One of the most frustrating and obfuscated topics that can be discussed is population and demographics. This is due to the mainstream public’s view on this issue seeming to be both very well sculpted and going completely unquestioned. Generally, even people who are supposedly Conservative and even Religious are sure that the “world is overpopulated” and that humanity at the very least needs to be somewhat downsized. Eugenics has sadly come full circle and come for us as a whole apparently. But there are many people out there who believe that having their kind of folk, whoever they may be, should continue on into the future and multiply fruitfully. This article is for those who see dwindling populations as a bad thing for the future of humanity. Some new statistics confirm the least spoken of solution for demographic decline that I have been screaming about for the last decade. There is hope, if at the very least for my sanity.

Pew Research has conducted polling over several years that shows that the problem of demographics being faced by (ironically) the wealthiest countries on Earth is ideological in nature and that the excuses most people make as to not having any children are inauthentic and I can prove they are invalid. But more importantly, they are a minority opinion. Most simply do not know why they are demotivated from doing the most natural biological function of any being – reproduction.

Firstly, we cannot forget that any polling in regards to the motivation of human beings has to be taken with a grain of salt. We are emotional animals and our subconscious mind, instincts and base desires weigh heavily on our decision making. If asked why we buy Coke over Pepsi we are unlikely to say that it has to do with the can being red, even though 60% of our purchasing decisions are based on something as seemingly meaningless as color. However, before we get to the specific stated motivations of the respondents we need to take a look at the blanket answer to the question of “will Americans choose to have children?”.

Roughly speaking, as you see in the graphic above, half of adults with no children have no desire to bear any offspring and the overwhelming majority of those that have at least one child are not planning to have any more. This is the big demographic downward spiral in pure numbers that we have all seen happening in front of our faces. But the question is why would any group of humans voluntarily desire to go extinct. When you have half of your population making zero children, and 2/3 of those with one kid calling it quits, your society is going to die out, shouldn’t the instincts to survive kick in at some point? Why is this happening?

The reason is ideological. We live in a society that is both Liberal (believes the individual is sacred) and highly Secular (there is no group or divine pressure to tell us what to do). Essentially, we have lived under Liberalism so long that it is hard to imagine an existence that is anything other than “self-centric”. Although brilliant men built the ideology of America in the late 1700s, they could not have predicted that over many generations their heroic Enlightenment values, praising the rights and sanctity of the individual, would turn into an excuse for Hedonism on a scale unseen in human history. If the individual is all that matters, why not live life for one’s own pleasure? In our Postmodern society, no one owes anyone anything, so why burden yourself with the ultimate buzzkill – children? Plus, the Seven Deadly Sins are a lot of fun!

Speaking of which, the decline of Religion only furthers the tendency of Hedonism that is created by Liberalism. When there is no community or God to tell us what we should and should not do, we again default back to Hedonism. The old joke “It’s easy to become a Catholic, if something feels good – don’t do it” remains very true, the problem is that without someone in the sky to tell us to keep our desires and instincts in check we all want to live lives of gluttony and pleasure, so now we live by the logic that “if it feels good… yeah just do it” and initially taking care of others and making sacrifices for our progeny feels very painful to our blackened Liberal hearts that so desperately want weed, pizza and Welfare.

Children require a lot of effort, especially to raise properly, as in not bearing them for the heck of it, then dumping them off at day care to be raised by paid randos. The idea of parenthood, of putting effort into creating more people at great expense and energy for the future of society/humanity is directly at odds with Liberalism + Secularism. In fact, you can see it dripping from the answers as to why the childless want to remain so. Let’s take a look at their responses and make some suppositions as to what they actually mean.

• 56% Just Don’t Want to Have Children
  This could be most simply translated as raw Hedonism – “I live for myself and I don’t owe anyone anything”. This is the shortsighted view that somehow the pittance that Social Security provides will replace the loving help of children in old age. It is a shame that we do not tell the population that the best insurance policy is a close-knit family. All-State and Geico have some lovely commercials but the help of a loyal relative far outweighs their copay plans. People in the past understood that they needed each other and that interdependence was a normal part of society. The Liberal arrogance that teaches us that we as individuals “can do it all” and that we “don’t need anyone” blinds us from the need to have a family and children, especially when we do not recognize our obvious dependence on the State.
• 19% Medical Reasons
  This is a legitimate reason to pass on children. Although some may be overinflating the risk as an excuse.
• 17% Financial Reasons
  The idea that one needs a lot of money to have children is another piece of cursed logic stemming from the average American’s complete lack of knowledge of history. For centuries, humanity, living in cramped quarters, at the risk of death from childbirth, with very limited resources, and zero guarantees that a baby would make it to adulthood, fought to create progeny that would go on into the future. Conditions in the past were awful, life was “brutish and short” and yet there were plenty of children around. If any time was a good time to have kids it would be now, homo sapiens are the richest they have ever been!But even if you are at the bottom of society living in a trailer park or the ghetto with little hope of escape, that is still no reason to not have children. Roughly speaking, about 1.5 out of 10,000 people commit suicide, meaning that the absolute majority of us would rather exist, even in shocking poverty, even in dire suffering, than take their own life. Not being able to buy a child a PS5 is no reason not to bring them into the world as 99.9%+ of us want to live regardless of our problems.
• 15% No Partner

Liberalism can be freeing, but it can also be isolating. The idea that a society is best made up of completely atomized individuals is flawed logic. We often blame technology for the rise of the “Incel Community” and the death of the family but systemic Liberalism and extreme Secularism should take the lion’s share of the blame. We are becoming a broken isolated horde of individuals and no one can force us to socialize or conquer our fears. More and more Americans are becoming completely unable to function in society and even just meaningless sex is not even on the table anymore, we are alone tapping on our phones and punching away at our keyboards.

• 10% Age
  If you are a woman over 40, then yeah you are out of luck, however men have no excuse as we mostly build wealth with age. Our provider function just gets better with time. Many men are terrified of being taken to the cleaners after a divorce and in many ways, instead of men amassing wealth to have a wife and kids, they now reject a wife and kids to try to gain said potential wealth. Socially we are living in very backward times. In the past established men had lots of children, and men were pushed to achieve much earlier in life thus having more time for more children. 
• 9% State of the World

Again, since very few people commit suicide, the world at its worst isn’t bad enough to choose non-existence. This is a non-excuse.

• 5% Climate Change/Environment
  The only people who worry about this are in the most under populated and eco-friendly nations to begin with. This is a non-excuse.
• 2% Partner Doesn’t Want Kids

There is a mistaken belief that it is women who decide about having kids. In many ways it is male aggression that drove us to achieve and want to put our last name on everything we could. Limp-wristed Beta-males are not going to fight to make sure that their family line continues, or go out and try to build their own house to make use of limited resources. Weak men are just as deadly to the family as bloated Feminists and their Secular Liberalism. Male aggression is what drives populations up, not guilting women into giving birth.

For those of you reading this in nations like Hungary, Poland or Russia that desperately want to change course demographically, you need to reject unfettered Liberalism and extreme Secularism right now. The West is probably doomed because it is built on this very same rotting ideological foundation. Liberalism isn’t part of the West – it is the West. So, they are in all likelihood stuck riding this out till the end. I very much so hope to be wrong about this. And who knows? America can be full of pleasant surprises and could find some way to nudge the country towards Illiberalism without touching even one letter of the brilliance of the U.S. The Constitution.

Paying people to have children is a good motivator and programs of the like from Putin and Orban have been successful, but this is secondary. We are wallowing in the sludge at the bottom of a mental abyss of Hedonism that we need to pull ourselves out from in order for our cultures to continue into the future. The problem of demographic decline is mental, ideological, and spiritual in nature, thus the answers to it are in kind.

Ilove Freddie de Boer’s Substack newsletter (to which you can subscribe for free right now). He’s a young Marxist, but more than that, he’s interesting and fearless, and I often learn from him. Below is his entire latest communiqué — uncharacteristically short, but it gives you a great idea of how he thinks — and here, he’s pretty much right:

It would be a mistake to say that social justice politics – OK, alright, fine, f*ck it, wokeness – is winning. It’s not losing, either. I think winning and losing implies a level of coherence to the project and materialism to the stakes that simply aren’t there. But I will say this. Those who draw their lifesbreath and their paychecks from the ritualistic expression of outrage can look out at their world and see nothing to fear. In the most obvious outward ways their chokehold on our communal idea of who and what we are and should be has never been tighter. There is no hope for reform in the expected manner, no chance that billowing Republicans or whining liberals or antique Marxists like me will talk the world out of it, will convince elite society to believe in freedom and nuance and forgiveness again. That will not occur.

But. There is a second front, in this war, a hidden battlefield on which the social justice movement is slowly losing to the forces of… not liberalism, not reaction, not conservatism, not civil liberties, not plain ol’ common sense, but anarchy, resistance, revulsion towards piety, the desire for revenge, the death drive, animal spirits, the id, the unheimlich, Jungian impulse, and most of all utter and total moral exhaustion. These are chip chip chipping away at the arrogant command of our moral betters. There are forces arrayed against the piety and vengefulness of social liberalism that cannot possibly meet it on the open field but which every day wage guerrilla warfare and, slowly, the great shaggy beast is bleeding out, that creature of preening righteousness slowly crippled by its hubris and arrogance. What looks like the inevitable and impregnable demands of history right now will look in time like the decaying aristocratic mores they are. An army of grinning goblins marches against the woke, and they take up their knives and syringes with glee while the forces of social justice trudge on, miserable, one more joyless day after another, hating themselves and each other. I am not saying the forces of opposition are good; they are, indeed, bad by their elementary nature. But still, in the conflict ahead I have my money on chaos, the ever-turning gyre, and the will to disobey. Tomorrow will not be like today, and the ones who now indict the unclean and issue verdicts and dole out punishments and deny every application for parole will wake up one day and wonder where it all went wrong. The witching hours approaches, the rabbis will be chased from the temple, and no one can say how the wheel will spin. Take shelter and tremble, or better yet, enjoy.

Happy Thanksgiving, guys.

I think he’s wrong about the “forces of opposition” being bad — some are, most aren’t — but of course a Marxist would say that. What I’m interested in is his belief that the revolt against wokeness and top-down social control will be violent, chaotic, and, well, revolutionary. And once again, Ross Douthat’s prophetic warning to the Left arises: If you don’t like the Religious Right, wait till you see the Post-Religious Right. 

What the woke elites are doing is building up within normal people a contempt that corrodes belief in the legitimacy of the system. Jordan Peterson released this week a two-hour Jonathan Pageau lecture about sacred order and social order. You should watch the whole thing, but here I’ve cued up a section near the very end, in which Pageau explains how “inclusivity” is going to bring about the collapse of civilization and/or tyranny:

His argument is about purpose. In order for a group, organization, or even a society to fulfill its purpose, it has to be judgmental and discriminating. That is, it has to select for the qualities that allow the entity to do what it is supposed to do. So, when a newspaper (for example) hires reporters, it has to discriminate in favor of job candidates who are better at reporting and writing. But for as long as I have been in the journalism business, the leadership class in American journalism has been obsessed with “diversity,” such that the less competent have been hired over the more competent, because the less competent were chosen for reasons having nothing to do with the ability to do the job for which they are hired. Liberals hate hearing this, but it’s true, and I have seen it up close on more than one occasion, and had to deal personally with the consequences. According to Pageau’s principle, a newspaper that is administered according to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion principles would be one that cannot help but decline, because it has populated its worker base with people who were not selected for their ability to fulfill the function of the organization, but rather to embrace DEI.

I once argued with a member of the leadership class who insisted that quality would not go down if a newspaper prioritized diversity in hiring, because “diversity is an aspect of quality.” This senior editor genuinely believed it. But it is not true. This is why nobody who runs a professional sports team hires for diversity. It’s interesting that the only major institution in America that doesn’t hire and manage itself according to DEI principles are professional sports teams. Not even the US military does this anymore!

Those who haven’t drunk the woke Kool-aid understand that you cannot run a society like this indefinitely. Things will fall apart. When a significant mass of people come to understand that none of this failure had to happen, that it was imposed on our society by woke ideologues, then things will shatter, and who knows how it’s going to shake out? If there’s any institution that ought to be immune to woke ideology, it’s the US military, because its sole task is to win wars. But now the Armed Forces has been captured by wokeness. Watch this interview with three female West Point cadets — one of them black — who left the academy, and who say that wokeness has conquered West Point’s mind. 

And check out this video from the US Air Force Academy’s football team, endorsing Black Lives Matter and the “antiracism” movement of Ibram X. Kendi. Some USAF Academy veterans launched STAARS, an activist group dedicated to fighting wokeness in the military. You should check it out. Below, I am going to post the entire press release that STAARS founder USAF Lt. Gen. Rod Bishop (Ret.) wrote explaining why he founded the group.

Back to Pageau for a second. He’s saying that the mania for “inclusivity” over quality will inevitably frustrate the purpose of any organization that accepts it. It’s mindless egalitarianism. For example, a society that refuses to recognize that the purpose of a family is to produce the next generation, and therefore declares that all family forms are equally as good as any other, is going to hurt its ability to produce the next generation. Back in 2013, I was visiting a conservative Christian university as a speaker, and in a pre-speech dinner, asked a small group of professors what their greatest concern about the coming generation (of students) was. One of them said, with tears in his eyes, that they wouldn’t be able to form families.

How is that possible? I asked. These kids are Christians. He said, “But they have never seen it” — “it” being a stable, functional family. These weren’t kids who had been catechized by wokeness. These are young people who were raised in a society that is falling apart because it has lost a sense of purpose, and a sense that to fulfill a purpose requires behaving in certain ways.

This loss of purpose and meaning is endemic to modern society, and did not emerge with wokeness. Wokeness, though, operates on such a demoralized and confused society, and begins with the premise that reality is socially constructed. It takes the communist delusion about the planned economy and applies it to social relations. It is not purposeless, but it rather assumes that the purpose of all social relationships and organizations is to instantiate “social justice” as it perceives it. I was just recording the Irreverend podcast with Anglican priests Jamie Franklin and Daniel French, and we discussed the loss of a sense of mission within Christian institutions. Many churches have forgotten that the prime directive is to seek first the Kingdom of God, and instead have given themselves over to social and political activism. It should surprise no one that they are failing, because they have abandoned their main purpose for existing.

Again, I ask: why is it that the only institutions in America that operates according to the Aristotelian ideal of excellence and purpose are professional sports leagues? I think it’s because their fans would not tolerate losing. They understand that the purpose of a sports team is to win, full stop. But a society can survive sports teams with losing records. It cannot survive having a military that makes achieving a Marxist idea of social justice its prime directive, or near to its prime directive. (Or, to be precise: it cannot allow anything to compromise its goal of winning wars.) A school that does that will fail to achieve its purpose. So will a business. So will anything. A church that subordinates holiness to cultural or social politics will fail. It’s written into the structure of reality.

So, Freddie de Boer is right. This can’t go on, because it cannot work. But there is going to be a lot of suffering before its collapse, and what replaces it will probably not be nice.

Now, let me share with you the STAARS letter. It’s important. You need to know about this — and if you are a military veteran, get involved with the fight to save the Armed Forces from wokeness. In the original, there are links to videos. I can’t figure out how to embed them within these photos of a PDF, so I’ve linked them between segments where I can:

(Here is a link to the Training Clip.)

Here are the images from Takei’s book:

(Link to USAFA Convocation Ceremony.)

(You will have seen the football team video earlier in this blog post.)

(Here is a link to an article about the Air Force Academy “safe space”.)

Here are the Takei book images referenced above:

And here is a link to Takei’s Twitter feed.

More:

(The Commandant’s Memo For Record can be read here.)

(Here is a link to that Fox News video.)

That’s the end of the STAARS letter. If you want to know more about the organization, and to get involved, go to the STAARS website.These men and women are trying to regain the purpose for which the US Air Force Academy, and the US Air Force, exists. The survival of our nation is at stake.

Freddie de Boer is a Marxist, but he is not a fool. If we don’t defeat the woke now, the reaction that will defeat them is going to be terrifying. Happy Thanksgiving.

theamericanconservative.com

Fifteen years ago, a man who was head of the GW Bush White House bio-terrorism study group, and a special adviser to the President, unexpectedly found himself propelled into becoming the ‘father’ of pandemic planning, after Bush had come to his bioterrorism people to demand some huge plan to deal with some imagined calamity. “We need a whole-of-society plan. What are you going to do about foreign borders? And travel? And commerce?”. From his perch of influence – serving an apocalyptic president — Dr Venkayya became the driving force for a dramatic change in U.S. policy during pandemics.

The then White House guidelines (born out of a bio-terrorism context), allowed the government to put Americans in quarantine while closing their schools, businesses, and with churches shuttered, all in the name of disease containment. It seemed so simple; “Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?”: A model of disease control, based on stay-at-home orders, travel restrictions, business closures, and forced human separation.

Well, from there, the “founding father of lockdowns” (not unnaturally) became successively head of pandemic policy at the Gates Foundation, and then President of Global Vaccine Business Unit. However, as U.S. commentator Jeffrey Tucker observes, the policy models developed by this White House study group “kept spitting out a conclusion that shutting down schools would drop virus transmission by 80%. I’ve read his memos from this period — some of them still not public — and what you observe is not science, but ideological fanaticism in play”.

Whatever its parentage, the lockdown movement that this adviser authored is global, ferocious, and, as a fully credentialised meme (bio-war parentage, White House and Gates), is almost irrepressible. It is the same in today’s euphoric stock markets: everyone gets caught up in the dance … chasing credentialised stock narratives to the point of irrationality. Who cares about the fundamentals, contra-indications, or even warnings from financial or medical experts. This pandemic policy approach has evolved into a form of contagion, in itself.

As in markets, so in politics: Memes, however well-credentialised, shift. The global political meme since early 2020 of lockdown and vaccine pandemic control – that became a quasi-hegemony – now is being overtaken by a fresh meme, and a new rising phase of politics: the politics of inflation.

Hot inflation figures are already defining the debate on the Biden agenda, the broader economy, and spooking the White House. Prices rose in the U.S. 0.9% from last month, for an annual inflation rate of 6.2% (the biggest inflation spike in 30 years).

This spike in inflation may sink Biden’s Build Back Better agenda (BBB), potentially killing a quick deal on the $1.75 trillion package. Many Americans are unsettled, finding themselves inhabiting this ‘weird pandemic economy’. Shelves are empty. Wages are up, but so are prices (by more than official figures suggest), on almost anything you want to buy. The stock market soars, on the conviction that the Fed can never allow ‘the market’ to fall more than 10%. The economy is adding jobs, albeit mainly low quality ones. But ports are backlogged. ‘For hire’ signs are plentiful. Yet businesses report difficulty recruiting workers. And no one knows when things are going to straighten out, or even if they will straighten out.

Republicans have been ramming home the message that the inflation spike effectively, is a covert government ‘tax’, and they blame Biden’s ‘Big Spend’ for the inflation demon’s frightening apparition. Some ‘up’ the anxiety further, reminding Americans that the global ‘Davos’ élite have been openly telling us that one day we will own nothing; have no privacy, and will be happy. And the way they will make it happen, it is said, is through destroying the value of money.

It seems that the ‘politics of fear’ may be ‘crossing the aisle’. But, in this shift, Big Tech cannot ride so easily to the Establishment’s rescue. With the vaccine meme, it has been relatively routine for the Tech social media to censor and delete all contrarian opinion, whether credentialed or not; but when it comes to inflation, ‘fact-checking’ becomes not just redundant, but counter-productive, for the ‘facts’ are visible with every purchase made. And every consumer can attest that prices are rising well above 6.2%.

Inflation will become the hottest political issue as we head toward 2022. Two ex-Federal Reserve members say the Fed should raise rates to “at least 3%,” and maybe 4%. And two current Fed Presidents warn that the Treasury market is “not as resilient” as it should be, and that even modest stress could break it.

The former Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, says that if the Fed doesn’t deal with inflation, then it “could result in the re-election of Donald Trump”. The Fed however, is locked tight in a corner of its own making: it has to finance Biden’s big BBB spend – and this implies keeping interest rates low (to keep Federal interest expenditure from ballooning). To ‘Go Big’ with fiscal spending will just accelerate inflation, yet this what the White House wants to do, when it says that spending will win the voters hearts, and that Biden too, very much shares Americans’ worries about inflation, and the prospect of rising mortgage payments. It is a plain non-sequitur.

Another ‘fully credentialised’ meme, chased to the point of exuberance, has been the ‘re-opening’ and return of ‘normal’ meme – if only (and when) vaccination rates were to reach 70% (a rate recently upped to 90%). But there is no normal. We’re living in a new post-pandemic world. The ever more complex, network, economic system is experiencing breakages at key points.

The notion that the economy could be locked down for two years, and then simply would ‘rebound’ just as ‘it was’, entirely intact, was always magical thinking, (and yet was widely embraced on Wall Street). The more complex the system, the greater the risk of systemic instability, as cascades start to slide away.

And human psychology and social culture is yet another complex networked system. The pandemic has made us question the ‘way we were’, and to rethink our life-balance. The behavioural changes induced by the Great Depression, for instance, did not fade until 30 years after the Depression was over. Such is the staying power of social trauma – whether it be war, depression or pandemic. Accordingly, we will not likely recover from this pandemic according to the logic embraced by the ‘bounce back’ meme.

On the whole, the ‘meme-politics of lockdown and vaccine mandates’ may be fading, but the inflation meme and the economic aftermath meme has only just begun.

Digging down deeper, we find that all this furious meme-chasing does have a common thread. Tucker observed that that the original pandemic planning was deeply ‘ideological’. How so? It may have become political-ideological since 2020, but the planning was years earlier. The link perhaps is expressed in the career progression of the ‘father of lockdown’ (as Tucker calls him): aide to the U.S. President, head of pandemic policy with the Gates Foundation and President of the Global Vaccine Business Unit.

The link would seem to be the commingling of Big Tech (Silicon Valley), Defence Tech, Big Business (Davos) and Big Pharma – giving birth to the technocratic managerialist mindset. (The managerial technocratic approach which so spectacularly blew-up, with the U.S. rout in Afghanistan, leaving in its wake only systemic human instability seeping across the nation).

Tucker gives us this thought about the ‘ideology’ underlying so many of these seemingly credentialised memes:

“In a surprising interview, Bill Gates said the following: “We didn’t have vaccines that block transmission. We got vaccines that help you with your health, but they only slightly reduce the transmission. We need new ways of doing vaccines.”

“What can we make of Gates’s passing statement: “We need a new way of doing vaccines”?”, Tucker asks. “Let’s travel back in time to examine his career at Microsoft and his shepherding into existence the Windows operating system. By the early 1990s, it was being billed as the essential brain of the personal computer. Security considerations against viruses were not part of its design, however, simply because not that many people were using the internet …

“The neglect of this consideration turned into a disaster. By the early 2000s, there were thousands of versions of malware (also called bugs) floating around the internet, and infecting computers running Windows worldwide … The problem of malware was dubbed ‘viruses’. It was a metaphor. Not real”.

It’s not clear that Gates ever really understood that. Computer viruses aren’t anything like biological viruses. To maintain a clean and functioning hard drive, you want to avoid and block a computer virus at all costs, explains Tucker. Any exposure is bad exposure. The fix is always avoidance until eradication.

“With biological viruses, we have evolved to confront them through exposure, and let our immune system develop to take them on. A body that blocks all pathogens without immunity, is a weak one that will die at the first exposure, which will certainly come at some point in a modern society. An immune system that confronts most viruses and recovers, grows stronger. That’s a gigantic difference that Gates never understood.

“In short, keeping viruses out of computers constitutes the single biggest professional struggle in Gates’ life. The lesson he learned was that pathogen blocking and eradication was always the path forward. What he never really understood is that the word virus was merely a metaphor for unwanted and unwelcome computer code. The analogy breaks down in real life.

“After finally stepping back from Microsoft’s operations, Gates started dabbling in other areas, as newly rich people tend to do. They often imagine themselves especially competent at taking on challenges that others have failed at simply because of their professional successes … And what subject did he pounce on? He would do to the world of pathogens what he did at Microsoft: he would stamp them out! He began with malaria and other issues and eventually decided to take on them all. And what was his solution? Of course: antivirus software. What is that? It is vaccines. Your body is the hard drive that he would save with his software-style solution.”

In parenthesis, we should note that dualism in ratiocination has be-devilled western thinking since the outset: First, the divine sphere of perfection redeeming the corrupted sinful sphere of humanity. And in its secularised form: Science redeeming wayward humanity towards universal utopias. And in our Tech age, AI ‘software’ correcting and ‘improving’ human hardware.

Here is the point; and here the thread: All our seemingly credentialised memes are hollow, in the same way Gates’ understanding of biology is. “Early on in the pandemic, to get a sense of Gates’s views”, Tucker says, “I watched his TED talks. I began to realize something astonishing. He knew much less than anyone could discover by reading a book on cell biology from Amazon. He couldn’t even give a basic 9th-grade-level explanation of viruses and their interaction with the human body. And yet here he was, lecturing the world about the coming pathogen and what should be done about it. His answer is always the same: more surveillance, more control, more technology”.

Let’s not pin this all onto Gates however – this dualistic way of ratiocination runs through all of western modernity. Tech vaccines are the solution to the Covid virus. And, forced (human) separation is good for placing the malware into quarantine. The real-economy is the hardware that Central Bank ‘software’ will protect against recessionary pathogens. The Davos’ Re-Set will upload new global software for a ‘fairer, greener future’. A fourth Industrial Revolution is the digital technological management that will clean out Climate malware. Etc, etc.

In reality, all these are highly complex network systems, not susceptible to dualistic intervention. They work – if they work – as organic wholes. At best, we face systemic instability, as a result of these naïve ‘software’ interventions. At worst, systemic collapse.

There is a growing broad consensus that the West is reaching its own event horizon or has perhaps already fallen into the abyss. This overwhelmingly diverse group of ideological camps, politicians and media pundits who want to avert disaster continue to sputter, searching for answers and doubling down on their own assuredness that the core of their value system is still right, it is merely being downtrodden by a parade of Postmodern freaks. But the real crisis is rooted in what made the West “great” in the first place, its belief in Individualism which is the backbone of the Liberalism that most of humanity lives under.

Complaining about the “degradation” of society gets louder with each year as the average Western man becomes more depressed, sexless, drug addicted, emasculated, jobless, debt ridden and utterly hopeless. The response to this steady decay over the decades following WWII has mostly been a lot of finger wagging. Those that want to save the West are very good at pointing out all the bad things that are happening, but their attempts to beg or guilt trip the next generation into holding on to traditions with no system of apologetics to explain them is completely futile.

The ultimate reason why Conservatives, Traditionalists (Western TradCons), Republicans, the Alt-Right, the Red Pill, Team Trump and so on continue to lose is that they firmly believe in the idea that the individual is sacred and that no government, and to a greater extent no one, should tell this blessed individual what to do. Yet this same group is eternally surprised that raising people in a system that can never tell them “no” turns society into spoiled narcissistic hedonistic adult children.

The Consumer Economy that we have all become used to is essentially a Hedonism machine. The “Free Market” adapts to our desires yet there is no mechanism in place to keep us in check when our desires are wrong. In fact we really always see meeting demand as a good thing, but perhaps some of our sinful animalistic desires are best left unfulfilled. There is no longer any arbiter to tell us not to do anything. Excluding some violent desires, everything that we want we can get with no thought to the future or how it affects society. The market meets our demands, but many of the things we want are from our own sloth and gluttony. The freakshow at your average Midwestern Wal-Mart is the perfect example of this tendency, where no one can tell us not to eat processed garbage, or be dressed publicly in sleepwear. Perhaps there are some economic penalties to becoming so obese that one cannot walk but the individual in his sanctity can never have the cheeseburger slapped out of his hand or be cast out from society for becoming, by choice, an abomination.

The sanctity of the Individual probably did create the great passionary leap that thrust the world into and through the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps the European of old was too tied to the land, too bogged down by authority and too restrained by unquestioned traditions. This rise of the Sacred Individual did not happen by accident. Liberalism (the political system that puts the individual as the subject) was like the salt added to a bland European Feudal soup. Adding this salt of Individualism made the soup taste better and so we continued adding more and more salt, convinced that “more salt = tastes better’. The problem is that people do not seem to understand that when you are looking at a bowl filled with wet salt with no soup left it is time to stop adding it.

In our Postmodern world, with the feelings of the individual placed on the highest pedestal above all else the words “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” have been twisted from their original righteous intent, rejecting the invisible yoke of Medieval Europe, into the justification for all that is wrong with society. The average person sees their life as the only thing that matters, society, family, and anything else greater than them be damned.

“Liberty” means that no one can tell us what to do, no one can slap the junk food out of our mouths, make a boy “act like a man”, or in any way push us to something greater. The “Pursuit of Happiness” has become the temporary fulfillment of our hedonistic delights and an economy that meets our demands even those most vile and destructive. Furthermore, if we all pursue our individual happiness, without even a thought of something greater than ourselves then how can we expect to live in a society with a solid culture? We can naively blame weird people with strange hair colors for the ills of the West, but it is really unchecked Individualism and Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness that are killing the West.

The very principles that made the West great are those that are nailing its coffin shut.

The broad spectrum of pro-Western political viewpoints mentioned above is stuck in a death cycle of clinging to its Liberalism constantly yet howling about the negative consequences of it. They cry about falling birthrates and the death of the family and yet generally advocate for living for yourself and building a career or not taking the risk on marriage after all “she could take half your stuff”. They want people to make sacrifices for their nation in spite of all of us being indoctrinated into a cult of Hedonism and “looking out for #1”. They want women to be feminine and men to be masculine, which are ideals to strive for that serve little purpose when you spend your adult life alone in your one-bedroom apartment, and when there is no means of enforcing any standard onto people in the first place. This group complains about the rampant narcissism in society but makes it clear that no one can tell anyone what to do. The “solution” to everything of adding more Liberalism is really the cause of our suffering.

No attempts to save culture, the family, traditional gender roles or anything else sane will work when we live by an insane premise, that society is made great via Individualism. Culture, patriotism, family, traditional gender roles, etc. are all concepts founded in the idea of contributing in or belonging to a group. Rampant “me culture” was the poison to society that all of our traditional religions fought to keep in check for the future of humanity, but since religion is now a personal choice they have essentially lost that war forever.

The Tea Party, Trump, Dennis Prager, the Evangelicals, the Catholics, the Red Pill, and every other possible organization that stands for the West will somehow have to accept that in order to live in the West they want they will have to paradoxically reject the origin of its recent greatness.

To the extent that the medieval peasant needed a shot of Individualism to rise from his meaningless cycle of existence, the Postmodern man needs a shot of the traditional values that kept the peasant working in the fields – productive, masculine, loyal, married with children and filled with ideas of something greater than himself perhaps worth sacrificing for. If the Right in the West does not answer the call to some level of Illiberalism, it will fade away into the night wrapped in a warm blanket of smug self-assuredness that the Individual is the Alpha and the Omega.

There’s a war on for the hearts and minds of children across the U.S. and the battlefield has become the very schools that millions of Americans are required to send their kids for a state-run education. But just as everyone has a constitutional right to speak their mind, members of the audience should never be forced to listen against their will.

In addition to the everyday worries over the physical safety of our children are concerns over their mental wellbeing, a subject that at one time could be largely taken for granted. No more. It’s no secret that many schools are subjecting children to lessons on transgender and alternative sexual lifestyles, as well as the racist ideology of critical race theory.

For millions of Americans on both sides of the political divide, these teachings are ideological heresies that have absolutely no place in the classroom. And make no mistake, people are no longer passively accepting the agenda. In school board meetings around the country, furious parents are speaking out against their children being indoctrinated with the latest madness to escape from the liberal laboratory of social engineering. Yet such teachings are already entrenched into the curriculum and will not go away without a major struggle.

The scene in Loudon County has completely devolved as public comments have been shut off and the school board meeting has been declared an unlawful assembly.

Two have been arrested.

This is the fight against Critical Race Theory.

pic.twitter.com/suiG1AcB6A

— Kambree (@KamVTV) June 23, 2021

That much was made clear earlier this month when the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers union, voted to support the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which postulates that the United States is plagued by “systemic racism” and that white people enjoy advantages in life due to their inborn “privilege.” That diabolical and divisive concept, which promises to tear America apart at the seams, is being prepared for export to all 50 states and 14,000 local school districts.

Yet here is a question few are asking: are the constitutional rights of American students being trampled upon in the face of these radical Marxist lectures? The question becomes even more pertinent when it is realized that, according to a YouGov poll, 58% of Americans are adamantly opposed to the teachings of CRT, with just 38% saying they supported it.

CUA Law Scholarship Repository

In 2010, Roger C. Hartley, a professor at the Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law, published a legal treatise that perfectly captures the dilemma of our days, entitled, ‘Freedom not to Listen: A Constitutional Analysis of Compulsory Indoctrination Through Workplace Captive Audience Meetings.’ I would encourage everyone to read this liberally footnoted document. Although it is primarily concerned with workers not being “force-fed the employer’s religious and political ideology at the workplace,” Hartley also includes discussion on unwanted indoctrination inside of the classroom.

“The past several decades have clarified much regarding the freedom not to listen,” Hartley writes at a time when the first ideological inroads were being cut into the classroom. “It derives from the freedom of thought, which assures every person the associated freedom to acquire knowledge, including the freedom to decide what knowledge to acquire-which viewpoints to entertain and which to avoid.”

“The marketplace of ideas permits no forced orthodoxy,” Hartley continues. “This freedom to filter intellectual input into one’s consciousness supports a constitutionally recognized liberty interest in not being coerced into listening” [italics added].

“This freedom not to listen trumps the speaker’s right to speak, however, only when the listener cannot avoid the objectionable speech through reasonable efforts.”

BREAKING: The nation’s largest teachers union has approved a plan to promote critical race theory in all 50 states and 14,000 local school districts.

The argument that “critical race theory isn’t in K-12 schools” is officially dead. pic.twitter.com/BMRDoAK0sA

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) July 3, 2021

In other words, any listener who is considered part of a “captive audience” is a listener whose constitutional rights are being violated. And who more than our children, compelled as they are to receive a compulsory education courtesy of the state, comprise the greatest number of captive audiences?

Hartley says that the way to determine whether one is a captive audience is whether avoiding unwelcome speech is “impractical” – not impossible. For example, oftentimes it will not be practical to quit one’s present employment over the question of indoctrination.

In the legal case, Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser (1986), the Court concluded that students attending a mandatory high school assembly constituted a “captive audience.” The Court proceeded to rule against a student whose speech to the assembly contained sexual innuendos, ruling that school officials “[should] protect children-especially in a captive audience-from exposure to sexually explicit, indecent, or lewd speech.”

Based on that decision, the climate inside of the classroom is now siding with those who are desirous of propagating the most explicit material imaginable, even to preschool children. Public libraries, meanwhile, have taken to hosting ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ for impressionable youth.

Hartley then proceeds to make the more principle-based argument against preaching to the captive crowd: “It makes no sense to conclude that centuries of struggle to secure the freedom of the mind from coercion should… come to nothing more than the right to make a choice between subjecting oneself to forced indoctrination of what may well be a reviled point of view or quitting one’s employment and sacrificing years of investment in a job.”

While countess corporate employees are receiving their fair share of “workplace indoctrination” – as recently revealed at Google, Coca-Cola and Raytheon – that pales in comparison to the amount of indoctrination students are receiving on a daily basis inside of their classrooms. A classical education anchored on historical precedence stretching back thousands of years has been largely vanquished in favor of teaching social justice claptrap that prepares students for a turbulent life of activism and sexual deviancy but little else. Even mathematics, the most subjective of disciplines, has been tainted by allegations of racism and ‘white privilege.’

The bottom line is that no student should be required to sit through lessons that they and their parents find ideologically repulsive. But what are their options? After all, it is no less practical for an employee to change his job than for a student to change his school, or start homeschooling, which few can afford.

At this point, it would appear that the U.S. public school system and the courts must be prepared to work on behalf of children who are not comfortable listening to lectures that cut against their personal ideological grain. Students subjected to sexually explicit material, or uncritical race-based theories should be permitted to politely excuse themselves from such controversial studies without the threat of academic punishment hanging over their heads. The U.S. Constitution and First Amendment demand it.

With the financial support of Mercer Family Foundation far-right heiress financier Rebekah Mercer, exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, U.S.-based Falun Gong cult leader Li Hongzhi, and the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, which is associated with the fascist Opus Dei Roman Catholic sect, Donald Trump’s sporadic political adviser, Steve Bannon, has implemented a multi-pronged approach to enabling fascist control of governments around the world. Bannon’s ideological approach to furthering fascism globally can be called “Bannonism.”

Bannon and his fascist political allies around the world have embarked on a project that seeks to take over existing major political parties of the traditional conservative slant and transform them into fascist parties. What has occurred with the U.S. Republican Party with it becoming a far-right cult of personality organization beholden to Trump is a case in point. Bannon and his allies hope to achieve the same results with the British Conservative Party and the Conservative Party of Canada.

Another tactic employed by the fascist is to create or dominate existing parties of the far-right and achieve initial representation in provincial or regional parliaments, councils, or legislatures. After gaining seats in legislatures with devolved political powers, the fascist parties can use their local power to aim for legislative seats at the national level, or, as in the case of the European Parliament, at the supranational level. An examples of this tactic includes the creation of the Brexit Party in Britain by Bannon and Trump ally and founder of the anti-European Union UK Independence Party (UKIP), Nigel Farage, the modern-day Oswald Mosley of British politics. Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists prior to World War II. His politics, like those of Farage, originated within the British Conservative Party. The British Tories, which also launched the career of racist politician Enoch Powell, have served as a well-spring for nurturing fascism. Farage and UKIP went on to commandeer a majority of the UK’s seats in the European Parliament. Farage now hopes that his far-right Brexit Party can have the same success with the British Parliament. Bannon appreciates the role of the Tories have played in fostering far-right political leaders and he is taking full advantage of the fact that Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government is the most far-right of any recent British Conservative government.

Bannon understands that making alliances with small far-right extremist political parties can pay off handsome dividends with patience and a healthy degree of financial support. The Nazis saw dismal election results when they first began to contest elections in Weimar Germany in the 1920s. They polled just 3 percent of the vote in the national election for the Reichstag in 1924. Their vote share fell to 2.6 percent in 1928, and they won a mere 12 seats out of 491 in the Reichstag. The Nazis fared no better in state elections. They saw 2.4 percent in East Prussia in 1928. In Bavaria, where the Nazi coup attempt failed in 1923, the Nazis inched up with 6.1 percent of the vote in the state election and 9 seats in the Bavarian Landtag. But patience and increased party funding from wealthy German industrialists, no different than the Mercers and the Koch family in the United States, paid off. In 1932, the Nazis won 36 percent of the vote for the East Prussian Landtag and 162 seats. That victory was followed by a Nazi coup that ousted the East Prussian government. In July 1932, the Nazis garnered 32.5 percent of the national vote for the Reichstag and 43 seats, which they were to use as leverage form a government the following year. Once Hitler became chancellor, the Weimar Republic – democratic Germany – was doomed.

One of Bannon’s staunchest fascist allies, Matteo Salvini, saw his far-right Northern League, which advocates independence for northern Italy, achieve major success in winning 29 out of 80 seats in the Regional Council of Lombardy. Salvini even entered a national coalition government consisting of his League and the Five Star Movement as the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior. Salvini’s rapid rise in Italian politics made him a valuable ally for Bannon, who has established a secretariat for a de facto “Fascist International,” known as “The Movement,” in Brussels. Salvini, to Bannon’s delight, established close links with two other far-right European leaders, National Rally chief Marine Le Pen in France and Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.

Salvini’s political strength in Italy, stemming from his co-option of the Northern League, originally a fringe party in northern Italian politics, is what Bannon, a student of fascist takeovers in Italy and Germany, hopes to achieve in other countries. With Salvini’s support and that of other Italian far-right leaders, Bannon has ominously attempted to create a fascist academy to train a new generation of political leaders at the 13^th century Trisulti monastery on the slopes of Monte Rotonaria in central Italy. Although the Vatican, Pope Francis I, and the current Italian government have opposed Bannon’s plans, the nation that launched the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini is seen by those like Bannon, Salvini, Farage, and others as a natural birthplace for a renewed international fascist movement.

These developments directly impact on the United States. The fascist co-option of the U.S. Republican Party has ensured that the opposition pro-democracy Democratic Party has been relegated to very weak minority status in some state legislatures around the country, particularly in the South and the West. Bannon and his fascist associates believe that takeovers of existing parties in certain other countries can achieve the same type of success. One of Bannon’s closest foreign associates, Brazil’s far-right neo-fascist Mussolini- and Adolf Hitler-admiring president, Jair Bolsonaro, worked his way into the presidency by joining the electoral slates of small far-right fringe parties, including the ill-named Brazilian Progressive Party, the Social Christian Party, and another inaptly named party, the Social Liberal Party. Bannon has provided political consulting not only to President Bolsonaro, but also to his three politician sons, all having higher ambitions beyond federal Senate and Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo municipal politics.

The Bolsonaros would have never been a serious factor in Brazilian politics had it not been for the strong support they receive from Brazil’s right-wing Christian nationalist evangelical community, which is steadily supplanting the traditional political influence of the Roman catholic Church across the nation. Christian nationalists are serving as a convenient vehicle for right-wing extremists to gain political power, from the U.S. state of South Carolina, where they dominate politics to the remote Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic, where a far-right Christian extremist currently serves as foreign minister.

It is now very apparent that Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party march on Rome in October 1922 served as the inspiration for the march on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Mussolini’s march was not taken seriously by either Prime Minister Luigi Facta or King Victor Emmanuel III. On October 28, 1922, after Mussolini besieged the Italian government with some 25,000 Blackshirt militia supporters, the King handed over the reins of government to Mussolini and his fascists. By 1925, Italy was a fascist dictatorship. The Parliament was dissolved and replaced by the “Chamber of Fasces and Corporations.” It is clear that the January 6 American coup plotters intended to replace the U.S. Congress with a rump parliament consisting of only Trump supporters. With the elimination of much of the Congressional leadership through assassination, the January 6 coup marchers and internal Republican enablers at the White House and in Congress would have ensured the rejection of the 2020 electoral victory of Joe Biden and declared Donald Trump the winner. Such an act would have ushered into being an American fascist dictatorship using the example set by Mussolini in Rome in 1922.

Although Prime Minister Facta declared a “state of siege” in Rome as the Blackshirt militias marched on the city in October 1922, the King refused to sign the order to deploy the military to quell the Fascist insurrection. Similarly, neither acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller nor Joint Chiefs staff director, Lt. General Charles Flynn, the brother of Trump’s former national security adviser, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, ordered the National Guard to protect the U.S. Capitol from attack. In November of last year, Michael Flynn called for Trump to declare martial law and order the military to conduct new elections in the “battleground” states that Trump lost to Biden. The fact that there have been sieges by pro-Trump fascists, similar to the U.S. Capitol attack, on the state capitol buildings in Michigan, Georgia, Oregon, and Washington state are a clear indication that the Mussolini example will continue to be followed by fascist forces everywhere. In February 2020, the Trump-friendly president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, entered the Legislative Assembly with armed police and soldiers in what was called an attempted coup. The fascists have the stage for similar anti-parliamentary actions everywhere.

It should be noted that Mussolini’s successful march on Rome in 1922 was followed the next year by a march by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi supporters in Munich, the capital of Bavaria. Hitler hoped to repeat the success of Mussolini in laying siege to the Bavarian government and overthrowing it in a “Beer Hall Putsch,” or coup d’etat. Unlike the situation in Rome, Bavarian troops opened fire on the vastly outnumbered 2000 Nazis, killing 16 of them. Hitler was given a lenient prison sentence for his role in the march and putsch attempt. When Hitler and his colleagues were freed from prison, they were more dangerous than ever, having garnered sympathy from some of the conservative-leaning members of the German electorate. This should be kept in mind by juries and judges handling the criminal cases of hundreds of Trump supporters arrested for their role in the U.S. Capitol attempted putsch. The granting of bail to some of the accused Capitol coup plotters is setting the stage for significant problems in the near future.

The playbook for the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was the October 1922 insurrection of Mussolini’s fascists in Rome, albeit with two different outcomes. Bannon has been serving as Trump’s resident ideological fascism chief since joining the ex-president’s campaign in 2016. In many respects, Bannon has been for Trump what Nazi ideological chief Alfred Rosenberg was to Adolf Hitler. Rosenberg promoted Nazi ideology to not only nations under German occupation but to countries around the world, including the United States, where a pro-fascist first-generation German-American, Fred Trump, Sr., became enamored of fascist and racist beliefs in his hometown of New York City. Bannon’s promotion of fascism goes back to at least his time as editor for the far-right Breitbart News, a media operation funded by Rebekah Mercer and her father. Today, Mercer money has supported the far-right social media platform Parler.

United Nations Secretary António Guterres recently told the UN Human Rights Council that the threat posed by global neo-Nazis and white supremacists have been “cheered on by people in positions of responsibility in ways that were considered unimaginable not long ago.” Guterres added, “We need global coordinated action to defeat this grave and growing danger.” He is correct.

The sooner the nations of the world awake to the clear and present transnational threat posed by fascists abusing electoral systems to gain dictatorial power, the possibility of a repeat of the fascist rise to power during the 1920s and 1930s can be snuffed out – now and far into the future and, hopefully, permanently.