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Yes, it's me! Mark Steyn of that ilk - and not dead yet, despite the best efforts of GB News management. For the moment, I am just about healthy enough to conduct another midweek edition of our Clubland Q&A, live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. If you chance to be elsewhere, do check local listings below.
It's sort of a post-birthday edition for The Mark Steyn Club, which turned seven on Monday. I thank all our First Day Founding Members who graciously decided to re-up for our eighth season, and hope our First Week members will wish to do the same as we chug on to the weekend. We marked this anniversary with the return of Tales for Our Time, the launch of a new weekly audio show, and an extended edition of our traditional cavalcade of Non-Stop Number Ones. But, if you'd like to express your satisfactions or dissatisfactions with our Club seven years on, you're more than welcome.
~What else to talk about? Well...
The Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine is being withdrawn worldwide, months after the pharmaceutical giant admitted for the first time in court documents that it can cause a rare and dangerous side effect...
Too late for Stephen Wright and Lord Zion and all the others whose stories we've told on The Mark Steyn Show. But still not too late for those in government, from the then British Prime Minister down, to be held to account for their grossly imprudent hustling of this product into the arms of millions of people who never needed it in the first place.
This vaccine never met the ethical definition of "safe and effective". Will the Crown likewise "withdraw" all those Anglo-Irish-Aussie knighthoods it showered on the Astra-Zeneca perps?
As for me, The Mark Steyn Show will be returning to GB News tonight. Oh, no, wait, it won't. Sir Paul Marshall prefers to advance his interests through the deathbed ratings of Rees-Mogadon. From one of my favourite (now former) presenters at GBN:
I was always proud to do this at a time when NO ONE anywhere else in the MSM would.
— Dan Wootton (@danwootton) May 7, 2024
And @MarkSteynOnline was an absolute hero. https://t.co/07b42SWf7d
~Meanwhile, seven months after October 7th, for the west "Palastine" is now a domestic issue entirely unmoored from anything actually going on over there. It determines elections in English boroughs, and in America it's fast-tracking the cultural Islamisation of its most privileged youth. Headline of the Day from NBC News:
GW president says school needs help from DC police as protesters call for beheadings
That's GW as in the president of George Washington University. I assumed the "call for beheadings" was just a bit of inference drawn from allusion, but no: at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment in America's capital, they held a "People's Tribunal" and sentenced the GW president, provost and board of trustees to death...
'Off to the motherf****** gallows with you too,' the encampment leader said.
As I wrote a few weeks back:
Pointing out Hamas atrocities doesn't resonate with them because that's what they like about it.
One should never underestimate the glamour of violence. Even the Prime Minister of Belgium says that, "if I were a student today", he'd join the protests. Give it another week and he'll join the beheadings...
~Oh, but there's a big election coming up, isn't there? Yeah but, while the right was waving the constitution, the left was busy loading up the electoral rolls. Since 2004, under US federal law, states have been obligated to ensure that voters have proof of ...well, not citizenship obviously (that would be racey-racey-racist) but residency or entitlement to Social Security or well, something, anything... But in North Carolina just shy of a quarter-million voters ain't got nuttin':
N.C. voter data lists more than 224,000 records since 2004 that are 'missing' both an SSN and a driver's license number.
Like I say, there's no point having the greatest constitution in the world if you've got the worst election system in the world.
~On today's show I'm happy to talk about that or whatever else is on your mind. I'm also up for any questions on my continuing legal battles on both sides of the Atlantic - against climate mullah Michael E Mann in the DC Superior Court, and against the UK state censor Ofcom in the English High Court. Many listeners have asked how they can support one or other or both of these free-speech lawsuits. There are several ways:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a near-and-dear one a SteynOnline gift certificate; or
c) ordering a copy of my latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it, says Kathy Gyngell).
~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. In this seventh birthday week, we cherish the founders of our Club, but we also love to hear from brand new members. Among the additions to our ranks in recent days are newbies from around the globe - from Melbourne to Manchester, Singapore to Silverdale, Thousand Oaks to Brow of the Mountain. Whether 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. So see you back here at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm in London, 9pm in Paris, 10pm in Jerusalem; half-past-ten in Teheran; midnight-forty-five in Kathmandu; 3am in Singapore and Honkers (sorry about that); 5am in Sydney and Melbourne; 7am in Auckland, and a rather more convivial hour for the kippers and kedgeree in His Majesty's Dominions eastward across the Pacific, where you're so far ahead I've probably already lost my appeal by now...