UPPESTDATE! If you missed today's edition of Mark's Clubland Q&A live around the planet, the action replay can be heard in full here.
UPPERDATE! We're live now, so let's have at it!
UPDATE! We'll be going live in about fifteen minutes, so do get ready to fire off your questions via the comment form below. See you at the top of the hour. And to listen simply click the livestream feed.
It was The Mark Steyn Club's eighth birthday just a few days ago, and I thank profoundly all those First Week Founding Members who opted to sign on for a ninth year. We hope, as this se'nnight proceeds, that our First Fortnight Founding Members will want to do the same.
Michael, a First Day Founding Member from Colorado, writes:
Dear Mark,
I want to join the chorus of Anniversary Congratulations! Proud to be a Founding Member! First heard your voice on the Hugh Hewitt radio show many moons ago. Knew you were someone special from the very start. Read your books. Once sent you a note that I had thought they were a warning about the future, but that future was happening now right before my eyes!!
Thank God Trump won the election! Him, his Team, the Congress better make the most of these next 4 years so we don't quickly slide back into utter madness!
That's really the key distinction, Michael. The DC think-tank right still believe we're having a good-faith policy debate grounded in what philosophical abstractions produce the best outcomes for the citizenry. The left, on the other hand, want power, and, if that's your priority, you are indifferent as to how many people get close enough to the other guy to skim his skull with a bullet: very odd to live in a country where the world's most lavishly funded security detail permit two assassins to come within a whisker of pulling it off - and the politico-media class is entirely uninterested. In Britain, the Prime Minister lies to the country about who's stabbing schoolgirls and sends you to gaol for disagreeing with him, where you hang yourself in your cell. In Australia, at least thirty-five people died on the day they received their Covid jabs, but their demise remains entirely uninvestigated.
They want you dead, or at any rate are indifferent to your death. If you disagree, do let me know why on today's edition of our Clubland Q&A. I'll be taking questions from Steyn Clubbers live around the planet starting at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm in the British Isles and 9pm in western and central Europe.
Yesterday Donald Trump was at the US/Saudi investment forum in Riyadh, which ended with the President inviting Crown Prince Salman up on stage to the strains of "YMCA" - because the House of Saud is renowned for its love of gay disco anthems. Instead of just enjoying the scene as merely another of the faintly surreal sights the Great Disruptor has added to the passing parade, the American right descended into internecine feuding with my former colleague Mark Levin accusing Steven Witkoff and by implication the entire Trump Administration of being "anti-Semites". Mr Witkoff happens to be a Jew:
Granted the rising tide of Jew-hate, Mr Levin isn't helping his cause by yoking it to the failed geopolitics of the century so far. "Peace through strength" is an odd way to characterise a "neoconservatism" that led to Iraq becoming an Iranian proxy state, left the Taliban as the ninth or tenth best-armed military on the planet, made every Libyan port Islam's express check-in for Italy ...and whose adherents then decided to apply the same techniques that worked out so swell in the Muslim world to the European theatre.
Happy to take your thoughts on American global strategy or any of the other topics we've discussed in recent days. Whether or not you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, you can listen to our show live as it happens wherever you chance to be on this turbulent earth: Club membership is required only to ask a question. As much as we cherish the loyalty of our First Week Founding Members, we love to hear from brand new Steyn Clubbers. Among the additions to our ranks in recent days are newbies from around the globe - from Boston to Bulgaria, Wellington to Wokingham, Cairns to Kamloops. If you've joined this eighth anniversary 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. So see you back here at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm in London and Dublin, 9pm in Paris and Berlin, 10pm in Kiev and Moscow; half-past-ten in Teheran; midnight-forty-five in Kathmandu; 3am in Singapore and Honkers (sorry about that); 6am in Sydney and Melbourne; 8am in Auckland, and an even more civilised hour for the kippers and kedgeree in His Majesty's Dominions eastward across the Pacific, where you're so far ahead Michael E Mann's probably lost his appeal by now...