In the wake of Mark Steyn’s recent contretemps with his editor at National Review (somebody named Jason Steorts) people have been wondering whether Steyn’s been Derb’d.
Since, at this point, Steyn is surely a bigger deal than everybody else at NR put together, I think it makes more sense to ask: has he thrown NR under the bus?
Anyway, here are his last four posts at NRO, in chronological order:
12/20. Article: “The Age of Intolerance”
http://nationalreview.com/article/366896/age-intolerance-mark-steyn/page/0/1
sample quote: “How do you make a fruit cordial? – Be nice to him. Or else.”
12/22. Corner Post: “Re-Education Camp”
http://nationalreview.com/corner/366943/re-education-camp-mark-steyn
sample quote: “I am sorry my editor at NR does not grasp the stakes. Indeed, he seems inclined to ‘normalize’ what GLAAD is doing. But, if he truly finds my ‘derogatory language’ offensive, I’d rather he just indefinitely suspend me than twist himself into a soggy pretzel of ambivalent inertia trying to avoid the central point – that a society where lives are ruined over an aside because some identity-group don decides it must be so is ugly and profoundly illiberal.”
12/24. Corner Post: “Mumbo-Jumbo for Beginners”
http://nationalreview.com/corner/367069/mumbo-jumbo-beginners-mark-steyn
sample quote: “I don’t know why one of NR’s editorial staff could not have posted the court order with an accompanying explanation…”
[editors note: uh-oh. things are getting REALLY ugly here.]
1/3. “Happy Warrior” Column: “Heading South”
http://www.steynonline.com/5995/heading-south
No sample quote this time. You simply must read the whole thing. Think what the late Lawrence Auster might have said about the Mandela funeral – if only he’d had a little more sense of humor.
Could this have been the last straw for the guys at NR, most of whom seem to be firmly in the Nelson Mandela = Martin Luther King = Jesus of Nazareth camp?
Occam's Razor 
“Nelson Mandela = Martin Luther King = Jesus of Nazareth camp”
Pretty much sums up contemporary American conservatism.
Well, not all of it, but way too much of it.
Steyn is too valuable and popular and careful to get the boot from NR. But mostly he’s too much of a genuine cultural-optimist to make the kind of really taboo statements that would get him canned. It’s not hard to believe blacks would be a lot better off with a better culture that didn’t celebrate socially detrimental values. Syeyns good at trying to pin the blame for bad culture on the left instead of saying it’s an internal phenomenon. The questions become how would you ever impose that ameliorative culture, and when do you get the region of saturation and diminishing returns.
@ Handle – greetings! great to see you here.
But I’m not so sure. I agree that Steyn is valuable & popular & mostly pretty careful – but something sure seems to be up. If you check out his commenting history at NRO, there’s a clear break after the brouhaha following his rebuke from Jason Steorts for the awful crime of mentioning that classic “fruit cordial” quip without denouncing it…
No more Corner posts, no Saturday column, and the 3rd January “Happy Warrior” column only seems to be available on Steyn’s own site – I can’t find it on NRO.
Did you read that column, by the way? I mean, sure – he doesn’t attribute South African dysfunction to any “internal phenomenon,” as you so delicately put it, but otherwise it could have been written by, say, Karl M.M. Boetel.
“…then they came for the neocons, but there was no one left to help them.”
Phoney scientists vs. phoney conservatives; it’s a shame they can’t both lose.
He’s done, but they can’t cut him lose publicly as they’re involved in joint litigation (the Michael Mann case). Especially since dumping him over inflammatory language would give booster rockets to the libel action being pursued against them.
I.e., they’ve dumped him, ’cause they’re a bunch of tiny little cowards, afraid that he might involve them in a lawsuit.
He dumped them.
Do you know this for a fact? Or are you just speculating? I have to admit – I’m kind of obsessed with this case. I really want to know.
btw – my post above was obviously not quite right – Steyn had *already* involved National Review in a lawsuit – the problem, from their point of view, is presumably that he hasn’t followed their lawyer’s instructions and lain low – instead, he’s come out swinging for freedom of the press, even engaging in some hilarious mockery of the previous “judge” in his case.
I began reading National Review when I was in the US Army in the 1960s’. I watched Firing Line starring Mr Buckley in the early 1970’s when I returned from overseas.
I subscribed to NR for 20 years plus. Somewhere along the line it became Karl Rove Republican, uninteresting for the most part and very establishment. I didn’t understand the softening of positions, so I just cancelled. Around 2007 or so I tried again but gave up. The magazine had gone to mush and cold pudding.
I have read Mr. Steyn’s books and he still has fire in his belly. That is the crucial difference. He is worth the entire editorial staff at NR. Someone said that “history is made by unreasonable men”. Mr. Steyn is still unreasonable, NR has capitulated.
It is surely worth noting that Steyn and his NRO lawyers have recently parted company…likely by Steyn’s choice with their acquiescence.
Read those tea leaves as you will, but a hiatus from further publication at NRO, especially given the recent public kerfuffle between Steyn and Steorts on those pages, shouldn’t really surprise anyone at this point.
Open border policy is genocide against the natives. The chickens are coming home to roost for Republicans and Conservatives who did nothing, not even enforce the laws that were on the books, about mass migration. They all understand and understood that it means an end to conservatism, and end to the Republican Party, and end to the real America and an end to Western civilization itself. The people at the top of conservatism are crooks who only care about their place at the trough, they went along with dispossession of the American people for cash, and hid that collaboration behind a slew of phony issues to keep their supporters distracted: Whitewater, the blue dress, Benghazi etc. The final ploy was wars in the Middle East – when they had to resort to that desperate measure you knew they were coming to the end game. Now that their permanent dispossession is nearly here and impossible to disguise cracks like Steyn and Coulter are starting to break out. But the basic system is still intact. and will be for some time to come – for as long as people are comfortable.
NRO begs for financial support but their biggest deficit is backbone.
First Derbyshire, now Steyn. It’s a pity that even National Review will no longer allow its writers to speak hard truths. I always thought conservatism WAS the creed of truth, however inconvenient or unpleasant, as opposed to the Left’s cult of the Big Lie. The Big Tent opens to sodomites and Chamber of Commerce open-borders fanatics, but not to people who notice that our civilization is under siege and name the besiegers.
“Could this have been the last straw for the guys at NR, most of whom seem to be firmly in the Nelson Mandela = Martin Luther King = Jesus of Nazareth camp?”
Really?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/366317/remembering-mandela-without-rose-colored-glasses-andrew-c-mccarthy
and that’s just one quick Google.
Here’s another:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/368892/beyond-gauzy-worship-what-left-got-wrong-mandela-john-fund
Even their main eulogy is not without its negative comments:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/365671/nelson-mandela-rip-editors
I’d say your sweeping statement is simply incorrect.
The last link doesn’t work. It does not take me to a column entitled “Headed South.”
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