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.
Happy St Patrick's Day to our many Irish listeners in the auld sod and around the globe. I'll be hosting a shamrock-hued edition of our Clubland Q&A live around the planet an hour later than usual, at 4pm North American Eastern - not because I'll be in the pub and so rat-arsed I forget the show, but because the US and Canada have prematurely sprung into summer while the rest of the planet remains fallen back to winter. So across the Atlantic in Dublin and Belfast we'll air at our regular hour of 8pm Greenwich Mean Time, and likewise at 9pm in the western half of the Continent, and at the usual hour beyond. We'll try to pin down the rest of the time zones below, but do, as they say, check local listings.
As always, we'll take questions from Mark Steyn Club members across the globe on a wide range of issues. Yesterday was the third anniversary of America's "fifteen days to flatten the curve" - the moment when the average citizen first became aware of Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, whose glee at their sudden eminence is palpable:
Three years ago today.
The day everything changed.
Look how excited Fauci and Birx were about permanently altering the lives of millions of people. pic.twitter.com/DjlP2lgHYW
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 16, 2023
In related news, last week I was convicted by the British censorship agency Ofcom of breaching its "rules". For those uninterested in my personal travails, the issue here is Ofcom's obstruction of any pushback against the suffocating narrative of the last three years. Ramesh Thakur, former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, is on the case over at the Brownstone Institute:
The latest example of the broadcast regulators coming down hard on the slightest misstatement from critical commentators is Ofcom pulling up Mark Steyn for the use of one wrong word – "definitive" instead of, say, "suggestive" or "possible" – in a GBNews broadcast on 21 April 2022.
As Dominique Samuels tweeted: "So Mark Steyn's comments were in breach of your 'broadcasting rules' but TV doctor Sara Kayat claiming [on ITV's This Morning] the Covid-19 vaccines were 100% effective, with NO counter opinion included, wasn't"? Precisely.
Disappointingly, GBNews let Steyn go. But the feisty commentator had his own say: "Ofcom is not an impartial arbiter, but rather a body that three years ago chose to take one side: the side of the state narrative. And when it did that, it killed honest discussion on TV and radio." Promising to take his appeal to a real court of law to expose Ofcom, he echoed Hitchens: "I wear my Ofcom death sentence with pride."
Indeed. Although the "feisty commentator" has decided to pursue Ofcom in court, GB News will not be appealing - and appears to have submitted to far more rigorous Ofcom-policing of their entire schedule than that required by law. It doesn't seem to be going over well with what remains of their audience. From the Together for Tourism Alliance:
I like Nigel Farage but I was sorely disappointed last night when he was asked what was his favourite TV show?
He replied Jacob Rees-Mogg's show that replaced the Great Mark Steyn.
Nigel's kinky aberrant tastes are not shared by his 67 million fellow UK citizens. The Lord President of the Privy Council Hour with Jacob Rees-Mogadon is only in its third week, but on Tuesday slumped to its smallest audience to date. It then declined to a new record low on Wednesday, and last night, Thursday, the show dropped further to its teeny-tiniest viewership yet. The weak lead-in is killing Dan Wootton's first hour, which may be why Dan should have spoken out against the plan when he got wind of it. Still, could be worse: at 3.30pm Patrick Christys was down to just 4,900 viewers. What a self-inflicted fiasco.
~Whether or not you're a Steyn Clubber 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, and we are delighted to say that this week yet again we have many who've chosen to follow The Mark Steyn Show to its new home. So if you've joined the Club in recent days, either for a full year or a see-how-it-goes experimental quarter, do shoot me a head-scratcher for today's Q&A, and I will do my best to get to it.
~We will have a brand new Mark Steyn Show for you on Monday. I cannot tell you how immensely grateful I am to those Steyn Show guests who have chosen to stick with me. I am forever in the debt of Dominique, Eva, Leilani, Alexandra et al - all of whom will be on this summer's Mark Steyn Cruise - because Ofcom can't get you in international waters (I think). No tests, no vax passports, but just a week of fun on the Adriatic with the aforementioned ladies plus Mr Snerdley, Michele Bachmann and other Steyn Show favorites. More information here.
~If you have no desire to join The Mark Steyn Club, no worries, as they say in Oz: We seek no unwilling members - and as always today's 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 they'll be answered as-it-happens on the audio livestream that should magically appear just before we go on air.
~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. However, 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 make sure you join us live this afternoon at 4pm North American Eastern Time. That's 5pm in the Canadian Maritimes, half-past-five in Newfoundland - and, beyond the Americas, 8pm in London; 9pm in Paris; 10pm in Kiev; 11pm in Moscow; half-past-eleven in Tehran, for all you Newfoundlanders who move to Iran for the half-hour time zone; 1.45am in Kathmandu, for all you Iranians who move to Nepal to check out the quarter-hour time zone; 4am in Singapore, 7am in Sydney, 9am in Auckland, and Saturday lunchtime in His Majesty's Dominions across the Pacific.
