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UPPERDATE! We're live now, so let's have at it!
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Yes, I know it's Wednesday, but it's me! Mark Steyn of that ilk - and not dead yet, despite the best efforts of both the University of Vermont Medical Center and the District of Columbia Superior Court.
This should have been the middle of the second week of my trial in the American capital's aforementioned dank septic tank of justice. But, as you know, on the eve of jury selection, the "fourth trial judge" decided to postpone the trial on what I regard as a dubious pretext. So, twiddling my thumbs waiting for his lousy Zoom-call "status conference" next week, I figure we might as well hold 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. We'll try to pin down the rest of the time zones below, but do, as they say, check local listings.
~In America last night, the Red Wave du jour refused to make landfall: Republicans came up snake eyes in Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio...
I find this interesting mainly as a very very minor manifestation of a core problem in our world - that "the right" consistently deludes itself as to the inroads it is making into the general population. In Virginia, Youngkin was spoken of as a no-brainer vice-presidential candidate (or possibly presidential, should Trump be in the Supermax come next November): yesterday he was supposed to hold the state's lower house and possibly flip the senate, and thus do for Virginia what DeSantis did for Florida. Now he's a lame duck.
Speaking of springtime's shoo-in for president, Ron DeSantis's biggest donor is now reported to be about to switch to Trump: the elevator boots, much mocked as an example of the trivial preoccupations of our public discourse, somehow got to the heart of the matter - that he had been artificially bigged up by his boosters.
And, speaking of Trump, what are we to make of the latest CNN poll?
Trump 49
Biden 45
Okay, throw in RFK Jr:
Trump 41
Biden 35
Kennedy 16
Is this just more head-fakery before next year's damp squib of a Red Wave? Or real movement? On the GOP nomination, Trump is up over sixty, and Nikki Haley, the establishment's post-DeSantis darling, is at ...ten.
On today's midweek Q&A, we'll get into all that, subject to my usual caveat that I'm a Big Picture guy: western civilisation is sliding off the cliff, most of your neighbours are not even aware of that, and my only interest in politics is candidates who are willing to get serious about preventing it.
Meanwhile, given the fiasco at the DC Superior Court, I thank all of you who have snapped up our brand new limited-edition, individually numbered (and signed) SteynOnline Liberty Sticks. The Liberty Stick features both Magna Carta and the US Constitution - so you can now wave that constitution at whomsoe'er you like. And, amazingly enough, our Liberty Stick is not manufactured round the back of the Wuhan Institute of Virology like everything else, but smack dab in the USA - in Minnesota, to be precise. You can order one here.
~I thank viewers for their kind words about SteynOnline's exclusive screen premiere of my video deposition in the matter of Mann vs Steyn. You can see Part One here, Part Two here, and the thrilling finale here.
~Anybody can be mired in lawsuits on one side of the Atlantic. But, at my level of the game, a chap expects to be mired on at least two sides. So I'm also happy today to take any questions on my pushback against the UK state censor Ofcom in the English High Court over their "rulings" against me for my coverage of the Covid vaccines. The latter case is officially called:
The King on the application of Mark Steyn
vs
The Office of Communications
Alas, His Majesty is leaving it to me and my KC to do most of the heavy lifting. You can read our second Statement of Claim here.
Many viewers, listeners and readers have asked how they can support this important free-speech case. There are several ways, including:
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); or
d) snapping up one of the above-mentioned limited-edition SteynOnline Liberty Sticks.
~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, 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 twenty-year history. But Club membership does confer a few benefits, starting with participation in our weekly Q&As.
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 Tel Aviv, because that's the zone where they hold all the wars; 11pm in Aden and Sanaa, where one or other of the competing Yemeni regimes has just declared war on Israel; 11.30pm in Teheran, 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, Honkers and Perth (sorry about that); 7am in Sydney and Melbourne; 9am in Auckland and even deeper into Thursday in His Majesty's Dominions across the Pacific.
But, whatever hour it is where you are, we do hope you'll be able to join us. To listen to the livestream, simply click the "play" icon on the audio player (in certain browsers, the audio will start auto-playing). And to pose a question simply use the comment form below.
