Happy New Year! In case you missed it, here's how the last twelve months looked to Mark:
JANUARY
In the first month of the year, the 45th and most unlikely President of the United States took office. On the eve of his inauguration, Steyn looked back at the outgoing and incoming chief executives. On The Mark Steyn Show, former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann swung by to preview the next four years, while Mark considered the mass boycott of the inauguration by American celebrities - and recalled some memorable inaugural disasters of the past 200 years. Click below to watch:
The American media, by contrast, having got the pre-election period entirely wrong, decided to double down and get the post-election period even wronger.
~Mark also addressed another media blind spot - the refusal to see the Islamization of Europe and what it portends. He was dismayed to find that a sarcastic Steyn aside has apparently been adopted as official government policy by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull: We're gonna need a lot more bollards. (In non-bollard news, Mark interviewed a long-serving and clearer-sighted predecessor of Mr Turnbull, John Howard.)
~Our most watched Mark Steyn Show of 2017 presented an in-depth interview with a beleaguered professor, Jordan Peterson, fighting for his life over transgender pronouns, free speech, and politically correct totalitarianism.
~The New Year found Mark reeling under a double assault - from the District of Columbia courts and from fans of the new film La La Land. The latter faded very quickly, but the sclerotic and incompetent DC jurists presuming to try the climate-change suit against Steyn is well into its second half-decade. The distinguished climate scientist Judith Curry filed a blistering amicus brief in the case exposing the appalling double standards and unscientific behavior of hockey-stick huckster Michael E Mann. Simultaneous to her suit, Dr Curry quit Georgia Tech because of the "craziness" of the climate-science echo chamber. As Jo Nova wrote, "Steyn doesn't hold back" in a withering dissection of the disgusting treatment of Dr Curry by Mann and his Mann-boys. As for the lawsuit, Jo Nova put it well:
Mark Steyn has no fear of Michael Mann.
We thank those many readers who've written in support of Mark, and especially those who've expressed it by buying his climatological bestseller on Mann's damage to science.
FEBRUARY
Steyn started the month on stage in Phoenix, looking at where America and the world are headed. Click below to watch:
He ended the month on stage in Ottawa with a stirring paean to free speech, plus obscure Canadian jokes, his house band, questions from the audience, and a live performance of two fine songs - one Canadian, one English - by the great Tal Bachman. Click below to watch:
In between came a SteynPost arising from President Trump's remarks on Sweden and the ensuing mockery by the American press. Mark addressed what's really going on in the country, and the media's remarkable lack of interest. Click below to watch:
MARCH
With spring came Brexit Day, the day that Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom belatedly triggered Article 50 and began the process of leaving the European Union. Mark celebrated.
In London itself, it was business as usual, with yet another excitable Mohammedan going all Allahu Akbar in his rental car. Steyn offered a tale of two Houses of Commons - one in London, one in Ottawa - and what we should deduce from recent events at each body.
On The Mark Steyn Show Christopher Caldwell joined Mark for some reflections on the revolution in Europe ...and in America. They discussed recent European events from terrorism and the migrant tide to Brexit and the rise of Marine LePen - and whether illegal immigration in America and Trump's victory are part of the same story. Click below to watch:
Within weeks of the inauguration Trump voters came to appreciate that the main obstacle to the President's agenda was not the Democrats but a handful of his own Republican senators. On Fox Business Mark engaged in a spirited argument with Stuart Varney on the soon-to-be-deceased Obamacare-replacement bill.
APRIL
Sultan Erdoğan romped to victory in the Turkish referendum and Steyn concluded that, yet again, demography is destiny. (It also prompted him to celebrate a famous number about a previous seismic shift in the country: "Istanbul (Not Constantinople).")
~It was a bad month for freedom of expression, and not just in Turkey. In the wake of the cancellation of Ann Coulter's appearance at Berkeley, Mark, who has a long history with this subject, noted that we've been here before. Ayaan Hirsi Ali canceled her tour of Australia for "security reasons". In a world of Islamic intimidation and western appeasement, Mark addressed "The Big Shut-Up."
In related news, the first round of the French presidential election was preceded by a terrorist attack, prompting Mark to reprise a pertinent and (as it turned out) final appearance with Bill O'Reilly on his top-rated "O'Reilly Factor", canceled by Fox News in April.
~The Prince of Wales, his sons, the Governor General and Prime Minister marked the centenary of a great Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge. Steyn considered the gulf between then and now - and the long shadows of the Great War. Click below to watch:
Later that month Steyn confronted one of the grimmest but most important subjects of our time - a world without work and death by despair: "What if there's no next?"
MAY
The cypher Macron was elected President of France, and Mark found himself pondering the barrenness of Eurocrats - in tandem with the most important graph of our time.
~As Buckingham Palace announced the semi-retirement of the nonagenarian Duke of Edinburgh, Steyn shared a few memories of a long-serving consort. Taking somewhat earlier retirement was FBI Director James Comey, whose firing caused a mass outbreak of Democrat-media whiplash. Unfortunately nobody can figure out a way to get Hillary Clinton to retire. In May she let rip with a lengthy list of people who cost her the 2016 election - including certain sinister Macedonians. Mark did his best to take it seriously. Click below to watch:
~It was a month brimming with lively examples of airline "customer service". Back down on the ground, Steyn addressed a paradox of our time: In the absence of a security perimeter at the border, we now have to have a security perimeter around everything inside the border. Mark joined Nigel Farage to consider some of the more disturbing aspects of another terrorist atrocity, in Manchester, and found himself contemplating the ruin of England.
~In May Steyn began his weekly appearances on America's top cable news show, Tucker Carlson Tonight. He also launched The Mark Steyn Club, and was very gratified by the response. Among the Club's most popular features was Mark's brand new series of audio adventures, Tales for Our Time, starting with his serialization of Conan Doyle's especially timely tale, The Tragedy of the Korosko.
You don't win them all, though: Steyn's long campaign to decriminalize Kinder Eggs in America resulted in a hollow victory.
JUNE
The month began with the second mass murder in Britain within twelve days. Click below to watch:
The following day, as the usual absurd revelations about this week's "known wolves" piled up, Mark returned to the subject on Fox News, and observed that Britons and Europeans were getting used to it. The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, on the other hand, noted the prescience of Steyn's words seven years earlier on the ever expanding security perimeter. On The Mark Steyn Show he interviewed Douglas Murray on his new book The Strange Death of Europe, and a Continent in existential crisis. Click below to watch:
For more on the fatal ennui in Britain and elsewhere, Mark offered "A Tale of Two Johnsons". It seemed grimly pertinent later in the month when an horrific conflagration consumed Grenfell Tower in North Kensington. Steyn pondered the appalling events in "The Great Fire of a New London".
~The UK election was a disaster for Theresa May, in which the safe pair of hands fumbled the easiest ball and became dependent for her parliamentary majority on Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party. Mark contrasted the left's instant hatred for Mrs May's allegedly homophobic and misogynist Ulster allies with their entirely relaxed attitude to Jeremy Corbyn's virulently homophobic and misogynist Islamic allies.
Mrs May's problems were as nothing to that facing Justin Trudeau: Which Muslim socks should a fashionable prime minister wear to the gay parade? In an even livelier breakthrough for vibrant diversity, a Canadian Tire store saw the first recorded instance of golf-club jihadism.
~On the morning of Flag Day, the GOP's Congressional baseball team became the target of a mass assassination attempt. Mark analyzed the attack - and the descent of political discourse - in two forceful interviews on the cultural appropriation of resistance. He found the rest of Washington in a Comeytose state as fifteen lawyers set off in search of a crime.
~It was a very bad month for CNN, but it made for a lively discussion when Steyn joined Tucker Carlson live on Fox News. Lots of viewers enjoyed this, and lots of news outlets picked up on Mark's comments. Elmo, black holes and interpretative dance were involved. Click below to watch:
JULY
The first day of the month was the 150th anniversary of the Dominion of Canada, born on July 1st 1867. By comparison with the centennial, it was a glum and muted anniversary, thanks to Justin Trudeau's decision to celebrate it as the first post-national holiday. Mark consoled himself with a look at the curious history of "O Canada"; Justin decided to hand a $10 million jihadist jackpot to murderous traitor Omar Khadr. Click below to listen:
~It was a month for the beach. Steyn offered a few thoughts on the new blockbuster Dunkirk, and launched a new series of pertinent poetry with Matthew Arnold's sobering and prescient Dover Beach. Fighting on the metaphotical beach, President Trump delivered a memorable speech in Warsaw on "the Will of the West". He spoke of symphonies, but the press heard only dog-whistles.
As evidence of wilting will, there was the latest ban at Berkeley, of the scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins, in the battle of values versus identity. Steyn considered the ever expanding ideological comfort zone in which terrorism incubates, and its related subject, one that he called the biggest issue of our time.
~Back in Washington, Debbie Wasserman Schultz's IT staffer was arrested as he attempted to flee to Pakistan.
AUGUST
It was the summer of tumbling statuary, as the American left insisted there was no place in the public square for Robert E Lee and Christopher Columbus and perhaps even Washington and Jefferson. Mark addressed the accelerating vandalization and destruction of American history across the country. The ongoing assault on the past represents the totalitarianism of the Now.
The one statue the left is happy to leave standing is the Statue of Liberty, although they seem very confused about what it represents. Steyn joined Tucker Carlson to mull the media meltdown over the Trump Administration's immigration proposals, and then followed up with some thoughts on bad poems and verse law, and the transformation of a Statue of Liberty into a Statue of Immigration.
~The 200th day of the Trump Administration was observed in Washington in a noticeable acceleration of the ongoing incremental coup against the new president.
~In his return to primetime as guest-host of America's top cable show, Mark did his best to stay on top of the bewildering intersections between race, sex and boutique orientations. Click below to watch:
How will it all shake out? What awaits is the mood music of Mohammed.
~August was also the 75th anniversary of the Dieppe Raid. Mark talked to the screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd about his own connection to Dieppe - and what happened when he pitched the story of that operation to Hollywood. Click below to watch:
SEPTEMBER
The annual 9/11 observances were most unsatisfactory. In their tinny rattle, Steyn heard only the language of losing, and the increasing incoherence of a war fought everywhere but where it matters. On the home front our policy is to let Opposite World move in next door and paper over the internal contradictions with stylishly deluded advertising.
In other immigration news, Mark's impatience with the fatuous characterization of illegal aliens as "Dreamers" finally snapped.
~American football players decided they're willing to stand for "God Save the Queen" but not "The Star-Spangled Banner", prompting Steyn to muse on the ever shrinking realm of manners. Meanwhile, the pantheon of American racists expanded from Christopher Columbus and Jefferson Davis to ...Dr Seuss. Hillary continued her OJ-like hunt for the real killers, but elsewhere the agitprop got noisier and rowdier. Steyn examined the violence on American streets, the respectable types who romanticize it, and the terror to come.
~It was the season of hurricanes, with Irma battering the Sunshine State, and prompting a special edition of Steyn's Song of the Week: "Songs in the Keys of Florida." As the hurricane prepared to make landfall, Mark was guest-hosting the Thursday episode of "The Fox News Specialists" and, midst meteorological updates, did an unusually professional wind-up before throwing to Bret Baier. Fox liked it so much the following morning they canceled the show. So, unbeknownst to Eboni, Mark or Kat, this proved to be the last three minutes of the entire series:
OCTOBER
On the ninth of the month the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, precipitating the Fall of Liberal Icons, tumbling in Hollywood and Washington, and, very strikingly, across the schedules of PBS and NPR.
~In a month in which Mark discussed and read Kipling's great poem Recessional, the Anglosphere's abandonment of individual liberty seemed only to accelerate. Steyn addressed three all too typical news stories from within Her Majesty's most senior dominions - Britain, Canada and Australia - culminating in a freeborn Englishman being gaoled for lèse-majesté to Mohammed.
~Mysteries abounded through the fall. Bowe Bergdahl pleaded guilty to charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, but there remains no explanation as to why Obama chose to honor the deserter and his Taliban-sympathizing father in the Rose Garden. Likewise it remains a mystery why the most influential foreigner of the 2016 US election should be not Vladimir Putin but a remarkably persistent British spy.
There were more mysteries in the deadliest single-shooter massacre in American history. Mark called the perpetrator of the Las Vegas attack an "empty Paddock", who, as the police investigation proceeded, seemed to get only emptier.
October ended with a far more conventional atrocity. A few hours before Halloween celebrations, an Uzbek Muslim decided to celebrate diversity by going full Allahu Akbar on a Manhattan bike path. The politico-media response to the attack was as usual. Click below to watch:
NOVEMBER
A majority of Australians said yes to gay marriage, but Mark was struck by those who said no: Does diversity=homophobia? The logic was easier to follow than that of the other big story from Down Under: the expulsion from the Australian Parliament of the Deputy Prime Minister and various other MPs for being covert semi-aliens.
~The eighth of the month marked the first anniversary of Donald Trump's triumph in the presidential election. Steyn looked back at a thrilling night, and why it happened. He also noted the Clinton kleptocracy's corruption of Democrat centrism, and responded to the latest 2016 post-mortem from Donna Brazile. On stage in Florida, Mark surveyed Trump's first year and the state of the world. Click below to watch:
~The mid-point of the month, November 15th, was a great day for Steyn: Side by side with Kellyanne Conway as the year's "Woman of Valor", he was honored in Washington as a "Gentleman of Distinction". It wasn't such a great day for Robert Mugabe.
~The month's gravest assault on free speech came from three totalitarian commissars at Wilfrid Laurier University determined to ruin a brave young lady. Click below to watch:
A postscript to the above: In a precise inversion of the plot of the month's big movie, in this whodunnit nobody dunnit: the university was forced to admit that the three tenured thugs were conducting an "investigation" into a "complaint" that was never made.
DECEMBER
It was a month in which Robert Mueller's "Russia investigation" took some astounding twists and turns, revealing a deeply compromised and corrupted FBI and Justice Department.
Doing what others had merely promised, President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Getting Democrats to recognize their trousers are round their ankles is much tougher, but Mark did his best. Click below to watch:
As for the Democrats' opportunist re-calibration in these matters, Mark offered some thoughts in "A Guide to Pants-Dropping for the New Man".
~On Monday, in the wake of an incompetent Bangladeshi jihadist in New York, Mark joined Tucker Carlson to talk about the more advanced state of Islamization in Europe - and our inability to talk honestly about it. Click below to watch:
Confirming Mark's point, there followed another pre-Christmas outbreak of vehicular jihad in Melbourne, but don't worry - it was "not terror related".
Even the most excitable Mohammedan cannot (yet) mow down all of Christmas. At SteynOnline Mark observed the season by reading both Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol and a Yuletide fable of his own. He talked to Ted Nugent about pop culture and politics in what Steyn Club member David Kelley-Wood called "one supercharged 69 minute blast", and to Dame Siân Phillips about A Child's Christmas in Wales.
As the year drew to a close, Mark looked forward to turning over a new leaf - mainly because all the old leaves are racist. Click below to watch:
At the end of a very difficult year for Mark and those of us who work with him, we are relieved and surprised to have made it. We thank all of the guests, musicians, audio and camera crew, producers and directors and editors and others who help create the content at this site - and we thank all those Mark Steyn Club members and Steyn store patrons and gift-certificate purchasers who've helped see us through to our sixteenth year. We wish you and yours only the best in the twelve months ahead, and we look forward to ringing in the new all through 2018.
