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One of the advantages of being comatose is that, on the rare occasions one emerges from it, nothing much seems to have changed. For example...
~THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:
Brent Hits $114 as Houthi Attacks Threaten Saudi Energy Infrastructure
For those of us whose admiration for the brilliant Trump 2024 campaign was near boundless, the self-bollocksing of the forty-seventh presidency is profound and tragic. But don't worry, House Speaker (at the time of writing) Mike Johnson says it's not his fault:
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson: Everybody's frustrated about fuel prices, obviously, but that's not related to policies. It's not related to the Republicans in office. This is related to the Strait of Hormuz. It is not yet resolved there. https://t.co/fE3LsIa3u0
— Clash Report (@clashreport) October 12, 2026
Strait of Hormuz? Nothing to do with us! This week, the President has been in the apparent battleground state of South Carolina to shore up Darline Graham, GOP nominee for the House of Lords. While her late brother was calling for boots on the ground on Kharg Island, it turns out they could really use some in the Palmetto State:
So, while I was in my coma, South Carolina mysteriously became a swing state. The latest poll shows whoever the Dem is in margin-of-error territory:
Darline Graham (R): 48.8 per cent;
Annie Andrews (D) 45.6 per cent
Two years ago Trump won South Carolina by 17.9 per cent. If you think this is just one of those polls that over-samples Dems, sixty per cent of respondents were Republicans and only twenty-nine per cent were Democrats. To put it at its mildest, the only question is whether, on November 3rd, there is a genuine "blue wave" or merely a more modest transfer of Congressional control: either way, if you wished to engineer the total destruction of the MAGA coalition, getting a cabal of "former" NeverTrumpers and unreformed neocons (Lindsey Graham, Mark Levin) to buffalo the President into a war you have no capacity to win is surely too crude a way to do it.
As longtime readers will recall, I agreed with The Daily Wire's Matt Walsh that war with Iran was not worth losing the midterms over. I characterised the Iran conflict as an "escalating fiasco" in early March, before my coma, before my foray to Ukraine to watch the cheap'n'cheerful Iranian drones in action. What was unknown back then was whether it was simply (after Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine) America's latest doomed war, or instead Washington's Suez - an ostensibly somewhat peripheral event that nevertheless fundamentally changes the world's perception of a once dominant power: As the Countess of Avon, a delightful lady and the widow of the then prime minister Anthony Eden, told me over tea in her drawing-room when I was in my early twenties: before Suez people still used the expression "the British Empire" with a straight face; afterwards, it was a punchline. In Peking, Delhi and beyond, Iran/Ukraine is fulfilling the same function for the 1950 US imperium.
In Texas and elsewhere, Republicans redrew their districts in the expectation that the 2024 margins of victory of the Trump coalition were forever. Then they threw that coalition away. A sense of betrayal - or even a more muted sense of disaffection - is hard to overcome.
~THOUGHT FOR THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW: One of the recurring features of our time is that, in a supposed democratic age, no change can be permitted to anything that matters. Hence, the Deep State's subversion of Trump, the German security services' penetration of the AfD, the criminal conviction of Marine Le Pen, the neutering of Meloni, the irrelevance of Wilders' victory in the Netherlands... Some of these tactics may be running up against their natural limits as electoral trends in the west become (in the American vernacular) "too big to rig". So consider the following, all from the last day or two:
Government websites go dark after AI-discovered flaw sparks security scramble
Australians face spike in data breaches after AI helps uncover 'critical' website flaw
At what point will AI - or "widespread concerns" about AI - be able to get entire national elections nullified? In time for next year's French presidential vote? Or maybe by a week on Tuesday?
If you're not in favour of paper ballots counted by l'il ol' ladies in town halls, you're part of the problem.
~THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: Advice from this week's UK prime minister:
Burnham suggests stocking up on tinned food and bottled water
The Ginger Growler fleshes it out a bit:
Mascara, concealer, I don't know, a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, a tin of baked beans because you've gotta have some baked beans, and I like a good tin of custard as well...
Shelter in place, now and forever.
And, on that note, back to my coma.
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)