Free Republic

As everybody but the New Guinea tribesmen who ate Joe Biden's uncle knows by now, Donald J Trump has been found "guilty on all counts" - a quintessentially American expression because, of course, the multiple-counts racket is one of the many perversions of judicial norms that have long disgraced the US courthouse. Just twenty-four hours ago, my friend John Hinderaker was writing: Experience has given me a lot of faith in the basic fairness of juries. Late yesterday, he remembered - oh, yeah, I've been here before: It is very much like the lawsuit that Michael Mann brought against Mark...

~As you know, two weeks from today my suit against the media censor Ofcom comes to the High Court of England. I shall be landing at Heathrow just as the UK election campaign kicks into what commentators insist will be "high gear". And yet I can muster zero interest in its outcome now that Nigel Farage has - for the second time - whiffed his rendezvous with destiny. Cometh the hour, cometh Nigel's absurd contention that he's unfortunately needed in America to get Trump across the finish line. Patrick O'Flynn, a favourite Steyn Show guest from the GB News days,...

Every generation has a sleeping lion just waiting to wake and roar up the charts. In the early Eighties "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" got to Number One in Britain for Tight Fit. Can't quite place Tight Fit? It sounds like a vaguely parodic name for a boy band, but in fact they were a coed combo - one boy, two girls, a male model and two female dancers, hired as a photogenic front after the record had already been made. The girls had failed to make the cut at an audition for the more successfully contrived group, Bucks Fizz, and...

~This month marks The Mark Steyn Club's seventh birthday, and I thank profoundly all those First Fortnight Founding Members who've opted to sign on for an eighth year. We hope, as the days proceed, that our First Month Founding Members will want to do the same. ~I don't have anything to say about the death of the President of Iran, except that I was struck by the curious detail that he and his Azerbaijani counterpart had been opening two new dams. American presidents don't do that: Instead, the US demolishes dams at the rate of over fifty a year. If...

~yesterday...I played America's Number One record from exactly three-quarters of a century ago - May 1949: Listeners seemed to enjoy it, and many wanted to know more about it. I don't blame them. It's extremely catchy for a song with no consistent title: "Ghost Riders in the Sky"? "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky"? "Riders in the Sky"? "Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend)"? Or maybe you prefer just plain "Ghost Riders", or "Ghostriders", or half-a-dozen other variations over the years. But, however you label it, it's a song unlike any other. It made its appearance seventy-five years ago, and...

~The western world's one-size-fits-all response to the Covid - lockdowns, mandates, silencing of dissenting voices, assault on core liberties such as freedom of movement and freedom of worship - remains their template for the years ahead, as manifested in impending restraints such as "Net Zero", "fifteen-minute cities" and the World Health Organisation treaty. And, if you're minded to talk about any of that, the most effective assault has been on freedom of speech, where in the interests of "preventing misinformation" governments around the west are taking Covidstan's crushing of dissent to the next level. If you look at what happened...

~In recent days, I've had requests to write another apocalyptic bestseller so I can do my tedious "As I said ten years ago..." shtick on a whole bunch of other subjects a decade hence. But I'm not sure I have it in me. At this stage, unless you're less sentient than an earthworm, if you don't get what's happening, it's because you choose not to get it. As millions do. Headline from my old paper, The Daily Telegraph: Sales of new petrol motorcycles set to be banned from 2040 This is the priority of a supposedly "conservative" government. But don't...

In Malmö, the twenty-year-old Israeli Eurovision contestant, Eden Golan, sits as a prisoner in her hotel room and requires a police helicopter and over a hundred officers to get her safely to the competition venue: BREAKING: 100+ Swedish policemen are transporting the Israeli singer Eden Golan to Malmo Arena in a very long convoy of police cars A police helicopter is flying above the convoy Eden is competing in the Eurovision Song Contest tonight in a city infamous for its antisemitism pic.twitter.com/oHXTq7ZPP3 — Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) May 9, 2024 Miss Golan is actually younger than the diminutive Greta Thunberg howling...

snip ~Back in 2017, I was the guest-host for Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson. But Rush died and Tucker got fired, and, with one or two exceptions, the conversation these days on talk-radio and cable-news seems to be nowhere near where it needs to be to effect meaningful change. Seven years ago, the two major anglophone electorates had just voted for such change - Trump and Brexit - and the permanent state on either side of the Atlantic immediately set about subverting the people's will, and teaching the ingrate masses a hard lesson in what happens when you start looking...

Does anyone still talk about the Three Rs in education? That would be reading, writing and racism ...whoops, my mistake, 'rithmetic. It isn't difficult. Every weekend, my inbox fills up with readers demanding to know what I think about this or that news story, but in the end all the news stories are the same. Just from the last couple of days: ~At McGill University in Montreal, cute young predominantly female students in masks and keffiyehs take over the campus to demand "intifada until victory"; ~At the University of Texas in Austin, a comedian attempts to point out to members...

The heyday of the American musical began in the late 1920s and lasted into the 1960s. The music that came out of Broadway and Hollywood during that period represents one of the pinnacles of American popular culture. This fourth and final CCA of the 2023-2024 academic year will consider the history and character of the American musical.

Not so long ago, when newspapering was still a going concern, being a "court reporter" was a much sought-after beat - albeit modestly demanding, in that one was expected to know something about the case one was covering and the legal questions it raised. Not anymore - as I learned during my own trial in the District of Columbia Superior Court a few weeks back. The likes of The New York Times and NPR never sent a reporter to court to cover proceedings for a single day, but instead waited until the verdict and then had the "climate correspondent" write...

Happy Passover, the holiday when American Jews attempt to pass over an Ivy League campus and British Jews attempt to pass over a Central London thoroughfare. Surveying the scene at Columbia, Powerline's Scott Johnson posts a picture of Nazis preventing Jews from entering the University of Vienna in 1938. We are enjoined not to go full Godwin's this early in the column, but the photograph prompted this thought: A century ago, the Jews of Germany were the most assimilated in Europe. They had prospered under the Kaiser, and seemed set to do even better in the Weimar Republic. They were...

The conventional wisdom of the media and think-tanks agreed its line around the time the two-hundredth drone was shot down: Iran's assault on Israel was a flop. A record number of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles were launched by the mullahs against the Zionist Entity: For the flight from Persia, a drone takes nine hours, a cruise two hours, and a ballistic missile about twelve minutes. Not a single drone or cruise missile made it to Israeli soil. A few of the ballistics penetrated the country's air space, lighting up the sky over the Temple Mount yet killing not a...

This week my old newspaper The National Post is full of columns about "the death of the Canadian dream", if not the murder of said Canadian dream. Oh, I don't know. Say what you will about Canada, but it's the first country in the world to decree that its citizenry are entitled to both a penis and a vagina - and taxpayer-funded at that: An Ontario resident has successfully secured public funding for a specialized gender-affirming surgery argued to be "experimental" by the provincial health insurer following a years-long legal battle. The … … to the review board following an...

The "last copier in the woods" scenario is showing up somewhat sooner than scheduled. In Scotland, Ireland, Canada and elsewhere, the micro-regulation of speech - even in your own home - is being imposed without much in the way of coherent political pushback. Likewise in the land of the First Amendment, my misplaced faith in which has cost me twelve years of my life and millions of dollars in the choked septic tank of DC "justice". It is, however, even worse for others: at least I was "sued"; there was a "case", a "controversry" to be "litigated" and "adjudicated". By...

Welcome to a brand new audio edition of The Mark Steyn Show, recorded live at sea before an audience of Mark Steyn Cruisers from around the world. Today's episode brings together two of the Steyn Show's favourite guests - Conrad Black and Samantha Smith - to take the temperature of the new reign of Charles III a year-and-a-half since the death of his mother, and to consider the merits of monarchy versus republican alternatives. And Conrad's proposal for a somewhat paradoxical constitutional reform prompts a scornful response from Samantha. To listen to the show, simply click above.

Mark Steyn is the bestselling author of many books, including America Alone, After America, and Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech and The Twilight of the West. His previous incarnations include broadcaster, film and theatre critic, and jazz musician. But for the purposes of this interview, it’s his role as a campaigner for free speech where I think Steyn deserves the most credit. He was the man warning us about demographic decline and the dangers of Islamic immigration two decades ago. He successfully campaigned for the repeal of Canada’s Section 13 hate speech law and, more recently, has been a voice...

Happy Easter Monday to our readers, listeners and viewers across the Commonwealth and Europe. On the other hand, if you're in the United States, presumably it's a big Happy Post-Transition Monday, yesterday having been officially proclaimed by the purported Leader of the Free World as Happy Transgender Day of Visibility: NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility. I call upon all Americans to join...

"Hooray for Hollywood" is the name of the song, not my general disposition toward that industry in its contemporary incarnation. For almost the more than two-decade history of this website, we have marked Oscar Night by celebrating an Oscar-winning song from the last nine decades, even though the Best Original Song category was one of the first to start running on fumes. Now the whole show is. I wasn't even aware tonight was Oscar Night until it was pointed out to me, and I would wager that general lack of interest will be confirmed by the ratings: it's a long...