“I love female Quebecoise pop stars who do terrible versions of English hits,” Mark Steyn confessed Wednesday night from a secure location — a heavily police officer-patrolled makeshift stage at Indigo Books & Music at Bay and Bloor. “But if you don’t have a shared pop culture, then it’s much harder to bond a society.”

This week, it was Steyn who became the pop culture, at least as much as an author published by America’s self-proclaimed leading publisher of conservative books could ever be. America Alone: The End of the Word as We Know It, while published in September 2006, was lavished with publicity uncommon for a book that’s been on shelves for longer than the Democratic Presidential nominee race has been running.

“We typically like to take a blitzkrieg sales approach,” explains Regnery Publishing president Marji Ross. Their biggest New York Times bestsellers have included titles by right-wing talk host Laura Ingraham, and books exposing John Kerry’s service in Vietnam and the biases of CBS News. Coming next week: How I Helped O.J. Get Away With Murder, written by his former agent. “It’s a direct marketing approach, maybe even a guerilla approach, where we’re convinced that our authors are passionate enough about the topic can make it a bestseller.

“Being based in Washington, DC gives us a different perspective,” says Ross. “Rather than talking to other publishers in New York, we’re talking to our market.”

Steyn self-published newspaper column anthologies, primarily sold through his website, but the only book he wrote from scratch was about stage musicals, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight. While initially an arts critic for The Spectator in the UK, a shift to political commentary made him a favourite of publisher Conrad Black — who naturally gave Toronto-born Steyn placement in the National Post.

America Alone was actually commissioned by Ross, who noticed the growth of Steyn’s online following — even as his platforms became more scattered as Black was gradually indicted out of the business. Getting into Canadian bookstores posed a greater challenge for a publisher specializing in American patriotism, though. Maclean’s to the rescue — ex-Post editor Ken Whyte hired Steyn as the "books" columnist to help salvage the weekly, and was glad to run a 4,800-word excerpt.

And that’s how, some 20 months later, Steyn became a real celebrity for a week.

The main event was an appearance on TVO’s The Agenda, where three of the Osgoode Hall law students — whose class project evolved into a complaint with the human rights commissions — were booked in the wake of the Canadian Islamic Congress offer to withdraw the complaints if Maclean’s prints a rebuttal.

This was after Barbara Hall, former Second City coat check attendant and mayor of Toronto and now head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, condemned Maclean’s — while conceding that the case couldn’t be legally heard. (The tribunal hearing in British Columbia is slated for June 2.)

Steyn was already flying in from his New Hampshire stead to promote the paperback release of America Alone (“Soon to be banned in Canada” is stamped on the cover) and he was finally wrangled on the show, hosted by Steve Paikin [and YouTubed here].

Problem was, the students who repeatedly called for a public debate, refused to appear alongside Steyn on TVO — an accommodation he failed to comprehend.

“I’m just one big, flabby, overweight Islamophobe and they’re three fit young people,” he said in the quasi-Aussie accent that lives up to the sneering rhetoric. (It’s a voice that, despite a hometown following that dates back a decade, was rarely heard around here, although Steyn claimed that he’s rarely been invited.)

But the second half of the show found Steyn and the students engaged in that two-way discussion — a live on-camera detente detailed by Paikin on his blog.

The Agenda, more likely to be taunted by Steyniacs for the host’s public sector salary than actually watched by them, scored a hit. “Two ladies stopped me in mid-traverse to say how much they liked the show,” wrote Steyn. “Appearing on The Agenda is evidently like guesting with Uncle Milty in 1954. I’m impressed.”

Paikin insists TVO won’t be cranking up the Fox News-style rhetoric any further, nor does he believe that he was played by Steyn for the sake of book promotion.

“I don’t think that’s his game,” says Paikin. “I take him at his word, and he believes the biggest transformation of our time is not being debated adequately.”

That transformation surrounds the fact that birth rates in multicultural-minded countries are dropping precipitously, and immigrants shouldn’t be counted on to make up the difference. That was the main topic of discussion at the Indigo store.

Heather Resiman, the store’s “Chief Book Lover,” conducted the interview before a packed house of the very people who wouldn’t have been impressed with her decision to keep the Danish cartoon edition of the Western Standard from being sold in her store, much as she was once revealed to have banished Mein Kampf.

Steyn delivered nonetheless: “You can’t be multicultural in Saudi Arabia. I can’t go to Riyadh and say, I’m uncomfortable with the alcohol prohibition here and I’d like to open a Hooters and hold wet T-shirt contests on Friday night to celebrate my culture. They’d say, ‘See you later.’ And chop my hand off on the way out.”

This sort of “old-timey vaudeville,” as Toronto Life blogger Douglas Bell described it, was accompanied by Steyn’s desire for more domestic babymaking. Too much education is getting in the way of women who oughta be knocked up.

He points to a cousin of his wife’s who’s been in university the entire time they’ve been married, about 15 years. Steyn figures art suffers for it, too: “If Mozart were alive today, he’d have never left college — and never written any symphonies.”

Steyn backs his assertions with a well-stamped passport: “I’d much rather be in a souk than a mall in Hamilton. But the better society — the one with a chance for fulfillment, and greater health care — is the society that built the mall in Hamilton.

“Just because our society is wealthy doesn’t mean we can tolerate unhealthy pathologies,” he said.

“Not a lot of people want to go around stirring up moderation. It’s hard to say what you’re against until you know what you’re for.”

But it was Reisman who ended the show on the hot seat, explaining her rationale for keeping certain things out of Indigo, a right backed by Steyn. After all, the store is as private a property as Maclean’s, who refuse to be legislated into running editorial content under the guise of being good for Canadian society. Her statement on the matter went over like a lead zeppelin with the audience, which queued up to books signed by Steyn — a line that took him two hours to satisfy.

Tarek Fatah, the founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress (a frequent rival of the CIC) who has ruffled feathers of his own with his secular perspective, seemed to enjoy Steyn’s show.

“The diagnosis is right,” says Fatah. “It’s the prescription that I disagree with.

“You have this boy band that initiated the campaign against Steyn — school kids having fun, who ended up shooting themselves in the foot. These twits have to be confronted and their real agenda needs to be exposed. The notions of armed jihad, Sharia law and wanting an Islamic state weren’t being addressed, even in the debate on TVO. As a Western society, we have no clue what’s happening.”

The law students who appeared with Steyn — even if they refused his invitation to go to dinner, they stuck around the TVO studio to talk for an extra hour — are widely seen as just “sock puppets” of the Canadian Islamic Congress. 

Fatah claims that the females on the panel, Muneeza Sheikh and Naseem Mithoowani, deferred to their male counterpart Khurrum Awan when answering many questions — an indication of where they were coming from, religiously. (Paikin thinks any deference was because Awan was considered the expert.)

The interest Fatah had in watching this most unusual book tour coincided with the publication of his  Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State.

“Steyn can give credit to the Canadian Islamic Congress for all the attention he received,” he says. “Maybe I should ask them for advice on how to sell books.”

Previously on the Scroll: Kathy Shaidle live

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