As I was saying on Friday:
What the future holds, who can say? Except that one thing is absolutely certain: at home and abroad, in Ballymena as in Beverly Hills, in Kfar Aza as in Kharkiv, it will be bloody and violent, on a scale few of us can imagine.
We are in the early phase of that process. But this leaden opening paragraph lumberingly captures the tenor of the day:
Authorities have identified the peaceful protester who was unintentionally shot and killed by an individual believed to be a designated peacekeeper during a "No Kings Day" protest in Salt Lake City.
If you're out and about of a weekend, try not to get "unintentionally shot and killed". You may recall my observation from a day or two earlier on the increasing need, wherever you venture, for "situational awareness". Without it, you're walking back to the car after a romantic candlelit dinner, and suddenly you're dead.
Even so, even very recently, one would not have thought that having been Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives would be sufficient to make one a target for political violence - granted that in recent years the home of "Minnesota Nice" has given us George Floyd, Ilhan Omar and her brother cum husband, and "refugees" from Somalia who mysteriously return home to self-detonate. I know nothing about the Twin Cities and/or the region beyond "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and Garrison Keillor, but I would not have gleaned from either that Minnesota is the sort of place where local legislators must assume a heightened risk of assassination. I am not sure it would be worth it in my own state: In New Hampshire, representatives and senators alike are paid $100 per annum - although an officer such as Speaker of the House is on the gravy train at 175 bucks per.
Nevertheless, get ready for enhanced "security", and even more insulation of the political class from the rhythms of normal life.
~It used to be that, in the wake of such violence, politicians would turn on a dime and, for at least forty-eight hours or so, start droning about the need to return to civility in our public discourse. But our politics is now so deranged that no one wants to let up even for a day or two. In a certain sense, the killer of Melissa and Mark Hortman is mad, but is he any madder than, say, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse? Rhode Island's political colossus spent the weekend tweeting out a cartoon comparing Trump's Flag Day parade to the ChiComs' Tiananmen Square massacre - although I'm a little confused because I'd got the impression that for the Governor of the aforementioned Minnesota the Tiananmen bloodbath was the equivalent of a dozen roses and a Johnny Mathis LP.
Is the assassin of Mrs Hortman any more insane than Congressman Eric Shagdwell? At the DC "No Kings" rally, the Homeland Security committee member who was famously penetrated by ChiCom spy Fang Fang but managed to hang on to his seat, called Trump (to the approval of the crowd) "America's Hitler" - although again I'm a little confused because he's previously suggested the Führer is a bit of an also-ran compared to the Orange Man:
Trump's MAGA Square Garden rally is making Hitler's rally there look like a basket weaving convention.
Is the killer of state representatives in Minnesota any kookier than another state rep, Julie von Haefen from North Carolina? Ms von Haefen's contributions to the No Kings weekend were stage props of the decapitated heads of Trump and Stephen Miller and a placard of a guillotine with the slogan "IN THESE DIFFICULT TIMES SOME CUTS MAY BE NECESSARY".
On balance, I don't think Ms von Haefen is likely to behead the President or Mr Miller herself, but it's increasingly hard to tell, don't you find? The No Kings base seems mainly to be NPR-listening ladies d'un certain âge. When I first became aware of this demographic a third-of-a-century back, they were certainly somewhat smug and self-regarding and not necessarily the type one would wish to wake up to each morning for the remainder of one's life, but they weren't stark staring nuts:
WATCH: Woman has breakdown, sobs on live TV at "No Kings" protest
"I'm just so scared. I'm 74 years old. I worry about everything. I just, I just am so scared and upset, and I don't - I don't understand why people voted for this person."pic.twitter.com/2dOMyNW6r8
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 14, 2025
"I don't understand why people voted for this person". Gee, I dunno. Maybe because they figured the only alternative, a high-caste Brahmin turned nitwit Montreal schoolgirl who persists in hailing Ukraine as a Nato member, wasn't what America needed right now.
But hey, let it go. Tim Walz has already got next season's exploratory committees roaming Iowa... The nitwit Montreal schoolgirl's over it: she managed to leverage her election flopperoo into an invite to the Soros wedding in the Hamptons!
Even if you can keep the lid on more assassinations, anything recognisable as normal politics is impossible in such a society. If transgenderism is an interesting evolution in progressive politics because it represents the imposition of mental illness as the basis for universal public policy, it is perhaps not surprising that we are now seeing the rise of a more generalised insanity. Bet on violence.
~This "No Kings" thing itself is slightly nutso, don't you think? In what passes for their saner moments, leftie panjandrums such as Bernie Sanders say their vision for America is not Venezuela but Denmark. Which has a king. As do its neighbours Sweden and Norway. King-wise, is the left's only objection to the House of Orange? Many bigshot Democrats' commitment to the cause is such that on Saturday they had to rush from the "No Kings" palooza straight to the aforementioned mediaeval dynastic marriage cosplay between Hillary Clinton's body woman and George Soros's spawn. Cooing headline from The New York Times:
The Clintons and Kamala Harris Descend on a Hamptons Wedding of Liberal Royalty
No Kings Except Liberal Royalty!
~Sir Keir Starmer has taken time out of his hectic schedule of having Ukrainian male models arrested to do a u-turn on "grooming gangs". He now says there will be a national inquiry. Richard Tice, Nigel Farage's boob of a "deputy", has accused Starmer of "copying" Reform. But enough about gang-raped twelve-year-olds; let's talk about me! Have Nigel and Zia formed a public limited company to enforce their copyright in words like "victims" and "survivors" and "anal branding"?
I share my friend Sammy Woodhouse's general scepticism, and contempt for Tice in particular. Girls like Sammy were twice violated - first, by the rapists; then, by the police and politicians and social workers who covered for and enabled those rapists. A true accounting would indict some of the highest figures in English officialdom. Is that likely to happen? Or is this inquiry now being permitted because they've figured out a way to turn it into the same fraud upon the public as the Covid inquiry?
For a fairly typical example of the connivance of "the authorities", here am I on Brit telly three years ago on the tale of just one girl in just one night in just one town:
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with my column on the new Middle East war.
Saturday brought a teary-windy-Abie edition of my weekend music show, while Rick McGinnis's movie date offered the documentary Harlan County USA. On Sunday we celebrated Father's Day with special editions of both the Steyn Show and my Song of the Week. Our marquee presentation was a brand new Tale for Our Time: Fredric Brown's ingenious short story Knock.
If you were too busy this weekend calling for the beheading of Donald Trump at Huma Abedin's wedding, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
