Around 2020, the entire Western world shifted in unison. It had been tilting this way for some years, but it really started downhill more rapidly in 2020.
Someone fed every free nation the same poisonous idea: that traditional Western values were the enemy, and that an all-powerful government — preferably a world government — was humanity's only salvation. Someone told us to trade our freedom for safety, directly spitting in the face of Benjamin Franklin's warning against exactly that devil's bargain. An alarming number of people swallowed it without question.
That shift has been world wide. Look at the scale of that coordination. England. Every nation across Europe. Canada. Australia. All of them lurched toward the same ideas, at the same time, in the same direction. That kind of unison doesn’t happen by accident. Independent nations don’t spontaneously abandon the same values — the very values each nation’s culture was founded upon — simultaneously. Something, or someone, drove them in that direction.
Don’t take my word for it — look at England. Not as some distant cautionary tale, but as a live demonstration happening right now, in real time.
For years, the British state has been feeding the individual into the machinery of government will, one dissident at a time. Ask Tommy Robinson. Ask the people Keir Starmer’s government tried to muzzle by threatening to shut down the Unite the UK rally last weekend.
Count the citizens currently rotting in British jails for the unforgivable crime of posting political opinions, defending personal freedom, and standing up for traditional English culture — on social media. Not in the streets, not ripping up businesses, not assaulting the police. On their phones. On their home computers. Their very thoughts are being regulated, not unlike in the former Soviet Union or Castro’s Cuba.
The machinery running this crackdown in England on free expression has a name. On July 25, 2025, the Online Safety Act 2023 — seven years in the making, because apparently even tyranny needs time to polish its paperwork — roared into full enforcement under Ofcom, the UK equivalent of the FCC. The law places legal responsibility squarely on social media companies, search engines, and online platforms to hunt down and eliminate whatever the state decides to label harmful content. The state writes the definition. The platforms do the dirty work. And the citizen keeps his mouth shut — or else.
On the surface, the stated goal sounds noble: protecting people, keeping the internet safe. How thoughtful. How caring. In practice — in reality — the government handed itself a weapon, because apparently what gets enforced is anything that runs afoul of the current government… in this case, Labour.
Ofcom wasted no time. It swung that weapon straight at Tommy Robinson, banning him outright from Instagram and X. His X account eventually returned, but the message was clear: step out of line, and we erase you. Rather than debate Robinson in open exchange and defeat his ideas with better ones — the way free societies are supposed to work — the British government moved straight to threatening him with imprisonment. Much easier than winning an argument. Or so they figured.
As the video points out, all it really did was further inflame an already angry electorate, many of whom took to the streets in even greater numbers.
And nobody should pretend this happened overnight. The state didn't seize this kind of power over the individual in one dramatic lunge. It's far too clever for that. It moved one calculated step at a time, over years — each step small enough to avoid triggering outrage, each one locking in the gains of the last. Death by a thousand increments. The Boiled Frog. By the time most people noticed, the architecture was already in place, the exits were already closing, and the machinery was already humming.
The British people's current rage — the screaming for Labour's head, and Keir Starmer's head specifically — traces directly back to this. Millions of Britons are finally rising up against their government's authoritarian overreach. Good for them. But let's be honest: they're closing the barn door long after the horse has bolted, started a new life, and sent back a postcard. They waited. They hesitated. They hoped it would sort itself out. And now they're paying for that hesitation in hard currency.
Turn your eyes to Canada — a nation sprinting down the same road with equal enthusiasm. Ottawa delivers its tyranny with better manners and a more apologetic tone, but the destination is identical. And nothing illustrates this more vividly than Canada's MAID laws — Medical Assistance in Dying. What Ottawa launched as a narrow, compassionate exit for the terminally ill, the government has since expanded to swallow the mentally ill whole.
Now ask the question that nobody in power wants to answer: who gets to define mental illness? Why, the government does. Naturally.
The same government that criminalizes political speech, silences rallies, and decides what online content you're permitted to read — that government now holds the power to declare a citizen mentally unfit. And a citizen the state deems mentally unfit is a citizen the state considers expendable. Canada isn't sliding toward that conclusion, gang. It has — alas! — already arrived.
I wrote this warning years ago — back when we were fighting over Hillarycare and Terri Schiavo. The argument was simple, and it hasn't aged a day: the moment government runs healthcare, cost transforms into a political calculation, and your life becomes a line item in somebody's budget spreadsheet. One of the core axioms I've hammered in my writings for many years holds as true today as it ever did — when government seizes control of healthcare, every healthcare decision eventually becomes a political decision. Every single one. No exceptions. No exemptions.
Canada doesn't just suggest this. Canada proves it, in real time, with a real real body count.
And yet America's push toward universal government-run healthcare barrels forward in exactly the same direction, toward exactly the same cliff, with exactly the same cheerful ignorance of what waits at the bottom. We have Canada's example sitting right next door — a live, cautionary experiment broadcasting its disastrous results daily — and the architects of American universal healthcare look straight at it and see a model. That's not naivety. That's a choice.
Related: Multiculturalism, Islam, and the Canary in the Coal Mine
Here in the United States, the same blueprint has been executed on a slower timeline — but I beg you, do not mistake the slower pace for a different destination.
For years, the cultural machine has hammered home a single message: get mothers out of the home and get children into state-supervised institutions at younger and younger ages. The architects of this push sold it as “equality,” “opportunity,” and “liberation.” It was none of those things. It was always about one question, and one question only: who raises the next generation?
Because, you see, whoever raises the children owns the future. Where do you suppose “It takes a village” comes from?
Indoctrination has two non-negotiable requirements — time and exclusive access. You need the children young, you need them often, and you need to minimize the interference of parents who might ask inconvenient questions or teach inconvenient values. The state has spent decades methodically engineering exactly those conditions. It didn't happen by accident. It didn't emerge organically from shifting cultural values. Someone drew up the blueprints, and someone has been building on them ever since.
And we cannot ignore the sustained, deliberate attack on Christians and Jews. The reason isn't hard to find. Belief in a God above being more powerful than government stands as the single greatest obstacle to total state authority. Marx recognized this early. He didn't stumble onto it — he wrote it directly into his foundational documents. A people who answer to God will not bow to the state as their highest power. That makes faith a threat. And that is exactly why the state is treating it like one.
Our Scott Pinsker recently and correctly noted that one of the foundational aspects of communism is the removal of all religion from the culture. So, yeah, communist thinking is at the root of this, along with, of course, Islam. Both are seeking to alter our culture to meet their needs, not ours, and are using one half of our government toward that end. Note, however, that communist governments do not have much regard for Islamists either. At the moment, they are fellow travelers in their shared goal of dismantling the West and its culture, but if they ever succeeded, they would turn on each other in a heartbeat. We would be looking at something like the old limerick about the Lady and the Tiger.
There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.
Who would be who in that scenario will, I think, only come to a conclusion with a good deal of bloodshed. Better to arrange for such a clash to be impossible.
But back to the subject: God forbid anyone champions individualism or suggests that something — anything — might outrank the government in the hierarchy of authority. That person gets slapped with the label “narcissistic,” a word so elastic it apparently means whatever is most convenient that Tuesday. And of course, the Internet had to go and make things worse by giving these dangerous free-thinkers a megaphone. Thus the extreme measures we see in trying to control free speech on the internet, in the whole of the EU, which, in this measure, still includes the UK. (As an aside, the left in the UK is still pushing to override Brexit. Gee, guess why.)
Everywhere we look, Western culture is being uprooted by the governments of Western nations. James Bradshaw, back in 2024, raised an important point when reviewing a book by Oliver Roy called The Crisis of Culture.
Roy makes the astute observation that economic changes, such as the decline in industrial employment, have had a particularly significant impact on lower-income segments of society by depriving them of a “social and territorial base” in which working-class cultures could flourish.
Aside from secularization, mass immigration and the obvious shift in moral values that has occurred, the individualistic focus on identity politics is playing a massive role in this overarching crisis.
[…]
Roy’s argument is broader though and the basic problem he is addressing is more serious; this is no longer an issue of insufficient education, but a question of what, if any, substantive ideas, traditions and behaviors should be exalted.
Or, for that matter, discouraged and eliminated, as we have seen. Bradshaw takes a rather unsympathetic view of Roy’s work, but he does make the occasional valid point, even if he can’t bring himself to the obvious logical conclusion. I suppose he would say that was outside the scope of a book review. (Shrug)
Look, I recognize, as one of my commentators put it: “James Russell Lowell wrote, ‘new occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient good uncouth.’” But at the same time, we cannot, with any amount of logic, view all of this and, within it, the overt push for “multi-culturalism,” without recognizing the destruction it brings to the long-standing cultural structures within each individual culture, the very things that make us what and who we are as a people.
Our individual Western cultures both require and deserve defending, even defending from our own governments. That is ironic in itself, given my long-held belief that any government that wants to survive for long needs to understand its first duty is to defend and, if possible, expand the influence of the culture that gave it life. We now find ourselves in a situation where Western governments are actively fighting against the very values they’re supposed to be protecting and advancing. The sole exception to that being MAGA, of course. That, in turn, has become the biggest political fight in decades. It is, however, one we MUST win.
In a piece from last February, our Sarah Anderson points out:
The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life," he said. "And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.
And I note, what is "America First" but that? I suspect that's the very reason MAGA is objected to so vehemently by the left both here in the United States and abroad.
You may not recall Biden and company labeling Tea Party people “terrorists.” Similar labels have since been applied to MAGA. In a broader view, what is behind this? Well, China, for one, as the great Don Surber points out:
I am not surprised to learn the CCP—Red China—is behind this effort to stop the U.S. government from kicking illegal aliens out. After all, Tim Walz was its Manchurian vice presidential candidate, chosen by the Democrat Party because of his ability to milk social justice programs to fund Democrats. Come on. Do you really believe the DNC (Obama) would let a goofball like Kamala pick her running mate? They wouldn’t trust her to pick her nose.
Projecting cultural strength stands as the only real answer to these attacks. A society that refuses to defend its own values invites every grievance cult and ideological parasite to push harder.
But it’s funny how quickly “problematic groups” rediscover the value of boundaries once a culture stops apologizing for existing, and starts showing a little spine. It's what President Trump has been doing. And that, my friends, is exactly what is required of us — all of us — now.
