At the end of a truly horrible week, I am trying to stay away, on the advice of doctors (seriously), from the Internet and from the bazillions of vile reactions to the death of Charlie Kirk - including from notorious courthouse fraudster Michael E Mann, who called him "the head of Trump's Hitler Youth":

If you send either your kids or your money to the University of Pennsylvania, you're a fool colluding in the death of your country. As I wrote fifteen sodding years ago:

Education is the biggest single structural defect in the United States.

If you support it, you're part of the problem. Charlie Kirk died because he took the battle into the belly of the beast.

However, if I had to pick the absolutely most despicable response to the events of Wednesday, it would have to be this appearance on the CBS morning show (which I haven't watched since before Charlie Kirk was born - back in the Harry Smith/Paula Zahn days, for those who remember either). To maintain the veneer of impartiality, CBS had booked "former Speaker" Kevin McCarthy to represent the far-right-Hitler-Fascist perspective. If you have no recollection of Mr McCarthy's speakership, well, he lasted less time than the average French prime minister. I have a vague feeling I interviewed him on Rush once, but I couldn't swear to it. Yet, credit where it's due, along with Paul Tweedledee and Eric Tweedledum, he was, just twenty minutes ago, one of that exciting new breed of Republican leaders Conservative Inc was all hot for.

So here he is responding to some telly superstar I've never heard of, but is apparently a compatriot of mine - from Alberta.

So a pro-trans Antifa loon shoots dead an effective conservative and Speaker McSquishpants, a world-class non-effective conservative, thinks this is the time to agree with "mainstream" media framing that it's all your party's fault? Greta is a fifth of McSquishpants's age, but even she knows there's a time to roar "How dare you?" The purported "Speaker" wrote a book called Young Guns, which means that he's only a BlueSky post or two away from being deemed solely responsible for the epidemic of American youth violence. This is not a time for a "national conversation", which, as in "national conversations" on race, is a Democrat-media obfuscation that permits one side to keep putting bullets in the other. Alas, like so much Republican "leadership", McSquishpants is not only Churchill's Boneless Wonder but a bloodless one, too.

Let me be clear, to lessen the likelihood of me dying in a SWAT-team takedown, that I am not calling for anyone to shoot Speaker McSquishpants, although I would not be ill-disposed to someone, as Graham Linehan would say, "punching him in the balls". Which will be enough to get me arrested upon landing at Heathrow.

Republicans accepting Democrat framing - even when their own sports team is shot up - is why we are where we are. Charlie Kirk held actual "national conversations" with his opponents all over the map - and that's why they killed him. For a sense of how thoroughly one side has dehumanised the other, consider this from the incoming president of the Oxford Union:

It is not simply the disqualifying absurdity of the head of the most famous debating society in the world glorying in the assassination of those who have different opinions from him, but the fact that this particular individual actually debated him. That's to say, unlike most of the social-media murder fans, he is not merely reacting to the death of a media cartoon created by the Southern Poverty Law Center and its ilk; he knew the guy - and yet he still rejoiced in his murder. Every couple of years or so, I get invited to the Oxford Union. It has never been possible to accept, initially because I had some prior engagement, more recently because of my health. Back when I was first asked, it was still a prestigious invitation. It's not anymore - and, even if it were, I would never accept a request from a degenerate murder groupie like George Abaraonye. He not only debated Charlie Kirk, he met with him beforehand, he shared a drink afterwards: he encountered him as a flesh-and-blood human individual, and yet he glories in the blood of that individual.

This was not how Charlie thought of George. He enjoyed the great variety of humanity, and was happy to give credit where it's due. Here's what he wrote after that trip to England to debate Abaraonye:

When the Gaza war came up, I thought I could expose the excessive focus on it by asking a student to name what African state is now in civil war (Sudan); and what Asian country is seeing ongoing ethnic cleansing (Myanmar). Unfortunately for me, he aced both questions.

I wonder if that undergraduate wag is celebrating along with Abaraonye. To reiterate: if you send either your kids or your money to Oxford, you're part of the problem.

It is, in a certain sense, easy to take note of the feral beasts preying on young women riding public transit, out jogging or walking their dogs. It is likewise easy to denounce the lifelong Pentagon bureaucrats and Secret Service agents delirious with joy at political assassination live on stage. The generality of the celebrants are a knottier problem: they comprise millions of ordinary people who live among you: they're the nice lady you sit next to at school-board meetings; the guy you banter with at your kid's soccer game; your accountant, your chiropractor, your veterinarian who runs a business so nice it's called "Gentle Care", even though he doesn't care and he"s not that gentle when you get your skull blown apart at a campaign rally:

"He is only the first! Could we actually be getting smart and culling the sick ones?" This is the oldest political divide of all: You think you and your neighbour have a public-policy difference; he's looking forward to seeing you bleeding to death on live TV.

Before he became the world's crappest GOP Speaker (a most competitive title), Kevin McCarthy had a distinguished Hollywood career, including his starring role in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), where he played a small-town doctor unaware that all his friends and neighbours have been taken over by space aliens devoid of common human feelings. Strange to see him on CBS seventy years later entirely oblivious to the fact that it's happening all over again, and they're all around.

The left has loosed madness upon the land. There is no way back. If we're lucky, there will be a way through the blizzard of lies and bloodlust to whatever awaits on the other side. As I said on Wednesday, there is insufficient common humanity to bind us together, so, before any available off-ramp, there's going to be a lot more blood on the floor. It is not just the assassination itself but the two days of dishonest "mainstream" media and slavering chum-in-the-shark-tank "social" media that make it inevitable.

~Programming note: Tomorrow, Saturday, Mark will be back for my weekend music show Mark Steyn on the Town. It airs at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here. On Sunday, he will have a different kind of audio diversion, with Part Two of the audio adaptation of his highly prescient America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.