Everything Is Going to Hell — Cheer Up!

I must open today's column with a confession: I screwed up badly this weekend.

Like my partner in thoughtcrime, PJ Media's own Stephen Kruiser, I take a 48-hour news sabbatical every weekend. When you spend your workweek almost drowning in the swamp of bad news, a little break is required to clear your lungs and remove the accumulated leeches.

Did I pick the worst weekend to follow the news, or what? Kruiser called it a "busy weekend for the worst of humanity," but he might have undersold it.

Everything everywhere in the West is going to hell on three different fronts, and the weekend's news — you know, the stories I wallowed in all Saturday and Sunday instead of waiting for Monday morning — provides three perfect (and perfectly chilling) examples.

Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer, were stabbed to death in their home, allegedly by their own son, Nick, who has a long history of drug abuse.

Two dead and nine injured at Brown University in a mass shooting where local authorities initially arrested the wrong person, so the actual target remains unclear. Was it the Jewish professor? The 19-year-old College Republican leader? We just don't know, but neither are exactly beloved by the murderous lefties in our midst.

Two Muslim terrorists opened fire on Australia's Bondi Beach — for 20 minutes! — in an antisemitic killing spree that left 15 dead (not including one dead terrorist) and another 42 injured (not including one injured terrorist).

So much death, all of it needless.

Assuming the early reporting is correct, we have a "migrant" terrorist attack, probably another lefty hit at a university, and a crazy person with a knife.

Crazies, criminals, and Islamic terrorists. For brevity's sake, I'm including violent lefties in with the criminals, but if you prefer to file them under "Terrorists," then I say go with it.

But then I had a happy thought, courtesy of the Blogfaddah himself, Glenn Reynolds. "If," he asked on Sunday, "the Intifada has been globalized, doesn’t that mean that it’s been, well, globalized on both sides?"

Glenn took it a step further.

"If it’s a global Intifada, then isn’t a mosque or Islamic 'charity' that, say, provided the guns to the Bondi shooters a legit target for droning? If not, why not? Can you have a global war in only one direction?"

Clearly, yes. But just as I and many others have been screaming into the void for a couple of decades or longer, Islam is at war with the West — as seen irrefutably on 9/11 and so many other dates since — but we choose to yammer on about "religion of peace" and other such nonsense.

Writing those words makes me wonder if our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were doomed from the start — not because of nation-building mission-creep that eventually did them in, but because our political and military leadership remained wedded to "religion of peace" instead of "rain death and destruction upon our enemies."

Yes, I think.

The West has plenty of enemies right within its open borders, and I don't (just) mean the estimated 18,000 Afghan terrorists helpfully flown into the US by the Biden cabal. The Left has been at war with traditional Western values since at least Marx, and more likely since Robespierre.

But they've changed tactics since the days of "Vive la révolution!" or "Dictatorship of the proletariat!"

Charlie Kirk once said that "Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America," and he nailed it. Should we let them when, at least we can enjoy — if only from the Beyond — some truly epic schadenfreude when the Islamists turn on their lefty enablers. If lefties understood history, they'd know that it's the useful idiots like themselves that the new regime murders first. But as I've written here before, if lefties understood history, they wouldn't be lefties.

Everything really is going to hell. But only because the most capable, innovative, and powerful people in the history of the world chose to allow it.

We can choose differently. It requires just four steps, very broadly defined — and only three of them require actually doing anything.

Here they are: