud, the man who set himself up as the King of Saudia Arabia in 1932. Mark takes notice of the "greasy" former ambassadors to Saudia Arabia from the United States and Britain, who told us after 9-11-2001, "The Saudis are our friends," even as the Saudis funded Madrasas all over the world in which their young people were taught to hate us. The principal export of Saudia Arabia is not oil, but ideology. The oil merely funds the ideology.

On March 11, 2002 there was a fire in a girls school in Mecca. The girls fled the flames, but the Mecca police made them go back into the burning building, because they did not have on their head covers.

Ibn Saud had 16 wives who bore him 100 children, 45 of whom were sons. Lots of princes running around in Saudia Arabia! The King died in 1953, and his six successors have all been his sons.

"It is the biggest story of our time, and no one is telling it!"

The demographic extinguishment of the people who built the modern world: but nobody is writing about it!

Japan: one-third of their citizens under thirty have never dated! They do not allow immigration.

President Trump in Poland spoke about faith and family. Europeans are averaging 1.3 children per couple. Muslims are averaging 3.5 children per couple, and Erdogan is urging them to increase that to 5 children per couple. Muslims are now a majority in Belgium.

The majority of elementary students in Arizona are Hispanic. I think that is probably true here in New Mexico, too. Demographics underlie everything.

By mid-century the majority of Austrians will be Muslims. The new song there will be, "How do you solve a problem like Sharia?"

There are now 1 billion Africans, and by the end of the century that number is expected to be 4 billion.

The will of the west to survive

Mark Steyn writes about Trump's Warsaw speech:

...The New York Times at least reported the story under the headline "Trump, in Poland, Asks if West Has the 'Will to Survive'".

That's the question - the one that matters. Angela Merkel won't ask it, nor M Macron or Mrs May or M Trudeau. But Donald Trump did - and then answered it:

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Just as Poland could not be broken, I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail. Our people will thrive. And our civilization will triumph. (Applause.)

AUDIENCE: Donald Trump! Donald Trump! Donald Trump!

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Thank you. So, together, let us all fight like the Poles — for family, for freedom, for country, and for God.

I am nowhere near as confident of that answer. But he raised the question at a time when no other western leader will. It is a measure of our decay and decadence that the question is necessary, but in an age of cultural relativism a statement of the obvious is daring and courageous: Ours is the civilization that built the modern world - as even the west's cultural relativists implicitly accept, if only because they have no desire to emigrate and try to make a living as a cultural relativist in Yemen or Niger. We built it, and, if we do not maintain it, and defend it, then, as Donald Trump says, it will never come again.

Read more here.

Where are we headed?

Mark Steyn will bring a smile to your face with this exchange with Tucker Carlson.

The latest hyphenated group in America are the journalist-Americans. They are now officially victims.

Steyn predicts that soon CNN may be asking CNN for more Elmo and less Russia because the more they drag on this investigation, the more likely it will lead to embarrassing moments for the Democrats such as Susan Rice and Loretta Lynch, and perhaps even Obama himself!

Steyn and Carlson on Leftist violence

"Comeytose"

Here are some excerpts from a post written by Mark Steyn on the "Comeytose State."

Trump is not "under investigation". That's a significant fact, and the only unleaked fact. Everything else leaks non-stop: Someone who met with someone who once worked for Trump in some hotel near Trump Tower two months before he launched his campaign once had business dealings with someone who knows a Kazakh oligarch who used to be close to someone close to Putin...

This is thin gruel. It only thickens and congeals and sticks if in the general atmosphere Trump himself is believed to be "under investigation".

He isn't, and never has been. Comey confirmed that to Trump three times. As far as I'm aware, I'm not a suspected Russian agent, but I know something about being mired under a cloud of suspicion. In the Mann vs Steyn case, I have made the point in court filings to the various lethargic jurists that being an alleged defamer is a serious slur on one's reputation that should entitle one to a speedy trial. To no avail, of course: we're about to enter our sixth year in the clogged toilet of DC justice, and no nearer a trial date in that joke jurisdiction than we were on Day One. Likewise, were my local paper to report "unnamed sources" claiming that the sheriff's department was investigating me as a suspected drug dealer, I would expect the sheriff to issue a statement saying that there was no such investigation. How much worse is it for the incoming chief of state of the global superpower when false rumors are circulating that he's a Russian agent? And these rumors are being disseminated with the express intent of crippling his incoming administration before it's even come in?

...The real scandal here is that the vast all-seeing permanent bureaucracy is investigating its political opponents - for no good reason, only for a general fishing expedition. The "Russia investigation" is a misnomer for what it really is: a domestic investigation of US citizens without any probable cause. They've come up empty, or you'd know it by now.

5) So what exactly has "the Russia investigation" been investigating for over a year now? Aside from arseholing around at taxpayer expense leaking the identities of US citizens they've improperly surveilled, what the hell do they do all day, every day, for months on end?

If that's not a crime, it ought to be. But we do know that, whether or not the surveillance is improper, the leaks therefrom are certainly a crime. Yet they're now such an ingrained habit at the FBI that the lads occasionally forget themselves and leak stuff that's nothing to do with "the Russia investigation" - like the Manchester bombing info shared by the Brits that Theresa May got so mad about. Being flattered by ideologically simpatico journalists as an "unnamed source" can become addictive. Nevertheless, it's damaging US credibility with allied intelligence services, and that will have consequences.

Read more here.

The most moving interview I have seen in a long time

This is the most moving interview I have seen in many years. JameS E. Mitchell did enhanced interrogation of the 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM). In return for his work in saving American lives, he has had to fight the Obama Justice Department for 8 years.

KSM told him, "We thought you would turn tail and run, like America had done in other places where terrorists struck. But George W. Bush was determined to protect America from further attacks. After Obama, a mall cop has more choices of interrogation tactics to use than does the CIA.

We assume that if we could just convince the terrorists that in the end we just want to live in peace with them, they will back off. Nothing could be further from the truth! (Are you listening, President Trump, when it comes to dealing with the wacko bird in North Korea?)

KSM told Dr. Mitchell that our judicial system, our Bill of Rights, our civil liberties, our desire to be liked were all weapons that Allah had placed in America to enable the Islamists to defeat us! When they kill people it is an act of worship! They believe they were chosen by Allah to purge the world of anyone who doesn't think like they do!

They are not going to go away because we want them to like us! Are our leaders making decisions without knowing these truths? That was certainly true with Obama. Obama blinded himself to what is going to be the obvious ratcheting up of the terror activity. Obama famously said, more people die in the bathtub than from terrorists. Dr. Mitchell replied, "Bathtubs don't get up in the morning figuring out a way to kill more infidels!"

Germany is committing cultural suicide. We have forgiven you. You don't have to kill your culture!

Islamophobia is a tool used by terrorist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood to control our behavior. The target is the minds of the American people! The terrorists' thinking is, "We will outbreed you, immigrate into your country, wrap ourselves in your civil liberties, while we ratchet up Sharia, feed ourselves off your social welfare programs, and when the time is right, we are gonna impose Sharia from within!

Our leaders seem more interested in having progressives from other countries like us and approve of our policies.

The Obama Justice Department was stacked with lawyers who had been defending jihadists! Two other politicians who have given Mitchell hell on earth are Senators Feinstein and McCain. In addition, the media tries to anesthetize us regarding the seriousness of the threat.

Mitchell is currently being sued by two terrorists he has never met. Obama's Justice Department was uncooperative with him in terms of helping his defense.

Here is the mesmerizing interview.

Their goal is the destruction of our culture

This post by Mark Steyn emphasizes the contradictions of multiculturalism.The goal of multiculturalists is the destruction of our culture. Dissolve the existing order. what do radical feminists and progressives have in common with Islamists? They are all control freaks telling people who disagree with them to shut up! Their priority is to dissolve the existing order into rubble, and then to rebuild their new world order in the rubble!

Mark believes we are in a Cold Civil War, and he wonders if there is sufficient common ground even to agree on what it is we are talking about.

The Meaning of the Blues

Mark Steyn's song of the week is The Meaning of the Blues. "Now I know, too well I know, the meaning of the blues."

"How cool is that to actually make the Chinese politburo sit through a night of American targeted bombing?"

Mark Steyn:

The disgusting aspect of the last eight years is that Obama mistook the sidelines for the moral high ground.

So he would use all this lofty rhetoric about red lines and he would stand there would be people killing each other, slaughtering each other, dead babies and he'd stand there with his hand on his hip giving a speech. And he stripped words of their meaning. And Trump isn't as articulate. He isn't as polished but his words have meaning. And to do that while is he having dinner with the Chinese. You said did he tell him over the salad bowl, as I understand it, he told him over the creme brulee or the tiramisu. How cool is that to actually make the Chinese politburo sit through a night of American targeted bombing?

...I think he's accomplished certain things. He sent a message to the Chinese as they are sitting across the dinner table from him. He sent a message to Putin, and, thereby, incidentally also made all these stupid investigations of investigations of investigations that the Senate and the House are chasing their tails and look absolutely ridiculous. You know, he has picked a fight with Putin at a when Congress has spent and Susan Rice has spent a year investigating whether he is Putin stooge. How stupid do they look?

...I think they understand this is really -- last night was inauguration day. That America is back in the world. Now, not ineffectively. What we have to be careful about here is whether the tactical ruthlessness of last night is matched with strategic clarity which hasn't been the case in Afghanistan and Iran. But accepting that Trump doesn't want to get mired in pointless civil wars. I think this keeps America's enemies on its toes and figure out what it is they have to do next.

Suicide by virtue-signalling