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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.

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 re-unites Mark with his old boss the Rt Hon the Lord Black of Crossharbour. In this programme, Mark and Conrad, having both been on the receiving end, talk about the viscissitudes of American "justice" - and, on a happier note, the latter recalls what it's like when Donald Trump telephones to say he's pardoned you. To listen to the show, simply click above. There will be more from Lord Black at...

I am literally the worst-timed financial decision in the history of Canadian enterprise. And yet, I’m still here and fully digitized, aren’t I? Every morning, some downtown Toronto sandal-wearer retches at the sight of me for sale at the local newsstand. Every day, some NDP staffer on Parliament Hill sneaks into the bathroom so nobody can see them reading John Ivison on their phone. Journalism schools have entire classes taught by CBC burnouts on how I am a malevolent threat to truth and justice, and their students (bless their hearts) still hit me up for internships.... Well, let’s see who...

week.They are muddling the sequence of events that got us to the present impasse: Trump ran against the corrupt back-scratching, log-rolling society of the OBushintons—the Clinton pay-to-play schemes, the Biden sales of influence and access, the semi-disguised socialist racism elitism of the Obamas, and the flabby sameness and ineffectuality of the Bush–McCain–Romney–McConnell–Ryan Republicans. Trump sensed the people were dissatisfied with the bipartisan Swamp, and he ran as strenuously against the Bushes and McCain and Romney in 2016 as he did against the Clintons and Obamas. The anti-Trumpers of both parties, in the most legally questionable presidential election in U.S. history,...

A few years ago, a friend of mine was sent to Kiev by the British government to teach Ukrainians about the Western democratic system. His pupils were young reformers from western Ukraine, affiliated to the Conservative party. When they produced a manifesto containing 15 pages of impenetrable waffle, he gently suggested boiling their electoral message down to one salient point. What was it, he wondered? A moment of furrowed brows produced the lapidary and nonchalant reply, 'To expel all Jews from our country.' It is in the west of Ukraine that support is strongest for the man who is being...

When the No. 3 House Republican gets the high jump this week, the real loser will be the attempt to suppress any real examination of what happened in the last election. By Conrad Black The vote this week on Representative Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) status as House Republican conference chairman vastly transcends her. All sides are correct that it is a battle over the “Big Lie.” Cheney, the Democrats, and NeverTrumpers all say the Big Lie is the contention that 2020 was not a fair election. They argue further that Donald Trump tried to promote the violent overthrow of the government...

This article appears first and formost on American Greatness. The Wall Street Journal on Friday published an editorial headlined "The GOP’s Trump Problem." It gets things terribly wrong. The GOP is Trump’s party and it is The Wall Street Journal that has the Trump problem. Having been commendably supportive of the former president through most of his term, the Journal joined in the general embarkation of NeverTrumpers over the ostensible election results. The theory that inspired this headline is Trump had his chance but lost the election in a manner practically indistinguishable from defeated incumbents Jimmy Carter in 1980 and...

The Biden administration is now almost halfway through its proverbial Hundred Days and appears likely to be able to jam through its coronavirus relief package of $1.9 trillion, of which under 10 percent bears any relationship to alleviating the impact of the virus. Tens of millions of Americans will enjoy receiving $1,400, and some of the more egregious ingredients of outright logrolling, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s subway system to Silicon Valley and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s redundant bridge to Canada. In his formidable address to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) in Orlando on Feb. 28, former...

President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of former Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, the New York Times reported Tuesday.Several Trump administration aides had claimed to ABC that the president is planning to grant the former governor clemency. Trump had previously hinted he was looking into commuting the 14-year sentence, which was originally handed down after Blagojevich was convicted of trying to sell the Senate seat of then-president elect Barack Obama in 2008, according to NBC Chicago. https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1229845536511070209 “Yes, we commuted the sentence of Rod Blagojevich. he served eight years in jail, a long time. He seems like a very nice person, don’t know him,” Trump...

Though this may not be a representative opinion, I think Joe Biden’s decline turned into a power dive with his claim over the weekend of almost sole responsibility for the destruction of Robert Bork’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987. Even this was dishonest, as Teddy Kennedy’s savage attack, imputing to Bork the desire to banish women who sought an abortion to the care of butchers in back allies, carried more weight than did Biden, who as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was supposed to show a modicum of impartiality. But they were both guilty of abominable...

It may be difficult to believe in this enlightened age but there was a time not so long ago when the National Review was the intellectual heart of America's conservative movement. Its writers were sharp, gifted and irreverent. Their appearances on Fox News and other TV outlets made them rock stars. All that ended on January 22, 2016, when the magazine posted online its "Against Trump" issue. Once again, the editors proudly chose to stand athwart history rather than make it. They chose to lose with what they consider honor rather than win. 22 writers signed on, each penning...

There is a slight redemptive quality in the helpless, irrational, and often demented fury of the haters. The current safe harbor of the disdainers is to nod smugly to each other on cable news panels while insisting the president and his defenders have failed in their effort to represent the Ukraine allegations as bunk and legally unassailable. Now the administration is left scrambling for excuses and technicalities.This usually leads quite quickly to the idea that everyone knows the president’s “perfect” conversation with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky was “wrong” but that there is some question whether it justified impeachment and genuine...

It has now become a frequent occurrence to wonder if I have taken leave of my senses and am imagining the unutterable nonsense being uttered by apparently normal, functioning news readers and commentators on television and in print.This began when the Washington Post reported the “Republican talking point” two-and-a-half years ago that the Steele dossier had been commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. I had just finished Hillary Clinton’s book What Happened about the election, the outcome of which she attributed to Trump’s “treason” with the Russians and being “shivved in the back...

You may read it here first: This sordid, contemptible impeachment ruse is finally disintegrating. It was another fraud, and I predict that this time the polls will move clearly in the president’s favor. There are limits to how often his enemies can get the public and the world to the edges of their chairs with their fantastic accusations. The Economist, a long-respected magazine in earlier times, told us a year ago that the Trump presidency was hanging on the thread of Michael Cohen’s testimony. Most of the American press gave the public to understand for two years that there was...

The controversy over President Trump’s pullout on the Turkish–Syrian border will settle down quickly. It is another useful debunking of ancient shibboleths and decrepit truisms, like the long-impregnable encrustation of false wisdom that moving the U.S embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would unleash hell upon the whole Middle East. There are about 35 million Kurds, approximately half of them in Turkey, where they make up about a fifth of Turkey’s population. A century ago almost all the Kurds had been in the Ottoman Empire, which the Allied powers broke up after World War I, a foolish decision that is on...

What appears to be emerging from the Ukraine controversy is an epochal contest for the political soul and future of America. It has been known from the morning after the last presidential election that Trump was planning an assault on the political conventional wisdom in policy matters. He and his followers—fully half the voters if the Libertarians and Conservatives are added to the Republican total, and the Greens to the Democrats—didn’t subscribe to the “OBushinton” consensus on the environment, tax levels, toleration of illegal immigration, trade policy, health care, education, nuclear non-proliferation and many other issues. They saw the 2016...

FDR in 1936, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984, all won by over 20 points. Trump will gain a victory on that scale next year, and he will have earned it Just as I was pulling my chair up to my desk and preparing to pounce clumsily upon my keyboard and pound out something about the current Canadian election campaign, an email from an old and valued friend popped up enclosing the dumbest column from the Globe and Mail I have seen in 65 years as a frequent reader of that newspaper. By Lawrence...

The election campaign to date has been an exercise in idiocy and cowardice. It is obviously embarrassing for Justin Trudeau to have had to admit to attending an Aladdin-themed party in 2001 made up to look like Aladdin (although Aladdin was an Arab not an African, and blackening his hands was oddly laborious). But Maxime Bernier is right that Justin is not a racist, just a hypocrite. As Tucker Carlson, the Fox News commentator, said on Thursday night, the prime minister’s conduct is “sort of like finding out your super-sensitive brother-in-law, the one who tells you he’s a feminist, the...

The last time I saw my old boss Conrad Black was a week ago. It was a very Conradian occasion: We ended up keeping a visiting prince (not from the House of Windsor, as it happens) waiting in the lobby, and by the time we parted on the doorstep the conversation had worked its way round to Doris Day, then still among us. When Miss Day died a few days later, almost all the broadcast tributes played a snippet of: Que Sera SeraWhatever will be will beThe future’s not ours to see… That’s a little fatalistic for my tastes. Nevertheless,...

President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a full pardon for former media mogul Conrad Black, who was convicted in 2007 of fraud and obstruction of justice and spent 3-1/2 years in prison. Black, 74, a Canadian-born British citizen, once ran an international newspaper empire that included the Chicago Sun-Times, Britain’s Daily Telegraph and the Jerusalem Post. “Lord Black’s case has attracted broad support from many high-profile individuals who have vigorously vouched for his exceptional character,” the White House said in a statement announcing the pardon. It said Black had made “tremendous contributions to business,” had written books on history and...