Steyn on Culture
The Word That Can't Be Questioned
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The state religion and its heretics
Infame and Great Place
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Anyone for tennis?
HOW UNCLEAN WAS MY VALLEY
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Take a look at this photograph. It appeared in The Toronto Star's education section on Saturday: It's the scene every Friday at the cafeteria of Valley Park Middle School in Toronto. That's not a private academy, it's a public school funded by taxpayers. And yet, oddly enough, what's going on is a prayer service – oh, relax, it's not Anglican or anything improper like that; it's Muslim Friday prayers, and the Toronto District School Board says don't worry, it's just for convenience: They put the cafeteria at the local imams' disposal because otherwise the kids would have to troop off to the local mosque and then they'd be late for Lesbian History class or whatever subject is scheduled for Friday afternoon. The picture is taken from the ...
Danes, Davos and Denial
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A clash of civilizational theses
The Grand Convergence
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The first mass shooter motivated by YouTube "de-monetization" policies
Inclusion Riders of the Showbiz Apocalypse
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At the Oscars: no show, no politics, no nothin'...
Too Stupid to Survive (Extreme Sports Edition)
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"Knowledge is power," said Sir Francis Bacon. Not anymore.
Grab 'Em By the Pussyhat
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The racist transphobia of the Resistance!
Virtue-Signaling While Rome Burns
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The shallow opportunism of the Pope's Christmas message
The Great Brain Drain
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Mark on "the biggest story of our time" - and the determination not to notice it...
The Gay High-Water Mark
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Australia's "marriage equality" campaign triumphed in this month's referendum under the slogan "Let's Get It Done". In other words, it's inevitable, so why waste another five years arguing about it?
That's how "progressives" think about progress...
The Triumph of Amoral Will
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The deadliest church shooting in US history
Contradictions and Condescension
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Harvey, Hillary, hypocrisy and hyper-progressivism
"The Weinstein Company is Dead"
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Welcome to a brand new week at SteynOnline. I spent part of my weekend with one of my favorite shows, "Justice with Judge Jeanine", on which both the Judge and I were preoccupied with the question of whether Harvey Weinstein, under investigation for rape and sexual assault by both the NYPD and Scotland Yard, will finally be getting justice. I was particularly disturbed by the New York cops making the Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez wear a wire - putting her at risk of certain physical assault had Weinstein discovered it - and then the sleazy DA, Cyrus Vance, mysteriously deciding to drop the case...
Unmoored and UnMammied
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A couple of cultural footnotes on recent events
Man Un-Makyth Manners
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When Americans decline to stand for "The Star-Spangled Banner", but rise for "God Save The Queen"
Statue of Limitations
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Sixteen years into the "war on terror", we're fighting over the wrong turf, and with the wrong weapons
The Totalitarianism of the Now
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Pol Pot's Year Zero as Bill Murray's Groundhog Day
All Shook Up
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Forty years ago Elvis Presley passed ...into a stunningly successful new phase of his career. This essay on death as a career move is from my book Mark Steyn From Head to Toe...
Lutey Tunes
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When the Warsaw Philharmonic strike up, all the US media hear is "Old Shep"
The Numero Uno Sock Puppet
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What the well-dressed Islamophile wears to march in the gay parade
Action and Reaction
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It is foolish and complacent to assume that the most effective techniques will remain forever the monopoly of one side...
A Kinder, Gentler America ...By Half
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Steyn's campaign for the decriminalization of Kinder Eggs in America wins a hollow victory...
Big Picture, Small Pleasures
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John Bloom (who's better known as Joe Bob Briggs of drive-in fame) comes north to interview Steyn for the current issue of the indispensable Aussie publication Quadrant...
The Thirty Years War
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Steyn revisits The Closing of the American Mind
Make Kellogg's Gr-rr-rr-rr-rreat Again
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Kellogg's extends the nation's political divisions into your cereal bowl
Snowflake Meltdown
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Today is Armistice Day, when the guns fell silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. We know it as Veterans Day in America, or, across the Commonwealth, Remembrance Day. Here is that most famous Canadian war poem, by Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, as recited by a far more famous Canadian poet, Leonard Cohen...
The Gelded Age
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Step forward, Richard Dreyfuss, star of Jaws and fan of America Alone...
The Fabric's Fading Dye
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Islamophobia, deluded parochialism, and the setting sun
Sinatra Centenary Weekend at SteynOnline
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Frank Sinatra was born 100 years ago - December 12th 1915 in Hoboken, New Jersey - and we're celebrating all weekend long. Click on the links below for a cornucopia of print and audio delights...
Croquembouche Lie, People Die
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For John Oliver, to say anything other than "f**k" might offend someone...
Cool Civilizational Death Wish Goes Viral!
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'Why do they hate us?' was never the right question. 'Why do they despise us?' is a better one...
Meeting Mr Bond
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Back to where it all began, with 007 on the page - and his creator, Ian Fleming...
Cross Purposes
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Islam is playing for tomorrow, whereas the west has given up on the future
Bakin' Baby Syndrome
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A uniquely American evil: the billion-dollar baby-parts conglomerate
I've Got A Crush On You, Baby
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If abortion were the respectable medical procedure its proponents insist it is, there would be no such thing as "Planned Parenthood", anymore than there is a Planned Hernia megacorp...
The Stupidity of Sophisticates
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Last week, I swung by the Bill Bennett show to chew over the news of the hour. A few minutes before my grand entrance, one of Bill's listeners had taken issue with the idea that these Supreme Court decisions weren't the end and, if you just got on with your life and tended to your garden, things wouldn't be so bad: Claudine came on and said that's what Germans reckoned in the 1930s: just keep your head down and the storm will pass. How'd that work out? David Kelsey writes from the University of South Carolina to scoff at that: In one corner, we have government recognition of marriage contracts between gays. In the other corner, we have Jews, Catholics, gays, their sympathizes [sic] and other undesirables being put in Nazi concentration ...
Going with the Flow
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I started the day on Bill Bennett's radio show, which is always fun. Jonah Goldberg was on before me, and advanced the proposition, after the Supreme Court's almighty constitutional bender, that it wasn't so bad; conservatives who just pottered around in their own world and tended to their families could still lead lives largely unbattered by the forces of "progress". A few minutes later...
The New Minstrelsy
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Two resignations, and very different reactions
Birth of the New
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This is not your father's sex change
Boy Meets Girl
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In my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, way up front, a couple of pages into the introduction, I write of the political choice in most western societies - where the left supports various causes, and so does the right, but a couple of decades late to the party. And I wonder what else "conservatives" will be playing catch-up to in another 20 years...
Ooze You Can Use
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As we announced earlier, SteynOnline is marking the official launch of Hillary 2016! by rerunning some favorites of mine since I first started writing about Mrs Clinton back in the Nineties. So, as we pitch base camp on the Hill to die on, here's my review of her memoirs, Living History, from Britain's Sunday Telegraph of June 16th 2003.
A Tale of Two Rapes
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Why are media feminists more agitated over fake rape than real rape?
Shepard and Sheep
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The murder of Matthew Shepard 17 years ago - is the clearest example of what happens when a favored lobby group inserts itself between the news coverage and reality
Allahu Hackbar!
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So, just as President Obama is giving a big speech on cyber-security, the jihackists of the Islamic State manage to take over the Twitter and YouTube accounts of the Pentagon's Central Command...
The Return of the Cartagena Hooker
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America's federal-motorcade hooker-culture is depraved
The Unmaking of the American World
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A superpower unmatched at everything - except winning
Degrees of Separation
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The courage of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the cowardice of Brandeis University
Live Brie or Die!
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On the radio with Michael Graham this afternoon (about one hour and fifty minutes in, I gather), I brought up what Time magazine calls "Europe's War On American Cheese"...
The Age of Intolerance
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Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American TV...
Big Government's Back Alley
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From two years ago, here's Mark's first thoughts on the Kermit Gosnell case
Tiptoeing on ever-thinner eggshells
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He who controls the language shapes the debate: In the same week the Associated Press announced that it would no longer describe illegal immigrants as "illegal immigrants," the star columnist of The New York Times fretted that the Supreme Court seemed to have misplaced the style book on another fashionable minority. "I am worried," wrote Maureen Dowd, "about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don't even seem to realize that most Americans use the word 'gay' now instead of 'homosexual'..."
Don't cross the forces of tolerance
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To modify Lord Acton, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, but aldermanic power corrupts all der more manically. Proco "Joe" Moreno is Alderman of the First Ward of Chicago, and last week, in a city with an Aurora-size body count every weekend, his priority was to take the municipal tire-iron to the owners of a chain of fast-food restaurants. "Because of this man's ignorance," said Alderman Moreno, "I will now be denying Chick-fil-A's permit to open a restaurant in the First Ward." "This man's ignorance"? You mean, of the City of Chicago permit process? Zoning regulations? Health and safety ordinances? No, Alderman Moreno means "this man's ignorance" of the approved position on same-sex marriage.
This youth movement has women covered
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Media types like to talk about "the narrative": News is just another form of storytelling, and certain plot lines grab you more than others. The easiest narrative of all is anything involving young people. "I believe that children are our future," as the late Whitney Houston once asserted. And, even if Whitney hadn't believed it, it would still, as a point of fact, be true. Any media narrative involving young people presupposes that they are the forces of progress, wresting the world from the grasping clutches of mean, vengeful old men and making it a better place...
Hookers bring Secret Service to its knees
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Unlike the government of the United States, I can't claim any hands-on experience with Colombian hookers. But I was impressed by the rates charged by Miss Dania Suarez, and even more impressed by the U.S. Secret Service's response to them...
Liberals 'conformity enforcers,' 'stupefyingly intolerant'
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(VIDEO) "'Celebrate diversity' — the great bumper sticker — actually means 'celebrate stultifying homogeneity,'" Canadian best-selling author and columnist Mark Steyn told The Daily Caller. In an exclusive interview this week with TheDC's Ginni Thomas, Steyn railed against liberal "diversity"-speak and the lack of tolerance for traditional values...
Who's Obama sneering at?
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Our lesson for today comes from George and Ira Gershwin: "They all laughed at Christopher Columbus When he said the world was round They all laughed when Edison recorded sound They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother When they said that man could fly They told Marconi wireless was a phony..." Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sang it in the film "Shall We Dance?" (1937) Seventy-five years on, the president revived it to tap-dance around his rising gas prices and falling approval numbers. Delivering his big speech on energy at Prince George's Community College, he insisted the American economy will be going gangbusters again just as soon as we start running it on algae and windmills. He noted that, as with Wilbur and his brother, there were those inclined to titter...
Miss Fluke goes to Washington
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I'm writing this from Australia, so, if I'm not quite up to speed on recent events in the United States, bear with me – the telegraph updates are a bit slow here in the bush. As I understand it, Sandra Fluke is a young coed who attends Georgetown Law and recently testified before Congress. Oh, wait, no. Update: It wasn't a congressional hearing; the Democrats just got it up to look like one, like summer stock, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid doing the show right here in the barn and providing a cardboard set for the world premiere of "Miss Fluke Goes To Washington," with full supporting cast led by Chuck Schumer strolling in through the French windows in tennis whites and drawling, "Anyone for bull****?"
Handing out condoms on the Titanic
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Have you seen the official White House version of what the New York Times headline writers call "A Responsible Budget"? My favorite bit is Chart 5-1 on Page 58 of their 500-page appendix on "Analytical Perspectives." This is entitled "Publicly Held Debt Under 2013 Budget Policy Projections." It's a straight line going straight up before disappearing off the top right hand corner of the graph in the year 2084 and continuing northeast straight through your eye socket, out the back of your skull and zooming up to rendezvous with Newt's space colony on the moon circa 2100...
Obama goes Henry VIII on the Church
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Announcing his support for Commissar Sebelius' edicts on contraception, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion, that noted theologian the Most Reverend Al Sharpton explained: "If we are going to have a separation of church and state, we're going to have a separation of church and state." Thanks for clarifying that. The church model the young American state wished to separate from was that of the British monarch, who remains to this day Supreme Governor of the Church of England. This convenient arrangement dates from the 1534 Act of Supremacy. The title of the law gives you the general upshot, but, just in case you're a bit slow on the uptake, the text proclaims "the King's Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England." That's to say, the sovereign is "the only supreme head on earth of the Church" and he shall enjoy "all honors, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits and commodities to the said dignity," not to mention His Majesty "shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts and enormities, whatsoever they be." Welcome to Obamacare.
Komen has its awareness raised
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This has less to do with any utilitarian benefit a condomless janitor at a Catholic school might derive from Obamacare, and more to do with the liberal muscle of Big Tolerance enforcing one-size-fits-all diversity. The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else...
'Vrouwen en kinderen eerst gold nog wel op de Titanic, maar niet op de Concordia'
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For our Dutch readers...
Who's Off First?
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VIDEO: Italy's Costa Concordia disaster has Mark Steyn mulling the "women and children first!" idea with Michael Coren on The Arena.
No More 'Women and Children First'
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Abe Greenwald of Commentary magazine tweets: "Is there any chance that Mark Steyn won't use the Italian captain fleeing the sinking ship as the lead metaphor in a column on EU collapse?" Oh, dear. You've got to get up early in the morning to beat me to civilizational-collapse metaphors. Been there, done that.
YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A DEAD, HANGING SANTA CLAUS
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When Christians take the Christ out of Christmas
YES, VIRGINIA,THERE IS A DEAD, HANGING SANTA CLAUS
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Christmas in America is a season of time-honored traditions – the sacred performance of the annual ACLU lawsuit over the presence of an insufficiently secular "holiday" tree; the ritual provocations of the atheist displays licensed by pitifully appeasing municipalities to sit between the menorah and the giant Frosty the Snowman; the familiar strains of every hack columnist's "war on Christmas" column rolling off the keyboard as easily as Richard Clayderman playing "Winter Wonderland"... This year has been a choice year. A crucified skeleton Santa Claus was erected as part of the "holiday" display outside the Loudoun County courthouse in Virginia – because, let's face it, nothing cheers the hearts of moppets in the Old Dominion like telling ...
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