Mum's the Word

Since emerging from my coma, I have endeavoured to follow my doctors' advice to eschew stress-inducing things like the Internet and spend more time in serene contemplation of the birds and flowers. However, once in a while friends will insist on drawing things to my attention. For example:

This is extremely important to understand.

The birth rate you see in the West is the BLENDED number of ~90% who have a fertility rate half that of replacement and ~10% who have a birth rate double that of replacement.

Demographics is destiny. https://t.co/18EJsYDFME

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 31, 2026

A single tweet from Mr Musk was enough to catapult the industrial-scale gang-rape of English girls into greater public prominence than it had ever received - which is pretty amazing considering that it is "the worst scandal in British history", not just because of all the sex-slavery and murder but also because of the connivance of officialdom, from local child-welfare departments all the way up to the Home Office and the Prime Minister. And that's with something that's as vivid and visceral as any public-policy question surely could be: little girls in a so-called "rape flat" being sodomised by multiple men from a, ah, very distinct demographic. (It's interesting to see that all the "racially-aggravated" "hate crimes" legislation does not apparently apply to Muslims - a revealing preview of how things will go when the English are the minority.)

By contrast, comparative fertility rates is a more subtle and elusive concept for the average citizen, so Elon's dissemination of an ancient Mark Steyn clip will not have the same impact. (UPDATE! Mr Musk giveth and Mr Musk taketh away: X.com has just flagged my picture of Ornella Vanoni as "sensitive content".) Nevertheless, way back when, my point was correct, and so is Mr Musk's amplification of it a generation on. (While we're on the subject, I was heartened to hear Rupert Lowe use the term "Islamification".)

Of course, noticing such things remains largely forbidden by rival social-media platforms such as YouTube, where simply using the phrase "The Great Replacement" will get you demonetised. (The rise of "platforms" has proven a more effective tool of conquest than, say, aircraft carriers.) So Nicole Stawiarski, Lead Content Manager at the amusingly styled Thought & Expression Company, immediately filed some lead content:

Elon Musk's Feed Has Become a Running Commentary on White Birth Rates, and Former Supporters Are Quietly Walking Away

So "influencers" are walking away just in case they get accidentally influenced:

Musk framed Western birth rates as a "blended number" masking two populations, roughly 90% having children at half the replacement rate and 10% at double, and declared "demographics is destiny." He posted it July 31 while quoting a 2010 Mark Steyn clip that used ethnic Europeans versus Muslim immigrants as its example groups.

As I pointed out, on those fertility rates the ten per cent takes just two generations to catch up with the ninety per cent. So, even if the borders were to be closed today, any subsequent uptick in birth rates will reflect not a demographic comeback by the natives but an accelerating ascendancy by the incomers.

~That's true even in America where the dramatic headlines...

US fertility rate dropped to another record low in 2025

...belie the underlying reality - that, insofar as Americans are still having babies, an increasing proportion of the next generation of "Americans" is due to migration and its attendant social transformation. I see that much of the US commentariat is presently exercised by the unprecedented popularity of socialism and even communism among ever greater numbers of the citizenry. I have spent much of my life in societies rather partial to socialism (Canada, England, Ireland, Sweden) and even communism (France, Italy). Be that as it may, the particular strains of socialism they fell for were deeply rooted in their own countries and culture and historical experience. By contrast, the striking feature of America's belated embrace of socialism and communism is how foreign it all is:

*Some Ugandan takes US citizenship in 2018, and is elected mayor of America's biggest city seven years later - and you're surprised America's semiquincentennial doesn't mean much to him?

*Unlike Hizzonner, the next representative of New York's 13th Congressional district was born in America into one of those Catholic Latino immigrant families Charles Krauthammer et al were always telling us were natural conservatives. Instead, round about the time New York's first Ugandan mayor was pledging allegiance to the Great Satan, the soon-to-be Congresswoman was converting to Islam. She spent two months living in Nablus in the West Bank and came to realise that, as she put it, the system of oppression that Palestinians labour under is very familiar to anyone who's been on the receiving end of Yank oppression: "These are not only like systems, they are the same system." So, if you're wondering why she wasn't in the Fourth of July parade, it's not because her Betsy Ross outfit was at the Somali drycleaner's.

*The next senator from Michigan, the son of Egyptian immigrants, is likewise mocked by surviving nonagenarians of the state's Democrat establishment for caring more about Gaza than Detroit. This might be a more persuasive line of attack if mainstream Dems had shown any sign in the last sixty years of caring a whit about Detroit. At any rate, it seems to me the socialism is mere manifestation of the foreignness: I include in that the large numbers of young Americans (by which I mean the under-seventies) for whom the foreignness is the main attraction (see the publisher of Obama's "memoir" whose publicity bio stated for years that he was born in Kenya, mainly because you got more NPR invites that way).

For what it's worth, as someone who turned down repeated invitations to run for school board in my small New Hampshire town on the grounds that it was presumptuous of an immigrant to lord it over Yankee settlers from the eighteenth century, I agree with Ann Coulter's view that the foreign-born should be ineligible for all elected office.

Incidentally, I see there is also a somewhat impenetrable doctrinal dispute on the American right over so-called "common-good conservatism". The "common good", like "common sense", presupposes we have anything in common. Increasingly, we don't.

~I was shocked to hear that my old Spectator colleague Rod Liddle had died, in hospital in Middlesbrough - a part of northern England 99.99 per cent of Brit media figures wouldn't be caught dead or alive in. Rod was a beautiful writer, one of the few remaining at what for much of its history was the best-written magazine in the world. He was also fearless. Plucked more or less at random:

Sajid Javid has denounced an article by the controversial journalist Rod Liddle that appeared to call for elections to be held on days when Muslims are forbidden by their religion to vote.

To such denunciations, Rod was wont to respond: "Islamophobia? Count me in." At the time, Sir Sajid was Chancellor of the Exchequer in an ostensibly "Conservative" ministry. You may recall this Tory grandee's reaction to the news that Anglo-Celts were now a minority in almost every English city: "So what?"

Whoever takes Rod Liddle's place in Rupert Murdoch's papers will be, it is safe to say, rather more muted. Here is Rod on cracking form on The Mark Steyn Show - a most consequential edition in that Ofcom ruled it should never have been broadcast. Rod turns up around ten minutes before the end, to reflect on his trip to Africa with Boris Johnson. Rest in peace:

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)