WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE
Why the Empire of Lies is going out of business
Today’s long post is a reply to people who call me an “optimist”.
I can understand why people are unwilling to recognise reality, as most of my work explains that liberal democracy has ruled us for a century by telling us that people who notice it are wicked or insane.
Here I go on about why the globalist project has been abandoned. It has lost the argument with reality, which is all it really was.
This loss came at enormous cost. In military, financial and human terms - as well as the damage to meaning and the sense of reality itself, which has replaced civilisational norms with confusion, mass hysteria and despair.
I hope to show how Project Global began and why it is now over. I also add that this is indeed a marvellous time to be alive. This is the end of an era. Wherever you live in the West, the firewall against reality is coming down.
This means a better future. Our politics will serve the national interest, whose mention was formerly prohibited as it hampered the creation of a global monoculture.
Our comedy will be about jokes and not lectures. Our mass culture will no longer be sponsored by the enemies of the truth.
Whilst the immediate result will be neither paradise nor perfection, I hope you will be able to see by reading to the end that the war on our civilisation has been lost and that the system designed to destroy it is going out of business.
What a time to be alive.
HARD LIMITS CREATE GOOD TIMES
We are living through a moment of historic change – and the common sense revolution of the Trump administration is part of a global realignment. Why has this happened?
The return to common sense at home, to “normalcy” in relations with Russia, and to realism in diplomacy are all hallmarks of the rapidly developing vision of the future presented by the Trump administration.
Every foreign and domestic policy move indicates a rejection of a war without limits on everything of value in life. The total lack of restraint leads to self destruction. We witness its monument at home as well as abroad.
I interviewed Dr Maitra - one of the architects of the Trump NATO policy here:
The return of sanity to politics is a significant break with the consensus of the last four decades, which produced a liberal system with ambitions to dominate the globe.
As the Soviet Union fell, a paper was published by the RAND Corporation.
In 1989 Samuel Hirschfeld wrote on “U.S. Grand Strategy for the 1990s and Beyond” for the Pentagon think tank, and presented four options for the role of the United States at the end of the Cold War.
Three of them would have seen the US draw down, with one offering a “disengagement strategy” - pulling back its military and financial commitments to a minimum. These options would reduce its enormous military budget and allow it, in varying degrees, to spend the resulting “peace dividend” at home.
Only one of the four options demanded an increase in spending and commitments. This was the strategy the US decided to pursue – option one, to become the “Only Global Power”.
The strategy of world hegemony – becoming and remaining the dominant global force – became the grand strategy of the United States. This means everything it did was mobilised to support this goal. Its economic, military and political culture was shaped, along with the production of belief through the sponsorship of mass culture, towards securing world dominance.
This goal is no longer in the national interest of the United States is what the Trump administration’s new direction means. Why is it no longer interested in global supremacy? Why has it pivoted to national renewal in place of building an international empire?
There are two main reasons for this shift. One, the world has changed. Two, these enormous commitments will bankrupt the United States if they are not cancelled.
The dream of global hegemony has met with the hard limits of reality. We were made to believe that the end of the Soviet Union meant that the “liberal democratic” system had won, and for all time.
THE UNIPOLAR MOMENT
Defined by Francis Fukuyama as elections plus cheap consumer goods, the fall of Soviet communism was heralded as the “End of History”, with “liberal” consumerism emerging as the perfect system.
This was the ideological basis for the argument that it should be spread around the world, by any and every means necessary – including propaganda, the subversion of sovereignty, and through the more direct means of regime change which is war.
This was the “unipolar moment” - when the world had only one power.
How was that power used?
The idea of a peace dividend was quickly forgotten. Instead of reducing the military and cultural propaganda budget, it was massively increased as a series of wars and dubious attacks furnished a globalist project with a case for a permanent “war on terror”.
The US National Security State expanded enormously, with billions spent on domestic and foreign surveillance. Projects such as the National Endowment for Democracy – begun under Reagan to subvert Soviet satellite states and counter Russian influence, were expanded through cutouts like USAID to sponsor a global social revolution.
These activities resulted in the subversion of news, entertainment, and the entire political culture of the Western world, producing a system which was either perfectly suited to produce a global empire – or was totally corrupt and fake, depending on whether you agree with liberal globalism.
This is why the formerly Free World is now managed by corrupt officials in every walk of life.
From Church to State, through the military and judiciary, everyone is managed by zealous political commissars who ruthlessly punish anyone who disagrees with the liberal-global agenda. This agenda, also known as the “rules based order”, seldom defines its obvious principles.
The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has given a simple explanation of what these rules are.
“LBGT, open borders and war.” To this description can be added the Net Zero or Green agenda.
Whether you agree with this agenda or not it is enormously expensive to maintain.
DISSOLVING POPULATIONS
The effects on national cohesion are disastrous, as nations are replaced with global supermarkets browsed by borderless bargain hunters. Wages are driven down, and housing costs go up with increased demand, making the raising of a family nigh impossible. Birth rates have collapsed, as the financialisation of the consumer economy has seen real wages stagnant since the early 1970s.
Importing millions more people to fix this problem simply makes it worse, and will lead to the extinction of the nations of the West in short order.
This is not a problem but a solution if you seek to standardise all former nations in a global system.
Yet the costs of this ambitious utopia are endless.
The consumer lifestyle is one of convenience, in which unwanted babies can be destroyed with a pill, and the elderly taught they should dutifully dispose of themselves when they become a burden. In this system there is no higher spiritual purpose to life than shopping, with fornication a close second.
To persuade people that the politics of national and even personal suicide are progressive and desirable is also enormously expensive. The USAID scandal has shown how vast amounts of money were spent to manufacture belief in this diabolical system. Much of our news, popular entertainment, our “thought leaders”, and indeed most of our mass popular culture in music and film and video games are all simply messages from the sponsors of a war on our entire civilisation.
The Synodal Catholic Church is nothing more than an arm of this project – which is obvious from its vehement defence of globalist principles and suppression of the Catholic tradition itself.
All traditions of all cultures were marked for replacement, as every aspect of cultural production was mobilised in making belief in the liberal-global system instead.
This has produced a fake culture and a false impression of reality in the minds of the public, and in the leadership who promote it.
The rise of China is one hard limit against which no propaganda can prevail. Another is the capacity of the Russians to mobilise and maintain the only seriously battle hardened army in the world. A “woke” NATO could not win a war with Russia.
Its power, as well as that of the European Union, was underwritten by the might of the United States. It has no reason to exist now the US has decided to withdraw its sponsorship of Project Global.
Why did this happen?
One of the architects of the liberal democratic system in the 1920s was a man called Walter Lippmann.
In his work on propaganda or “public relations”, he said liberal democracies should rule by creating a manufactured idea of reality in the minds of the public. This he said was the creation of a “pseudo environment”.
Once created, it could easily be manipulated by the management of mass media messaging and the use of mass culture as means of propaganda. This was enormously successful, as Western populations simply cannot see this propaganda because it is everywhere.
These days it is almost impossible to convince many Westerners of the reality of any situation, as their phones, televisions, street advertising, Netflix shows and news media all tell them a different story.
THE LIPPMAN GAP – BETWEEN DREAMS AND REALITY
Yet reality was understood very well by Lippmann. He also gave us the Lippmann Gap – the concept in foreign relations which describes the distance between a states commitments and its capability. This gap explains the pivot to MAGA, the drawing down from NATO, and much of the revolutionary changes in the US today.
What was yesterday’s grand strategy is today’s total corruption of democracy. The vast expense in sponsoring globalist culture towards world domination can no longer be maintained. The foreign commitments of the United States are so huge that America will go bust if it does not scale back.
Americans, Canadians, Australians, Britons and Europeans are all realising that much of their mass culture was nothing more than an advertisement for the business of global domination – and their consensus politics were basically rigged.
The economic, military and propaganda commitments of the United States have produced a gap between ambition and reality that is so enormous that closing it is a matter of national survival.
This is the hard reality behind the MAGA movement. The necessity of avoiding collapse has produced a raft of virtues: the return of reality to international relations, the removal of policies and propaganda which promoted a war on everything that was, in the service of a utopia that could never be.
The United States has come to its senses in time to save itself from a diabolical nightmare.
Politics in the West is now about one simple question – better or worse?
With the example of renewal in America, it is highly unlikely the rest of the West will be capable of surviving on the sale of the politics of ruin. From the Vatican to NATO, through the WEF and the EU, all the ideological bureaucracies increasingly resemble the holdouts for a dissolved and discredited system.
To continue the fight for this dead system, as its holdouts must, is to wave the Soviet flag after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
YOU CANNOT PERSUADE PEOPLE OF THE EXISTENCE OF REALITY
It is not surprising that people are not persuaded by reality. We have been trained for a century to believe in advertisements instead. Change is happening regardless of the remnants of the old system, as reality requires neither propaganda nor belief in it to exist.
This is not optimism, it is not merely another point of view among many. The old global-liberal system is going out of business. You are living through an historic moment of change, in which the true nature of the “liberal democratic” system is being revealed.
It was neither liberal nor democratic. It was a business of making war and making belief, and its chief campaign was the total destruction of our civilisation and its replacement with a mass produced substitute.
This was called progress – itself another grand illusion presented as fact. In reality, men do not change, and neither does the nature of reality. The war on what is in service of what could never be has been fought and lost at tremendous cost.
In March 2022 I argued that Liberalism was dead , explaining it was a war on reality which has produced a crisis of incompetence and chaos.
The Grand Illusion
Why does the world not make sense? Why does nothing work anymore? What is the meaning of this chaos, and why does it come as such a surprise?
FIGHTING A LOSING BATTLE
Every government, church and institution captured by the old order will fight on, like a Japanese soldier in the Philippine jungle – but the banner they are waving is not that of the rising sun – it is the tattered standard of the rainbow empire of lies.
What happens now? The “liberal” EU, along with Britain and Canada and New Zealand will be utterly discredited once the vast corruption in Ukraine is revealed. Every one of these globalist wars was also a criminal enterprise, and this last one on the borders of Russia was perhaps the worst of all.
Peace in Ukraine will be followed by the exposure of the massive corruption in which all the liberal governments are invested.
This is another reason why peace is fatal to the likes of the UK, French and German regimes - and why they called anyone who wanted peace a traitor.
In case you have not noticed, the main instrument of liberal-global power is to smear anyone who objects to its agenda as an extremist, a traitor, or a lunatic.
PUNISHING THE BEST OF US
Catholics who uphold Catholic doctrine are “rigid”, and must do more to “welcome” unrepentant sinners and radical departures from the Catholic tradition.
People who do not support wars, suspicious “vaccines”, and measures identical with mass psychological warfare are called cranks and denialists. People who refuse to consider that two men buying a baby are not equivalent to a traditional family are said to be full of hate, as are those who notice patterns in crime statistics and calls for censorship pertaining to ethnic groups.
The liberal system was enforced by the punishment of the circumspect and the wise, by demonising anyone who dared to draw their own conclusions and who bravely insisted on stating the obvious.
The prohibition of the basic facts of reality has come at an enormous cost to competence in politics, and in every other institution. Police now seldom catch criminals.
Teachers are commonly zelotic scolds who know or care little for their subjects beyond redacting liberal-critical material. The health care workers now recommend dangerous injections and promote suicide as a remedy for old age and the epidemic depression caused by living in a fake democracy funded by debt slavery and the universal promotion of addictions. Our entertainment and literature is derivative, pontificating trash. Comedy is more like a lecture from HR, as is practically everything we see and read these days.
THE LIBERAL STATE IS A TERMINAL DISEASE
Liberal democracy is not only fake – it is a sickness presented as the supreme cure for the human condition. Our populations are fat and most people take some form of medication – legal or otherwise. Hormone disruptors which drive women out of their minds are presented as a technological panacea providing liberation – from womanhood, and even from sanity in fact. Anti-depressants are nothing of the sort. They simply cancel you, leading to a state of nihilistic despair when the afflicted realise they have replaced misery with emptiness.
Most of our mass produced food is toxic waste. In this matter as in so many others, everything that is bad for you has been presented as good. Real food such as meat, eggs and fish have been labelled as carcinogenic and hostile to Mother Earth.
This is a strange mother indeed whose worshippers seem to demand the abortion of her “children” to save her life. What other end could the large scale abolition of real food serve?
These are the realities produced by the liberal-global state. Humanity is a problem to be solved by people who care nothing for it. Everything of value, including the value of life itself, has been degraded by this system. How long can it go on?
NEITHER LIBERAL NOR DEMOCRATIC
The liberal holdouts in Europe have resorted to cancelling democracy and censoring speech to preserve their fading power. In reality, they have no economic, military or industrial power of their own – and only policies of national renewal and sensible diplomacy will rebuild them.
The liberal globalists have created a crisis for which they have no solution, as it is they who are the problem. This is becoming obvious to everyone.
The coming months and several years will see them finished off, as populations realise the people they were told were the only respectable option are a cartel of warmongering vandals, thieves and liars.
Against this, an example of rational and national regeneration is emerging in the USA. It has already condemned the European departure from democracy and free speech.
It no longer sponsors the global social revolution it once pursued as a matter of national interest. The most powerful nation in the West is no longer interested in global domination. This means the return of reality to your politics, the return of jokes to comedy, the revival of the idea that it is reasonable to have a home for your children and to able to afford to have them and buy one to live in.
At base, the MAGA project is an exercise in strategic prudence.
In counting the cost of the failed global project it explains to the population what has been lost, and for whose benefit.
All of us have been robbed by our politicians for decades.
This is not a case of one set of corrupt officials swapping the baton to another. This is a fulcrum in history, a grand disenchantment with utopian narratives, in which the formerly free world is coming to its senses. These people are finished.
Your children will not grow up in the political asylum you thought was inescapable.
This is the end of an age. Be kind to those who cannot accept reality.
After all, we have been trained for a hundred years to reject it for a fever dream.
I will return on Monday with the third chapter of my book A Brief History of Liberal Democracy.
Next Friday I aim to talk about why our culture is stuck, and where you can find some excellent examples of it - despite the efforts of our liberal censors.
Have a fruitful Lent on this Ember Day. Seek the grace of God and do not despair.
Life is wonderful.
Thank you for pulling this all together in such a coherent way.
President Trump has been a blessing so far, despite some concerns about his Ukraine strategy and relationship with Blackrock and Musk.
I have recently felt a profound sense of panic about my own country (England/UK) and the continuing efforts to subvert justice here, when we have a millenium of history behind us during which we forged widely-adopted principles of good law.
I welcome your feeling that this continual gaslighting, subversion of truth and the horrors of war cannot last for much longer, and pray (as a pantheist!) that we will get to that new reality soon.
Fantastic stuff! Thankyou for writing that!