Webster

The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions." --American Statesman Daniel Webster (1782-1852)


Thursday, January 1, 2026

Happy New Year! and "10 Biggest Media Hoaxes of 2025" And a bonus Music Video

 

Happy New Year to my friends out there in the Blogosphere, Yes I'm working...Yes Its New Years Day, and Yes I work in the Aviation field, there are no such thing as a Holiday.  Anybody that works in what is classified as "essential, back in the Covid days or served in the Military  or classified as a "First Responder"knows what I am talking about.   I am squeezing in this post in real quick, I hope heads roll over the Somali daycare scams and some of the others but I do fear that after all the fuss dies down, it will be *Bidness as usual* and nothing is done, the apparatus that is known as the *deep state* will run interference so nobody gets punished....again unless they are from the "right side of the aisle" and they wonder why people's faith in our institutions are at an all time low.

  Because it is "New Years Day," I decided to throw out a bonus Music video.

I decided to go with U2 and the song "New Years day" because the video uses a lot of combat camera footage from the Soviets and I though that was pretty neat.  This album got a heavy playlist on MTV, that is where I heard of it and subsequently bought the CD a few years later when I was stationed in Germany from the PX at Robinson Barracks.

The boy on the cover is Peter Rowen (brother of Bono's friend, Guggi). He also appears on the covers of BoyThreeThe Best of 1980–1990Early Demos and many singles. Bono described the reasoning behind the cover: "Instead of putting tanks and guns on the cover, we've put a child's face. War can also be a mental thing, an emotional thing between loves. It doesn't have to be a physical thing."

    
"New Year's Day" is a song by rock band U2. It is on their 1983 album War and it was released as the album's lead single in January 1983. Written about the Polish Solidarity movement, "New Year's Day" is driven by Adam Clayton's distinctive bassline and The Edge's piano and guitar playing. It was the band's first UK hit single, peaking at no. 10, also becoming the band's first international hit, reaching for example no. 9 in Norway, no. 11 on the Dutch Top 40, no. 17 in Sweden and charting on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States (just missing the Top 50) for the first time in their career.
In 2010, Rolling Stone magazine placed the single at #435 on their list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". This song was also included in the Pitchfork 500.
    
The lyric had its origins in a love song from Bono to his wife, but was subsequently reshaped and inspired by the Polish Solidarity movement. The bass part stemmed from bassist Adam Clayton trying to figure out what the chords to the Visage song "Fade to Grey" were.
In 1983, Bono said of the song, "It would be stupid to start drawing up battle lines, but I think the fact that 'New Year's Day' made the Top Ten indicated a disillusionment among record buyers. I don't think 'New Year's Day' was a pop single, certainly not in the way that Mickie Most might define a pop single as something that lasts three minutes and three weeks in the chart. I don't think we could have written that kind of song."
     
"New Year's Day" is U2's fifth most frequently performed live song, with The Edge switching back and forth between piano and guitar during the song. It has been a standard on every U2 tour since its debut on 1 December 1982 at the first show of the War Tour's Pre-Tour. During the 1980s, The Edge used a Fender Stratocaster to perform this song, along with a keyboard. During the 1990s and 2000s (decade), he has alternated between a Gibson Les Paul Custom and Les Paul Standard. The Les Paul the Edge used to write this song was sold for charity. Up until the Elevation Tour, Clayton normally used a chorus effect on his bass guitar for this song live. In the Top of the Pops performance, Bono is seen playing guitar.
"New Year's Day" has appeared on many of U2's concert video releases including 1983's U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red SkyZoo TV: Live from SydneyPopMart: Live from Mexico CityU2 Go Home: Live from Slane CastleVertigo 2005: Live from ChicagoLive from Paris, and U2 3D.
The B-side of "New Year's Day", "Treasure (Whatever Happened to Pete the Chop?)", was never performed live. However, an early version known simply as "Pete the Chop" was played at some concerts in 1980.
During the Vertigo Tour at Silesian Stadium in Poland a quite remarkable example of fan action occurred. During New Year's Day, the lower sections of the crowd waved red coloured items while other sections waved white, creating the Polish flag and stunning the band. This was repeated during the U2 360° Tour at the same venue.




The video was one of their first to see heavy rotation on MTV. It was filmed in SälenSweden in December 1982 and directed by Meiert Avis. The band only appeared in the performance scenes of the video as it was filmed in the dead of the Swedish winter. U2 guitarist Edge revealed in the official U2 biography that the four people riding on horseback in the video that appeared to be the four U2 members were in fact four Swedish teenage girls disguised as the members of U2 riding on horseback with masks over their faces. This was done as the band were frozen from shooting the video in sub-freezing temperatures the day before. Their biography states that Bono refused to wear any headgear despite the cold weather and had a lot of trouble mouthing the lyrics. The video also features footage of Soviet troops advancing in winter during World War II.
The video made its debut UK television broadcast on Friday 31 December 1982, on the Channel 4 music programme, 'The Tube'.
U2 allowed free-of-charge use of this song in a spot prepared by the European Commission. This clip published on YouTube shows a transformation of Poland in last 20 years mixed with short scenes from today’s Warsaw seen from a perspective of a 20-year-old woman.

   I shamelessly clipped this from the "Federalist."




It turns out that when you spend every day parroting the most asinine conspiracies and narratives imaginable, people lose faith in your ability to play it straight pretty quickly. That’s the situation that America’s propaganda media found themselves in this year, as their credibility amongst the public hit the lowest level in recorded history.

For anyone who’s paid attention to their coverage of the 2025 “news” cycle, it’s not hard to see why. From running cover for leftist violence to gaslighting Americans about their role in the cover-up over Joe Biden’s ailing health, the corporate media’s bid to hide the truth was nothing short of remarkable.

So, as a public service, The Federalist has compiled a list of the top 10 biggest hoaxes run by our reality-deprived media throughout the past year. In no particular order, here they are.

Elon the ‘Fascist’

It didn’t take long after President Trump was sworn back into office for the media to pick up right where they left off after his first term.

While celebrating alongside Trump supporters at a post-inauguration event, X owner Elon Musk delivered remarks to attendees, in which he thanked them for making Trump’s victory possible. With his hand over his heart, the tech mogul then pointed to the crowd and said, “My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.”

Media hacktivists quickly leapt into action to falsely characterize the hand gesture as a “fascist” or “Nazi” salute. This included outlets like PBS News, which wrote on X, “Billionaire Elon Musk gave what appeared to be a fascist salute Monday while making a speech at the post-inauguration celebration for President Donald Trump at the Capital One Arena.”

Anti-Hegseth Campaign

From the day President Trump tapped him to lead the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth has been under a barrage of media smear campaigns and hoaxes. Throughout his Senate confirmation battle to become America’s next war secretary, the media ran endless stories featuring anonymous sources alleging wrongdoing at his prior places of employment and dishonest hit pieces about his personal life — all to keep him from being confirmed.

Even after failing to prevent Hegseth’s confirmation, the media have shifted their focus to ousting him from the position. Throughout the past year, these efforts have included pushing the Signalgate dudmanufacturing a “constitutional crisis” about a Pentagon-led prayer service, elevating the voices of unnamed disgruntled officers to trash Hegseth, and — most recently — fomenting a hoax surrounding the military’s strikes on drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean.

Wait … Joe Biden Wasn’t OK After All?

Despite outlets like The Federalist reporting on it for years, America’s propaganda press didn’t just ignore Joe Biden’s clear cognitive decline — they actively participated in the cover-up. At every turn of his presidency, the media did everything possible to run interference for the doddering Delaware Democrat and preserve their party’s political power.

It was only after Biden disgracefully exited stage right that media hacks like Jake Tapper felt it was OK to acknowledge what those who aren’t regime simps have long known to be true about the now-former president. Earlier this year, the CNN talking head and Axios’ Alex Thompson embarked on a media tour to hawk their new book, which promises readers an inside look at the Democrat-led effort they participated in to hide Biden’s decline from the American public.

If that’s not gaslighting at its absolute worst, then I don’t what is.

A ‘Maryland Man’

Given their willingness to turn a blind eye to the border crisis under the Biden administration, it came as no surprise when the media ran to sow falsehoods about President Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts.

One of the most prominent examples of this came to a head with the deportation of Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a credibly accused MS-13 gang member and wife-beater. Rather than inform their readers that Garcia is an illegal alien and detail his reported criminal record, the media orchestrated a full-blown disinformation campaign to deceive Americans into believing the Trump administration abducted an unsuspecting “Maryland man” off the streets.

One Associated Press headline read, “El Salvador President Bukele says he won’t be releasing a Maryland man back to the US.,” while an NBC News piece partially read, “El Salvador won’t return Maryland man to the U.S. …”

The disinformation op was but one of many that media hacks ran throughout the year to smear and vilify immigration enforcement operations throughout the country.

Whitewashing the Russiagate Scandal

The damaging, years-long Russia collusion hoax would not have been possible without the active participation of America’s corrupt media. So, when explosive records on the subject were released earlier this year, it wasn’t exactly shocking that these so-called “defenders of democracy” immediately moved to sweep it all under the rug.

Declassified by the Trump administration, these damning documents showed how Obama-era intel leaders included uncorroborated intel in a 2017 intelligence report ordered by President Obama that parroted the false claim that Russia “aspired” for Trump to win the 2016 election. Not only was this and other unsubstantiated intel included at the behest of officials like then-CIA Director John Brennan, but intel contradicting that central claim was left out of the report altogether.

[EXCLUSIVE: ‘This Should NOT Be Included’ — Read Intel Officials’ Objections To ‘Extremely Sketchy’ Steele Dossier]

The propaganda press wasted little time in downplaying the scandal it helped to create. From running dishonest headlines to spewing outright falsehoods, the brazen hackery was a sight to behold.

[READ: Shameless Accomplice Media Spins Again To Cover For Obama And Friends]

(Meanwhile, The Federalist — which conducts actual journalism — was awarded the 2025 Dao Grand Prize for Investigative Journalism for its work exposing the Russia collusion hoax.)

Sydney Sweeney’s Good Jeans

It’s hard to imagine how even the most deranged members of the corporate press could turn an ad for denim jeans into a controversy about “racism.” And yet, they somehow found a way to do it.

When actress Sydney Sweeney modeled for American Eagle’s summer jeans line, shrieking leftist harpies and other media numskulls immediately rushed to characterize the ad campaign as one that promotes “racism,” “white supremacy,” “eugenics,” and pretty much every other left-wing outrage word you can think of. And then, after being inevitably mocked for their stupid responses, masculinity-challenged media flakes like David French were there to tell us that it was actually those darn right-wingers who made up the entire controversy.

Smearing Charlie Kirk

If you thought the barbaric assassination of a young husband and father of two small children would be enough for the media to change their grotesque ways, then you are gravely mistaken. Almost immediately after the murder of Christian and conservative speaker Charlie Kirk, the despicable ghouls allowed to permeate cable news wasted no time in smearing him.

Less than an hour after news broke that Kirk had been shot, MSNBC (now MS NOW) correspondent Katy Tur characterized the TPUSA founder as a “divisive” and “polarizing” figure and attempted to frame the shooting around gun access and Utah’s “permissive” firearm laws. She furthermore appeared to express more concern about the political fallout for her Democrat allies than for Kirk, saying, “You can imagine the [Trump] administration using this as a justification for something.”

Meanwhile Tur’s then-colleague Matthew Dowd initially suggested that Kirk could’ve been shot as the result of a “supporter shooting their gun off in celebration,” and then pivoted to smearing Kirk as “one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures … who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech … aimed at certain groups.” (Dowd was later fired for his repulsive conduct.)

[READ: Debunking The Top 5 Lies The Left Is Spreading About Charlie Kirk After His Death]

The smears were two of the numerous media-led character assassination campaigns against Kirk that occurred in the wake of his assassination.

Excusing Leftist Violence

The assassination of Charlie Kirk. The attempted assassinations of Donald Trump. Attacks on ICE agents. The destruction of Tesla cars and dealerships. The firebombing of pro-life centers. The 2020 Black Lives Matter “summer of love” riots. The mafia-like murder of a health care CEO. The 2017 congressional baseball shooting. The attempted killing of Brett Kavanaugh. Transgender-led terror attacks on Christians.

These are but a few of the many acts of leftist violence to plague America in recent years — a problem that keeps getting worse by the minute. But according to our propaganda media, this is all just a figment of conservatives’ imagination.

[READ: While Media Denied Leftist Violence After Kirk Murder, Three More Left-Wing Attacks Happened]

When they’re not trying to downplay or “both sides” the issue, these so-called “journalists” are busy victim-blaming Republicans for getting attacked by Democrats’ wacko footsoldiers. And in the case of outlets like The Economist, they’ll even report out garbage studies conducted by literal Antifa to push the bogus narrative that political violence is really a right-wing problem.

Democrat Lawfare? Never Heard of It

If you pay close enough attention, you may notice a slight difference in the way the media covered the Biden administration and other Democrat prosecutors’ lawfare against Donald Trump and how they responded to the Trump administration moving to hold Dems’ corrupt allies accountable for their allegedly unlawful actions.

When Biden and Co. attempted to imprison Republicans’ 2024 presidential candidate on the eve of a major election, the “democracy dies in darkness” crowd could not have been more ecstatic. This unprecedented lawfare, media entities like The New York Times editorial board reasoned, was necessary to preserve what they professed to be the rule of law.

Yet when the Trump administration moved to hold figures like James Comey and John Bolton accountable for their allegedly unlawful actions, many of these same hacks have (unsurprisingly) been singing a different tune. Throughout the past year, they have twisted themselves into pretzels to deceive the American public into believing that this has nothing to do with the corrupt activities of such individuals and everything to do with Trump exacting “political retribution” against his enemies — all while ignoring their allies’ past lawfare against the president.

War on SCOTUS

The media’s bid to discredit the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative justices is not a new phenomenon. But this year, it took on a new phase.

With left-wing activists and groups filing lawsuits against the Trump administration at every turn, predominantly Democrat-appointed judges have been quick to grant these actors’ requests to issue overreaching injunctions designed to grind the president’s agenda to a halt. Several of these cases have since made their way up to the Supreme Court, which has stopped many of the legally dubious orders from going into effect while litigation continues in the lower judiciary.

Seizing the opportunity, the media have used the conservative justices’ willingness to stifle this judicial coup as part of their campaign to destroy the court. These regime mouthpieces have since adopted the bogus narrative that, by following the law, SCOTUS is doing the bidding of Trump, whom they gleefully paint as a lawless authoritarian.

“The Supreme Court Is Trump’s Partner in Crimes Against America,” a September Rolling Stone headline read.

“The overwhelming evidence that the Supreme Court is on Donald Trump’s team,” blared a September Vox article.

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

Feminism, Anti-racism, and the Unraveling of Western Civilization

 


I wrote this excerpt "Back in July 2020" if y'all want to read the whole thing.  I had read that thingie from American Greatness and it reminded me of what I wrote back in 2020.  The funny thing is that the White Dudes are going into the Trades to make a living, and it is a good living, but to me there is a long term effect in several generation, all the white guys unless they fall in the alphabet community, will be in the "worker class" category and that is considered a 2nd class status in a lot of cultures.  All the white guys will be blue collar and everyone else will be in the "white collar world", can you imagine the stigma, the discrimination?   The people that settled the world, took us to the moon, and all the great things that our culture did, now digging ditches because that is all our society will let them do because of "ancestral Sin?"     Don't know about you, but that is a frightening future.

    2020 blogpost

 Sure I am enjoying the Hollywood leftist eating their own, there is a certain satisfaction watching that happen after watching that cultural trainwreck coming into the station, after seeing them screw over their country for 20 plus years by embracing the latest and greatest of the leftest causes  all of a sudden to find themselves on the outside looking in and wondering "what just happened" and realized that they are 2nd class citizens now.   But the realization for me is that what happened in Hollywood is happening all over the United States especially in Corporate America.  We have  the CEO of NBC stating that he is pushing to reflect 50% diversity hire in his company in new initiative's  and right now his company is a mix of men and women and he states that he wants to set a cap of 25% of white males in his company and if memory serves, it about 38% white males  so he will have to early retire them, or offer severance packages or outright fire them to meet his goal.  Now this practice will become more widespread as the wave continues and more companies will do the same practice and it will be acceptable.  Sure it is discrimination, but nobody will fight it because of "systemic racism(tm)"  and if somebody tries to fight it in court they will be committing career suicide and they will be toxic for any future employment, Tell me I am wrong in this present corporate environment.

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By Edward Ring from American Greatness

Earlier this month, Compact Magazine published “The Lost Generation,” written by Jacob Savage, a man who spent fifteen years trying to build a career in screenwriting and finally gave up. He claims he was the victim of active discrimination as a white male, and backs it up with facts:

“In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent… White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023… In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69 percent people of color… In 2018, The New York Times replaced its summer internship with a year-long fellowship. Just 10 percent of the 220 fellows have been white men… Since 2018, only 14.6 percent of tenure-track assistant professors hired at Yale have been white American men. In the humanities, that number was just six out of 76 (7.9 percent)… Today, just one in ten millennial programmers at Sundance is a straight white man…”

Savage goes on to gallop through every other profession in America, citing statistics for each of them. The story stays the same. White males need not apply.

Meanwhile, only two months earlier, in October, Compact Magazine also published “The Great Feminization,” in which the author, Helen Andrews, describes how over the past decades, and especially in just the last ten years, most professions in the United States have become majority female. She writes:

“A much more important tipping point is when law schools became majority female, which occurred in 2016, or when law firm associates became majority female, which occurred in 2023… Today, women are 33 percent of the judges in America and 63 percent of the judges appointed by President Joe Biden… In 1974, only 10 percent of New York Times reporters were female, today, the female share is 55 percent… Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in 2023.”

The closest that Savage comes to exploring the implications of institutionalized anti-white, anti-male bias is to ask the obvious question: “Is the media more trusted now than a decade ago? Is Hollywood making better films and television? Is academia more respected? Have these institutions become stronger since they systematically excluded an entire cohort—or did abandoning meritocracy accelerate their decline?” In his article, weighing in at nearly 9,000 words, he mostly limits his focus to comprehensively quantifying how pervasive and extreme anti-white, anti-male discrimination has become in America.

Andrews goes further in her indictment of the anti-male bias that has transformed American institutions. Her opinion as to the consequences is unambiguous. She writes, “If wokeness really is the result of the Great Feminization, then the eruption of insanity in 2020 was just a small taste of what the future holds. Imagine what will happen as the remaining men age out of these society-shaping professions and the younger, more feminized generations take full control.” In case you’re still wondering what she means by that, she writes, as an example, that “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.”

The statistics offered in these two articles ought to convince any reasonable person that anti-white, anti-male bias is not just distorted fantasies promulgated by opportunistic right-wing demagogues. It is numerically indisputable, and it’s been going on, steadily getting worse, for a long time. It began back in the 1970s with affirmative action, which, in plain English, institutionalized discrimination in favor of less-qualified people if they belonged to “protected status groups.”

But in the 1970s, hardly anyone noticed, for obvious reasons. In 1970, America’s population of non-Hispanic whites was 89 percent, so if you shoehorned into your company or college student population 11 percent minorities to achieve proportional representation, it wasn’t going to affect very many white applicants.

Today, the impact is felt everywhere. The latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the non-Hispanic white population for people under 30 is now down to 47 percent. This means that non-Hispanic white males under 30 in America are now only around 24 percent of the population. And based on the trends cited by Savage and Andrews, their presence in American institutions is not merely whittled down to proportionate representation but disproportionate underrepresentation.

There is another dimension to this, of course, which is why it’s happening and how it’s being marketed. Because it’s gone well beyond the noble sentiment, expressed by Joe Biden in one of his more coherent moments, who said, “What’s wrong with trying to include people of diverse backgrounds?” Underneath that lofty ideal, unfortunately, is a culture that has turned venomously anti-white and anti-male.

This culture, despite some signs of a return to sanity, persists in every aspect of professional and political life. But to comment on the systematic marginalization of white males, to even identify its existence, is to risk losing credibility on whatever else it is you may wish to accomplish. It is not polite to recognize that you are being erased. It is a sign of racist, sexist, paranoid bigotry.

From the other side of this equation, there are no consequences. You may indulge in uninhibited demonization of the white male, and your professional risk is almost negligible.

This double standard cannot be accepted. These two articles, The Lost Generation and The Great Feminization, describe one of the most significant and rapid transformations of a civilization in the history of the world, and a transformation of this magnitude is not going to end well if only one perspective on its consequences is permissible in polite company or compatible with professional survival.

Nonetheless, I had no intention of commenting on these articles until I was triggered by a post on LinkedIn where a hedge fund manager with a Spanish surname attacked someone for using the term “settlers.” Their transgression had been to post a fascinating map of North America’s unmatched gift of navigable rivers, which, as they explained, made it easier for “settlers” to build a nation.

The rebuke to the use of the term “settlers” was articulate, and the moral outrage evinced by this hedge fund manager was dialed up to eleven, but when I checked his profile, staring back at me was an aging boomer with skin so white that if he went to a football game on a sunny day, his face would probably sprout freckles before the end of the first quarter.

And there in plain sight was the justification used to hide what is the transactional, economic, hypocritical, opportunistic underbelly of the great war on white men. They are to blame for everything. The land wasn’t “settled”; it was stolen. So now we’ll assign perpetually elevating legal privileges and status to “sovereign” tribal “nations” (translation: corporations with foreign investors who get to circumvent anti-gambling and anti-smoking laws). We’ll have “stolen land acknowledgements” prior to commencing any public meeting or allowing performers onstage in a theater. We’ll need to come up with reparations and reallocate vast tracts of stolen land to the “first peoples.”

This is one of the core premises of a bigger story. Along with slavery, it’s one of the “original sins” of the white male. Writ large, we bear collective guilt for conquering the world, and now, in penance, we must renounce and relinquish our culture, pride, our agency, and our participation; even our masculinity is toxic. We deserve to be erased.

Maybe this sounds like hyperbole, but the numbers don’t lie

The way Savage ends his essay is a tribute to his character. He writes, “I could have worked harder, I could have networked better, I could have been better. The truth is, I’m not some extraordinary talent who was passed over; I’m an ordinary talent—and in ordinary times that would have been enough.”

The question we must ask, however, is where these extraordinary times are taking us.

In a speech Andrews delivered on the topic of the Great Feminization, she offered two solutions. The first was to remove artificial pressures favoring women’s employment by reforming “anti-discrimination” laws and HR mandates. That solution would also go a long way toward eliminating anti-white discrimination. Andrews also proposed we address the “two-income trap,” the cost-of-living increases that have forced millions of women into the workforce.

Why are these solutions so hard to imagine? Why not restore a meritocracy? Why not rediscover the economic model where any person earning an average income can sustain a family? As AI and social media actively melt down our brains, shouldn’t selecting our engineers and teachers, and other professionals based on their individual skill and aptitude become an even more compelling priority? Now more than ever, don’t we need the smartest and hardest-working people, selected based on merit instead of group identity?

It is difficult today to even discuss the feminization of our institutions, a quantitative reality, much less propose a new approach. But the threats of feminization alleged by Andrews are even bigger than the impact it is having on our freedom and creativity as a society. It threatens our survival as a civilization. Women empowered by careers are not typically attracted to men whose careers have been sidelined. Marriages are down. Childbirth is down. Throughout the West, birthrates are so low that entire cultures will be extinct within a few generations. The birth deficit has been accelerating for the last 40 years, but we are only just beginning to talk about it, and there is no mainstream consensus for what to do.

The only acceptable solutions so far are to import replacement populations while replacing jobs with automation, and malign anyone who objects to this as sexist and racist.

The mainstream commentariat in America is literally incapable of honestly addressing the issues that matter in a way that will matter. They deny the existence, much less the harm caused by institutionalized anti-white and anti-male discrimination, feminization of our institutions, the existential threat of extinction-level rates of reproduction, and the inevitable chaos that will result if we continue to import non-white immigrants by the tens of millions who are then taught to resent white men, resent wealth, and view the land they’ve moved to as illegitimately stolen and hence up for grabs.

An example of a mainstream approach to profound challenges that is utterly vapid would be the recent bestseller by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance. In a nutshell, instead of proposing across-the-board deregulation of the laws that have choked the life out of American productivity and innovation, driving the cost of living sky-high (and forcing two-income households), the authors propose deregulating their favored industries—renewable energy and subsidized infill housing. To put it mildly, this is a hopelessly inadequate, ideologically hamstrung cop-out.

Co-author Thompson displayed further evidence of the fear and denial that prevent honest dialogue on the biggest challenges facing Western Civilization when, earlier this month, he wrote “The 26 Most Important Ideas For 2026.” This is a terrific essay by a top-tier writer and analyst. But #11 was revealing. He presented a chart showing the number of births to everyone living on the European Continent versus births in the one African nation of Nigeria. In 1950, more than 12 million babies were born in Europe, and fewer than two million were born in Nigeria. In 2026, European mothers had barely 6 million babies, half as many as 75 years ago, while in Nigeria, 7.5 million babies were born.

And what did Thompson have to say about this? “Presented without comment” was all he wrote. One may commend him for dipping his toe into some cold and forbidden water. But given Thompson’s verbosity and useful insights on 25 other “most important ideas,” he could have done much better.

Only taking it one step further, Andrews and Savage were willing to at least identify what has undermined our country and embittered a generation. That’s as far as they were willing to go. So far, only outcasts are willing to speculate as to the causes and motivations behind the numbers we see, and even offer solutions to change the trend. Some of these outcasts are extreme; others are genuinely searching with their compassion intact. But all of them, so far, are dismissed as dangerous extremists.

This must change. Time is running out for Western civilization.