Free Republic

I have been wondering for quite a while about the absence of Mark Steyn on the Tucker Carlson show. I always made it a point to watch him on his regular Thursday evening visit. Does anyone know why he isn't on the show any longer?

It's easy to forget that the years after the end of World War Two in America weren't just a quick change of gears from the arsenal of democracy to the economic boom. This uneasy, decade-long period might have been forgotten if weren't for film noir. Even though it had its genesis in pictures like The Maltese Falcon (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Double Indemnity (1944), it was a genre in search of an era, and it found it with the return of the first demobbed G.I. Former soldiers appreciate Nick Garcos in Thieves' Highway, director Jules Dassin's 1949...

Mark Steyn Discusses the Ukraine Conflict and Bigger Stuff, The Four Horsemen of the ApocalypseMarch 4, 2022 | Sundance | 39 CommentsThe first white horse, pestilence (virus); the second red horse, war (Ukraine); the third black horse, famine (fertilizer shortage); and the final horse, death.Stunningly, in this monologue Mark Steyn takes a tour reminding viewers of the past two years of western government action, while connecting the corporate mandates from the World Economic Forum. That outline is brave considering the mention of the totalitarian shift amid New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States when attached to the WEF...

The weekend seizure of a Texas synagogue by a "British man" is the umpteenth example of "Let's pretend that the 37,893rd incident of Islamic terrorism is anything but Islamic terrorism". The dirty stinking rotten corrupt FBI (whom the pom-pom girls of Conservative Inc still make goo-goo eyes at) immediately announced that the "British man"'s act was "not specifically related to the Jewish community", so that's okay then, although presumably it was a bit unfortunate that some of the "Jewish community" wound up getting "detained" by the "British man", as the BBC delicately put it.You know, "detained", like you might be...

America has literally lost the plot. On the last soundstage, all parts are interchangeable: Men become women, and the grizzled butch coaches of college athletics can't wait to put 'em on the ladies' track team. Women become men, and then pregnant men, and then threaten the hospital for the humiliation of having to give birth in a "maternity ward". Warner Bros gives J K Rowling the bum's rush for being so out of it as to think periods are something women have. In the TERF wars, lesbians are transphobic because they don't wish to date women with penises. At dark...

I have been reluctant to comment on certain well-aired rumors about Joe Biden at international meetings, mainly because a lot of them seem to originate on Chinese "social media", which, hard to believe, is slightly more tightly controlled than American social media. However, this latest incident was big news over the weekend - and we do seem to have a witness, HRH The Duchess of Cornwall:An informed source has told The Mail on Sunday that Camilla was taken aback to hear Biden break wind as they made polite small talk at the global climate change gathering in Glasgow last week.'It...

Tuesday is what less evolved societies than Virginia still quaintly call "Election Day". The Democrat candidate, the unlovely Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe, claims that "we are substantially leading on the early vote". In the fullness of time he will also be substantially leading on the late vote, if he isn't already. That leaves the votes on Voting Day up for grabs. The Republican candidate, Mr Youngkin, is a squish of no fixed beliefs who will govern as Mitt did in Massachusetts or Pataki did in New York. But he has been handed a winning issue that he would probably not...

It was certainly the weirdest year. It began with a supremely weird decision by the entire world, except China and Sweden, to tank the global economy.No one has ever done that before. The only major economic power to grow last year was China whose GDP is up by, I think, about 2.5 percent compared to declines everywhere else, including some actually catastrophic ones, such as 11% in the UK.This decision to tank the entire global economy is something that strengthened China, the creator of the virus, and the exporter of the virus, and weakened any opposition to China -- and...

On the day that twelve US Marines and some 150 civilians were blown apart by suicide bombers, it was heartening to learn what real heroism is.Until January 6th, the highlight of Michael Byrd's "law-enforcement" career was leaving his loaded Glock in a congressional men's room and paying no price. He "serves" with the grotesquely misnamed "Capitol Police", which is not a police department but a praetorian guard - a personal security team for the praetors of Congress. Lieutenant Byrd shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, a 5'2" unarmed woman, because "she was posing a threat to the US House of Representatives".All...

A week after the Fall of Kabul, the flailing hegemon continues to embarrass itself: America's official deadline for total withdrawal from Afghanistan is August 31st, so half the remaining time has already elapsed, and in that time, according to the Department of Defense, it has evacuated just 2,500 Americans - or about 350 per day. That seems an under-performance - or, as The New York Post's front-page headline distills it, "DUMKIRK". The soi-disant "superpower" now resembles one of those stories you see from time to time on Eyewitness News: the 700-lb bedridden guy unable to get up, even to go...

With respect to Afghanistan, the puppeteers waggling the dead husk that is Joe Biden have made a political calculation - that, on the home front, the fact of departure will count for more than the manner of departure. Joe's not a ubiquitous figure in the news cycle the way Trump was, so he can sit in the basement for a few more days - and, in electoral terms, America's total humiliation in its umpteenth unwon war in some krappistan no one can find on a map will ultimately work for the Dems. The Taliban, for their part, seem happy to...

To reprise a line from a decade-old column of mine:Afghanistan is about Afghanistan – if you're Afghan or Pakistani. But, if you're Russian or Chinese or Iranian or European, Afghanistan is about America.That's the point to remember: if you're an Afghan schoolgirl, today is the fall of Kabul; elsewhere, in the chancelleries of allies and enemies alike, it's the fall of America. Even by their usual wretched standards, the world's most somnolent media are struggling to stay up to speed on the story. Here's the scoop from USA Today:Taliban's Afghanistan Advance Tests Biden's 'America Is Back' Foreign Policy PromiseYou don't...

A month from now, America will be marking the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The observances will be muted here, because it's too sad: we've lost the war, as the present recreation of the Saigon embassy evacuation in Kabul reminds us, somewhat crudely and obviously. Instead, ahead of that grim date, I thought we'd revisit August 2001 with a few columns of mine from that last summer. As a scene-setter, we began a week ago with the summer of sharks. Here, from The Sunday Telegraph of August 6th 2001, is a column on Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam -...

Mark Steyn mocks Hunter's "valuable" art works. This is the funniest thing you will see all week!

We are in a literally Orwellian world now. Until a couple of days ago the headline on this Washington Post story from February 2020 read:Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked. Now it reads:Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.Democracy dies in darkness, but stealth editing thrives there. That's Orwell 101 - although one assumes whichever of Bezos's woeful hacks was ordered to do it was unaware of his literary antecedents, or self-respect would have required him to seek alternative, less pitiful employment. Nevertheless, as you'll know if you heard...

I live about 20 minutes south of the Canadian border, which used to be called the longest undefended frontier in the world. People moved freely back and forth across it all day every day. But now it’s been closed for over a year. At one point my daughter asked me to drive her up there, because there was a 30-minute opportunity for people on one side to talk to their friends on the other. “Sad!” as President Trump would say. It was like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the Cold War, except that both sides are now like East Berlin....

A couple of weeks back on Fox News I did a little round-up of the state Easter crackdown across Christendom... The above was such a hit with viewers that we invited Calgary pastor Artur Pawloski onto the following night's show to give his own account of the pitiful constabulary's shameful invasion of his church.... That too was quite the ratings hit, and made Artur Pawlowski a hero to millions of Americans - and made the Calgary Police an object of total and deserved contempt. Over the weekend, they decided to do something about it. They waited till Artur had left...

It is ten years - May 2nd 2011 - since Osama bin Laden went to his virgins. Observances of the anniversary are muted - either because the once most famous man on the planet is now entirely forgotten, or because the Afghan withdrawal renders the whole subject too depressing. At any rate, many of the psychoses noted a decade ago have now spread far beyond anything so narrow as America's longest unwon war. Here is what I wrote about Osama's dispatch in my syndicated column that week: As my old friends at The Spectator in London pointed out on Monday...

that HRH The Duke of Edinburgh, the longest-serving Royal consort in history, died in the early hours of the morning, just a few weeks before his hundredth birthday. There will be many of the Queen's subjects who will believe that he did not make his century because of the vile conduct of his wretched grandson and the in-law from hell - and I would not disagree with that, God rot both of them.Here's what I wrote four years ago upon the occasion of his retirement from official Royal engagements around the Commonwealth in the autumn of 2017. He was ninety-six,...

It's Easter and Passover at SteynOnline. We started on Good Friday with a little muscular Christianity and the sublime heights of western art on the Easter edition of The Mark Steyn Show... But, as has become traditional for our motion-picture department at this time of year, we present Mel Gibson's big blockbuster from seventeen Easters ago. Mel has spent the last decade getting a little crazier with every year that passes - and I note, sympathetically, that he and I have had the same third-rate shyster tormentor for much of that period. Surprisingly, there have been no attempts to follow...