Rush to Judge

Programming note: We hope all our American and Canadian readers had a grand Labor Day or Labour Day according to taste. With the summer receding in the rear-view mirror, today and tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday, I'll be back behind the Golden EIB Microphone for three hours of substitute-host-level Excellence In Broadcasting sitting in for Rush on America's Number One radio show. The fun starts at 12 noon Eastern/9am Pacific. Hope you'll dial us up either via the iHeart Radio app or on one of over 600 stations across the fruited plain, such as our old friends at WNTK New Hampshire, where you can listen to the full show from anywhere on the planet right here.

~The top story this morning is the Senate hearing (if one can dignify what we've heard so far as such) on Judge Kavanaugh's nomination for the Supreme Court. We'll cover all that as it happens, and try to get to any other burning issues, big and small.

~The big questions don't get much bigger than the downfall of western civilization, which Pankaj Mishra in The New York Times is very chipper about:

Today it has reached its final and most desperate phase, with existential fears about endangered white power feverishly circulating once again between the core and periphery of the greatest modern empire. "The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive," President Trump said last year in a speech hailed by the British journalist Douglas Murray, the Canadian columnist Mark Steyn and the American editor Rich Lowry. More recently, Mr. Trump tweeted (falsely) about "large-scale killing" of white farmers in South Africa — a preoccupation, deepened by Rupert Murdoch's media, of white supremacists around the world.

I'm not entirely sure how that last sentence follows from the previous one, but, having been on the receiving end of it myself back in the Nineties, I'm well aware that under New York Times editing techniques a lot of stuff falls through the cracks. Still, my recollection is that appreciation of Trump's speech in Poland went beyond obscure "Canadian columnists". At any rate, Mr Mishra declares that "the religion of whiteness" has become "a suicide cult", and that this "wounded and swaggering identity geopolitics [a cute coinage, but a bit too obviously so] puts the world in grave danger".

Oh, well.

~Meanwhile, back in the Swamp, life goes on. On Saturday I joined Ed, Rachel and Pete on the curvy couch at "Fox & Friends" and re-emphasized what remains the principal takeaway of the Steele-Comey-Mueller shenanigans:

.@MarkSteynOnline: We have classic one-party state tactics going on. In 2016, the state and Clinton campaign merged – where's the media's moral outrage over that? pic.twitter.com/jvVAdtY2bT

— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) September 1, 2018

That was part of a busy weekend at SteynOnline, beginning with a guest-co-hosting (or co-guest-hosting) stint at "The Five" and an appearance shortly thereafter with Martha MacCallum (I'm right at the top of the show). Our Labor Day movie date was a film about the ultimate laborers - Antz - although you may prefer Fritz Lang's Metropolis and/or some sobering thoughts about what happens in a world after work. My Song of the Week celebrated the most successful Italian song of the last century - Volare - and the latest installment of my video poetry anthology pushed back against the latest victim of cultural vandalism - Rudyard Kipling's If... If you were busy with the barbecue this long weekend, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing.

~Steyn's Sunday Poem is made with the support of members of The Mark Steyn Club, for which we are profoundly grateful. As I always say, membership isn't for everyone, but it is a way of ensuring that all our content remains available for everyone - all my columns, audio interviews, video content, all our movie features and songs of the week. None of it's going behind a paywall, because I want it out there in the world, being read and heard and viewed, and maybe changing an occasional mind somewhere along the way. And we're delighted to say that, since the birth of The Mark Steyn Club, this website now provides more free content each week than at any time in its fifteen-year history.

That said, we are introducing a few bonuses for our Club Members - not locking up our regular content, which will always be free, but admitting members to a few bonus features. Aside from blockbuster video poetry, membership in The Mark Steyn Club does come with some non-poetic benefits, including:

~Our nightly radio serial Tales for Our Time, the sixteenth of which starts later this month;
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To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here. And for our limited-time Gift Membership see here. It makes the perfect belated Labor Day gift.

As for that inaugural Steyn cruise, we'll be spending the first week of October sailing from Montreal to Boston at the height of the eastern seaboard's fall foliage season. Guests include former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and two of the doughtiest cultural warriors Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, whose new film on America's biggest mass murderer, Kermit Gosnell, opens next month. We'll be doing many of our regular features - The Mark Steyn Show, Tales for Our Time, Clubland Q&A - but live on stage and on water.

See you on the radio at noon Eastern - and do give me a call.