As the dust settles in the smoking crater where that big Iranian mountain used to be (your mileage may vary), I remain, as I said yesterday, full of foreboding. But what do I know?
All the smart guys are ready to move on to the next phase. Trump may think he launched a one-off surgical strike, but the fellows who brought you the last quarter-century are hard at work figuring out how to stretch twenty minutes of precision bombing into a couple of decades of Take Your Trans Daughter to Work Day in Fakhrabad:
President Trump did the right thing for America in striking Iran's nuclear-weapons program. Now, on to regime change.https://t.co/GAQt6KEKiJ
— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) June 22, 2025
In case you were in any doubt, Mr Bolton had a couple more tabs of Uniparty Viagra and clarified his position:
The road to lasting peace and security in the Middle East goes through Tehran. Overthrowing the ayatollahs is the only way.
As Karl Marx famously observed, history repeats itself - first as John Bolton, second as John Bolton. Notwithstanding that the Walrus was one of those who openly subverted the forty-fifth president, the forty-seventh president is in an indulgent mood and inclined to humour him:
"Nobody is calling for regime change" pic.twitter.com/r0cBFh6Zwi
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) June 22, 2025
"Regimes" may change, but some things never do. This is the first part of a post-Fordow series on what has not been bunker-busted:
1) WHAT MATTERS IS THE HOME FRONT: America and the wider west are sliding off the cliff. Assume for the purposes of argument that Saturday night did indeed set back the Iranian nukes "twenty years". I don't quite buy it myself: From the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was seven years; even in Pakistan, from the inauguration of the programme to the first successful nuclear test was a mere decade. But be that as it may...
In another ten years, it won't matter if the weirdbeards go nuclear. By then, most of what we used to call Christendom will be demographically past the point of no return, and certainly its capital cities: Brussels will be Greater Molenbeek, Paris will be Greater Clichy-sous-Bois, London will be Greater Tower Hamlets. Even the craziest mullahs are not going to be interested in nuking incoming members of the dar al-Islam.
So, if you're not seriously thinking about "remigration" and how to save your own country, there's no point worrying about "regime change" in places you can't find on a map ...because, without leaving the house, you're in for the Mother of All Regime Changes a decade or so hence. The fate of the United States - as a giant Latin-American favela - will be a little different from France and Germany, Sweden and Ireland, but, per Dr Johnson, that's like arguing the precedence of a louse and a flea.
Trump was quite right to excoriate "Europe" for last week's summit with the Iranians. Do nations with open borders and no armies really need this much foreign policy? Keir Starmer can't police Ballymena; why should anyone care what he has to say about Tehran?
But Trump is president because voters in Wyoming and Pennsylvania do not wish the United States to be "the world's policeman". In today's America, it's tough enough being some no-account suburb's policeman: four days after the political assassination of the former Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, her home was mysteriously broken into - just as, if you recall, the Las Vegas shooter's home was likewise mysteriously broken into. More generally, have you spoken to a policeman lately? Yesterday the wanker coppers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department released a statement expressing their condolences for those living in suburban sub-divisions in whatever Fordow's equivalent of San Fernando Valley is:
Our hearts go out to the victims and families impacted by the recent bombings in Iran. While this tragic event occurred overseas, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is closely monitoring the situation...
The statement was subsequently deleted, but only after the USAF dropped half-a-dozen bunker-busters on LA County police HQ.
To reiterate, but in James Carville terms: It's the home front, stupid.
For the entirety of this century, the number of illegal aliens living in the United States has supposedly remained constant at eleven million. Even after another seven million strolled in on Joe Biden's "watch", you'll be reassured to hear that the total number remains eleven million. Pay no attention to those wackjob conspiracy theorists who say the real count of undocumented aliens living in America may be closer to fifty million - which would certainly be considered a large number in more paranoid jurisdictions.
Mass unskilled migration affects everything: not just the rape and murder stats, but the declining quality of schools, hospitals and affordable housing. It will cost you your country, and sooner than you think.
Over the weekend, it fell to my former CRTV colleague Mark Levin to offer the traditional hosannas to mark the ceremonial Kicking of the Foreigner's Ass:
Levin on U.S. Iran Strikes: 'We Just Kicked Their Ass'
Over three decades ago, I stopped with two visiting Englishmen at the general store in Monroe, New Hampshire. They were enthralled by the range of pre-war T-shirts on sale, and keen to buy some. This was for Gulf War One, if you're having difficulty keeping track. The war had yet to commence, but the Chinese-made T-shirts were already crowing over the soon-to-be-kicked ass.
But, when tens of millions of foreigners can just stroll into a country on supposed "orange alert" while airport security is preoccupied confiscating gran'ma's pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving because it's insufficiently dry and inedible and its succulent moistness could easily be weaponised, you're the one with the kicked ass - the most comprehensively kicked ass on the planet. Is it time to introduce a Kicked Ass of the Day feature? Courtesy of Heather Mac Donald, a snapshot of American shock-and-awe in California:
A crowd broke into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center downtown to liberate the detainees. The vandals overpowered the skeletal crew of National Guard soldiers, using improvised bombs made from M-80 firecrackers, nails and broken glass...
The day before, according to the commander I interviewed, a mob of several dozen surrounded two ICE agents taking an illegal alien into custody on Vermont Boulevard. Six men jumped out of a truck and grabbed the handcuffed suspect from the back of the ICE van, threw the suspect into their truck and fled. The ICE agents gave chase, but without sirens or lights, the pursuit was futile. Neither of these incidents was reported in the press. The commander said the LAPD didn't put out an alert for its officers to apprehend the fleeing abduction squad, presumably to avoid violating Los Angeles's sanctuary law, which bans using city personnel for federal immigration enforcement.
George W Bush liked to say that "they envy us our freedoms". But "government of the people, by the people, for the people" is a tougher pitch when it appears to be serving the interests of an entirely different bunch of people - as it's doing in, say, the average federal courthouse. What precisely is supposed to be the selling point of "democracy" in an open-borders world? Say what you like about Chairman Xi, Crown Prince MBS, Ayatollah Khamenei, Fatboy Kim, Tsar Vlad, Your Strongman Here, but none of them let a thousand Somali jihadists and a thousand sex traffickers from MS-13 (on the Rio Grande) or Albania (on Dover beach) walk into their country every night.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with a full-length interview of yours truly by the great Dan Wootton.
Saturday brought a new edition of my weekend music show, while Rick McGinnis's movie date offered Powell and Pressburger's strangely topical tale, The Small Back Room. On Sunday morning I presented some initial thoughts on the overnight bunker-busting and our Song of the Week was "God Bless America".
If you were too busy this weekend kicking random asses to keep your ass-kicking up to snuff, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
