Monday

February 23rd, 2026

Insight

The Non-Far Left and its Friends

Mark Steyn

By Mark Steyn

Published Feb. 23, 2026

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On this fifth anniversary of Rush's death, I am in somewhat reflective mood, and not terribly engaged by the headlines. However, a few thoughts on the passing charivari:

~RARE SIGHTING OF "FAR LEFT": As you know if you get your news from "mainstream" outlets, anybody on the right is either "far right", "extreme right" or "hard right": even when as in France and Germany they're the most popular party in the country, they're still way out on the far extremist fringe, unlike the single-digit mainstream guys. Conversely, anybody on the left is simply "the left".

So this BBC headline seems to have discovered an entirely new demographic grouping:

Student death puts French far-left under pressure

The "French far-left"? What the hell did those starry-eyed peace-and-love idealists do to deserve that designation? Well, just a few hours north of where I chance to be, on the streets of Lyons, they beat a guy to death: Quentin Deranque. - or, if you read the worthless French newspapers, merely "Quentin D", it being a convention in the Gallic press that the dead should be rendered anonymous and generic even in their own slaughter.

M Deranque was a twenty-three-year-old student, who had gone along to a protest by seven ladies of conservative bent. He was there to keep an eye on his friends in case "the left" - an Antifa outlet - got a bit intimidatory. It did not seem to occur to the poor fellow that they would kill him.

And yet as we always say: They want you dead. Not all of them are willing to kill you, but almost all of them have dehumanised you sufficiently to cheer your killing. It is the same distinction one has observed for decades with the footsoldiers of the jihad: a "radical" Muslim enjoys beheading you; a "moderate" Muslim enjoys watching the other fellow.

Officialdom remains for the moment a little more squeamish, which is why M Macron's cabinet ministers are eager to emphasise that this isn't the common-or-garden left - it's the far left, the counterparts of such homicidal rightists as Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor OrbĂĄn and, er, Marco Rubio:

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said: "Manifestly it was the far-left that was at work ... This was a mob-killing, with blows that the perpetrators probably did not intend to be fatal."

According to Justice Minister GĂ©rald Darmanin, "it is the far-left that killed him. Of that there is no question."

Gotcha. So you're the non-adjectival left until you get a bit carried away and cave somebody's skull in. Good cop, far cop.

Poor M Deranque was killed because the lefties objected to a small counter-protest against Rima Hassan's appearance at the Lyons campus of the celebrated "Sciences Po" - l'Institut d'Études politiques de Lyon. Mme Hassan's first encounter with Sciences Po came when she posted a TikTok video of the walls of the building drenched in blood: a "Palestinian refugee" born in Syria, young Rima felt the famous French institution was insufficiently pro-Pally. Well, they got the message. She's since been elected to the European Parliament and is a rising star on the French non-far left. And they've now got real blood for the next TikketyTok. Here are her supporters killing Quentin:

Good luck with that far/non-far distinction on the streets of France in the years ahead.

~PSYCHOTRANNY OF THE DAY: More death. Last week, it was a British Columbia high school; this week, a Rhode Island hockey game. So meet today's plug-ugly tranny "Roberta Esposito":

The corruption of language accelerates: Even in The Sun, Roberta is a "gunperson". Meanwhile, "her" wife and their little girl are deadpersons.

As I said last week, that's the choice: in Western Europe you get stabbed by an Islamic knifeperson; in North America you get gunned down by this week's unconvincing trannyperson. And, in both cases, you wonder how long the public is going to put up with this.

~LOWE AND LOWER: I don't know Rupert Lowe. He never appeared on my GB News show - unlike, say, Ben Habib, a splendid fellow and doughty defender of the 1801 Act of Union with whom I have a slight acquaintance. I have a slightly less slight acquaintance with Nigel Farage, and thus have the same opinion of him as everyone else who's known him non-slightly does. He is the only UK party leader who does shout-outs to IRA supporters for seventy-two quid on Cameo. Even Jeremy Corbyn eschews that.

Be that as it may, Farage is incredibly thin-skinned and cannot work with anyone of independent status. So naturally he kicked Lowe out of Reform UK, called the cops on him for allegedly threatening to kill Zia Yusuf (the first of those Muslim moneybags to whom Nigel has mortgaged his party), and for good measure put it about that the chap has dementia. He doubled-down on that today, conceding that he tried to get him banged up in gaol because he disagreed with him on immigration policy. That's Farage: Princess Poufterpants on policy, but your go-to guy on personal grudges.

If you regard the present-day UK as the direct heir to the pre-1707 Kingdom of England, we are witnessing, in rapidly accelerating real-time, the death of the oldest nation-state on earth. That does not augur well, either for the Continent or for the British dominions beyond the seas, as we used to say (until 1953). So over the weekend Rupert Lowe launched a new political party. I must say he sounds rather less demented than Farage enthusing "Up the 'Ra!" for seventy-two quid:

I would have swapped out the piano muzak either for no soundtrack at all or something as profound and eloquent and as those shots of ancient Gloucestershire farmland - a poignant landscape of which, under the Uniparty, the English are about to be dispossessed. Rupert Lowe appears to be a real person as opposed to a Cameo chancer cosplaying a saloon-bar bore in between bunking off to the Emirates to kiss Islamobutt. At any rate, this is a sober and serious message - because this is an existential crisis, as Mr Lowe subsequently clarified:

If you prefer "confetti and pyrotechnics", well, you know where to go: more on Farage here. In four days, Rupert Lowe's farm video has had forty million views - in a land of, officially, seventy million. For purposes of comparison, Nigel's announcement that he was taking over the leadership of Reform and standing for Parliament has racked up just one-and-a-half million views in one-and-a-half years: the limitations of a one-man band playing the call to prayer with washed-up Tory backing singers.

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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