Programming note: Join me later this evening for another episode of our nightly audio adventure - The Girl on the Boat by P G Wodehouse. It airs right here at SteynOnline at 7pm North American Eastern - which is midnight British Summer Time. On Saturday I'll be back for the latest edition of our weekend music show, Mark Steyn on the Town, which airs on Serenade Radio every Saturday at 5pm London time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
I have not seen the new Netflix series Adolescence, and have no plans to. So I will not comment on the script or the acting or the direction. But I will note that, in a healthy society, the casting would be bizarre. The central character is a white English boy - which is an odd choice in a land where every single day girls and women are assaulted by "migrants" - to the point where this website now has recurring Diversity Rape of the Day and Diversity Stabbing of the Day features. Oh, and careful which hospital you go to after your rape, because the UK media are now normalising rape by the medical profession. From the BBC:
Doctor not struck off by panel over 'one-off' rape
That would be Dr Aloaye Foy-Yamah of the Blackpool Victoria Hospital.
If the hospital name rings a bell, it's because it's where a 75-year-old stroke patient called Valerie Kneale died not of a stroke but from internal bleeding after a sexual assault that took place while she was in the ward. Seven years on, as the local paper reminded us this week, the killer has never been found.
From the Midlands Regional Hospital (where I've been treated, long ago) in Mullingar, Ireland:
A healthcare worker who sexually assaulted a teenage girl and a woman while taking blood samples in a Midlands hospital emergency department has been spared jail.
And yet to Netflix "toxic masculinity" is a white English boy. The evil bastard Starmer has now decided that this perverse drama is not just another bit of telly crap but so vital to the populace that it has to be shown in school.
It is less than a year since the evil bastard and his minions imposed a fraud on his nation by passing off the killer of three little girls in Southport as a rugger-playing male-voice-choir-singing Welsh boyo - rather than the Islamic convert of migrant stock that he is in what we used to call reality. And, if you were minded to disagree with the evil bastard on social media, he had you thrown in gaol.
And now he's doing the same thing all over again. As our Mark Steyn Cruisemate and a survivor of England's rape rampage, Samantha Smith, puts it:
So Keir Starmer is tripping over himself to change laws on "toxic masculinity" because of a TV episode, but refused a national enquiry on Pakistani-Muslim grooming gangs.
Yet more proof that Labour cares more about identity politics than protecting little British girls.
— Samantha Smith (@SamanthaTaghoy) April 2, 2025
That's because the evil bastard is determined to ensure that, when the history books are written, the paedo gang-rapists of Telford and Rotherham and Oldham will all look like the boy above.
One of the most awful characteristics of our time is that governments know they can rely on the Big Media cartel to create an unreality that for hundreds of millions of people will outpunch the truth: to take only the most obvious example, the half of America that still gets its news from The New York Times, CNN and their acolytes still assumes Trump is a Russian asset.
A fellow Tweeter of Samantha's reminds us that we have been here before:
Mark Steyn did a classic article on the "Montreal massacre" over twenty years ago that still stands up today (though he didn't dwell on the fact that "Marc Lépine" wasn't really, well... wasn't really "Marc Lépine"). https://t.co/jHf5ESy7Er
— Hector Drummond (@hector_drummond) April 3, 2025
As with the "Russia investigation" and the Southport slaughter, so with the Montreal massacre: a wholly false narrative has supplanted reality. As to my not "dwelling" on "Marc Lépine", well, I dwelt on him more than any other Canadian columnist in The National Post, The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star or any other papert has done before or since.
What I didn't dwell on in our unmanned world - because, to be honest, back then it would never have occurred to me - is that the Montreal massacre would become the standard operating procedure for the entire western world: the "son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater" or some such preying on the women, while their menfolk walk away and literally turn a blind eye, while the governing class imposes an utterly fraudulent narrative on the national consciousness. And so it goes - in England, Ireland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Your Patch Of A Dying Christendom Here...
At which point I marvelled at how the Canadian state had succeeded in so thoroughly imposing a meaning on the slaughter that is more or less the precise opposite of what actually happened. I've written about it over the years, although my comrades in the Canadian media complain every time I do so, as if any questioning of the official fairy tale cannot be permitted. Here's what I said on the thirteenth anniversary, in The National Post of Canada on December 12th 2002 - twenty-two years ago:
I loathe the annual commemorations of the Montreal Massacre. I especially dislike the way it's become a state occasion, with lowered flags, like Remembrance Day. But, in this case, whatever honour we do the dead, we spend as much time dishonouring the living -- or at least the roughly fifty per cent of Canadians who happen to be male: For women's groups, the Montreal Massacre is an atrocity that taints all men, and for which all men must acknowledge their guilt. Marc Lépine symbolizes the murderous misogyny that lurks within us all.
M Lépine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, whose brutalized spouse told the court at their divorce hearing that her husband "had a total disdain for women and believed they were intended only to serve men." At eighteen, young Gamil took his mother's maiden name. The Gazette in Montreal mentioned this in its immediate reports of the massacre. The name "Gamil Gharbi" has not sullied its pages in the thirteen years since.
Ah, well, I would bring that up, wouldn't I? Just for the record, I'm not saying that M Lépine is representative of Algerian manhood or Muslim manhood. I'm saying he shouldn't be representative of anything -- least of all, the best efforts of women's groups and the convenient gloss of that pure laine name notwithstanding, Canadian manhood.
UPDATE: I doubt I'd write that today, if only because, while M Gharbi might not have been all that representative in the 1980s, he's certainly a lot more representative than he used to be - if only because the Muslim population of Canada has more than quadrupled since I wrote that line, and has similarly accelerated throughout Britain, Western Europe and elsewhere. However:
This spring, there was an attempted gun massacre at the Appalachian School of Law in West Virginia. But, alas for the Appalachians' M Lépine, there were two gun-totin' students present who were able to pin down the would-be mass murderer until the cops arrived. Allan Rock stepping forward to recite the relevant portions of the gun registry requirements would have been far less effective. Generally speaking, when the psycho shows up and opens fire, your best hope is that there's someone else around with a gun to hand -- a situation Canadian law has now rendered all but impossible.
Extreme cases make bad law, and just because it's a cliché doesn't mean the Liberal Party of Canada can't take it to hitherto undreamt of heights. Our disarmed Dominion will be the first jurisdiction on the planet with a one-billion dollar gun-registry. It was supposed to cost two million, but, as Dr Evil learned in Austin Powers, these days that's just chump change, they'll laugh at you. No self-respecting government plan should cost less than ONE BILLION DOLLARS!!!!! According to police, the gun registry is officially 25 per cent inaccurate. I'd figure that makes it unofficially 40 per cent inaccurate. But last week, while cynical Liberal bigwigs were openly boasting that this record-breaking government fraud would just be another one of those things you hear about for a couple of days that then mysteriously vaporizes somewhere over Shawinigan, the radio call-in shows were full of concerned, earnest, reasonable, moderate Canadians saying that, even if it did cost a billion, it still "sends the right message" on gun control. Which is just as well, as it'll still be sending the right message when it's up to two billion...The gun registry is symbolic not of Canada's predisposition to mass murder, but Canada's predisposition to mass suicide.
But the gun-registry boondoggle is just big-government business as usual. In a certain sense, the men present that day in Montreal were more profoundly disarmed. From my book After America:
To return to Gloria Steinem, when might a fish need a bicycle? The women of Montreal's École Polytechnique could have used one when Marc Lépine walked in with a gun and told all the men to leave the room. They meekly did as ordered. He then shot all the women.
Which is the more disturbing glimpse of Canadian manhood? The guy who shoots the women? Or his fellow men who abandon them to be shot? For me, the latter has always been the darkest element of the story. From my column in Maclean's, January 9th 2006:
Every December 6th, our own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the Montreal massacre -- the fourteen women murdered by Marc Lépine, born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you wouldn't know that from the press coverage. Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lépine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, obediently did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate -- an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The "men" stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.
Your average Western feminist lobby group doesn't see it that way, naturally. "The feminism I think of is the one that embodies inclusivity, multiculturalism and the ability to change the world through the humanity that women do bring," says Stephanie Davis, executive director of Atlanta's Women's Foundation. "If there were women in power in representative numbers -- 52 per cent -- I think that the World Trade Center would still be standing."
That's a familiar line. If only your average Security Council meeting looked like a college graduating class, or that room at the École Polytechnique after the men had departed, there would be peace on earth.
I don't think so. Look at the current rape statistics under one of the most thoroughly feminised regimes on earth - the Government of Sweden, a country where, as a mum from Oestersund told me after Muslims sexually assaulted her daughter and friends at the municipal swimming pool, all the native men are "manginas". More from After America:
To those who succeeded in imposing the official narrative, Marc Lépine embodies the murderous misogynist rage that is inherent in all men, and which all must acknowledge.
For a smaller number of us, the story has quite the opposite meaning: whatever M Lépine embodies, it's certainly not (if you'll forgive the expression) Canadian manhood.
In 2009, the director Denis Villeneuve made a film of the story - Polytechnique. "I wanted to absolve the men," he said. "People were really tough on them. But they were 20 years old... It was as if an alien had landed."
But it's always as if an alien had landed. When another Canadian director, James Cameron, filmed Titanic, what most titillated him were the alleged betrayals of convention. It's supposed to be "women and children first", but he was obsessed with toffs cutting in line, cowardly men elbowing the womenfolk out of the way and scrambling for the lifeboats, etc. In fact, all the historical evidence is that the evacuation was very orderly. In real life, First Officer William Murdoch threw deckchairs to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling to, and then he went down with the ship – the dull, decent thing, all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron's movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and murders a third-class passenger. (The director subsequently apologized to the First Officer's home town in Scotland and offered £5,000 toward a memorial. Gee, thanks.) Mr Cameron notwithstanding, the male passengers gave their lives for the women, and would never have considered doing otherwise. "An alien landed" on the deck of a luxury liner – and men had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, and watch them clamber into the lifeboats to sail off without them. The social norm of "women and children first" held up under pressure.
Today, in what Harvey Mansfield calls our "gender-neutral society", there are no social norms. Eight decades after the Titanic, a German-built ferry en route from Estonia to Sweden sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 1,051 passengers, only 139 lived to tell the tale. But the distribution of the survivors was very different from that of the Titanic. Women and children first? No female under 15 or over 65 made it. Only five per cent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors were young men. Forty-three per cent of men aged 20-24 made it.
"There is no law that says women and children first," Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine. "That is something from the age of chivalry."
If, by "the age of chivalry", you mean the early 20th century.
As I said, no two maritime disasters are the same. But it's not unfair to conclude that, had the men of the Titanic been on the Estonia, the age and sex distribution of the survivors would have been very different. Nor was there a social norm at the École Polytechnique. So the men walked away, and the women died.
Whenever I've written about these issues, I get a lot of e-mails from guys scoffing, "Oh, right, Steyn. Like you'd be taking a bullet. You'd be pissing your little girlie panties," etc. Well, maybe I would. But as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle put it:
When we say 'we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances', we make cowardice the default position.
I prefer the word passivity – a terrible, corrosive passivity. Even if I'm wetting my panties, it's better to have the social norm of the Titanic and fail to live up to it than to have the social norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it.
~The above includes material from Mark's book After America, and from his review of the film Polytechnique, which can be read in full here. If you disagree with Steyn and you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, then feel free to have at him in the comments.
