Yes, it's me! Mark Steyn of that ilk - and not dead yet, despite the best efforts of the University of Vermont Medical Center. I'm still on my Eurosickbed, but it's Friday, so that means I'll be rousing myself and conducting another edition of our Clubland Q&A live around the planet. The fun starts at 3pm North American Eastern time/8pm British Summer Time. We'll try to pin down the rest of the time zones below, but do, as they say, check local listings. And, if my ruinous health refuses to cooperate, please forgive me.

On today's edition I'm willing to take questions on whatever's on your mind, but let me take a circuitous route to what I'd propose as an overall theme. A week or two back, I noted that travesti, in one form or another, has existed as a niche demographic in human society for thousands of years. Paul Harmon, a First Hour Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, did not care for my relaxed attitude to an age-old phenomenon:

I do have a great objection to a man identifying as a woman.

First Week Founding Member Robert Fox agrees with him:

I gotta give Paul Harmon his due. Unfortunately, I did not spend the weekend emptying Mr. Webber's mini-bar, but I did chance to read one or two articles regarding some struggles between some school districts in the United States and the parents of children who attend said schools.

Some school districts are revoking the option given to parents to excuse their kiddos from being exposed to the nouveau style vaudeville shows at school featuring scantily clad men posing as flamboyant women, shaking and gyrating, leaving little to the imagination. The 'purpose' of these shows is to allow children as young as five years old to 'celebrate' degeneracy. Overwhelmingly, parents were asking that their children be excused from this 'activity'. In response, these school districts are now requiring the children to attend so they have a full house to 'celebrate' it.

What I would like to know is, how in the first place were these groups permitted to stage these shows in public schools? Were they invited, and by whom? Did they approach the schools and ask them if they could do this?

I think Mr Fox knows the answer to his questions. Did armies of transtroopers suddenly decide to storm the schoolhouses of America and start twerking their perinea at kindergartners?

No. They were invited in by school boards and librarians, and indeed with the encouragement of almost all other officialdom, starting with the purported chief of state himself (a man who was credibly exposed this last week as a child molestor of his own daughter). Look at any picture of "Drag Queen Storytime", and all the adoring mommies loving every minute of it. These are the most "normal" women of your community: perfectly respectable NPR listeners and the like.

To reiterate: Trannies have been around in the shadows for millennia. So who decided to bring them front-and-center, and weaponize them against millions of children? Answer (American readers may want to stand well back):

AMERICA!!!

Okay, if you'd prefer I be less universally condemnatory:

The American state, the American media, the American educational system and the American medical profession.

And, if you've got those on board, you don't need much else, do you?

To be sure, the dominant English-speaking power's fads and fancies have, as usual, been mimicked to one degree or another across the Anglosphere. But the rest of the west regards it as mainly an anglo perversion, mass marketed in the way US manufactures once were: to modify Henry Ford's Model T, you can get it in any color as long as it's trans.

Yet, from my instant and not terribly unscientific survey, it is not a phenomenon in my corner of either Italy or Slovenia. And nor is it likely to be.

So the question for those American parents baffled by the transanity of their kids' grade schools is: Is this even a tranny thing at all? Or is it, in fact, an End-Stage-America-Is-Evil thing?

We are undergoing (to revive a meme of last year) a controlled demolition of the entirety of western civilization - led by the west's dominant power. On almost any of the individual saplings that excite the news cycle, it makes more sense to pull back and survey the forest:

So you can talk about the "weakness" of the prosecution's case in the latest Trump indictment, as the legal scholars do all over cable TV, but to do so is to go along with the pretense that this is the routine functioning of a normal justice system. It's not. At the federal level, America has thrown out equality before the law because to do so diminishes any possibility of meaningful course correction by peaceful means. Look at the Trump officials who've been reduced to penury by legal "process" - General Flynn, Peter Navarro - and then ask yourself, if Trump wins in '24, who's going to be willing to serve in his second administration?

Speaking of 2024's Election Day Election Month Election Quarter, you can do as Conservative Inc does and pretend this is a free and fair election contest - ooh, who's up two points in Ohio? - or you can recognize that this is a racket that no practitioner of self-government, whether France or India, Denmark or Botswana, would recognize as a respectable election system.

So I'm interested in any questions on the madness of end-stage America - whose credit rating, I see, has just been downgraded by Fitch due to "erosion of governance". In the old days, US credit used to be downgraded just as a marketing gimmick for the launch of a new Steyn book. But now things are so bad it's gone beyond mere Steyn promotional tie-in. Hmm. Why is that?

~I'm also happy to take any questions on my (second) free-speech lawsuit against the UK state censor Ofcom in the High Court of England over its "rulings" against me for my coverage of the Covid vaccines. The case is officially called:

The King on the application of Mark Steyn
vs
The Office of Communications

But His Majesty is leaving it to me and my KC to do most of the heavy lifting. So you can read our latest Statement of Claim here.

~I thank all of you for your kind comments re my new book The Prisoner of Windsor. You don't have to buy it just to support my Ofcom suit; it's worth it on its own terms. However, aside from procuring a copy of The Prisoner of Windsor, there are other ways to lend a hand, including:

a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;

b) buying a near-and-dear one a SteynOnline gift certificate; or

c) treating your beloved to a stateroom on our next Mark Steyn Cruise, which we shall be officially announcing very shortly.

The "chilling effect" of Ofcom on public discourse is far worse than Canada under Section 13 or Australia under Section 18C, so once more unto the breach...

~Whether or not you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, you can listen to our Clubland Q&A live as it happens wherever you chance to be on this turbulent earth: Club membership is required only to ask a question. We love to hear from brand new members, so if you've joined this week, either for a full year or a see-how-it-goes experimental quarter, do shoot me a head-scratcher for today's show. But, if you're not interested in joining, no worries, as they say in Oz: We seek no unwilling members - and as always the show is free to listen to, so we hope you'll want to tune in.

As soon as we go live, members should log-in and submit their queries via our comment form below - and I'll answer them as-it-happens on the audio livestream that should magically appear above (or possibly below - I forget which). And, if you disagree with my response, then let rip in the comments, and I'll endeavour to address a couple of the objections as we go along.

Clubland Q&A is a special production for The Mark Steyn Club. We're not paywalling off SteynOnline or any of that nonsense - and in fact this site now offers more free content than ever before in our twenty-year history. But Club membership does confer a few benefits, starting with participation in our weekly Q&As.

So see you back here live this afternoon at 3pm North American Eastern Time. That's 4pm in the Canadian Maritimes, half-past-four in Newfoundland - and, beyond the Americas, 8pm in London and Dublin; 9pm in Paris and Berlin; 10pm in Kiev and Moscow, now in the same time zone if not the same country; 10.30pm in Teheran, for all you Newfoundlanders who move to Iran for the half-hour time zone; midnight-forty-five in Kathmandu, for all you Iranians who move to Nepal to check out the quarter-hour time zone; 3am in Singapore, Honkers and Perth (sorry about that); 5am in Sydney and Melbourne; 7am in Auckland and even deeper into Saturday in His Majesty's Dominions across the Pacific.

But, whatever hour it is where you are, we do hope you'll be able to join us. To listen to the livestream, simply click the "play" icon on the audio player (in certain browsers, the audio will start auto-playing). And to pose a question simply use the comment form below.