On Wednesday night I kept my midweek date with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. The subject was the re-emergence under bizarrely controlled circumstances of the key witness to the Vegas attack. Despite both our protestations of non-conspiracy-nut status, we did a bonus round on the impending and supposedly final JFK revelations. Click below to watch:
If you're a Mark Steyn Club member, feel free to disagree in the comments below. If you prefer me in audio only, you can find a few moments from my guest-hosting stint on America's Number One radio show here. And I hope you'll join me later today for Part Seven of my current serialization The Prisoner of Zenda.
~We have fun in the Steyn Club, with our 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 circulation, 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 over half-a-million. 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 Monday night, for example, CNN's Ashleigh Banfield on HLN had a total audience of 154,000, and SE Cupp the hour before had 54,000. So my interview with one Toronto professor has been seen by more people than those two expensive cable-network shows combined. That's not bad for substantive long-form big-picture discussions 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. Oh, and with regards to my interminable battle with litigious climate mullah Michael E Mann over the criminalization of scientific disagreement and the left's attempt to throttle the First Amendment, we have some ambitious plans on the freedom-of-speech front, too.
So, if you listen to me on Rush or watch me 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.
*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, moved on to Joseph Conrad's insights into the psychology of urban terrorists in The Secret Agent - and we're currently enjoying Ruritanian derring-do in The Prisoner of Zenda. We've also got a short-story bonus Tale for Our Time later this month.
*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, 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 November 15th appearance in Washington with Kellyanne Conway and Diane Hendricks.
*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 earlier in the summer, 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.