We here offer our best wishes and a sincere prayer for good health to Mark Steyn, the one-of-a-kind writer and commentator, who suffered a couple(!) of heart attacks a couple of weeks ago. He revealed this grim news in his uniquely jaunty/jaundiced fashion during his weekly audio Q&A on his own website, after having been missing for a week from his usual TV gig on Britain’s GBNews.

Steyn has long been like one of the family in the Cinch household, as he no doubt is in quite a few others, so this news arrived as much more than just an ordinary lump of coal.

In particular, although Mrs. C. and I live in the U.S., his weekday show on GBNews had become our sole bit of must-watch television, and just about our only source of TV news and commentary. That’s not just because virtually all U.S. television news is deeply dishonest and vile—though it most certainly is—but also because the news here is so unrelentingly bad that it is effectively unbearable to sit and take it in (no matter how they try to get us to swallow it). The beauty of Steyn’s show, for us, is that the issues he focuses on—although very closely related on a macro level to things going on in the U.S—are at least one step removed from our own daily reality. The players’ names are different, although the games they are playing are essentially the same.

So, we can enjoy Steyn’s side-splitting skewering, day by day, of the likes of Klaus Schwab, Rishi Sunak, and Ursula von der Leyen (or, as he would have it: the sinister Teutonic megalomaniac hiding in plain sight as a sinister Teutonic megalomaniac; Rishi Rich; and Cruella von der Leyen, respectively). He pays little or no attention to the daily ticker of distracting stories tossed up like Milk Bones to mutts by the corporate media, and instead zooms in on the underlying rot, and the players who are pursuing an agenda of civilizational destruction, whether through outright malignancy or abject obliviousness to reality. And he perfectly frames them and their plans as the objects of mockery that they ought to be to any people who value what freedom they still retain.

We need a lot more of that.

Instead, with Mark Steyn no doubt facing a long period of recovery, we will have less of it. Nevertheless, we’ll continue checking in on GBNews, which has proved itself a spunky and worthy media start-up, and one that seems to be moving the needle in the direction of free debate in Great Britain on previously undiscussable topics.

For Mark’s own sake, we hope that he places his health first, even if that means a very long break from the stresses of a near-daily live television show, and indeed even if it should mean a permanent break from such. His voice is one of the most special and irreplaceable out there. Even if he were to break from topical commentary entirely and limit himself to writing about music and such—which he does so very well—we would be much happier continuing to hear that voice, rather than mourning its premature passing.

Above all, here’s to his health and increasing strength.

…

UPDATE: In a bizarre turn of events, the executive leadership of GBNEWS chose to jettison Mark Steyn after his heart attacks, by requiring him to sign a contract no rational person would sign. In essence, they gave in without a fight to the state regulators of speech and thought at Britain’s “Ofcom” agency. Steyn continues to post his inimical content at his own website, so follow him there.