Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I shall endeavour to be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~Two years ago, after some medical treatment following my third heart attack following the Mark Steyn Adriatic Cruise, I took a cab to Milan's central station to board one of the most agreeable trains I've ever ridden. The dining car had an excellent wine list, better than most restaurants.
I don't recall the station being quite as impressive as the train, but it had a handsome atrium. I remember standing awhile and looking up at the ceiling. I wouldn't do that today, because I might fail to spot the incoming projectile and duck in time. This was the scene yesterday:
Ecco i famosi "pacifisti" della sinistra, tra attivisti Propal e centri sociali, che mettono a ferro e fuoco la Stazione Centrale di Milano.
Scene indecenti e inaccettabili. I soliti estremisti parlano di pace ma portano solo violenza e distruzione. Altro che sciopero... e tu... pic.twitter.com/Jm2ENYYPXz
— Alessandro Morelli (@AMorelliMilano) September 22, 2025
What were they rioting over? Well, I saw one report describing it as an ad hoc alliance of pro-Palestinians, leftist unions objecting to Meloni, and assorted neighbourhood "migrants".
Whatever. It doesn't really matter, does it? I mean, it's not like twenty-five arrests at a Tommy Robinson rally, two-thirds of whom turn out to be anti-Tommy counter-protesters. All that can be said for certain is that, if you live almost anywhere in the western world, violence is in your future. For the moment, it comes overwhelmingly from the political left and their various shock-troops, whether Antifa or your local migrant sex-fiends. Because the left are the most turned on by it. Even the comparatively peaceful ones can't stop salivating over the thought of killing you. Here, for example, a perfectly nice respectable American lady - probably listens to NPR - has a grand old time beheading an effigy of Trump:
Old woman wearing a "be kind" shirt tries to decapitate a Trump effigy pic.twitter.com/lUoSzDzDc5
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 22, 2025
Do stay tuned for the punchline. At the end she turns around and has what we used to call the golden rule emblazoned all over her T-shirt:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
So does that mean Trump supporters can decapitate, say, Kamala Harris?
Well, no, because, if you lopped off Kamala's head, it wouldn't make any difference. The most stupid and incompetent major-party candidate of the modern era has just "written" a book seeking to explain how everyone's favourite glass-ceiling-shattering Montreal schoolgirl somehow failed to beat a "convicted felon" who spent most of campaign season in court. So, to pitch her book to fellow wine-moms like the decapitator above, Kamala has been out on the plug circuit. Shooting the breeze with leftie superstar Rachel Maddow, the former vice president calls the current president a "tyrant" and a "dictator":
SICK: Failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris is inciting violence on MSDNC, calling the duly elected President of the United States—who escaped two assassination attempts—a "tyrant."
"...Communist dictators—that's what we're dealing with right now in Donald Trump." pic.twitter.com/ETLYFycE71
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) September 23, 2025
For any aspiring tyrants out there, if you're wondering how to become one yourself, all you have to do is win Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the Electoral College. That's how all the tyrants and dictators do it.
Is Ms Harris not worried that, by de-legitimising her opponent's lawful, peaceful and democratic victory over her good self, some excitable types might try to, say, shoot his head off?
Aw, that's crazy talk. Nobody would ever try to assassinate Trump. If they did, it would be in the papers, wouldn't it?
Observe, by the way, Rachel Maddow's reaction to Kamala's tyrant talk. This interview comes mere days after one of her fellow current-affairs commentators and show hosts was gunned down on stage in front of his audience. Yet Ms Maddow betrays no suggestion that any similar peril might possibly await her. From her reaction to Ms Harris's blithely insouciant dictator shtick, one might almost get the impression that live appearances are only dangerous for one side of the political spectrum.
Oh, well. Rachel Maddow's former MSNBC comrade has already moved on to the next target. Here's Keith Olbermann lining up CNN's token conservative for the fate of Charlie Kirk:
🚨 WOW: Keith Olbermann just threatened @ScottJenningsKY.
He quickly deleted the set of tweets after getting called out on it. pic.twitter.com/CtItqyzHYz
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) September 22, 2025
I briefly caught Mr Olbermann's attention a decade or three back, and, from what I can recall of it, he struck me as a big pansy fagulous trannifilarious nancy poufter mincing dweeb of a homicidal maniac but who likes sounding butch by saying "motherfucker" a lot. Yet, in a functioning society, it should not be incumbent upon Scott Jennings to judge whether the guy specifically menacing him actually means it or is just an insecure over-compensating loser. As noted here an hour or so after Charlie Kirk's death, at least seven Internet posts appeared to have foreknowledge of what had yet to happen.
I have joked for years about jihadist nutters being fully paid-up members of Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. But the leftie nutters are beginning to feel like that, too. One half of the political spectrum is so drunk on its bloodlust they don't even notice it. "Denver's oldest gay bar", for example, took the trouble to create a new cocktail and make a sign for it:
The left can do this because they don't fear violence from the right.
Democrats are the party of violence https://t.co/9kJ5euIRn8
— Marc Lobliner - IFBB Pro (@MarcLobliner) September 21, 2025
The old definition of a gay bar was: one hundred bottoms looking for a top. It requires a perverse genius to re-imagine it as one hundred bottoms looking, in the Britannic sense, to top someone.
None of the above seems particularly psychologically healthy, and that's before the veep chews it over with an over-medicated transition. The American left's universal indulgence of the language of political violence and, when acted upon, its consequences has no equivalent on the right. The other side certainly has its fancies: a lot of conservatives think Barack Obama was born in the coastal hospital at Mombassa, and his wife is packing a little extra; Candace Owens and many of her listeners seem to believe that the First Lady of France is another of those bepenised women so fashionable nowadays. In the present condition of the world, I wouldn't rule anything out. But these are not equivalent obsessions: Mme Macron's accoutrement is a harmless peccadillo compared to "Let's do JK Rowling next!", or "Let's all go to that Denver gay bar. The Charlie Kirks are on me!", or "Trump is a Fascist tyrant because there's no way I could really have lost to him electorally..." And so it goes from presidential candidates to media personalities to Denver bartenders. In a society where ordering and serving a cup of totally garbage Starbucks "coffee" is a political act, there is no society - and no possibility of anything recognisable as society.
And yet the Left, in the media and the education system and elsewhere, retains a monopoly of virtue: Hate has no home here! Save the planet! Love wins! Black lives matter!
Over two decades, I have occasionally quoted the words of the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut: "The lofty idea of 'the war on racism' is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology," he said in 2005. "And this anti-racism will be for the twenty-first century what Communism was for the twentieth century: a source of violence."
Bloodlust mixed with moral preening is a uniquely toxic cocktail and, unlike those available at the R&R bar in Denver, it will not be content with merely a single shot.
~Thank you to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club in this our ninth year, and thank you to those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
