Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I hope to be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.

~Well, it's been nine months since the last US election. So time to get the next election underway. Here is the latest campaign video by one of three declared GOP candidates for Texas-31:

Miss Gomez's last big viral video showed her shooting a hooded man strapped to a chair in the back of the head. Free-speech champion Elon Musk has disappeared the tweet, so I can't link to it, and I forget whether it was a real man or merely a tailor's dummy. But, if the former, one assumes it was some squishpants RINO committeeman from party HQ - or possibly a multiculti S&M fetishist for whom being tied up and abused by a Latina hottie is more of a turn-on than droning "Diversity is our strength!" with the glassy-eyed women d'un certain âge at the NPR quilting bee.

Enjoy the latest video while you can. It's already being suppressed by Twitter, and the more temperate infidels have condescendingly dismissed it:

This is ill advised.

That's all very magisterial of you, but the trouble is none of the well-advised stuff has worked. I don't mean just that the same people who, in the wake of the latest Executive Order, are gung-ho about the right to burn an American flag but generally go all sotto voce about the right to burn a Koran. That's fine and dandy if life is a late-night philosophical discussion in your dorm room, but in most of the west we are way beyond that now. It's an existential question: Do you want your society to die before mid-century?

We are witnessing throughout the west the Ulsterisation of politics. One sees this not only in England's very Irish-style flag wars of recent weeks, in which the same authorities that are happy to ram the approved banners of Palestine and LGBTQWERTY down your throat suddenly draw the line at St George's Cross and dispatch their (strikingly non-Anglo-Celtic) minions to remove it. But Ulsterisation is also visible in, to channel Yeats, the non-holding of the centre. Tony Blair's "Good Friday Agreement", supported by all members of the well-advised class, delivered Nobel Peace Prizes to Northern Ireland's well-advised loyalist, David Trimble, and well-advised nationalist, John Hume. They flew off to Oslo to collect their gongs, and returned to find their respective parties were on an express chute down the toilet of history and that the ill-advised masses now preferred Ian Paisley's DUP and Gerry Adams' Sinn Féin. Since then, the same phenomenon has been observed across western Europe - in France, say, where the well-advised Républicains and well-advised Socialistes have haemorrhaged voters to the ill-advised Mme Le Pen and M Mélenchon; likewise in Germany, vis-à-vis the well-advised CDU and SPD and the ill-advised AfD and Greens. My own preferred term for the well-advised class was "the lunatic mainstream" - and, as I wrote twenty-one sodding years ago, subsequent developments have been entirely predictable. .

America, because of its institutionally frozen two-party system, is different, but only to a degree. It is, somewhat incredibly, a decade this summer since I mused on the ill-advised masses eschewing the well-advised Jeb and Hillary for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. The response of the "lunatic mainstream" has been, in France, Germany, the United States and elsewhere, to attempt to criminalise its opposition. My coinage is not a rhetorical flourish from a columnar blowhard: the history of our time is that the mainstream is lunatic, which is why, in any recognisable sense, both North America and western Europe are on the brink of the abyss.

In Texas, the GOP's eighty-three-year-old well-advised incumbent has not yet declared whether he is running again. But, whatever happens in 2026, in the medium-term (there is no long-term, absent course-correction), the future is with ill-advised types like Valentina Gomez. Because the uniparty has created a "centre" that cannot hold. So, as in Ulster, on "both" "sides" there will be a drift to the ill-advised.

The results are not always equal: in Belfast, the Shinners have benefited far more than the DUP; in Paris, M Mélenchon is in no danger of joining Prisoner Le Pen in the dock to be tried, convicted and banned. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is bipartisan: the well-advised centre-right and well-advised centre-left have both yielded to a righter right and lefter left. After the 2020 US "election", we were told by the commentariat that Americans had voted to put the adults back in charge, which sounds very well-advised. To be sure, Biden's crime-syndicate family was on the take from China, Ukraine and anybody else flush enough to pay the cover charge. But, within the norms of the Democrat Party, that's about as normie as it gets.

Instead, whoever was waggling the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock-puppet immediately set about trannifying your middle-schooler. Which you'd think would meet anybody's definition of ill-advised. Yet, notwithstanding electoral and judicial setbacks, the left is not prepared to give up on it: they have decided that, if you have to have a hill to die on, the bepenised woman is as fetching a butte as the landscape offers.

Valentina Gomez, on the other hand, gets that the contradictions cannot hold. Twenty-one ...here we go again! ...twenty-one sod-bollocking years ago, I wrote in The Spectator:

A few weeks back I was strolling along the boulevard de Maisonneuve in Montreal when I saw a Muslim woman across the street, all in black, covered head to toe, the full hejab. She was passing a condom boutique, its window filled with various revolting novelty prophylactics, 'cum rags', etc. It was a perfect snapshot of the internal contradictions of multicultural diversity. In thirty years' time, either the Arab lady will still be there, or the condom store, but not both. Which would you bet on?

Well, we're only two-thirds of the way through, but the condom store is already gone and Montreal is twinned with Gaza. So we know the answer to that one. As to the broader question of the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition, from this weekend in Ottawa:

By the way, that Spectator headline ("Only Bush can save Europe") was written not by me but by my editor, one Boris Johnson, who has since risen without trace. As the piece mentions, the treasonous f**ker had recently encountered a ten-year-old girl "who was distraught because Tony Blair was going around telling anyone who still listens that we were all in 'mortal peril'." I responded:

Picture that ten-year-old schoolgirl when she's the age Boris is now — sometime in the 2030s, say.

What will London — or Paris, or Amsterdam (for she is after all a citizen of the European Union) — be like in the mid-Thirties? On present demographic projections, it will be far more Muslim... Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?

Well, we know the answer to that second question. Boris's mythical "ten-year-old schoolgirl" was older than Valentina Gomez back then. Ms Gomez does not think as her octogenarian congressman does, anymore than Eva Vlaardingerbroek thinks as Mark Rutte does. They loathe the world the well-advised class has consigned them to, and they know its contradictions cannot hold:

I was interested to see that [Niall] Ferguson, in a recent speech, has become a somewhat belated convert to the Eurabian scenario I've been peddling in these pages for a couple of years now. Perhaps he'll have better luck with it than I've had... That ten-year-old girl could have a lot more to worry about than gloomy Blair speeches.

We know the answer to that one too, alas. Some on the ill-advised left will double-down on mass trannification, but, as the weekend scenes from Ottawa suggest, they will go the way, very easily; of that Montreal condom boutique. On the ill-advised right, there will be more and more Valentina Gomezes, who do not wish to live in the ruins of a well-advised world they never signed up for. "Celebrate diversity" while you can: one way or another, it is only an interim phase, and from Ottawa to Epping to Austin the contradictions are already being forced.

~Thank you to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club in this our ninth year, and thank you to those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.