Free Republic

One of the glummer aspects of advancing years is seeing all your more whimsical jokes become literally true. So it has now been announced that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be writing a "thriller". Plot spoiler: It was Putin. With the Macedonian Content Farmers. In a $100,000 Facebook ad. Well, no. It will surely be a little more thrilling than that. Mrs Clinton will be collaborating with Louise Penny, who writes (to me not entirely persuasive) police procedurals set in Quebec's Eastern Townships, a short tootle north of me, if you can get across the shuttered border. If I'd known Hillary...

Happy Presidents' Day - or Presidents Day (the style is variable) - to all our American readers. You can find our two-part forty-five-song Presidential Medley here and here. Usually, after the mostly-peaceful peaceful transfer of power, I update our special to take account of the new guy - in this case, the purported forty-sixth. But for some reason, this time round, I just thought, aw, screw it. ~As I've been saying for some months, we are aswirl in a blizzard of lies: Covid-19 originated in bats or pangolins. New York did a way better job of handling it than Florida,...

Happy Australia Day to all our readers Down Under. The national holiday is, in fact, on Tuesday, but for all I know it's already Tuesday there, or possibly Wednesday, in which case Happy Australia Day for yesterday - or, as the depraved nutters at the nation's state broadcaster say, "Happy Invasion Day". Not being able to visit the Lucky Country is one of the things I've most missed in this last year of lockdown, but I hope to see it once more before I die, if the Vegemite Curtain is ever lifted. As you know, we always like to have...

I leave it to readers to decide whether this week's Song of the Week was selected as a plea for healing in a divided land or merely because sixty years ago - January 1960 - it was on the Billboard Number One album. The latter is verifiable, although to be precise one should clarify that it was on the Billboard Number One stereo album; the Number One mono album was the soundtrack to the Elvis film GI Blues. As to the healing balm, you'll have to hang on till our closing paragraph. The stereo album in question was Frank Sinatra's...

As I said earlier, I find myself at odds with virtually the entire politico-media class in my reaction to the "storming" of the US Capitol. As I put it: The political class (represented by a Speaker who flies home to San Francisco on her own government plane) has been largely insulated from the pathologies they have loosed upon the land. For a few hours yesterday they weren't. In a self-governing republic of citizen-legislators, that ought to be sobering and instructive. But, of course, it wasn't. Still, I was surprised that even politicians and pundits could utter all that eyewash about...

Mark Steyn's Brilliant Commentary on the January 6 2021 Riots at the U.S. Capitol. Tucker Carlson Show, January 6, 2021.

For this New Year weekend, I'm delighted to present a two-part conversation with Don Black about his recent bestselling memoir The Sanest Guy in the Room, in whose success (as you'll hear) I was honored to play a very small part. Don talks about all kinds of things - from his stint in the hospital with Covid-19 to his friendship with a young Michael Jackson, whose first solo Number One he wrote. (That's Don and Jacko with Petula Clark and Sophia Loren above.) Along the way we'll hear not only Don's big hits such as "Born Free" and "Diamonds Are...

By popular demand we are rebroadcasting a Steyn program first aired two years ago: In this special audio edition of Steyn's Song of the Week Mark celebrates the bicentennial of a beloved Christmas song first performed exactly two centuries ago - Christmas Eve 1818 - in a small church in Oberndorf, Austria - "Stille Nacht", or "Silent Night". For these birthday observances, Steyn welcomes the man who knows more about "Silent Night" and the men who created it than anybody on the planet - the Austrian actor and producer Hanno Schilf, who tells the story of the song, and the...

Some years ago, the late Mort Shuman, a marvelous composer and one of the first generation of rock'n'roll songwriters, took me to lunch. Mort had written "Why Must I Be A Teenager In Love?" and "Can't Get Used To Losing You" and a bunch of stuff for Elvis, including "Mess O' Blues", "Suspicion" and "Viva Las Vegas". But, like most successful music biz types, he wanted to talk about what he was doing next. So, after the usual pleasantries, he slid across the table a script bearing the title Save The Last Dance For Me - after his Number One...

Powerful interview. https://youtu.be/IZp8e3Mcmdc

ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the Associated Press and Fox News have just called the election: Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States, CNN projects, after a victory in the state where he was born put him over the 270 electoral votes needed to win. "Joe Biden is a unifier," says Nancy Pelosi. If that's so, it seems odd that, in the small number of precincts that decided the election, Democrats needed to steal it. As I laid out in this weekend's Mark Steyn Show, election fraud in American cities has deep roots - far deeper than...

Last night was the first Halloween with a blue moon for over three-quarters of a century, and visible in every American state, unless yours is in serious lockdown and your apartment is facing the wrong way. What's the expression? "This comes along once in a blue moon"? Pocket that for a Tuesday-night surprise, if you're a cable pundit. My deployment of the phrase two days out is for purely musical pleasure, from one of Rodgers & Hart's biggest hits: Act One You gulp your coffee and run Into the subway you crowd Don't breathe - it isn't allowed... Doesn't ring...

If anybody is around to write history in a generation or two, October 14th 2020 will go down as the first day of a new Year Zero. Yesterday, with less than three weeks to go in a national election in a settled democratic society with an ostensibly free press, the woke billionaires of the social media cartel decided to freeze and/or cancel the Twitter/Facebook accounts of the President's press secretary, the Trump campaign, Republican Senate candidates and Republican House members. So America is now formally a one-party state, at least as far as fair access to media platforms is concerned....

From yours truly in The Spectator two decades ago - February 10th 2001: I have been on a short vacation. Well, not that short as it turned out. Apparently, I was away so long I missed the entire duration of Jesse Jackson's withdrawal from public life. Citing his need to 'revive my spirit and reconnect with my family', the Reverend Jackson withdrew from public life on Thursday, 18 January. He returned to public life on Saturday, 20 January. I missed the whole thing. Two complete days without the Rev Jackson on TV! No fewer than forty-eight — count 'em! —...

Watching American cities burn across the map all summer long is a little dispiriting for those of us foreigners whose first acquaintance with these burgs was through American songs. I have been to St Louis a handful of times, but, if you sneak up on me unawares and yell the name at me, I'm more likely to eschew my limited personal experience and burst into a few bars of "Meet Me in St Louis" or "The Saint Louis Blues" - notwithstanding that the former renders the town exclusively as "St Louiee" and the latter does likewise in all but a...

Sixty-five years ago - September 1955 - America was reeling under one of those blockbuster Number Ones, so blockbuster indeed that it toppled "Rock Around the Clock" from the top spot. What does it take to knock off rock's first great iconic anthem? A beautiful Sinatra love ballad? A showstopping Rodgers & Hammerstein eleven o'clock number? Not a chance: To see off Bill Haley, all it takes a century old folk-song, heavy on the snare drums. And next thing you know you're blasting from every radio and jukebox: (video at link) Mitch Miller was a prodigious hitmaker of the early...

A truly great song for the season isn't about the calendar, or the weather. It's about the seasons of life and love: Spring Is Here Why doesn't my heart go dancing? But then: The Things We Did Last Summer I'll remember all winter long... Of course, if you're not a young man whose fancy turns to love, spring fever may pass you by, and, if you're in late middle age, the summer may be no more likelier a prompter of romance than mid-November. Yet there is one great seasonal signifier that almost everyone responds to. You don't have to be...

I remember when Christians used to actually believe in Christianity. Those were the days. (Some still do, but their numbers are shrinking.) Back then, you could still visit an average (Protestant) church and hear a pastor actually teach real doctrine and share authentic insights. You could hear his thoughts on how to live an upright Christian life, or on why bad things might happen to good people, or how Christian marriages might be improved. And you could hear it all supported by actual Bible passages. After the sermon, you could hear the congregation sing hymns affirming the importance of obedience,...

When Chicago burned, I offered a song about Chicago. So, with Kenosha burning, I thought I'd offer a song about Kenosha - figuring the way things are going in America this format should keep me going till retirement. Alas, I failed to anticipate that there are apparently no songs about Kenosha. Oh, well. There must be a songwriter or two born in Kenosha. But again, apparently not. There is, however, a very great instrumentalist who, while not born in Kenosha... After his father's death in the Great War, Hamp spent his boyhood in Kenosha, in the second decade of the...

Monday is not only Labor Day in America and Labour Day in Canada but also Independence Day in Brazil, marking the moment when Prince Pedro was persuaded by the country's leaders to declare himself free of Lisbon. To be honest, it always depresses me to see various charmless presidents preside like mob bosses over Independence Day observances, as nothing makes me pine more for the old Empire of Brazil: South America does not do republics well. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that in global pop music Brazil punches above its weight, its contributions to the repertoire...