Thank you for all your questions. If you missed the live broadcast, 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.
Before anything else, let me once again thank all those who've dialed up The Mark Steyn Show on recent nights. On Thursday, we closed out a very good week by beating Sky News and TalkTV combined. We had five times the audience (and, indeed, at certain points in the show ten times) of Piers Morgan.
Rupert Murdoch is paying more per viewer for Piers's pitiful audience than anyone has ever paid in the history of television. I have no idea why one of the all-time savviest guys in global media continues to indulge this fiasco, but he could at least change the name of his money-bleeding show: Piers Morgan Uncensored? No one has ever been in less need of being "censored": His views on every subject are utterly conventional. "Britain's most outspoken broadcaster"? On what? The Second Amendment? Get your Covid jabs?
I wouldn't usually bang on about such things, except that the cocksure Mr Morgan sneered that he would crush GB News like a bug, and his London media mates asserted that he would have no difficulty doing so, given that he was up against what The Guardian dismissed as a "niche Canadian". Not to go all Churchillian on you, but some Canadian, some niche. Rupert has a phenomenal half-century track record: why he's letting Piers Morgan destroy it is a mystery.
~With that out of the way, it's Friday, which means I'll be conducting another edition of our Clubland Q&A live around the planet. The action begins 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.
On this edition I'm happy to take questions on pretty much anything, bearing in mind that certain subjects a) hold little interest for me; or b) I've been banging on about them for so long I've little new to add. As an example of the latter, I see Conservative Inc are very belatedly waking up to the woeful state of federal "justice": The GOP leadership are now complaining that the FBI is purging its ranks of conservative G-men.
There is also a third category of news: a non-political event that can be weaponised against your political opponents. Hurricane Ian continues to wreak havoc on Florida, piling up boats in the streets of Naples, severing in two the Sanibel Causeway, and leaving millions without power. But, for the US media, its main point of interest is whether it can also be deployed to total Ron DeSantis's presidential ambitions.
~Whether or not you're a Club member you can listen to our Clubland Q&A live as it happens wherever you chance to be on this turbulent earth: 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 nineteen-year history. But Club membership does confer a few benefits, including not only participation in our Q&As but also access to Tales for Our Time, our Sunday Poems and much more.
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; half-past-eleven in Tehran, 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, 5am in Sydney, 7am in Auckland, and an even more convivial hour for the kippers and kedgeree in the King's dominions across the Pacific.
