Yesterday was a busy day for me on TV - talking Dreamers with Ash Webster, banana-republic secret police with Neil Cavuto, and finally Congressional approval ratings with Lou Dobbs.
~Today I spent three hours on the radio guest-hosting America's Number One radio broadcast. You can find a few moments from the show here. Somewhere along the way I mentioned Kim Jong-Un denouncing Donald Trump as a "dotard". And, after a couple of Shakespearean references, I trilled:
High on a hill was a lonely dotard...
Mar Dukes emails to correct:
Tell Mark in The Sound of Music they sing of a goatherd, not a dotard.
There are days I feel I'm ten years overdue for retirement.
We also talked about rugby, and I mentioned the New Zealand team, the All Blacks. Mr Snerdley wanted to know whether they were all black, and I remarked that, in fact, none of them were. A Tweeter Tweeted that in fact that refers to the color of their uniform...
Come to think of it, make that twenty years overdue for retirement. The Internet has made everyone incredibly literal.
~Later this evening I'll be back on camera for a brand new SteynPost. SteynPosts is made possible through the support of members of The Mark Steyn Club, for more on which see below.
~In a week or so, on October 2nd, I'll be back in Minneapolis for an evening with the Center of the American Experiment, live at the Guthrie Theatre. More details here. If you're in the Minnesota area and would like to attend, please click here and enjoy a $25 discount on the ticket price by entering the promo code steynclub.
~We have fun in The Mark Steyn Club, with the Clubland Q&As, monthly audio adventures, and much more. The Club helps fund much of what we do here at SteynOnline and around the world.
The Mark Steyn Club's not about walling up our content and limiting its reach, but about enabling us to maintain and expand its reach around the planet. Indeed I'm heartened to see that our recent TV shows with Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray have between them, merely on YouTube, stacked up a combined audience of well over 450,000. That's not exactly viral, as the young 'uns say, and it's not like the millions and millions of listeners I have when I guest-host for Rush, but it's surprisingly competitive with most US cable networks - at 8pm on a recent Monday night, for example, CNN's Ashleigh Banfield on HLN had a total audience of 209,000. So our viewership isn't bad for a couple of substantive long-form big-picture interviews with serious persons arguing their corners in a compelling and persuasive manner.
That's all by way of explaining what The Mark Steyn Club isn't. The content at SteynOnline will still be free and available to all. What we're trying to do is keep it going at the highest-quality level. Many of you, for example, have said how much you enjoy the full-length interviews with the likes of Lionel Chetwynd on the stories Hollywood won't tell; James E Mitchell on what it's like to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; and Amity Shlaes on the history of the Forgotten Man, from the 19th century to the 2016 election. In-depth interviews can't be done on Skype, because that's kind of hard to watch for a full hour: It requires you and the guest being in the same place, knee-to-knee across the sofa, professionally lit and shot, etc. So that's a major commitment, but one worth doing and one we intend to keep going. Likewise, my live appearances - like the recent Phoenix and Ottawa events - reach a far greater audience than those in the theatre if they can be filmed and distributed. (And we intend to place some of this content on a real TV station, too.) Oh, and with regards to my interminable battle with litigious climate mullah Michael E Mann over the criminalization of scientific disagreement, we have some ambitious plans on the freedom-of-speech front, too.
So, if you listen to me on Rush or watch on Fox or read me around the planet, I'd like to invite you to become a member of our new Mark Steyn Club. You can sign up for a full year - or, if you think this is some dodgy malodorous scheme cooked up by a fly-by-night Canadian scamster, you can opt to be more lightly scammed and sign up for a mere quarter. Membership of The Mark Steyn Club isn't for everyone, but it does ensure that all our content will be for everyone, and out there in the world - from my essay on Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind to my interview with Christopher Caldwell on Europe's Islamization, from my columns on the latest terrorist attack to my SteynPost on America's white-male epidemic of "death by despair" to my Last Call on the malign House of Saud ...and, on a cheerier note, our celebrations of the late actor Martin Landau, the story of "Over the Rainbow", and all our other cultural diversions. Members of The Mark Steyn Club help to support all this content.
Whether you've enjoyed me in Canadian newspapers, on American radio, on Australian stages, The Mark Steyn Club is a great way to tie it all together. And membership does come with benefits:
*Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, CDs and other products.
*The opportunity to engage in Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly, in print, audio and video. I'll be hosting another next week.
*An exclusive new series of monthly audio adaptations: Tales for Our Time. We started with my serialization of Conan Doyle's timelier than ever Tragedy of the Korosko, continued with H G Wells' prescient view of a bifurcated humanity The Time Machine, and our latest is Joseph Conrad's insights into the psychology of urban terrorists in his 1907 novel The Secret Agent. You can either listen to an episode per night, or you can binge-listen to the lot on a long car journey. And we'll be launching our new serial in October.
*Transcript and audio versions of our video content: For those who find it less stressful not to have to look at me, we're making The Mark Steyn Show available in non-visual form. If you go here, you'll find that we've already posted audio episodes of every single SteynPost all the way back to the very first one, plus some of our long-form shows, which we're also working our way through.
*Comment Club membership: you get to frolic and gambol through our comments section and take issue with me and my columns and radio shows and TV appearances. I weigh in there myself from time to time, but it's essentially your turf where you get to take the rhetorical baseball bat to any cut of my jib that happens to rankle. There's a lot of good stuff in there.
*My new quarterly newsletter, The Clubbable Steyn: The first issue is full of fun, including climate-change "adjustments", the first "known wolf" with the "mysterious motive", the anniversaries of Benghazi and Diana, Canada's all-time greatest flag design, and my visit to Rotherham to talk to the victims of Britain's Muslim "grooming" gangs.
*My new video series of pertinent verse.
*Advance booking for my live appearances around the world - such as my October 2nd appearance in Minneapolis.
*Customized email alerts for new content in your areas of interest (arts, politics, culture, or the whole shebang).
*and, most importantly, the opportunity to support all our content, from the Big Picture stuff on Islam and climate change and civilizational collapse to the small pleasures of good conversation, great movies and live music.
We have a few more Club activities we'll be introducing in the weeks ahead.
When I was guest-hosting for Rush recently, I took a call from Natalie from Montana who said she was saving up from her summer job for a Steyn Club membership. I was surprised and humbled by a fifteen-year-old's interest in my work, so I decided to give her a Club membership for her 16th birthday a few weeks ago. It got me thinking that other listeners might also have friends or family members who'd appreciate a Steyn Club gift membership. So here it is. You can order it now and have it delivered instantly or on a special day, such as a birthday or anniversary. Or you can print out our personalized welcome message - perfect for tucking inside a greeting card.
So I'm not into paywalled echo chambers, we're back in the world, full of ideas, and growing. For more on The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - or treat a pal to a Gift Membership here.
