A monologue Mark delivered on the Rush Limbaugh Show a couple of years back has been making the rounds on the internet this week. The segment, broadcast in the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, was inspired by a remark Spectator columnist Douglas Murray had made months earlier about feeling as though he was at a "party at the end of the world." Mark thought the comment by Murray (whose interview on the Mark Steyn Show you can watch here) was apropos for the occasion.
With Mark on assignment, we offer the transcript of the segment—a perk normally reserved for Mark Steyn Club members.
The Rush Limbaugh Show
June 13, 2016
I wanted to say one thing about the the kind of symbolism of this. As I said it's 49 gay nightclubbers killed by a Muslim and there is something, whatever you feel about gay night clubs or whatever there's something kind of poignant about that.
I spoke on the tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons in the Danish parliament about nine months ago with a couple of other people and it was a heavily guarded event. Very heavily guarded event. We were protected by the PET which is the Danish intelligence and security service. Very nice ceremonial uniforms and they weren't all wearing them because they had to blend in with all the crazies trying to get us and the United States State Department and the British Foreign Office put out alerts saying it was dangerous for American and British nationals to be anywhere near my event so if you see that I'm coming to your town given it a wide berth because according to the U.S. State Department it's dangerous to come anywhere near me.
And afterwards we were all supposed to go out for dinner to some big...we'd we'd given the speeches in the Danish parliament, there was a big triumph, and we were supposed to go out and have dinner in some swank restaurant as is often the way after these things. And the Danish intelligence service was going to accompany us to the event and they would be posted at the doors to make sure people didn't get into the restaurant and kill us. And of course when the restaurant got wind of this they decided that their other fancy diners wouldn't wouldn't like to have dinner with a bunch of people who required the Danish security service to protect them, so they can canceled the reservation. So as a result we wound up just kind of wandering the streets, this knot of people surrounded by Danish security agents and eventually wound up in some rather sort of seedy Copenhagen bar that was full of just like regular clubbing Danes, pub going Danes except for the fact that there was us and these Danish intelligence operatives there.
And it was full of these hot Nordic blondes and they have like a little tradition there that if you say, "A magnum of champagne," they don't open, they don't pop the cork. The blonde girl takes the sword out of the scabbard and slices the top off the bottle, slices through the glass so the glass top of the bottle goes flying over the other side of the room and takes some guy's eye out and then the champagne is full flowing everywhere and it's nice---I enjoyed it to be honest, more than I would have enjoyed being at that swanky restaurant with all the dull, stiff, elite members of Copenhagen society because I had all these hot blonde totties waving swords around and slicing the tops off magnums of champagne, so I had a pretty good time.
And Douglas Murray, who writes for The Spectator in Britain and has spoken out on this subject as often as I have on Islam and free speech and all the rest of it, he said afterwards the whole event was a bit like a party at the end of the world. And I've thought about that phrase a lot since then. We were the only ones, people gave us a sort of funny look when we went into this bar because we were a bit over dressed and obviously we had a security detail and they couldn't quite figure out why we were there and what we were doing there. And you have the idea that this problem that the world is grappling with, that most people 15 years after 9/11, most people in the Western world still have no idea what it is and that phrase that Douglas Murray used to me, "a party at the end of the world," that's kind of what it felt...what what it felt like at the idea of being trapped in that gay night club in Orlando for three hours between 2 and 5 when that guy was holding the joint down and the police hadn't bust in on him and he shoots, he shoots 1 in 3 of the people in there, either killed or wounded.
A nightclub, everyone's dancing, as far as I can tell from the dead they're mostly Latino names, it was a Latino dance event of some kind. They're dancing away and they cut down, they're gunned down, they're dead as they dance and if you read these texts, they're almost unbearably painful to read. There's a series of texts, somebody's making last texts to their mother as the guy is coming for them and to think about that, it's a Saturday night, it's a Saturday night and you lead a hedonistic Florida lifestyle, you don't give a thought to all this boring stuff, this depressing boring stuff. Somewhere at the end of the dial they were these boring news channels where there are people talking about this boring stuff all day long every day and you don't care about it because life is great, you're in southern Florida, it's a great climate, it's a fabulous town, you can party all night and it's an all night party and you go to the party at the end of the world and you are gunned down.
And I'll relay one other poignant detail from the events of the early hours of Sunday morning that I think also speaks to that idea of the Western world as a party at the end of the world and that the police are going in....I gather the majority of bodies are still there in that night club. And the police have been going in there and they're going through the night club, they're looking for clues, they're looking for this, they're looking for that, and from the lifeless corpse on the floor every so often the cell phone rings because all over Florida and beyond there are loved ones trying to get in contact with someone who isn't returning calls and they're still trying to call that number, call that number and hope someone will pick up and answer. And the idea of those police officers going through that club painstakingly yesterday and there are these lifeless bodies on the floor with the persistent every few seconds another chiming ring from a phone in the pocket and I think a lot about Douglas Murray's words to me that night in Copenhagen, the sense of a party at the end of the world.
Most people don't know, most people don't...most people don't want to think about it, they want to believe the liberal illusion because as on so many things we wonder sometimes at the conservative end why is conservatism such a tough sell? Because conservatism deals with the hard facts of life, with reality, and it's easier, it's easier to to let the default setting of society be the left side, to say there's nothing to worry about here. There's nothing to worry about. We can all just gambol and frolic on the diversity quilt together. And there is no Islamic enemy and there is no civilizational clash and there is no bloody borders between one culture and another as it loops up from West Africa through the Magreb into the Middle East and through Asia until eventually it snakes through the dance floor of a gay night club in Orlando, Florida. And it's easier to believe the liberal illusions and bear that in mind when you look at the stupid news headlines and the idiotic tweets this morning.
We will all be upset about these people and then we will start looking for the cliches that will get us over it at the candlelight vigils, the holding hands, the idea that an act of love beats an act of hate. Holding a Tony Awards ceremony with the cast of Hamilton but not carrying the muskets. We want to believe it's that easy because the alternative to those pathetic stupid hashtag avatar gestures are too hard and unpleasant for the state of the Western World today. But I think Douglas Murray is right, I think that that image of his on a Saturday night in a bar in Copenhagen with blonde women slicing the tops off champagne bottles, most people cannot bear reality we are in a party at the end of the world.
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