Free Republic

So in the end two-and-a-half years of Pierre Poilievre micro-gatekeeping the Tory party so as not to frighten the horses counted for less in Canadian politics than two-and-a-half hours of Tony Blair having dinner at Lady Rogers' agreeable Michelin-starred River Café in West London. Not a bad Dover sole, should Sir Tony ever invite you to join him so he can pitch you a stint as prime minister of New Zealand or the Netherlands. As to M Poilievre's micro-gatekeeping, here is a fine example of that from close to home: Two years ago the alleged "conservative" leader called the views...

~In a shrewd assessment of the current campaign Down Under, Paul Collits cites a certain "niche Canadian"": Mark Steyn says that we cannot vote our way out of the Western mess. The 2025 Australian election is living proof of the truth of his claim. Whoever wins here will inherit an unholy mess, and will not have the will to address it. Of course, he could be talking about next week's Canadian election or last month's German election. As we have noted, Fred Merz, the incoming chancellor in Berlin, has yet to take office but what Americans call the honeymoon is...

On Sunday Pope Francis publicly blessed the Easter crowds from the balcony of St Peter's Basilica and privately received the Vice President of the United States to give Mr Vance's children a gift of Kinder Eggs. Yes, really: those Kinder Eggs. The following morning, the Holy Father died at his residence in the Vatican. If the choice of Easter chocolate was a conscious jest on the part of the Pontiff, it was an excellent one, and a reminder that even in America chest-thumping about liberty will only take you so far. So I thank him for that. Other than his...

Nothing is static or "stable". Under the churn of the daily news cycle, the long-term trends advance remorselessly. Thus, if you are English or Irish, Swedish or German, the police are now on the other side. Here's a particularly extreme example of that from yours truly long ago, musing on the soi-disant "most wanted man in Europe": A few months after writing the above, I chanced to be in Molenbeek, which I knew well from my childhood (my mum was Belgian). I was checking out the story of Salah Abdeslam, who after taking part in the Bataclan atrocities in Paris...

The fifth annual Mark Steyn Cruise docked yesterday at Southampton (not my favourite port of call) and so, in consequence, I spent a few hours in what passes for the United Kingdom. It is a very weird land. For example, if a partially deaf man asks a "migrant" to "speak clearly", this act necessitates a visit from the British state. Meet our Brit Wanker Copper of the Day: British police tell an elderly man that it has been alleged that he told a migrant "speak English." They warn the elderly man that it could be perceived as a hate crime....

snip... ~This, for example, is an interesting development. From the Reinickendorf district of Berlin: Mann stürmt mit Machete in Bäckerei – und wird mit Baseballschlägern totgeprügelt Which means: Man storms into bakery with machete - and is beaten to death with baseball bats Who takes a baseball bat to a bakery? Well, as usual, the local media coverage is minimal and designed to obfuscate. The 38-year-old deceased had apparently been living in a homeless shelter and was a regular of the baker's who believed him to be Romanian. He entered the shop on the Residenzstraße bearing the increasingly popular Euro-accessory...

UPDATE: Yesterday afternoon (4/3) Judge Irving of the DC Superior Court denied Michael E. Mann's request to stay enforcement of the half million-dollar judgement he has been order to pay National Review: Here, Dr. Mann does not give any specifics as to his assets, net worth, or liquidity in support of his request.... Nor did the trial record establish the extent of Dr. Mann's assets, net worth, or liquidity at present: The only substantiated figures were drawn from Dr. Mann's W-2s from 2012 to 2017, showing an annual income of at most $198,877.40.... Dr. Mann's perfunctory and unsubstantiated assertions plainly...

The French have been here before. In 1804, First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte, the Emmanuel Macron of his day (a short guy married to an older woman), ordered the seizure of a perceived political threat to his regime, the Duc d'Enghien. When Joseph Fouché, Minister of Police, learned that M le Duc had been executed in a moat, he observed, "C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est un faute" - it's worse than a crime, it's a mistake. (The remark is often attributed to Talleyrand, but I incline to Fouché.) Yet the cynical police chief was wrong: two months later the First Consul...

Just for General Thoroughly Modern Milley, the beribboned buffoon from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, some snapshots of "white rage" - prefaced by a small news story for which there appears to be no detectable rage at all: ~A great and indefatigable friend of The Mark Steyn Show, Dr Clare Craig, notices that ten nurses who work on the fifth-floor maternity ward of Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Massachusetts have been diagnosed with brain tumours "over the last few years": 10 nurses who work on the same ward have brain tumours diagnosed. TEN. Occupational health say they've checked and there is no...

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @realchrisrufo · Follow Rep. Brandon Gill brings up all of Katherine Maher's old tweets claiming that "America is addicted to white supremacy" and supporting looting, reparations, and BLM. This woman is the blonde version of Robin DiAngelo.Maybe it would be easier to list the seven Tweets she still stands by.If you were really making an effort plausibly to pass yourself off as a "public broadcaster" representing the full range of the American people, you would never hire Katherine Maher or anyone like her. Mark has loathed PBS and NPR ever since he set foot in America,...

What a difference a year makes. A year ago, Michael Mann was riding high after winning his 12-year-old lawsuit against journalist and pundit Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg over comments sharply critical of Mann’s famed “hockey stick” graph. That graph purported to demonstrate a sharp rise in global temperature following industrialization, supposedly caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The offending comments were by Steyn in a National Review blog post and by Simberg in a Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) blog post. Mann brought suit against all four, but in 2021 National Review and CEI won “summary judgment” (a peculiar term...

It would not have been surprising at all that a visitor to Mr. Mark Steyn’s home in New Hampshire, USA, on the evening of March 4th would have heard the popping of bottles of champagne being opened and the clinking of glasses amidst cheerful toasts. On that Tuesday, Justice Judge Alfred S. Irving, Jr. of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia issued a long (over 14,000 words) Final Judgment Order, reducing the punitive damages charged against Mr. Steyn from an astronomical $1 million to a modest $5,000 in a 12-years long defamation suit launched by the plaintiff Dr....

Setting aside any "national security" concerns arising from letting The Atlantic's Russia-hoaxer Jeffrey Goldberg in on the Administration's Houthi-bombing call, I doubt that any creature more sentient than an amoeba can have been surprised to learn that US cabinet members "loathe" European "freeloading". If you're paying attention, you'll know that total contempt for the Euros appears to be entirely bipartisan. Are you shocked by Hegseth dismissing the Continent as "pathetic"? Well, you should have been around in the Obama era, when Victoria Nuland, She-Wolf of the Donbass, was rather pithier: F**k the EU! Or in the Bush era, when Ms...

It is over four years since Shannon Bream and I talked on Fox about the US Chief Justice's wish to avoid the Supreme Court being dragged into "controversy". And I remarked to Shannon that at a certain point the desire to avoid controversy becomes itself controversial. We are now well past that stage - to the point where any old rinky-dink district-court judge in Dead Moose Junction can presume to substitute his own foreign policy for that of the President and usurp the conduct of privileged state-to-state relations: The Administration did not 'refuse to comply' with a court order. The...

A few thoughts on the passing scene: ~Happy St Patrick's Day to our many Irish readers around the globe. We mark the occasion with a major breakthrough for diversity: Congratulations Northern Ireland!!!! It used to be a backward little country. Now it can proudly take its place among the progressive nations of the world with its first radical Islamist stabbing.@MarkSteynOnline pic.twitter.com/biCHKVfzvy — Phelim McAleer (@PhelimMcAleer) March 14, 2025 We finally have an answer to the Irish Question: in the Erin of tomorrow, Protestants and Catholics can all come together to be stabbed by Muslims. ~The French Euro-MP Raphael Glucksmann is...

Three months ago, upon the overthrow of Boy Assad, I wrote:Ah, but Arab Springs eternal. The jihadists now in charge of Damascus were, not so long ago, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Isis, but don't worry, the expert analysts assure us the leadership has become far less 'ideological' and far more 'nuanced'. Is John Kerry doing a little light consulting work for them..? We are tourists in the heart of darkness: we know nothing and we learn nothing.Well, that didn't take long. As I write, the gleeful smiling men of the new regime are going to the Alawite and Christian neighbourhoods,...

A bite-sized chunk of my big-picture piece from Quadrant has now been excerpted in Australia's national newspaper, The Australian: The biggest story of our time is that the entirety of the western world is sliding off the cliff – and most citizens of the west are not even aware of it, and have no desire to be made aware of it. In that respect, I envy them. It is comforting to paddle one's canoe and insist that the ever louder roaring sound from up ahead is the crowd at a Taylor Swift gig and not Niagara Falls. To be sure,...

The satirist Ambrose Bierce had it right: The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff. I might suggest a rather inelegant rephrasing of an old proverb: Live by Falsifying Evidence, Die by Falsifying Evidence And, that's how it started.... "Setting aside questions of credibility" when it comes to Michael E Mann's iconic hockey stick... Mann opened this case in the District of Columbia Superior Court on October 22nd, 2012 – with a lie – a big whopper: It is one thing to engage in discussion about debatable topics. It is quite another to attempt...

BREAKING: A Washington DC court has just ruled on Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg's motion for sanctions against Michael Mann and his attorneys for misleading the jury at trial. Decision: Mann and his attorneys are SANCTIONED for bad faith misconduct and will be assessed costs

I've written and talked for some years now about the emerging "Post-Democratic Era". But it has advanced significantly in recent months. On Sunday, Romania's "Central Electoral Bureau" ruled that Călin Georgescu was ineligible to be on the presidential ballot on the grounds that he "doesn't meet the conditions of legality" because he "violated the very obligation to defend democracy, which is based precisely on fair, honest and impartial elections." Mr Georgescu is ahead in all the polls. From the most recent: New polling (MKOR, Feb 25-28) shows Călin Georgescu dominating with 44.1%, far ahead of establishment-backed candidates. That's getting pretty...