Mark Steyn Club members can enjoy The Mark Steyn Show in whatever form they wish - video, audio or text. For the video version of this episode of the show, visit this page. The transcript follows below.
[Happy Birthday music, followed by a female voice: "It's The Mark Steyn Show. And now here's Mark."]
[Ed. note: New sections are in italics, sections from old shows in regular font.]
Mark Steyn: Maybe you were there on Thanksgiving Day 2002, when somewhere between the turkey and the pumpkin pie SteynOnline, slyly went live with its first postings. Even on a very family focused house bound holiday, word slipped out and within hours thousands upon thousands were clicking on our first offerings. 20 years later, we are still here. And a lot of people aren't from those early days of the internet. Here with an audio collage of the last two decades with some starry names from Megyn Kelly to Jordan Peterson along the way, but to kick things off, of those initial offerings at SteynOnline here's the one that of all things has lasted. If you heard our special 20 years ago show, you'll know that in SteynOnline's first week, the Miss World competition went to Nigeria and prompted a Muslim riot in which hundreds of people died.
For my Telegraph column a couple of days later, I sloughed off some far away parody lyrics that with the help of my burqa clad child bride have stayed with me to this day on stages around the world and have been heard by tens of thousands of people.
[Old clip of Mark onstage]
So if you will please welcome my second wife. [Laughter] Oh, my apologies. This is actually wife number three. The girls like to get a little crazy and switch burqas on me, you know how that goes. Hit it!
Yeah I like to get a little romantic here at the Kodak center. This one goes out to all the lovers here tonight. A bouquet of love to the Flower City. Smooch along with one this Rochester.
[Sings]
My Sharia amour,
She's hot enough for Gulf Emirs
My Sharia amour,
But I'm the cat she really fears
My Sharia amour,
I got her from an imam in Lahore
One of only four that I beat raw. How I wish that I had five.
In her burqa, this chick could take away your breath
But don't even glance, or I'll have to have her stoned to death
Kind of a pity right?
[Old clip ends]
That's one of the rare moments over the last two decades when my two principal interests, the music and the politics came together. We didn't do a lot of audio and video at SteynOnline back then because the internet was still primarily a text medium. And I didn't do a lot of radio or TV except occasionally when I'd be invited on an arts show or a music show or some such. But 20 years ago, things were changing. My theatrical life was shrinking, mainly because of the dearth of production. Here I am on PBS with Michael Riedel.
[Old clip]
Michael Riedel: A lot of our top directors now in the musical theater, have not had very much experience working with new musicals. I mean, new musicals take forever to get out of there, and very few of them coming along.
Mark Steyn: I think it's terribly sad this. There is no reason in the world why musicals should take 10 years to get on. All that means is that by the time if you were George Gershwin, by the time you get your first show on, you'd be dead. It's never going to work. You're never going to have a viable theater like that. In a sense, the Disney way is the quickest way if you're someone like Stephen Schwartz, who wrote Godspell or Tim Rice and Elton John, it's actually quicker to go to Disney and get them to make a cartoon movie of the thing and then adapt it for the stage a couple of years later, you'll have it in three years. Using the motion picture business as a as the new tryout is actually far more efficient.
[Old clip ends]
It's hard to be a man about Broadway when Broadway's dead so I started accepting very sparingly the occasional invite from non artsy, non musical shows. Only the best, of course, such as the great Brian Lamb, founder of C- SPAN.
[Old clip begins]
Brian Lamb: Top of the hour and on a website that says it's SteynOnline. They say he divides his time between Quebec, New Hampshire and London, and we found him in Burlington, Vermont. Mr. Steyn, how did you get to Burlington and where are you on your way to?
Mark Steyn: Well, Burlington, Vermont is kind of midway between Quebec and New Hampshire. So it's kind of my daily, not daily commute but it's the nearest I have to a commute. I'm en route between the two.
Brian Lamb: It also says on your SteynOnline website that you can find you in The Daily Telegraph of Britain, The Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator, The Chicago Sun Times The New York Sun, The Richmond Times Dispatch, The New Criterion, the Atlantic Monthly, National Review, The Western Standard, the Jerusalem Post, The Irish Times, you write different things for all of those publications every week?
Mark Steyn: Yeah, there's a bit there's a bit of recycling, it's environmentally friendly to a degree, but I think if you write for British, Australian, Israeli, Irish, Canadian, American newspapers, you got to know something about your audience. Because everything's has to be slightly tweaked a little, you got to take out the obscure British reference and put in an obscure Canadian reference, take out the obscure Canadian one, put in an obscure American reference. There's a moment in the course of the week, when I go through the column and put different local jokes in but you got to know something about each of your audiences, I think.
Brian Lamb: How did you get into this business?
Mark Steyn: Well, you know, I didn't go to journalism school, and I didn't do media studies. And I find it hard to understand people who did to be honest, because everyone I knew when I started in journalism in Fleet Street, they'd only gone into journalism, because their life had gone horribly wrong. You know, they had these sob stories, you know, their dad had left them a copper mine in Zambia, or something and then the government had nationalized it and they'd had 48 hours to get out of town with only three pounds in their pocket. And they hitched a ride up to Nairobi and some guy said, Do you want to write something for the local paper and everybody I knew in journalism was only doing it until their life took a turn for the better and they could get out of it. And that's what happened to me, I was short of money, and I needed some in a hurry. And I started doing journalism, intending to do it for a couple of months until my life turned around. It never did so I'm stuck with it now.
Brian Lamb: By and large, and correct me if I'm wrong, you have stayed off of American television. Why?
Mark Steyn: Well Brian, I did a lot of TV when I was young. When I was, in my late teenage years and early 20s, I did a lot of TV and radio, it was great way of getting chicks, which was kind of important to me at that age, if people knew you from TV and things. And I don't do a lot these days, because I don't find it particularly rewarding. I'm doing this because I love your show. And I have a great deal of respect for C-SPAN but a lot of these things, you know, just slipping into a studio to be put up as the guy on one side of the argument who shouts at the guy on the other side of the argument for eight minutes, I don't find terribly rewarding. And you know, it's great fun to watch sometimes, but it's not something I want to spend my time doing.
[Older clip ends]
Mark Steyn: Whoa what happened to that guy? Here he is doing a daily TV show. Well, what happened is that newspapers died and radio and TV are headed the same way but at a slightly different pace. So my business model was obliged to evolve. What I didn't realize was that unbeknownst to me, I was already on American TV. I'd fly in to Cedar Rapids or wherever to give a speech. And although I had no idea, it would be broadcast on C-SPAN, so here I am, for example, at the Claremont Institute in California.
[Old clip—2005]
Mark Steyn: I was speaking to a Frenchman about the riots on TV. And he was a friend of mine, very successful Parisian lawyer. And he said, "I think this is a lot of nonsense. Them showing the riots on TV every night is not a problem unless you don't you don't have to see it unless you choose to drive through these terrible areas where they're all rioting and burning. And me I don't think about it. I'm going for a weekend in the country."
And I said to him that the problem is you're not going to have a country to have a weekend in, that these fellas face an appalling situation that they're essentially in denial about. So I apologize, I speak to you as a foreigner or uh, technically, I think in California, it's what do you call it? The undocumented? I'm a documented undocumented, which probably is illegal. I mean, one thing I love about the left is they invent the best euphemisms. I would love to have been at the brainstorming session that came up with the undocumented. I would never thought that would fly for a minute, I would have said, Oh, come on nobody's gonna....the undocumented? Nobody's going to fall for that one. Next thing you know, it's, it's everywhere. It's an amazing thing.
So I am now a proud upstanding member of the undocumented American community, which I think is the largest single demographic in this country now. I love the word. It's like, since they introduced African American, I don't know whether you saw Carol Lin on CNN a couple of weeks ago during these French riots. But she was.....the guys were jumping around in the street burning cars. And she was obviously you know, you have to chit chat over it because it gets pretty boring looking at flaming Peugeots all night long. And, and she wanted a word to describe the rioters and she didn't like to say she didn't like say Muslim, you know, and youths gets a bit boring just going youths youths. So eventually, she described them as African Americans.
And I heard I heard an ABC announcer years ago describe Nelson Mandela as the famous African American and she got she got herself halfway through, famous African American African. You know, at least with Nelson Mandela he's heavy on the African, light on the American and they're half right. You couldn't even say that about calling these poor disaffected French Islamist rioters African American, it seemed grossly unfair to all parties, but it's like ever since ever since ever since they invented African American it's like they can't, it's difficult finding a word for black people who aren't who aren't African American. And I feel that way as a foreigner, that ever since they invented undocumented immigrants it's kind of hard finding a term for you know, the three of us who aren't undocumented but anyway I'm proud to stand before you as a legal immigrant, although so was Muhammad Atta, of course.
I'm having some construction work done at my home in New Hampshire, and I came downstairs a couple of months back find the carpenters and painters wall moaning about illegal immigration, and they don't like that line you hear all the time about how America needs immigrants to come here to do the jobs that Americans won't do. And they didn't like this line. They resented the illegals annexing the construction industry and they were generally bad mouthing foreigners. And, you know, I came down I said, "Look, ease up on the xenophobia guys. The only fella writing any checks around here is the foreigner." And my carpenter said to me, "Oh, yeah, right in our case, we need immigrants to come here to hire Americans to do the jobs immigrants won't do." So I'm happy to be doing my part.
I'm a newspaper columnist. And I must say I was tremendously heartened after slogging through the Los Angeles Times from cover to cover this morning to discover that apparently one of the jobs Americans won't do is produce a lively readable daily newspaper.
[Clip from 2006]
Mark Steyn: Give peace a chance is one of those songs I really never want to hear again. I was up in Quebec a few months ago and a bunch of Quebecois pop stars, whom I love dearly, but if you're a Quebecois pop star with a great exception of Celine Dion, nobody in the rest of North America has heard of you. And they were all singing their Give Peace A Chance, a special anti war version they'd recorded and in the middle of them, one of these highly accented Quebecois pop stars suddenly goes in the middle, "Are you're listening, Mr. Bush?" And I think the answer to that is definitely no. But good for them. We should all say what we think.
Interviewer: Yeah, indeed. I want to read you a quote. You know, one of the things that an author who was just launching a book always hopes for is a news hook on which to hang the launch of a book and of course, the 300 million mark happened right around your book launch. And then here we have this, quote, "Western countries have problems. And since they have a negative population growth, they are worried and scared that if our population grows, we may dominate them." Who said it?
Mark Steyn: I've no idea. Who....was it Col. Gaddafi?
Interviewer: You know, I am wondering if you didn't pay this guy to help promote your book. It's Ahmadinejad this weekend, who was urging Iranians to have more kids. "I'm against saying that two children are enough." It segues right into one of the main points of your book.
Mark Steyn: Yes, it's a conscious strategy. He's joined the crowd, because I know that the Colonel Gaddafi and a few others have said this, over the years, the big shot imams, that basically you can participate if you breed fast enough. And the people you're with breed slow enough, in one of the fastest population transformations ever seen. That's what's going on in Europe right now. And you know, to be honest, I don't blame Jacques Chirac for figuring that in his situation, the last thing he needs is to go to war alongside George W. Bush. It's a huge demographic transformation. We've never seen one that happening this fast.
Interviewer: And so for people to wake up and see headlines now about a quote unquote, permanent Intifada in France, it didn't just come from nowhere.
Mark Steyn: No, no, and I was modestly encouraged by that. I think I first used the word about what's going on in France, the Intifada, about four months after September 11, early 2002. And everyone's oh that's ridiculous talking about this as a low level Intifada in France and all the rest of it. Now the head of the French police union has said it's a permanent feature of French life. And it's getting nearer and nearer and nearer to the Élysée Palace and the Champs Élysée and the Arc de Triomphe and all that kind of bits of tourist France every day.
Interviewer: 112 cars a day, yeah, burning there in France. And yet you have most of the local media there and the international media, by extension, whitewashing who's behind all of those cars burning, it's still quote unquote, "unidentified youth" behind it.
Mark Steyn: Yes youths. And in a sense, you know, they make the point, the point about youths is that they're youthful and the significant feature of the Muslim population in France and most other European countries, is that they're the young people, not just France, and you go to Belgium, if you go to the Netherlands, the young people on the streets, you can tell a lot about a city about who's on the street, after eight or nine o'clock in the evening. And if you were on the streets of Brussels, or Rotterdam, or Malmo in Sweden, after eight or nine o'clock in the evening, you'd think they were Muslim cities.
[Clip from 2007]
Mark Steyn: To address multiculturalism more broadly. I mean, what I find fascinating is, you take traditional isms, Fascism, Nazism, Communism, they are almost by definition, isms designed to provoke an argument, some guy comes up and says, I'm a fascist, and you say, oh, yeah, well, I'm a communist. They're designed to be oppositional. Multiculturalism is the slipperiest ism. Because it doesn't invite an argument. It says there's no point to having an argument. You know, it says, basically, if everything is of equal value, what the hell is the point of talking about any of it? That is what makes it such an elusive enemy to get a hold on. Now, almost every Western country has signed up to full blown multiculturalism. And I say, just every Western country because the interesting thing about multiculturalism is it's a uni-cultural phenomenon. You can't you can't be multicultural in Saudi Arabia. It's impossible. And so if the purpose of your culture is to celebrate multi culture, you're in effect, saying that our bedrock belief is that we believe in everything, which is the same thing as saying we believe in nothing. You know, our core value is that we have no core values. And that is what they teach in schools these days.
I think multiculturalism is two things. It's a cult of ignorance. I said we were all, except for this rebel colonist here, we were all children of the British Empire. And I'm old enough to have been taught by old teachers who taught, who went back to the days when there was a big map in the classroom and the bits in it that were colored red to mark the British Empire. You know, that was the ultimate red state, not like the ones here, that was one serious red state. And had spent a couple of years out in obscure islands teaching the natives about Shakespeare and the glories of Rome and all the rest of it. And they were very clear, they were tremendously multicultural in the sense that they knew tons and tons about other cultures, they knew phenomenal things about obscure tribes that nobody else was ever going to hear about. They could speak all kinds of obscure languages that nobody is ever going to speak. And yet the fact of the matter is they knew all about these other cultures, but they knew which culture was objectively superior to that.
Now, you don't need to know anything about other cultures. The main thing about multiculturalism is it, it absolves you of knowing anything. You go to people who believe in multiculturalism and say, well, what are the what are the principal exports of Nepal, they can't tell you. You say, what is the capital....a couple of days after September 11 I went to Dartmouth College, I had to look something up in the library there. And outside the library, there's a demonstration saying, you know, war is never the answer, one of these things. And these guys were standing around, elites, people mortgage their houses to send their kids to this place. They go, you know, they go, this was a terrible thing. They go, Well, what you must remember, you got to address the root causes. And I go, yeah, what's that? And they go, "Well, poverty breeds resentment, breeds desperation. Desperation breeds hostility, hostility breeds... I said, Oh, yeah. What's the capital of Saudi Arabia? Nobody knows anything. Multiculturalism is not about knowing anything about other cultures. It's just about feeling, you know, warm and fluffy about them. And I'm sure Douglas, I'm sure every member on this panel has had this experience. You go on set, you're, you're given some speech somewhere, you're on some radio show, somebody calls in and they say, "Well, I think you're being...." I had this experience on NPR the other day, somebody called up and goes, "Well, I think you're being very hierarchical."
I never even knew that was a pejorative word. This guy, I said, "Well, what do you mean?" He said, "Well, you've just said most Muslim countries aren't free." And I said, Look, that is that is a fact I said, if you take, if you take, for example, countries that just have 20% of the population is Muslim, only three of them qualify as free—Serbia and Montenegro, Benin and Surinam and it will be interesting to see whether France will prosper as a fourth member of that group. And the guy goes, what do you mean they're not free? So then you start reeling off objective statistics about literacy, about GDP per capita, about women's rights, about votes and democracy. These are facts, what we used to call before the multicultural age facts. So you reel off five facts and the guy goes oh, yeah, well, that's just your opinion.
Robert Frost famously said of free verse, that it was like playing tennis with the net down and the trouble with having discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says your ace is just a social construct.
[Old clip ends]
As you know, America Alone was a big, best seller, but it also attracted vexatious lawsuits from the Canadian Islamic Congress. Television people are tricksy, I was booked on The Agenda on TV Ontario with Steve Paikin for the paperback release of America Alone. I then found out shortly before airtime, that immediately after I'd be on they were going to have the four sock puppets on, the young Muslim law students that Canadian Islamic Congress had found to front their lawsuits, who would then proceed to trash me without me having any right of reply. They were the plaintiffs in the suit. In any civilized court system, as you probably know, the plaintiff goes first, then the defendant, but not on Steve Paikin's show. I was miffed.
[Clip from 2008]
Steve Paikin: Here's the key question though. Now the vast majority of people I think it's fair to say who move to the West, they Westernize. Do you not think these Muslims will do the same?
Mark Steyn: Well, I think that again, I think that's where we're getting into the discussion of whether I'm racist and Islamophobic for talking about this. And you know, that's why at this point, I'd much rather you bring in your other guests, Steve. I found out yesterday that I was I was booked on this show, and you'd also booked in these fellas who've been running around town, calling me Islamophobic and racist for the last five or six months and when I found out about it, we fired off an email to your producers and said, "Hey, great. We meet at last. Let's have the debate that they've been asking for."
These fellas, your other guests refuse to debate with me, refuse to sit with me. I don't know why that is, I'm not scary. I don't eat Muslims for breakfast. I'm just one big, flabby, overweight Islamophobe and they're three fit young people. It shouldn't be threatening or menacing to them. But more to the point when they refused the debate I found that interesting, because in The Globe and Mail on December the eighth, they said the intention is to engage Mr. Steyn about his views, to engage in civilized debate. December 20, National Post: "True to Canada's tradition of free speech, we decided to engage Mr. Steyn in a debate." December 29, Calgary Herald: "We asked for an opportunity to debate. All the way to the BBC a couple of weeks ago, we want an opportunity to debate Well, here's the opportunity. Why don't you come over guys? Why can't we...they're sitting over there. I've never.... I mean, with all due respect to you, Steve. I've been on TV shows talking about my book in Australia, Britain, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, Europe. I've never had a situation where free people who have been protesting a whole month they want to start a debate are sitting over there and won't debate.
Steve Paikin: I understand. Apparently, there were negotiations held between their people and your people.
Mark Steyn: No, no, no, I'm happy, they can come over now. Come over now. I mean, turn up the lights. I'm happy. I got no problem with debate. I was on Al Jazeera a couple of weeks ago. I'll go anywhere, I'll talk to anyone.
Steve Paikin: Let's try this. Let's complete the time we have allotted for the first part of our discussion. I'll go over there. I'll talk to them. I'll ask them. We'll see what happens.
[Clip ends]
Mark Steyn: On the TV O replay they chopped out the bit where Steve Paikin said the litigious Muslims couldn't come over and join me because there weren't enough chairs, and I yelled somewhat intemperately, "it's not a chair issue!" One of the great lines and a bit later yelled at the sock puppets, do you want to come out to dinner and Khurrum Awan, the head sock puppet, shouted back, no! I think the two delightful Muslimas felt differently but then I always reckon I'm doing much better than I am in such matters.
[Rush Limbaugh Show theme music plays]
Mark Steyn: Mark Steyn honored to be here, no supporting paperwork whatsoever. But I have been subjected to at least three enhanced pat downs already today. The guy at the airport pulled me out a line to pat me down. And you know, I wasn't really in the mood and he said, "Would it help if you closed your eyes and fantasized about other TSA agents?" I'm so sick of this pat down business. The TSA guy tells me to raise my arms above my head. He runs his hands down my back. I give an involuntary shudder. So he spreads my legs and slips his hand under my inner thigh, moves around behind me and then pat's, my bottom a dozen times. Great to be with you. Great to be with you. Wherever you are in the land of the free and the home of the grope. Give me liberty or give me an enhanced pat down.
The bipartisan debt commission has already factored in the $2 trillion reduction in Obama care costs by allowing TSA agents to perform prostate examinations. If you're 17. If you're 17 and flying to Florida for spring break, you might not think you need a prostate exam, but the best prevention is early screening. Ladies and gentlemen, the terrorists have won. The government of the United States cannot get confessed jihadist murderer Ahmed Ghailani convicted on any of the 224 murders he was charged with because they decided to shower young Ahmed with all the protections of the civilian justice system, but the very selfsame government of the United States has decreed that your private parts and those of your children and your grandmother, that all 300 million sets of American genitalia are up for grabs without any probable cause. God forbid you use enhanced pat down techniques on any Gitmo detainees. You'd never hear the end of it from Amnesty International, but you can use them on three year old girls and octogenarian nuns.
Ahmed Ghailani has been found guilty of one sole charge of conspiring to blow up the embassy buildings in Africa, but not guilty of murdering all the people inside them. How does that even work? What's the logic there? If I blow up the Empire State Building I'll get convicted of vandalism and failure to apply for a demolition permit but the thousands of corpses are just an unforeseen consequence. If it hadn't been for the peculiar nature of the jury that decided you can apparently conspire to blow up a building without conspiring to kill all the people who happen to be inside it at the time you've decided to blow it up, if it weren't for the ludicrousness of that particular verdict this guy would have walked.
This is decadence and pat downs or the death of the Republic. Because we only have pat downs, because we're not allowed to profile people like Ahmed Ghailani. Profiling you know has become one of these words, these bad words, it's almost like racist now. Oh you're profiling. Oh, you know profiling is what we used to call good policing. That's what they do in all the old cop shows, every detective novel is about profiling. The Naked City, "there are there are 8 million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them." And now you're not allowed to narrow it down to find out which particular subsection of the 8 million it might be. Hmm these men trying to blow up American Airlines, they range from young Muslim men called Mohammed with an O and a double M, who studied in Pakistan, to young Muslim men called Muhamad with a U and a single M, who studied in Yemen so there's no obvious pattern here. No obvious pattern, we got nothing to go on. There are no leads. So we'd better just pull in everybody, we'll pull in a southern redneck, a Belgian businessman, an Amish elder, an Inuit kindergartner three guys from the Elk Lodge in Pocatello, and a couple of lesbian newlyweds from Massachusetts. There are 8 million stories in the Naked City and we intend to hear all of them. No sense narrowing it down at all. The terrorists have won. There are 8 million penises in the naked airport, yours has been one of them.
[2010 show]
Interviewer: But in some countries, in Denmark, for example, and other countries, you recently have seen that Muslims are having fewer and fewer babies. And with this statistics in mind, what does that do to your conclusions?
Mark Steyn: Well, I don't think it does anything because I think the demographic energy only has to exist for a couple of generations. I mean, for example, if you have 90% of the population who have 1.3, or 1.4 children, which is the European average, and you have 10%, who have 3.5, which is supposedly the European Muslim average, you only need two generations to catch up. In other words, the 90% and the 10%, will have pretty much the same number of grandchildren. But beyond that....
Interviewer: But if it goes down actually then what will happen then?
Mark Steyn: Well, I think at that point, you will be seeing, which we're already seeing in Brussels or already seeing in Rotterdam already seeing in many, many cities, you will be seeing them take on a semi Muslim political character.
Interviewer: So you don't think that the lower birth rates will change your predictions?
Mark Steyn: No, I think in the end, we're past....I think in most French cities, for example, we're past the point of no return. I think in significant other parts, I think in Brussels, I think in Amsterdam, we're past the point of no return. So the question then is not whether these jurisdictions will be Muslim in character, but what kind of Muslim jurisdictions they'll be.
Interviewer: On the other hand, some might say that the native Europeans, they're having too few babies, so why not be happy that someone will help us to get enough babies to keep the welfare state sustainable and so on?
Mark Steyn: Well, I don't think I don't think it works out like that, for example, because if you take Turkish Muslims in Germany, generally speaking, they retire at an earlier age, than ethnic Germans. 40% of French imams are on the dole. So in a sense, they've got nothing to do but sit around all day, being subsidized by the state. So that model doesn't work, because immigrants understand very quickly, how to how to figure out the system. You go to almost any part of Europe and the idea that importing large numbers of immigrants will save you from your own demographic decline when...
Interviewer: But what you're saying here that shows that there is a potential for changing these things. I mean, there is a potential maybe for doing the integration better all over Europe, what would that change?
Mark Steyn: Well, I think at a certain point, it goes beyond assimilation. But I think it's yes, you should have certain integration and assimilation policies, but you have to have something to assimilate to. And it's not clear to me, for example, that if you were a Turkish Muslim, living in a German city, what is there to assimilate to? What is there about contemporary German...
Interviewer: Do you even believe in integration?
Mark Steyn: Well, no, that's not the point. I'm saying you have to have something to integrate with. In other words, German culture, or Danish culture or Dutch culture has to be sufficiently confident that immigrants want to be a part of it. If you go to an English school, English Muslims are told that Britain was the font of imperialism, of racism, of colonialism of everything bad in the world. And then they're surprised that British Muslims are turning up in Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban. Why would you love your own country if you're told it's the source of evil in the world?
Interviewer: But all this Mark Steyn raises the question, why isn't the European culture strong enough to defend this?
Mark Steyn: Because I think since the Second World War and even since the First World War, European elites have not believed in themselves or their own people, I think European elites drew the wrong conclusion at the end of the Second World War. When they said never again on the German death camps, they didn't really mean never again, they drew the wrong conclusion. They thought it meant rejecting nationalism, rejecting national identity, rejecting your cultural inheritance, and there's a huge hole in the heart of where European identity ought to be.
[2011—Rush Limbaugh Show theme music plays]
Mark Steyn: The administration has now clarified its position on Egypt. President Mubarak is not a dictator and he should stay in office according to Vice President Biden, but he needs to step down immediately, according to Secretary Clinton and remain President to ensure stability, according to Special Envoy Frank Wizner and he should have resigned as president yesterday, according to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, paving the way to elections that must be held within three months according to senior officials, unless he waits till September, which is fine by us, according to the State Department.
Got that? The official US position is that Mubarak needs to go immediately, he needs to stay indefinitely, he needs to stay for a bit, then go, needs to stay for a bit longer than go sooner rather than later, unless he decides to stay until September because he's standing in the way of the full bloom of a new Egyptian democracy. Unless it turns out that he's all that stands between us and a Muslim Brotherhood takeover. Because the Muslim Brotherhood are a radical theocratic tyranny in waiting unless of course, it turns out that they're reasonable, moderate types we should have been talking to all along. So that's the official Obama position verbatim from whitehouse.gov. If you're making that critical 3 a.m. call to the Oval Office and you get voicemail, press buttons one through six for whichever Obama position on Egypt suits you best.
[2012 show]
Interviewer: Look, let's have a change of pace. Let's have a song and I know you've suggested "Old Buttermilk Sky" by Hoagy Carmichael. What does that do for you?
Mark Steyn: Well it's funny you were you were talking about my childhood. I think any writer at some point, when a guy wants to be a writer, it's because at some point, he starts taking an interest in language and the way I took an interest in language was I heard pop songs and I heard phrases in them that I didn't understand and it made me think about words and what they meant and I always liked this song. It's like a western song from a movie, you mentioned Hoagy Carmichael, he wrote the music. A guy called Jack Brooks wrote the words. Do you know Jack Brooks?
Interviewer: No I don't.
Mark Steyn: His only other big hit was "when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie that's amore." Which is complete opposite of this, but the title is lovelier, "Old Buttermilk Sky," which I think if you're if you're an old, old Ozzie sheep man from the late 19th century, you would call a mackerel sky. I think that's what they think that's probably what we call it down here. And it has a lovely phrase in it, I think hang a star above a hitching post, hitch me to the one I love. And again hitching post is you know, that little post outside the Old General Store or the saloon that you'd tether your horse to when you go in for a beer at the end of the day, and so I never forgot first hearing this song and thinking about the specificity of the imagery which I still love to this day you know.
Interviewer: It's a great line isn't it, hang the moon above a hitching post. Okay, here's "Old Buttermilk Sky" by Hoagy Carmichael.
["Old Buttermilk Sky," plays]
[2013]
Female announcer: It's now time for One More Thing.
Hugh Hewitt, who is a wonderful guy. You got to follow him on Twitter. Last night he had a great suggestion. He said that Mark Steyn, radio host, author, thinker, writer, should run for the US Senate in New Hampshire. Mark Steyn replied, Well, basically he did not shut the door on it. He said, Mark [inaudible] and Hugh Hewitt actually has a website. So if you think that Mark Steyn should put his hat in the ring for US Senate, you can go to...
Man: He's not an American, he's Canadian isn't he?
Female announcer: You can run for Senate Bob.
Man: As not an American?
Female announcer: I believe so. If you're a resident, of course.
Man: Alright, great guy by the way.
[2014]
Conrad Black: My guest today is my friend of great many years and fellow columnist at the National Review and elsewhere, Mark Steyn, a legendary figure with an immense following all over the English speaking world and indeed parts of the French speaking world. Thanks for joining us, Mark.
Mark Steyn: I was sitting at the Tim Horton's on the Townships Auto Route in Magog, Quebec and my soul, Franco Francophone fan from Sherbrooke, Quebec came up and buttonholed me in Tim Horton. So you are correct to say that I'm a legend in the French speaking world.
Conrad Black: Exactly. And they know you but they don't remember who Tim Horton was. Even though he was a formidable performer in the Old Montreal Forum.
Mark, you're now in the midst of some litigation. And let me see if I have this correct. You have exposed the fact that Mr. Mann, one of the great propagators of the dangers of global warming, not only was mistaken with his infamous hockey stick of how suddenly the temperature of the world had shot upwards. But also the Nobel laureate, Mann did not in fact, win the Nobel Prize. He was a complete imposter. But can you just because if it doesn't come from you, I'm afraid our viewers won't believe but the absurdity of this latest manifestation of the workings of the American justice system, but what's actually going on here?
Mark Steyn: Yes, I'm being sued in the District of Columbia Superior Court. And it's, as you said, it's over Michael Mann, who's a climatologist, who is the man behind the famous hockey stick graph that the Government of Canada I believe distributed to every man, woman and child in the country a few years ago, basically showing the 1000 years before the beginning of the 20th century is the flat stick of a hockey stick. And then the 20th century is this blade of the hockey stick, shooting up out of the ceiling of the graph around about 1989. And plainly looking as if we're all going to be broiling by about 2014, which we're not. And this was used by the IPCC to gin up the whole, basically to I would say, to change the level of debate about climate change and the environment.
Conrad Black: Into one of outright hysteria.
Mark Steyn: Yep. And the sky is falling, stuff. And he's now suing me - he claimed in the state- in the complaint, to - accused me of the crime of defamation of a Nobel Prize winner. Because it's - he's not a Nobel Laureate. [They laugh.]
Conrad Black: He no more won the Nobel Prize than we did.
Mark Steyn: Well he won the Nobel Prize in the same sense that I did, he has an association with an organization that won the Nobel Prize, which is the IPCC in 2007. He once wrote a report for the IPCC. And they were co awarded, they won half a Nobel Prize with Al Gore in 2007. In the same way, I'm a Nobel Laureate because my mother is Belgian and in 2012, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace.
Conrad Black: And I am a UK citizen. So I feel that I I'm a Nobel Laureate also.
Mark Steyn: That's true. This is the first time I think on your show we've had a Nobel to Nobel conversation.
Conrad Black: It's as if the inventor of insulin met with Lester Pearson. Dr. Banting.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Banting meets Pearson. That's the level at which the show is operating.
[2015]
Megyn Kelly: My next guest has been criticized, even taken to court for what he has written and said about radical Islam. Mark Steyn is a writer and activist and author of the [Un]documented Mark Steyn Don't Say You Weren't Warned. Mark, thank you for being here tonight. And I know you knew some of the men who worked at this publication. Your thoughts on what we have seen in Paris today?
Mark Steyn: Yes, they were very brave. This was the only publication that was willing to publish the Mohammed, the Danish Mohammed cartoons in 2006. Because they decided to stand by those Danish cartoonists. I'm proud to have written for the only Canadian magazine to publish those Mohammed cartoons and it's because the New York Times didn't and Le Monde in Paris didn't and the London Times didn't. And all the other great newspapers the world didn't, only Charlie Hebdo and my magazine in Canada and a few others did, that they were forced to bear a burden that should have been more widely dispersed. I mean, I see all these teary candlelit vigils and everyone claiming suddenly to be for freedom of speech. I think one consequence of this is that a lot of people will retreat even further into self censorship. The New York Daily News won't even show, dishonors the dead in Paris by not even showing properly the cartoons, they pixilated Mohammed out of it. So it looks like Mohammed has entered the witness protection program. But they left the hook nosed Jew in and that exactly gets to the double standard here. You can say anything you like about Christianity, you can say anything you like about Judaism. But these guys, everyone understands the message that if you say something about Islam, these guys will kill you. And we will be retreating into a lot more self censorship if the pansified Western media doesn't man up and decide to disperse the risk. So they can't just kill one little small French satirical magazine, they got to kill all of us.
Megyn Kelly: The decision not to republish the these images that mocked the Prophet Mohammed initially may have been done because they found those offensive, many in the Muslim community find them very offensive, same as they wouldn't republish images, some publications, mocking Jesus Christ, mocking other religious figures. Has morphed now to a place where it's not just about respect for religion, it's about fear. I mean that newspapers, news organizations....
Mark Steyn: I think your point of view is valid, Megyn. If you're the cartoon editor of the New Yorker, and that those fellas in Denmark send you the cartoons and you think, well, these are in poor taste, not particularly funny, not particularly well drawn. But the fact that the New York Times and the LA Times and The Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune and the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Irish Times, and The Sunday Star Times in New Zealand didn't publish them after people have been killed for them and they're actually a new story now. They're not a cartoon. It's not an artistic judgment. It's not an aesthetic judgment. But the fact they won't even show you them after people have been killed for them, shows that we're actually retreating. The media, which congratulates itself on its bravery is one of the most tedious institutions for handing out awards for its bravery far more than firemen or soldiers do. The fact that they didn't even have the courage to show these cartoons after they became a news story is why these brave men at Charlie Hebdo had to bear the burden almost single handed and see what the New York Daily News did is absolutely disgraceful I think and dishonors the dead.
Megyn Kelly: You've studied a lot about radical Islam. It just it we get a report every week of another lone wolf terrorist attack. These guys reportedly trained in Syria, one of them already had a terror conviction under his belt. I mean, what should the West be doing? What are we doing or not doing that we need to stop this?
Mark Steyn: Well, we need to be honest. John Kerry today said that this was a battle between civilization and pregnant pause the forces that are opposed to civilization. Well, perhaps he'd like to be a bit more specific. Because these men all have something in common and John Kerry isn't prepared to address it. And President Obama, the leader of the so called free world, quite disgracefully stood up before the world at the United Nations, and said the future shall not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam. For a start under American law and the laws of all civilized societies, you can't slander a bloke who died in the seventh century. But secondly, the head of the country with the First Amendment shouldn't be standing up at the United Nations and indicating that he's willing to trade off freedom of speech, that that was a disgraceful performance. He said the future shall not belong to the those who slander the Prophet of Islam, he talked the talk, these savage murdering fanatics in Paris today, walk the walk. So words matter. And as long as the president and John Kerry and David Cameron and all these other people are dishonest and evasive, about the source of the threat, we will continue to lose brave men like we did in Paris today.
Megyn Kelly: Mark Steyn, thank you for being here.
[2016 Rush Limbaugh Show theme music plays]
Mark Steyn: I wanted to say one thing about the kind of symbolism of this, as I said, it's 49 gay night clubbers killed by a Muslim and there is something, whatever you feel about gay nightclubs, or whatever, there's something kind of poignant about that. I spoke on the 10th anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons in the Danish Parliament about nine months ago, with a couple of other people. And it was a heavily guarded event. Very heavily guarded event, we were protected by the PET, which is the Danish Intelligence And Security Service, very nice ceremonial uniforms, and they weren't all wearing them because they had to blend in with all the crazies trying to get us and the United States State Department and the British Foreign Office put out alerts saying it was dangerous for American and British nationals to be anywhere near my event. So if you see that I'm coming to your town, give it a wide berth, because according to the US State Department, it's dangerous to come anywhere near me.
And afterwards, we were all supposed to go out for dinner, we'd given the speeches at the Danish Parliament, it was a big crowd and we were supposed to go out and have dinner in some swanky restaurant, as is often the way after these things. And the Danish Intelligence Service was going to accompany us to the event and they would be posted at the doors to make sure people didn't get into the restaurant and kill us. And of course, when the restaurant got wind of this, they decided that their other fancy diners wouldn't, wouldn't like having to have dinner with a bunch of people who required the Danish security service to protect them so they can cancelled the reservation.
So as a result, we wound up just kind of wandering the streets, this knot of people surrounded by Danish security agents, and eventually wound up in some rather sort of seedy Copenhagen bar that was full of just like regular clubbing Danes, pub going Danes, except for the fact that there was us and these Danish intelligence operatives there. And it was full of these hot Nordic blondes and they have like a little tradition that if you say a Magnum of champagne, they don't open they don't pop the cork. The blonde girl takes the sword out of the scabbard and slices the top of the bottle slices through the glass so the glass top of the bottle goes flying over the other side of the room and takes some guy's eye out and then the champagne is all flowing everywhere. And it's nice at the end, I really enjoyed it to be honest, more than I would have enjoyed being at the swanky restaurant with all the dull, stiff elite members of Copenhagen society because I had all this hot blonde totty waving swords around and slicing the tops off magnums of champagne. So I had I had a pretty good time.
And Douglas Murray, who writes for The Spectator in Britain and has spoken out on this subject as often as I have on Islam and free speech and all the rest of it. He said afterwards, the whole event was a bit like a party at the end of the world. And I've thought about that phrase a lot since then. We were the only ones. People gave us a sort of funny look when we went into this bar, because like we were a bit overdressed and obviously we had a security detail and they couldn't quite figure out why we were there or what we were doing there. And you have the idea that this problem that the world is grappling with, that most people 15 years after 9/11, most people in the Western world still have no idea what it is. And that phrase that Douglas Murray used to me, a party at the end of the world, that's kind of what it felt like, the idea of being trapped in that gay nightclub in Orlando for three hours between two and five when that guy was holding the joint down and the police hadn't bust in on him, and he shoots, he shoots one in three of the people in there either killed or wounded. A nightclub, everyone's dancing. As far as I can tell from the dead they're mostly Latino names. It was a Latino dance event of some kind. They're dancing away and they're cut down their gunned down, they're dead as they dance. And if you read these texts, they're almost unbearably painful to read these, there's a series of texts, somebody's making last text to their mother, as the guy is coming for them. And to think about that it's a Saturday night. It's a Saturday night and you lead a hedonistic Florida lifestyle, you don't give a thought to all this boring stuff, this depressing, boring stuff. Somewhere up the end of the dial, there are these boring news channels where there are people talking about this boring stuff all day long, every day, and you don't care about it. Because life is great, you're in southern Florida. It's a great climate. It's a fabulous town, you can party all night and it's an all night party. And you go to the party at the end of the world and you are gunned down.
[End of clip from Rush]
Even in a party at the end of the world, there is room for a new star. Just six years ago, Jordan Peterson was virtually unknown outside Toronto academe, but I thought him worth having on the Mark Steyn Show, which prompted Mark Levin to complain that this was foreign content of no interest to an American audience. He didn't reprise the complaint a year or two later when his own guests, talented young American conservatives, cited Jordan Peterson as a great influence and one of the new stars of the right.
[2017]
Mark Steyn: The New York Post headline Caitlyn Jenner still has her penis. Her penis was not something that tabloid headline writers had to worry about until a few years ago. The lady who wrote The Vagina Monologues, big feminist hero for 20 years, she had a great run. Now, that play is not being produced at American campuses, because they say it's ghastly, it's hateful for her to imply that you have to have a vagina to be a woman. So she's transified her play, and put a scene in there about a trans woman who still has quote "her penis." And you put it in civilizational terms. And I'd just like to do is basically as possible. I mean, is the jig up for us? Is this how it ends?
Jordan Peterson: Well, I don't know. I mean, I think that this, this transgressive behavior that you're describing is part of the all out assault on Western categories of thought. And I think that that was started not even so much by the Marxists as by the French intellectuals in the late 1960s, especially Jacques Derrida, who maybe is the most dangerous person of the last 40 years. And he's, of course, the hero of the humanities and much of the social sciences. And he believes that and states this in his work, that the whole purpose of categorization is for exclusion. And categorization is the basis of cognition. And so he basically has made the claim that thought itself is an agent of oppression. And that that's absurd, except that he's the dominant thinker. And I don't think people....I know people don't understand how radical and transgressive the universities actually are, and how deeply embedded this sort of thinking is in them. And this gender issue is a screen as far as I'm concerned. And it's a screen for, which is why it's got so much attention. It's a screen for an all out assault and that assault started back in the late 60s. It started when the Marxists transformed themselves into post modernists, roughly speaking, when, when they realize that their working class utopia, when they finally realized after decades of denial that their working class utopias in the Soviet Union, for example, were absolutely murderous and reprehensible empires. They transferred their thinking to identity politics and carried on their merry way.
[2018]
Tucker Carlson: So you have at Davos right now the leaders of the world's largest democracies, the economic leaders and political leaders. How many of them do you think personally believe in democracy for real?
Mark Steyn: I don't think they do. And I think that's what's fascinating about this. They regard things like the Trump election and Brexit, and the rise of say Marine Le Pen in France and the AfD in Germany. They regard these things as aberrations and as proof that democracy has to be moderated by all the sensible, clever people getting together in a Swiss ski resort, kind of like the Blofeld doing the SPECTRE round table in at the top of the Magic Mountain in the Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service, if you're keeping in touch with your wild conspiracies. They all meet at the top of a mountain like the SPECTRE board meeting in James Bond films, and they decide the measures they can take to ameliorate and moderate the voice of the people because the voice of the people is vulgar and keeps voting for Trump and Brexit and that kind of thing.
Tucker Carlson: But don't you think if you're going to have a global conspiracy of elites, at least the people involved should be impressive and self aware? Smart?
Mark Steyn: Yes, I think so. And I think it's become a rather sort of third rate, pseudo celebrity event, as you say this idea that they're all the people with private jets, it's a kind of class thing. So there's a lot of layabout Saudi princes who fly in there. There's a lot of rather trashy celebrities. There's a lot of powerful business leaders, but at heart it is an anti democratic bias. You mentioned that hamburgers cause global warming. That was this story today. I didn't actually believe that. But it turns out that if you eat a breakfast sandwich from McDonald's, every time you eat a sausage and egg McMuffin, a polar bear loses its ice floe. Apparently the sandwiches are responsible for global warming. So as bad as it is, Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore flying around to these summits on their private jets. If they all flew into Davos on a sausage and egg McMuffin, the entire planet would be kaput, because that's apparently what causes global warming according to these guys.
Tucker Carlson: Okay, next January, you and I are going let's do a show from there. That would be so fun.
[2019]
Man: Just quickly, give us your thoughts on what James was talking about with the so called impeachment of Donald Trump. Is this more nonsense? Or is there something serious in this?
Mark Steyn: Well, the guys who are driving it do have a serious thing that they wish to accomplish. They're launching, if you can follow this, this CIA whistleblower, and the Democrats are launching this investigation to stop Trump's investigation into the phony Russia investigation. So it takes a new investigation to stop the current investigation into the old investigation. That's the way things work. That's the way things work in Washington. So in actual fact, even the impeachment is centrally located in Alexander Downer's cocktail olive in the Kensington wine rooms.
[Strains of the song "Kung Fu Fighting" play. Mark starts singing to tune of Kung Fu Fighting.] March 27, 2020,from my house arrest to yours, It's your corona pandemic paloosa.
Everybody was Kung Flu fighting.
Those stats climb fast as lightning.
In fact it was a little bit frightening,
Chicoms have expert timing.
There were funky Chinamen from funky Wuhan town.
They were chopping bats up,
They were chowing them down.
It's an ancient Chinese dish
And everybody says delish.
Chairman Xi will book your flight
You'll be in Italy tonight.
And everybody starts Kung Flu dying...
Those Chicoms can't stop lying.
Fake tests it's they're supplying.
The whole world they're Shanghaiing.
There was funky Dr. Tedros from the funky W-H-O.
He said Xi is the big boss, I've gotta blow.
He made his frown and then he said,
Hey folks there ain't no human spread,
So go hug a Chinaman when you're out strolling in Milan.
So everybody is Kung Flu spreading
It's at your sister's wedding,
It's in Prince Charles's bedding,
And ISIS's next beheading.
[Oh oh oh oh] You're under house arrest,
[Oh oh oh oh] Doc Fauci says it's best,
[Oh oh oh oh] If you don't leave the nest
[Oh oh oh oh]He'll keep you all abreast
When they stop Kung flu fighting.
A choo a choo a choo.
This is what people are seriously proposing now the new normal. I'll tell you two things I don't like about it that just sort of creeped me out a bit about it. That somehow all the solutions, like for example, no live music. You know the last time I was writing about societies banning music, it was ISIS and the Taliban. So I'm creeped out by the fact that we're basically adopting ISIS Taliban policies and music. There's no music in Afghanistan. They don't like it, whatever you're into. You can't play the Celine Dion Christmas album in Taliban run Afghanistan, they'll decapitated you for it. They actually beheaded a bunch of musicians, I think it was on the Libyan coast ISIS did when they caught them with their cellos. Why are we adopting ISIS policies on music, that's basically what's happening.
And then again, we get to the mask. The face covering again, that is a sign of Talibanic societies, ISIS societies. It's not quite the full kneecap like they like they wear in Raqqa when it was run by the new caliphate. But it's actually getting pretty close though, it destroys social trust. This idea....I've never liked burkas and niqabs, and all the rest of it because I don't want to be walking through a city surrounded by masked people. I think it lowers social trust, and now we're adopting it? So the funny thing is, what's weird to me is that these two things, the mask, which is also I think, a symbol of one of the other appalling features of the last few months, the restraints on free speech, where we strain....the fact that we're covering our mouths itself seems to have some disturbing aspects to it. But it's basically like a sort of Sharia light thing, no music and you have to wear masks. These are not....if this is the new normal, screw it squealing I don't want to live like this.
[Female voice: The Mark Steyn Club presents Tales for Our Time.]
Excerpt from George Orwell's 1984.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the Party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.
[2022]
Megyn Kelly: He even told us the last time he was on about how he dined at the palace with the royal family, after Prince Philip saw a piece that he had written and wanted to have him over to discuss. He's an old friend from The Kelly File as well. Mark Steyn is the host of the Mark Steyn Show on GB News in Britain. So great to have you back, Mark.
Mark Steyn: It's lovely to be back with you, Megyn, even on a very sad day for those of us who have never lived under any other monarch, which is most people in the British Commonwealth these days.
Megyn Kelly: So let's start there. What is it about Queen Elizabeth's passing that has led to this level of news coverage and outpouring of support? To me this feels very different from the passing of any normal leader, a former president, especially somebody who's 96. This one feels very different.
Mark Steyn: I think it is. She became queen when Harry Truman was in the White House. Now that is ancient history to most Americans. It's a whatever it is a third of the entire history of the United States but the Queen has been there through Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson and all the others and has been a constant presence. My country, the Dominion of Canada is 155 years old. And she was Queen for 70 of those years, which is virtually half the entire history of the country. And I think at a time when we live in a super hyper present tense culture, as we do these days, that it's useful and comforting to have something that isn't up to the minute and that doesn't change and that just endures decade after decade, and even at 96, it's a tremendous shock when she's there one minute. Her last official act was she sent a message to the people of Saskatchewan on Wednesday after a terrible mass murder in that province in Canada. That was the day before she died. She's 96. And she's working until the day before she dies.
Megyn Kelly: And even on camera, as recently as Tuesday, she passed on Thursday, with incoming Prime Minister now Prime Minister Liz Truss. That was amazing. I mean, think about it, if you're that ill. And there was news about her hands looking bruised and darker on the back of her hands. So clearly, she'd been undergoing something. To bring yourself up, just to get dressed in that kind of state never mind go before the cameras, pose for the photo op. I mean, to the end, she sacrificed self in the name of public service.
Mark Steyn: Yes. And she'd been trying to will her failing body into being strong enough to fly back down to London, and be there to swear in the new members of the Privy Council and her doctors put their foot down and said you can't do it. But that's the thing. That's what she'd been doing....I was going to say since 1947, when she gave her famous speech from Cape Town in South Africa, pledging her life to the service of the peoples of our great imperial family. But in fact, she'd been doing it since before then. I was talking to a friend of mine, friend of mine's mother, who's a little old lady in her 90s. And she remembers being invited to tea with the Queen when Princess Elizabeth was a little I think it was a 7-year-old girl. And they arranged a sort of photo op for her with other 7-year-old girls from around the Empire. And my friend's mum got to go to that. I mean, that is the world is completely....that would be like 90 years ago. Everything about the world has been utterly transformed since then, but she's still there.
[The Mark Steyn Show is a production of Mark Steyn enterprises and Oak Hill Media. All rights reserved.]