Yes, it's me! Mark Steyn of that ilk - and not dead yet, despite the best efforts of the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt American "justice" system. On the sixteenth of this month, the Mann vs Steyn trial will, after a thrilling twelve-year build-up, finally begin in Courtroom 518 of the District of Columbia Superior Court. But, for the moment, I am at liberty and thus able to conduct another midweek edition of our Clubland Q&A, taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members around the planet. The fun starts at 3pm North American Eastern/8pm Greenwich Mean Time.

~Today's show is my last before jury selection, so feel free to shoot me any questions on Michael Mann's attempt to put the full force of the law behind any criticism of his "hockey stick".

After twelve years in litigation with Mann and slightly less with Cary (The Cockwomble) Katz, I'm naturally impressed by the stellar quality of American jurists. So here's one for all you constitution-wavers: Washington State Superior Court judge Charnelle Bjelkengren was nominated by Joe Biden for a federal judgeship. She has now withdrawn her name from consideration - possibly because, when asked at her hearing, "she didn't know what Article II and Article V of the Constitution were".

~I'm also happy to take any questions on my other legal battle - against the UK state censor Ofcom. The English High Court has accepted the case for judicial review, and it will be coming to the King's Bench Division sometime before the end of March. In fact, it's not altogether impossible that the tail-end of the DC trial could run into the opening of the London one. I don't know whether to laugh or cry, or have a massive stroke.

At any rate, Britain's godawful non-conservative Conservative Government has now rewarded Ofcom for its ruthless enforcement of the Covid propaganda by giving them control of the Internet:

Ah, those smiles can light up a room. Celebrate lack of diversity with the Sisterhood of State Censors.

Ofcom's powers over the Internet have only existed for twenty minutes, but already the non-Conservative Government is calling on Dame Melanie to use them to vaporise Joey Barton, a footballer who made some ungallant remarks about lady sports commentators. My friend and Mark Steyn Cruisemate Leilani Dowding responds:

Leilani's right. In the course of 2022 The Mark Steyn Show interviewed women who'd been sexually assaulted for years on end by Pakistani Muslim rape gangs with the connivance of the authorities. One consequence of the light we shone on this disgusting and shameful phenomenon was that a couple of closed police investigations got re-opened and - surprise! - hollow and unprincipled Tory leadership candidates were obliged to butch up on the issue:

Liz Truss pledges to hold police to account over 'repulsive' grooming gangs in 'places like Telford'

And even:

Evil grooming gangs who target children and young women will be stamped out under new plans unveiled by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak today

But then GB News retreated to its core mission of Tories'n'trivia, and the butching up promptly de-butched like a deflated soufflé. To Mr Sunak's worthless ministry some sexist Tweets are a far bigger priority than schoolgirls in towns up and down the land getting gang-raped, urinated on, doused in petrol and dangled off tower-block balconies.

I shall be pleasantly surprised if this website is still available in the British Isles by the end of the year. So I might as well state now that nothing will improve in the United Kingdom until the leftie poseurs who run the present "Conservative and Unionist Party" (which is neither) are destroyed and a serious alternative to the uniparty wankery replaces it.

~In opposition to the litigious Michael E Mann's climate-change "hockey stick", we have a limited-edition trial souvenir, the SteynOnline Liberty Stick, to help me make it through a month in the grisly American capital city. The Liberty Stick features Magna Carta at one end and the US Constitution at the other, so you can shake it, according to taste, either at Ofcom censorship czars Michael Grade and Melanie Dawes or at your local Secretary of State as she removes Trump from the ballot - or at multiple Commonwealth commissars in between, such as those tormenting the Canadian truckers and throwing the book at Kiwi vaccine whistleblowers.

These Liberty Sticks are individually signed and numbered by yours truly - and are made not, like everything else, round the back of the Wuhan Institute of Virology but by red-blooded all-American types in Minnesota. If you don't know any liberty-lovers among your circle of friends and family, don't worry: They make a perfect gift from you to you. Kentucky Steyn Clubber Andrew Curl writes:

I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed listening to you read Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". Also, while my family and I made Christmas cookies together we listened to several of your Christmas Song of the Week shows - White Christmas and Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and then your Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols show. We enjoyed all your Christmas shows so much!

Everyone also got to see the Christmas present I bought for myself - my Mark Steyn Liberty Stick #155 hanging prominently near the stockings.

Thank you for everything you do Mark and I wish you a happy and healthy New Year!

Thank you, Andrew. The Liberty Stick was hung by the chimney with care... I feel a poem coming on.

~Many listeners have asked how they can support these important free-speech cases on both sides of the Atlantic. There are several ways - and, if your Christmas gift for your beloved failed to do the trick and you urgently need to restore household tranquility, the first two below can be digitally delivered:

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

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

c) ordering a copy of my latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it, says Kathy Gyngell);

d) snapping up one of the aforementioned SteynOnline Liberty Sticks; or

e) treating your loved one to a once-in-a-lifetime Mark Steyn Caribbean Cruise.

~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, and among the additions to our ranks on the eve of trial are newbies from around the globe, from Wichita Falls to Dripping Springs, from Victoria, British Columbia to Victoria, Australia, from Nottingham, England to Nottingham, New Hampshire. Whether 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.