Somewhat incredibly to me, it is half-a-decade today since Kathy Shaidle took her leave. Our dear friend and fearless comrade in so many battles died just before dawn at Mississauga Hospital in Ontario on Saturday January 9th 2021. She was brilliant and incisive in almost every literary form: As I always say, Kathy is the only writer I know who was both a respected poet nominated for major prizes and the "Ed Anger" columnist of The Weekly World News - and she was great at both. The Internet is a lot less fun without her.
As I write, Governor Jazz-Hands is threatening to rain down civil war on America, Hilton and Marriott desk clerks are doxxing and leaking emails and surveillance images of federal agents, the Vice President's home has been attacked by the usual upper-middle-class psychotranny, and deranged NPR-listening white women are hurling themselves in front of government vehicles at a Minnesota ICE facility. I am reminded, as I often am, of a great insight Kathy made on The Mark Steyn Show - prompted partly by being on the receiving end for years of an extraordinary number of repulsive emails and tweets from impeccably "progressive" "men" of the "Kathy Shaidle really needs a good f**k" variety. She was not alone among our female contributors in having to put up with this: the pyjama boys of "the resistance" are not above sending such comments even to years-long victims of England's paedo-Muslim rapists.
As Kathy saw it, many of the footsoldiers of the activist left are profoundly damaged people. It is perhaps a chicken-and-egg conundrum: Are they attracted to leftism because they are damaged? And does being on the left then damage them further? Here is Kathy on that and other subjects, excerpted from her appearances on our show. Click below to watch:
Among the many other hats she wore, Kathy Shaidle was our dazzling movie columnist every week. On the day of her death I rounded up a few favorite moments from her film essays. As I also wrote then:
She had a carefully constructed persona as an agoraphobic misanthrope who never left the flat. Whereas, as Mark Steyn cruisers who had the good fortune to be at her dinner table will attest, in real life she was gregarious and occasionally (as I told her a couple of weeks back somewhat to her horror) verging on bubbly. I had the pleasure a few years ago of introducing her to half the Canadian cabinet over pizza at the Prime Minister's house. Reading about it afterwards, the highly-strung leftie bloggers were horrified at the thought of the hated Shaidle piercing the holy sanctum of 24 Sussex Drive like a one-woman trial run for the mob's storming of the US Capitol. But the various ministers of the Crown seemed to enjoy the opportunity to shoot the breeze with her - as we all did.
Kathy understood the Left because she had been one of them, as I never have been. Because she died during the lockdown insanity, in order to see her one last time I had to more or less break in to Ontario like crossing the Berlin Wall (except with East Germany on both sides). Propped up in her bed, she asked me what I thought she'd got wrong over the years, and I cited her preferred formulation for the transanity all around: "mentally ill castration fetishists" - because the last half-decade had seen the spectacular rise of the bepenised woman.
She nodded thoughtfully. "Yes," she said. "We always underestimate the scale of their ambition."
I miss her so much.