Norms and Parameters

Steyn Online ^ | 27 Jan 2026 | Mark Steyn

[Rummyfan]

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....

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TOPICS: News/Current Events
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[Rummyfan]

[aquila48]

“As some “niche Canadian” once said, sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive.”

Sadly, at this rate, whites may soon go the way of Neanderthals.

Even sadder it’s a self-extinction, a race committing suicide.

[tlozo]

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.

[Tunehead54]

L8r BUMP!

😎

[MikelTackNailer]

I'm glad he brought up "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" as that had her as a news staffer in...Minneapolis. Some creative YouTuber type needs to remake the whole intro where we see a figure traipsing through the city in a burka.

In the last shot she pulls off the hood (like Mary did with her beret), toss it in the air to reveal that it was Tim Walz the whole time.

("You're going to make it after all.")

[dfwgator]

There’s a statue of MTM throwing the hat in Minneapolis, I wonder how long until they take it down for being “too white”.

[MikelTackNailer]

There’s a statue of MTM throwing the hat in Minneapolis.

And she got to see it before passing away. How cool is that?

So glad she didn't have to see the current state of things.

[dfwgator]

She became quite conservative in her final days.