Yes, it's me! Mark Steyn of that ilk - and not dead yet, despite the best efforts of the University of Vermont Medical Center. It's Friday, so that means I'll be rousing myself from my sickbed 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 wretched health refuses to cooperate, please forgive me.
If you want to find anything in a daily paper about what's really going on in America, you have to skip The New York Times et al and read The Daily Mail - which yesterday gave us "a glimpse of the hot war on America's southern border – a direct consequence of an out-of-control crisis that has resulted in nearly five million illegal migrants entering the United States since President Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021."
That's equivalent to the entire population of Norway and New Zealand in less than three years. Except, of course, that they're not Kiwis or Scandinavians. President Trump famously wondered why America only got "immigrants" from bleephole countries as opposed to anybody from Norway. But even if, say, five per cent of Norwegians could be persuaded to move to the US (which they have no rational reason to do) they would be demographically irrelevant in the continuous nightly tide of bleepholers.
When they get citizenship (or even before), how do you think those five million fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community are going to be voting? Yet at that stupid "Republican" debate on Fox Business the subject of immigration only came up as "what are you going to do to legalize the Dreamers?" That single statistic (almost certainly an under-estimation) is the death knell of America.
~Minded to disagree? In the US the FBI is "targeting" "Donald Trump followers" and in the UK Scotland Yard is targeting my former GB News colleague Laurence Fox:
As something of an expert in non-disparagement litigation, I would doubt that contractual clause Laurence refers to is enforceable, not least given Nigel Farage's very public disparagement of Lozza.
Aside from Fox's firing, GB News also sacked their in-house vicar for the sin of disagreeing with management:
I'm glad to see Calvin brought up GB News's settlement with an excellent female presenter for whom I have the greatest admiration. That episode deserves to be more widely known. In essence, the CEO Angelos Frangopoulos destroyed a fine broadcaster's career because she declined his advances. Way back when, I wrote to GB co-owner Paul Marshall that he was going to have to get rid of Frangopoulos sooner or later, so it might as well be sooner. Sir Paul decided to go all-in on the Thwarted Shagger. It will be interesting to see whether that strategic and moral decision helps with his bid for the Telegraph.
~For well over a decade now I've been saying something along the lines of:
When I was a kid and watched sci-fi movies set in a futuristic dystopia where individuals are mere chattels of an unseen all-powerful government... I always found the caper less interesting than the unseen backstory: How did they get there from here? From free western societies to a bunch of glassy-eyed drones wandering around in identikit variety-show catsuits in a land where technology has advanced but liberty has retreated: how'd that happen?
Well, it's pretty obvious that on both sides of the Atlantic we're well advanced on the getting-there-from-here phase. So that's the theme of today's show, and I'm looking forward to your questions on whichever aspects of the accelerating descent into darkness tickle your fancy.
~I'm also happy today to take any questions on my free-speech lawsuits on both sides of the Atlantic: on the one hand, after eleven years in the fetid septic tank of the District of Columbia Superior Court, the Mann vs Steyn trial is apparently set to begin this month; on the other, this week's events at GBN have added further relevance to my pushback against the UK state censor Ofcom in the English High Court over their "rulings" against me for my coverage of the Covid vaccines. The latter 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. You can read our second Statement of Claim here.
Many viewers, listeners and readers have asked how they can support this important free-speech case. There are several ways, 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) ordering a copy of my latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor. You won't regret it.
The "chilling effect" of Ofcom on UK public discourse has been made plain this last fortnight, 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); 6am in Sydney and Melbourne; 8am 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.