Americans no longer share sufficient reality to live together. To the left, Charlie Kirk's killer is a hardcore MAGA Christofascist who shot him because the disgusting totally racist misogynist homophobic Kirk was a bit of a pantywaist on the issues. According to the impeccably respectable Reuters, many experts agree:
Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the symbology found on the bullet casings suggests the shooter had affiliation with the so-called Groyper movement, associated with far-right activist and commentator Nick Fuentes.
(Some things are too stupid even for the mainstream press. Reuters subsequently "stealth-edited" their piece to entirely remove the above.)
To the right, on the other hand, Charlie Kirk's killer was dating a girl with a penis.
Might this not be more relevant, even at the Carnegie Endowment for International F**kwittery?
After all, he'd just been asked a question about transgender violence, and then he got shot. As I suggested the other day, the American left has now reached the same condition as "moderate" Islam. As I wrote - here it comes, folks; first of the week - twenty years ago ...oh, actually, no, a mere sixteen years ago in my book Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech and the Twilight of the West:
As Tasnim Aslam of the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad helpfully clarified, 'Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence.'
So don't say we're violent or we'll kill you. As I wrote in National Review at the time, quod erat demonstrandum.
But that's a debating society line. Islam isn't interested in winning the debate, it's interested in winning the real fight, the clash of civilizations, the war, society, culture, the whole magilla. That's why it doesn't care about the inherent contradictions of the argument: in the Middle East early in 2002, I lost count of the number of Muslims I met who believed simultaneously (a) that 9/11 was pulled off by the Mossad and (b) that it was a great victory for Islam. Likewise, it's no stretch to feel affronted at the implication that you're violently irrational and to threaten to murder anyone who says so.
And so the more or less official position of American "progressives" is (a) that the murder of Charlie Kirk was pulled off by the right and (b) that it was a great victory for the left ...and can we do JK Rowling next? This is the point at which the rest of us just try to back away without catching the "progressive"'s eye or suddenly startling him. As JK responded:
If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal.
If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist.
If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian.
If you believe...
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 11, 2025
We really know nothing about the accused at this point, other than that his father took the decision to turn in his own son while aware that Utah's governor was already talking about the death penalty. The short version of the alleged killer's life seems to be that he was a normal well-adjusted kid until he made the mistake of going to an American university - and brought home a bepenised woman.
In that sense, the accused had transitioned as thoroughly as his best girl. Any parent in today's America should feel some measure of sympathy for that dad, who has lost his son as totally as the father of the "girlfriend" has lost his: there but for the grace of God go I.
The fetching young lady with meat and two veg has, of course, always been a niche fetish for certain men. In the Eighties, I interviewed a woman running a Mayfair "escort" agency who told me Saudi princes were especially partial to it. In the Seventies, I was the night clerk at Lichtman's News in Toronto, on Adelaide between Bay and Yonge, and among the shrink-wrapped specialist porn mags at the back of the store was Busty and Hung, the first issue of which now goes for forty bucks on eBay.
Well, it's not shrink-wrapped anymore. It's out of the plastic and, ideologically speaking, on the desk of your middle-schooler's guidance-counsellor - and she's very alert as to who might be next for the treatment.
Of course, this is the trajectory of the age: for Carl and Bertha Benz, their Patent-Motorwagen was perforce an elite luxury item; Henry Ford democratised it. Likewise, for the House of Saud the hottie hung like a stallion is an occasional treat during their summers in Europe; now the LGBTQWERTY crowd has democratised it to every school district across the fruited plain 24/7.
Is that likely to work out for America? On Saturday, Harper Moyski was laid to rest in Minneapolis. She was a ten-year-old girl, already superseded by newer horrors but gunned down by yet another psychotranny on the rampage.
How many others out there are willing to heed the siren song of Tranny Get Your Gun? Within an hour or two of Wednesday's sudden spasm of violence, I mentioned that certain social-media accounts appeared to have foreknowledge of it:
Charles James Kirk. Mr. College Drop out does not know whats coming tomorrow. Be ready. This isn't a threat. It's a promise.
The FBI is now reported to be investigating at least seven pro-trans TikTokkers who wrote similarly. Yet at The New York Times and CNN the leftie code of media omertà holds. Likewise, conservatives complain that the now wholly corrupt American press will not acknowledge that those Minnesota children were gunned down by the latest "transgender shooter".
Yet it might be more precise to describe little Harper's murderer as a "transgender shooter with second thoughts". As I wrote just a fortnight back:
The psychotranny is one of the many exciting new identities of our age, but the somnolent American media appear to have no interest in covering the subject. They persist, quite fraudulently, in referring to Robin Westman as 'she', even though Mr Westman himself renounced his trannification pre-bloodbath:
'Minneapolis school shooter Robin Westman confessed he was "tired of being trans": "I wish I never brain-washed myself"'
True, he wanted to be a girl, but he came to understand that he wasn't: 'I just know I cannot achieve that.'
Ah, but what does he know? 'Self-identifying' is all very well, until you decide you'd like to self-identify back to where you were. So, at The New York Times, NPR et al, Mr Westman is she-her through all eternity.
The misgendering police are likewise already all over the infelicitous Governor of Utah for referring to Lance/Luna Twiggs by the wrong pronoun. God forbid you should misgender people who want you dead.
The killer tranny of Minneapolis was self-aware enough to know that the extensive medical interventions could not achieve their stated purpose and "affirm'" his womanhood. What remains unknown is what they did instead. Andy Ngo's detailed investigation into the Utah killer's sweetheart has uncovered some interesting comments re the pain of D-I-Y hormone injections:
seriously. sometimes it's just muscle memory, sometimes i gotta get buzzed on something so i'm not too anxious about it.
What permanent damage is being done by the mass implementation of "gender-affirming care"? Say what you like about our enemies, but Putin and Xi know what a woman is and aren't deluded enough to think they can manufacture one out of your son. Nevertheless, despite the dwindling moral authority of a decayed west, at least - unlike all those Sudanese clitoridectomists - we don't physically mutilate little girls.
Oh, hang on a minute, my bad. Yes, we do. Whoever you're up against, if you're the one slicing the breasts off middle-school lasses, you're the bad guys.
I see Rahm Emanuel is complaining that "Democrats have lost touch with Roosevelt, Johnson and Truman". You would have thought the easiest way to get back on the road to the little haberdasher's would be to abandon the transanity. As Eva Vlaardingerbroek said on The Mark Steyn Show way back when, in her experience it's the issue on which even otherwise doctrinaire liberals are a bit queasy - and that's before the trannies open fire.
And yet the left is not walking back the transanity. Rather, they have no desire to give it up. As for the right, a decade or more back, when I used to bring this up on Rush, I used to get callers dialling in to denounce me for wasting their time: "This isn't anything important, Steyn. Why don't you try talking about the stuff that matters - like whether John Kasich or Phil Gramm is two points up in Iowa?"
Because while you're having wet dreams about Lamar Alexander in his Brooks Brothers plaid shirt, the left is calling madness to the regeneration of the world. Because, while you're playing small ball, they play humungous supertrannifragalistic balls. So now, a half-century ahead of schedule, they've just taken out one of the few figures on the right who genuinely connected with the young. The idea that "gender" is just something randomly "assigned at birth" with the maternity-ward matron wandering around passing out "internal" and "external genitalia" from an Obamacare grab-bag is an 80/20 issue. But back in my Rush days it was a 95/5 issue - and the current twenty per cent is everyone who matters: teachers, doctors, media, mainline "churches", Supreme Court judges...
Not to mention the leadership of half of America's only two political parties: the so-called forty-sixth president roused himself to moments of rare coherence for "Transgender Visibility Day", his Vice President was the first in US history to announce her pronouns, and the Veep's own running mate had no accomplishments whatever beyond installing tampon-dispensers in boys' school bathrooms, just in case l'il Jimmy was being visited by his Aunt Flo. Or Uncle Flo.
Why? Why would they do this?
Well, the answer's pretty obvious: if you can abolish biological sex, what can't you do? "Calling madness to the regeneration of the world" is an exercise in power. The mass trannification of your children greatly weakens the two most important obstacles to the universal supremacy of government. First, the family - for, if you can "identify" as whatever tickles your fancy, then a family is anything ...and nothing. And second, and even more ambitiously, it weakens God - for, if you're "born in the wrong body", whose fault is that?
That's why they're now trebling down on it: if biological sex is a mere "social construct", all things are possible.
I see Lance/Lula Twiggs calls his/her/their opponents "cisfags". He/she/zher has a point. Had the opposition to this madness been less cisfagulous, we wouldn't be in this mess. America's geopolitical rivals - Tsar Putin, Chairman Xi - have the advantage of not only presiding over more or less conventional ethnostates but of societies where there are only two sexes.
Imagine that.
~We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on the post-assassination bloodlust - and the feeble GOP response. On Saturday there was the latest edition of Steyn's weekend music show, while Rick McGinnis's movie date was Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon in Atlantic City. Our Sunday Song of the Week was the only hit to be sung into your dictaphone, and our marquee presentation was Part Two of Mark's special twentieth-anniversary audio serialisation of his highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone - along with a bonus pop-culture footnote.
If you were too busy this weekend being fitted for your tucking pouch, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.