Eugène Delacroix, La Liberté guidant le peuple / Liberty Leading the People (1830), Musée du Louvre, Paris.

In the previous articles, we have covered a lot of ground already when it comes to indoctrination and demoralization. We started out with the indoctrinated individual: the one who tests you with questions, demands proof for everything you say and moves the goalposts when you get too close. Annoying but predictable and harmless the moment you recognize the script.

Then we moved on to the demoralized mind and things turned considerably darker. These are the people who have internalized the script and treat every critique as a personal attack. Their responses are almost always hostile and can turn dangerous. There is no middle ground when it comes to demoralization. Once critical thinking has shut down completely, the collapse tilts to fight or flight. Together they produce the perfect machinery of a society that starts policing itself.

Then came language. We traced how words are stripped of their original meaning, reloaded with moral weight and spread through activist networks into law and everyday life until no one recognizes the true meaning anymore. This is the moment when language itself creates fault lines that fracture Western society and facts become secondary to the moral weight assigned to words. As a result, people no longer disagree about interpretations of reality but start arguing about reality itself.

This is where we are now. The point where inverted language has been adopted by all the institutions and is spread as the new truth.

Let’s find out what happens next.

The Subverted Society

In 1984, Yuri Bezmenov gave an interview that has since been watched by millions. As a former KGB agent, he had defected to the West in 1970 and began warning about how the USSR used demoralization techniques to destabilize and ultimately dismantle its enemy societies from within. Bezmenov called it ideological subversion and he broke it down into four stages: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization.

Demoralization, he explained in his video, targets the foundations on which a society rests. Not its military or its economy, but its culture: religions, education, the social bonds between people, the legitimacy of government, the rule of law and the relationship between employers and their workforce. The goal of demoralization is to hollow out these institutions, for example by ridiculing religion, by providing children with textbooks telling them what to think and how to feel and by replacing community with state-funded bureaucratic institutions. Running through it all is the most powerful solvent of societies: the ideology of absolute equality, or equity as it is called today, hollowing out personal responsibility by replacing equal opportunity with equal outcomes.

Destabilization follows. When everybody thinks they are right or entitled, people are pitted against one another. Black versus white, poor versus rich, young versus old, the righteous versus anyone else. It is the moment when the demoralized society turns on itself and every relationship that once held society together becomes a battleground. As a result, differences that used to be resolved through conversation, now escalate into legal disputes or open confrontation.

When a society becomes so fragmented that nothing can be solved anymore and every disagreement becomes a battle for moral supremacy, crisis follows. Legitimate power structures lose their authority and are replaced by unelected organizations, self-appointed experts and activist groups. Media outlets appoint themselves as the arbiters of truth by spreading narratives that coincide with their beliefs, while repressing everything that contradicts them. The population, divided and suppressed, starts looking for a strongman to restore order. Of course, that strongman always steps forward, but on both sides of the divide. At the end of this stage, only two outcomes are left: civil war or a power grab that imposes stability by force.

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Normalization follows when the new power is in place and obedience is demanded. The very people who drove the subversion are now a liability and are cancelled or eliminated. One narrative replaces all others and the society that existed before is simply gone.

Bezmenov recorded his video in 1984 when the USSR was still a formidable power, and passed away shortly after. His model rests on one key assumption: that subversion is driven by an external enemy. But that enemy, the USSR, collapsed in 1991 and ceased to exist. Yet many western countries are in crisis today, precisely as Bezmenov predicted. The following tragic events illustrate how his model found its proof.

Between 1997 and 2013, an estimated 1,400 girls, most of them white and from care homes, were systematically raped and trafficked in Rotherham. The police, social workers and local politicians all knew, but for over a decade nobody acted. Later investigations revealed that officers looked away because they were afraid of being called racist. In the meantime, young girls were arrested for being drunk and disorderly while their abusers walked free. Fathers who tried to retrieve their daughters were detained by the police. A girl was found in a derelict house with multiple male abusers, leading to her arrest, not of the abusing men. The Casey Report of June 2025 confirmed that data on the ethnicity of perpetrators had been systematically avoided for years; it was a culture of blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness, and even good but misdirected intentions.

In contrast to the Bezmenov model, there was no foreign power behind this massive scandal. Government institutions had simply learned to place the risk of being called racist above the protection of children. In other words, we are being destroyed from within. But then the question is: what is driving it?

The Folly of Luxury Beliefs

Over the last decades, the most profound damage done to Western societies comes from people who mean well and who devote their lives to making the world more virtuous, more equal and more just. Yet their measures consistently produce the opposite result, driven by beliefs about how the world should work rather than how it actually does. And because the people who design these policies rarely live with the consequences, there is nobody to tell them they are wrong.

The term luxury beliefs was first defined by writer Rob Henderson, who observed that the upper classes had replaced status symbols with status convictions: ideas that are costless to hold at the top but carry real consequences for everyone below. In an earlier article I expanded on this definition, to capture what happens when luxury beliefs are converted to government policy:

Luxury beliefs are ideas grounded in good intentions and noble motives, but when implemented as policy, they often result in disastrous outcomes.

As such, luxury beliefs share five characteristics:

1. They are rooted in intentions: Luxury beliefs are based more on good intentions, assumptions, calculation models, and fallacies, rather than on solid, underlying facts.

2. They are detached from consequences: Individuals who uphold luxury beliefs often do not experience the negative consequences of the policies derived from these beliefs.

3. They are absolute: Luxury beliefs are frequently oversimplified to the extent that any nuance or alternative interpretations are disregarded. Consequently, well-founded criticism is almost impossible to acknowledge.

4. They cost a lot to implement with very low results: Luxury beliefs often demand significant financial resources without yielding measurable results.

5. They are a solely Western phenomenon: Luxury beliefs cease to exist when you cross the border.

Luxury beliefs are generally held by people who live insulated. They do not live in the neighborhoods their immigration policies affect. They do not sit in the classrooms their education reforms produce. They do not pay the energy bills their climate targets generate. As such, they see not reality as it is, but an idealized version of what ought to be.

It started in the 1960s, when a generation of students who rejected the established order went into academia. They went on to become the professors, scientists, sociologists, educators and historians who have been teaching our children ever since. The spread accelerated in the 1990s when Western universities expanded massively and a university degree became the gateway to institutional power. Graduates then flowed into functions where they could actively practice the worldviews they learned in college: government and politics, education, media and NGOs.

With enough people holding luxury beliefs in high places, the mechanism became self-enforcing. Hiring committees selected people with the same beliefs, creating a homogeneous class that now controls the institutions shaping public life. Inside that world, evidence that contradicts the belief is simply dismissed. The policy can therefore never be wrong: it is the people living with the consequences that have simply not understood it correctly, or have not made the right choices.

One of the clearest examples of luxury beliefs is the folly of genderism. Starting from a genuine concern that transgender people deserved better legal protection, Western institutions began replacing the biological category of sex with the self-declared category of gender identity. The intentions were good. The consequences were not.

Men who identified as women gained access to female prisons, changing rooms and domestic violence shelters. Male-born athletes began competing in women’s sports, breaking records and displacing female competitors. Women who objected were called transphobic. The luxury belief that gender identity must always override biological sex was absolute and it was absolutely non-negotiable.

But the biggest victims were the children. The same institutional machinery that had pushed gender identity into law moved into education. Children were taught that biological sex was a social construct and that they could be any gender they felt. What they were taught came straight from academia, where a multitude of studies citing one another had stripped gender from biology. In reality, these studies all drew from the same small dataset, provided by an even smaller network of clinics and researchers. Using the same data and the same methodology, they inevitably reached the same conclusions. Even so, the copied findings were reported as scientific evidence.

Those who objected publicly were destroyed. J.K. Rowling became the most prominent target: years of coordinated harassment, death threats and professional boycotts followed her public statement that biological sex is real. Academics, doctors, journalists and ordinary people who asked questions about the evidence or the safeguarding of minors were labelled transphobic, fired or deplatformed. Meanwhile, from the mid-2010s onward the number of adolescents referred to gender clinics increased tenfold, overwhelmingly girls. Thousands of minors started receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender reassignment surgery on the promise it was all safe, reversible and life-saving. When the evidence-base finally collapsed under independent scrutiny, thousands had already undergone irreversible procedures.

By then, the activists who had driven the gender agenda had moved on to the next moral emergency. After October 7, 2023, the same networks pivoted almost overnight to the pro-Palestinian cause. "Queers for Palestine" became the emblem of that shift: gay and transgender activists marching in solidarity with a movement that executes people for the same identity they march for.

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The Consensus Machine

At the root of Western democracy stands the trias politica: a separation of powers between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. Together they represent a system of checks and balances, where each independent power limits the other two. Yet when these three powers start to move in the same direction, democracy ceases to exist but in name only.

In the last three decades, Western institutions have become almost entirely progressive. The three powers now share the same mindset, the same luxury beliefs and the same moral language. As a result, they no longer correct each other, but reinforce each other in pursuit of the same objectives.

The engine behind this reinforcement is the non-governmental organization (NGO). For most of the twentieth century, NGOs were primarily associated with humanitarian aid. However, from the 1990s onward, governments started using the NGO to meet objectives for which they could not attain democratic support. NGOs became political and started presenting themselves as working in the public interest, while lacking the public mandate and accountability to do so.

To understand the game, one must follow the money. Governments fund NGOs whose objectives align with their own political agenda. Those NGOs lobby the legislature, provide expert testimony and take the policy objective to court when democratic support falls short. The judiciary, shaped by the same institutions and carrying the same luxury beliefs, rules in their favor and orders governments to implement and execute laws they could not pass through democratic means.

The European Green Deal is a clear example of how this works in practice. The European Commission is the author of Europe's largest environmental legislation. To get it passed, the EC channeled billions through its LIFE environmental subsidy program. The contracts were explicit: NGOs had to prove their lobbying had made Green Deal legislation more ambitious, actively promote the Nature Restoration Law, which faced the most resistance, and steer agricultural debates in a greener direction. The NGOs then went to work on the Members of the European Parliament who opposed the Green Deal, flipping their votes against the explicit wishes of their own constituents. And it worked. Despite fierce opposition the Green Deal passed and was subsequently presented as the will of the people.

The media closes the loop. Journalists come from the same universities and enter the newsroom carrying the same luxury beliefs as the politicians and judges they are supposed to hold to account. Furthermore, the outlets they work for are owned by a handful of conglomerates whose owners move in the same circles, sit at the same tables and share the same worldview. As a result, the news produced by these outlets is selective, amplifying what confirms the consensus and downplaying or ignoring what challenges it.

Together, politicians, judges, NGOs and media create a self-sustaining sealed system. The legislature produces the policy. The executive funds the advocacy. The NGO lobbies the legislature and takes the legal route when lobbying is not enough. The court validates the outcome and the media subsequently explains why it was necessary.

Each part of the system believes it is acting independently. None of them are.

One only has to point at the handling of COVID-19 to see how dangerous the consensus machine can become. From early 2020 onward, governments, courts, scientific institutions and media operated in near-perfect alignment. Lockdowns were imposed with court approval. Vaccine passports tied access to public life to vaccination, while doctors who prescribed alternative treatments were prosecuted and fined. Scientific institutions suppressed findings that challenged the narrative. Media outlets that should have been asking questions were instead enforcing the consensus. And social media platforms removed content and deplatformed professionals on government instruction. None of this required coordination. It only required a shared, unquestioned belief that the narrative was true and that deviation was a threat. Years later, with mounting evidence of the damage done, the consensus machine does not adjust. Mandates have been quietly dropped, but the excess mortality that started after massive vaccination with unknown mRNA is still being ignored. That is what makes the consensus machine genuinely dangerous. A dictatorship knows it is lying; the consensus machine does not. But the result is exactly the same.

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Why Consensus Ultimately Leads to Dehumanization

A sealed system that is convinced its consensus reflects truth is always threatened by those who believe otherwise. In order to survive, it must therefore silence dissent. We have seen what that looks like on an individual level: the demoralized mind that labels, excludes and ultimately condones violence against anyone who challenges its narrative. But when the entire society applies that same logic in unison, something far more dangerous emerges. The brake is gone and history has numerous examples to show us exactly where that leads.

On the path to dehumanization a demoralized society follows the exact same steps as the demoralized person, only on a grander scale. It starts with the label. Your opinion is not a well-meant critique, but an extremist or dangerous point of view. You are categorized as a fascist, a threat to democracy or a danger to public health. At its core lies the same worst-motive fallacy as we discussed in the previous article of this series: the reflex to assign the worst motive behind any behavior we don’t like. By labelling the person, we no longer have to engage their arguments. Bad people can of course never be right.

The second step is exclusion. You don’t negotiate with a threat and you certainly don’t provide a platform to a danger. On a societal level, that exclusion is almost always institutional: a bank that closes your accounts, platforms that remove you completely, or governments that deny you access to their countries because your opinion might incite division. Institutional exclusion is far more effective than a mob cancellation, because the institution that excludes you is the same institution that rules on your objection. You simply disappear, while the system that erased you continues to present itself as fair and the guardian of free expression.

The final stage is dehumanization. By this point, the hatred is real and widespread, often with an intensity normally reserved for someone who has personally wronged them, even though most have never even met the person they hate. The actual person has been replaced by a symbol of evil and evil must of course be destroyed, without remorse and without the moral hesitation that the destruction of a human being would normally provoke. It is at this stage that elimination becomes justified; of a person, of a people, of a nation. Every mass atrocity has been preceded by dehumanization, where people could no longer see through the label and justified the violence accordingly.

For years, Putin has been the devil you don’t negotiate with. That label alone has been enough to frustrate peace negotiations, close the door to diplomacy and sustain a war at enormous human and economic cost. No serious attempt has ever been made to understand what drove the conflict, because understanding evil is already a form of collaboration. The narrative is simple: we are good, Putin is evil and every means is justified.

It is precisely this label that prevents us from ending the war. Diplomacy requires us to see the human being on the other side of the conflict, but dehumanization prevents us from doing just that. The result is a war that keeps grinding because stopping it feels like moral surrender and letting the devil win. In the meantime, our moral crusade has had the opposite effect: sanctions meant to cripple Russia’s economy have instead crippled our own and the window for peace negotiations has long since closed.

The same mechanism played out in the medical world during COVID. Doctors and scientists who questioned the official protocol were labelled dangers to public health and spreaders of disinformation. Their findings were suppressed, their licenses revoked and their voices removed from the public debate. The institutions that were supposed to protect the integrity of medicine became the enforcers of the narrative instead. To this day, doctors are being prosecuted, fined and disciplined by health inspectorates and professional associations for having the audacity to deviate from the official narrative. It is a tragic example of how a society that immunized itself against correction ultimately turned the cure into something worse than the disease.

But even on the individual level, a demoralized society demands your absolute obedience. A social media post with ‘the wrong opinion’ is nowadays enough to label you a racist, conspiracy theorist or a climate denier. Execution follows swiftly in the form of shadow banning, algorithmic suppression and deplatforming, with no room for appeal. The European Union has built its own censorship complex with the Digital Services Act, which requires social media platforms to remove all content deemed illegal or harmful. In the United States, freedom of speech is secured in the first amendment, but that doesn’t deter institutions like the FBI or CIA from opening investigations when your opinion threatens that of the establishment.

From a world leader to a doctor to an ordinary citizen posting the wrong opinion, the mechanism is always the same: label, exclusion, punishment. A society that has fully internalized this mechanism has transferred control over reality itself. It’s not just silencing dissenting voices, it is silencing facts and replacing them with narratives. When the line between illegal and critical is drawn by the same institutions that benefit from the outcome, they do not only censor reality.

They decide what reality is.

In the next article we move on to what happens when reality becomes a forged concept and why the West is just as capable of propaganda and foreign interference as any non-western nation.

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The future you fear is already here. Recognize the script before it writes you out.

Thomas Couture, Les Romains de la décadence (decadent Romans) 1847, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Last weekend, the United States used military force in Venezuela, forcibly removing the country’s sitting president and transferring him to U.S. custody to face charges related to narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. The operation involved the extraterritorial use of force against a sovereign state and constituted a clear breach of multiple principles of international law.

The public justification offered by the United States did not engage with those legal violations. There was no attempt at rule-based argumentation. Instead, the act was reframed as fair and just: a necessary procedure to bring a dictator to justice where the law was said to have failed. President Donald Trump went even further, openly stating that the United States was now in control of Venezuela and its assets, including the country’s vast oil reserves.

Only weeks earlier, the European Union pursued a parallel course, seeking to confiscate Russian state assets held at Euroclear and redirect them to Ukraine. Sovereign assets are explicitly protected under both domestic and international law. Even the current practice of appropriating interest revenues already stretches those legal boundaries. Moving to confiscate the principal itself would cross them entirely.

Here too, the justification was not legal but moral. Because the EU deems Russia the aggressor in its war with Ukraine, seizing its assets to pay for damages in Ukraine would be fair and just: a righteous act in the absence of lawful authority.

In both cases, Western powers use moral language to legitimize why they are permitted to break international rules to which the rest of the world is expected to adhere. More troubling still is the fact that the Western international order itself established these rules after the Second World War precisely to constrain the abuse of power, protect state sovereignty and prevent exactly this kind of geopolitical aggression.

By invoking words such as fair and just instead of legal arguments, Western powers are not merely breaking the rules. They are hollowing out the framework that once distinguished authority from brute power. When the states that designed the post-war international order openly abandon its constraints and justify doing so through claims of moral superiority, they do more than undermine individual norms. They signal to the rest of the world that rules are conditional, international laws are optional and military power once again determines who’s boss. In doing so, they mark the end of Western civilization as it has existed since the Second World War.

The Original Meaning of Fair and Just

The phrase fair and just did not originate as a moral justification for immoral acts. Both terms describe outcomes that can exist only under clearly defined conditions.

Justice cannot be separated from law. It is neither a feeling nor an intention. Justice is the result of the correct application of a legal framework. It presupposes jurisdiction and established procedures. It also requires proportionality between act and response, and accountability of the authority enforcing the outcome. Whether an action or outcome is just cannot be asserted in advance; it can only be determined after the legal framework has been applied. In simpler words: there can be no justice without law.

By contrast, fairness concerns the conditions under which that outcome is reached. An action is fair only if the rules governing it are known in advance and applied equally to all parties. Those rules cannot be altered once the process has begun. Fairness offers no guarantee of a favorable result. It assesses only whether the process itself is impartial and stable.

Taken together, fair and just describe neither intent nor moral standing. They constrain the excess of power by subjecting it to a shared regulatory framework. An outcome can therefore only be fair and just if it is produced by rules that pre-exist the action, applied equally to all parties and binding the authority enforcing them.

This implies a crucial condition: acceptance of outcome. A system can only be called fair or just if its results are accepted even when they are unfavorable. Being constrained by rules that prevent a state from achieving its desired outcome is not an injustice. It is evidence that the system is functioning as intended.

Even when some powerful states have long acted in violation of these rules, the existence of a shared framework restrained power often enough to prevent escalation and large-scale conflict. The difference today is not that rules are being broken, but that their binding force is openly denied and replaced with moral claims.

Seen this way, fair and just were never tools of moral elevation. They were instruments of self-restraint. They transformed raw power into legitimate authority by making its exercise predictable, contestable and limited.

This is why in essence the rule-based international order functioned for decades. Until now.

How We Got from Illegitimate to Fair and Just

A visible turning point in the geopolitical inversion of fair and just was the 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo during the Yugoslav war. NATO acted without a United Nations mandate and carried out a large-scale military campaign that resulted in significant civilian casualties. After the operation, the alliance openly acknowledged that the intervention had been illegal under international law, yet claimed it was legitimate.

That formulation mattered. By admitting illegality, NATO reaffirmed international law as the governing standard against which the intervention ought to be judged. Yet by framing the intervention as a tragic necessity required to end the war, the alliance avoided confronting the legal breach. At this point, international law was still treated as authoritative, even as it was overridden.

In the decade that followed, the Kosovo exception became standard practice. In Afghanistan after 2001, military intervention was framed not only as self-defense but as a just response necessary to protect civilians and restore order. When the legal justification based on weapons of mass destruction collapsed in Iraq in 2003, the intervention was reframed as enforcing justice, removing a tyrant and preventing future harm.

This pattern culminated in Libya in 2011. Acting under a narrowly defined UN mandate to protect civilians, NATO expanded the mission into regime change while continuing to describe the operation as fair, just and necessary. At this stage, fair and just no longer referred to compliance with a legal framework. They described how legal constraints could be stretched or reinterpreted. When that proved insufficient, they were exceeded.

After Libya, the practice of stretching legal mandates hardened into something more structural. In Syria, repeated U.S. and allied airstrikes were carried out without a UN mandate, but were justified as necessary and just responses to chemical weapons use and humanitarian suffering. In Yemen, Western powers continued military support and arms transfers to coalition forces despite mounting evidence of civilian harm, framing their role as fair and responsible engagement rather than as participation in an unlawful conflict.

In both cases, binding legal frameworks no longer functioned as the decisive source of legitimacy. Political declarations and informal coalitions took their place. Appeals to responsibility and values subsequently filled the gap. Just was used to legitimize the action itself, while fair served to normalize its conditions and consequences. Neither term was the result of any form of legal assessment but deployed to cover for the absence of one. In essence, the law was already sidelined, though not yet openly discarded.

That final step has now been reached. In Venezuela, the United States no longer attempted to place their actions within any recognizable legal framework. The extraterritorial use of force, the removal of a sitting head of state and the claim of control over national assets were first and foremost presented as fair and just for the United States itself: a legitimate assertion of power, interest and entitlement. Only in a second step were these actions framed as fair for the Venezuelan people, cast as liberation from a dictator and the restoration of freedom and order.

The EU has arrived at the same destination through financial rather than military means. In its attempt to confiscate Russian sovereign assets held at Euroclear, the EU openly acknowledged that existing legal frameworks offered no clear basis for such action. Instead of resolving that problem, it dismissed it. Because Russia was deemed the aggressor, confiscation was declared morally fair and just.

On both sides of the Atlantic, fair and just have now been fully detached from law and repurposed as its substitute. They no longer describe outcomes played by the rules, but function as axioms that authorize action by invocation alone. Anyone who questions such actions is accused of defending injustice or siding with evil, thereby neutralizing any form of legal debate. What remains is power exercised without constraint, responsibility or accountability; precisely the situation the rule-based order was designed to prevent.

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The End of Western Civilization as We Know it

Trust comes on foot, but leaves on horseback. Within the Western hemisphere, actions such as the attack on Venezuela may be presented as decisive or even laudable: the removal of an untrustworthy dictator, order restored, justice served. Outside that echo chamber, the interpretation is very different.

What the rest of the world observes is not moral leadership, but a divided and declining West openly breaking the rules it once declared universal. It sees moral language used to sanctify the use of power. It sees that the rules imposed on others are optional for those who enforce them. It sees that fair and just no longer function as constraints, but as markers of rank with the West on top.

The result is a collapse of trust. A system that exempts itself from its own rules cannot be relied upon, negotiated with or bound by agreement. Once reciprocity disappears, legitimacy cannot survive. What remains is power asserted by moral superiority rather than grounded in law.

The global response to this shift is already visible and largely pragmatic. An increasing number of non-Western states no longer treat the West as a stable or reliable partner. Publicly, cooperation continues. Quietly, dependence is reduced and unwound wherever possible.

Over the past decade, countries within and around the BRICS framework have expanded direct trade relationships. They have developed parallel financial and payment systems and reduced reliance on Western-backed institutions and the petro-dollar. Western sanctions and military interventions intended to isolate individual states have only accelerated this process. When access to markets, reserves and security can be withdrawn unilaterally, dependence becomes a strategic risk. The more coercive these tools become, the stronger the incentive to build outside the Western framework.

In effect, the Western hemisphere is steadily losing both its customers and its access to the raw materials on which it depends. It enters this phase already burdened by high debt levels and a highly financialized and weakly productive economy. It is also structurally dependent on resources located outside the West and weighed down by extensive regulatory overhead. Under such conditions access, cooperation and trust are strategic necessities.

Rather than mitigating those vulnerabilities, current Western actions deepen them. By enforcing compliance through sanctions, confiscation and claims of moral superiority, the West has demonstrated that agreements, property, and even sovereignty are conditional upon them.

The response of the rest of the world will be economic and institutional rather than military. As trust continues to erode, non-Western countries will increasingly seek to reduce their exposure to Western systems that have proven conditional and discretionary. Trade relationships will be diversified, financial reserves placed outside Western-controlled frameworks and reliance on Western-backed institutions steadily reduced.

As access narrows and isolation deepens, the material foundations that sustained Western power begin to fail. A system dependent on external resources, global markets and continuous capital inflows cannot survive once those inputs are restricted. For decades, the Western standard of living has been maintained through debt rather than productive capacity. As trust erodes and access diminishes, that debt becomes unserviceable.

What follows is the breakdown of a system that can no longer sustain itself materially or financially. Military power may give a short reprieve, but cannot hold the structure together. The result is the end of Western civilization as we know it.

The future you fear is already here. Recognize the script before it writes you out.

Paul Klee, Twittering Machine (1922), Museum of Modern Art, New York

Author’s Note:
This article introduces a step-by-step model that clarifies how inverted language can evolve into a tool of institutional control. It is not a universal formula. Different terms may follow different routes before entering this process. What follows is a description of the process itself, the structural logic, rather than a claim that every term moves through the steps in exactly the same way.

The Drift from Meaning to Control

In the previous article, I examined how language is stripped of its original meaning, reloaded with moral weight and turned into a tool of psychological and social control. That first part focused on the mechanism itself and on how individuals and groups internalize inverted language. This second part examines what happens once that vocabulary is absorbed by institutions: when governments, legal systems, educational structures and administrative bodies begin to speak the same moral language and impose it as the new normal.

Some readers noted the use of predominantly progressive examples. Language inversion is indeed not confined to one political orientation. The reason for focusing on progressive terminology is structural rather than ideological. Over recent decades, progressive vocabulary has been codified in law, embedded in policy, integrated into education, enforced through corporate compliance and normalized through media and cultural institutions. By contrast, conservative language largely remains rhetorical. This asymmetry is decisive. Only the side that holds institutional power can mandate vocabulary and it is precisely this capacity that transforms language from persuasion into enforcement.

This article traces the path a single term can follow once it enters the machinery of power. It shows how moralized language moves from activists and academia into policy, from policy into law and from law into everyday life. Along this path, inverted meaning becomes compulsory: a word becomes a doctrine, a doctrine becomes a rule and a rule begins to define the limits of what may be thought, said and lived.

Once the meaning of key terms has been altered, no formal restriction on speech is required. A sanctioned reality emerges and those who speak outside its boundaries quickly learn the consequences. People begin to regulate one another through vocabulary alone, mobilizing social, professional and legal mechanisms to enforce conformity. Deplatforming and self-censorship become ordinary features of public life.

If this process is already underway, the question is no longer whether language shapes reality but how much of our reality has already been reshaped without our noticing.

The Transmission of Moral Language into Power

Contrary to popular belief, and unlike the dystopian “Newspeak” presented in George Orwell’s 1984, linguistic control does not begin with governments inventing new words behind closed doors. By the time a term appears in legislation or official policy, it has often been circulating for years within activist networks and academic environments.

It is only after inverted language becomes embedded in legislation, policy and education that the wider public encounters these redefined terms for the first time. By then, an ideological position has already hardened into an administrative norm, making substantive rebuttal largely ineffective.

Behind this transformation lies a multi-stage process in which a voluntary rhetorical shift becomes an institutional obligation. Boundaries of acceptable speech can then be moved without the need for explicit censorship.

This process is not transparent and it gains rigidity as it moves through the institutions. The following steps outline how a single word can travel from the margins of discourse to the center of institutional power.

Step 0 – Origins of Meaning

Redefined terms such as antiracism and gender identity do not begin as legal categories or policy tools. They start as concrete responses to concrete problems. The moral weight they now carry was not part of their original meaning.

As described in the previous article, antiracism emerged in the 1950s as a call for race-neutral laws and equal treatment under the law at a time when Black Americans faced daily discrimination. The term gender identity appeared in the same period, introduced by psychiatrist Robert Stoller to describe the sense of belonging to one’s biological sex. Any incongruence was classified as a psychiatric disorder. It was a binary clinical term explicitly tied to male and female, used in the diagnosis and treatment of intersex and transsexual patients.

For decades, both terms remained within these boundaries. They referred to specific realities, without any moral framework attached to them. Their meanings were understood and largely uncontested.

Until they began to shift.

Step 1 – Redefinition and Academic Legitimization

Redefinition begins when an existing term is given a new moral meaning. Words that once described concrete realities are reframed as markers of injustice, each carrying an implied hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed. The wording assumes that a serious problem already exists and that the new term is the only honest way to name it. The language is presented as compassionate and progressive, yet structured in such a way that disagreement is easily recast as hostility toward the vulnerable.

This shift follows different routes. Antiracism was reinterpreted by legal scholars associated with Critical Race Theory, who tied it to systemic racism, unequal outcomes and inherited group responsibility. Gender identity was detached from biological sex through activist reinterpretation and broadened into an inner, self-defined sense of gender. In both cases, a descriptive concept became a prescriptive framework.

Once a redefined term enters academia, its function changes. Instead of being questioned, it becomes the starting point of inquiry. A researcher studying racial disparities begins from the premise that structural racism exists. In gender studies, the validity of the revised term is not examined; its assumed effects, mechanisms or social implications are.

As publications accumulate, a second mechanism takes over: reinforcement through citation. Each paper builds on earlier work, creating a dense network of references that appears to confirm the underlying idea without examining it. Consensus forms through repetition and is then treated as evidence.

A third mechanism completes the cycle: funding. Grants and institutional incentives reward research framed in terms of antiracism, structural inequality or gender identity, while work that challenges the redefinitions and its implications struggles to gain support. This structural imbalance, reinforced by repetition and consensus, creates the belief that the revised terms are neutral, objective and scientifically grounded.

With academic consensus in place, the terminology is ready for the next phase: political adoption.

Step 2 – Political Adoption

Once a term has acquired academic legitimacy, it enters politics carrying the appearance of scientific certainty. Policymakers adopt the vocabulary not because its assumptions have been tested, but because it arrives framed as research-based language grounded in expert consensus. This framing shields the term from scrutiny and allows any opposition to be portrayed as a rejection of “the science.”

At this stage, the new terminology begins to shape legislation and policy agendas. Concepts such as antiracism, equity and gender identity are introduced into strategic documents, action plans and administrative guidelines. Political actors present these terms as neutral tools for correcting societal problems, even though their meanings remain broad and open to interpretation.

The European Commission provides a clear example. Under the banners of combating racism and protecting LGBTIQ communities, it launches action plans, funding programs and policy frameworks that encourage member states to embed concepts such as structural racism, equity, diversity and inclusion into national policy.

In the United States the same dynamic appears through executive orders. Federal agencies are instructed to identify systemic barriers and to advance racial equity, not equality. Additional guidance tells institutions to treat gender identity as equivalent to biological sex, elevating identity-based terminology to the level of official policy.

Political adoption begins with broad commitments. Recommendations and strategies appear first, followed by budgets and incentives that reward compliance. Each step reinforces the vocabulary, pushing it to become the default frame through which problems must be analyzed and solved.

At this point the terminology has gained political legitimacy. It now sets the stage for the next phase: legal codification.

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Step 3 – Legal Codification

Once supranational bodies adopt the new terminology, national legislatures translate it into binding law. Civil and criminal statutes are expanded with provisions that rely on the new definitions, giving them legal force. At this point the vocabulary is no longer advisory. It carries consequences.

In Europe this shift is visible in both antiracism and gender law. Scotland’s 2021 Hate Crime and Public Order Act introduced the offence of “stirring up hatred” against groups defined by protected characteristics such as race, religion, sexual orientation and transgender identity. The statute, however, does not specify what “stirring up hatred” entails. Interpretation is left to police, prosecutors and courts.

Germany’s 2024 Self-Determination Act goes in a different direction but follows the same pattern. It allows individuals to change legal gender and first name through a simple declaration at the registry office. Self-declared gender identity becomes the controlling legal fact, overriding biological sex in administrative and civil contexts.

The United States shows the same dynamic. New York State’s 2021 law declaring racism a public health crisis frames health disparities as evidence of systemic racism. It mandates statewide efforts to advance racial equity. Around the same time, the New York Gender Recognition Act introduced self-attestation for gender markers on identification and birth certificates. Here too, subjective identity becomes the decisive legal category.

By framing disparities as evidence of structural injustice, these measures treat individual agency as irrelevant. Equity becomes the expected outcome even when the inputs are unequal. And because the new terminology is now written into law, it falls to administrative systems to enforce it.

Step 4 – Institutionalization

Once the new terminology has been written into law, public institutions translate it into procedures, reporting structures and administrative standards. At this stage the language no longer expresses a principle. It functions as an operational rule.

In Europe this process takes the form of regulatory alignment. Ministries, agencies and municipalities revise their procedures to match the new legal categories. They add reporting requirements, create oversight bodies and introduce compliance mechanisms to enforce them. Bureaucratic harmonization ensures that every public authority works with the same definitions. Deviations trigger audits, investigations or administrative penalties.

In the United States institutionalization takes shape through compliance frameworks. State agencies, school districts, health departments and licensing boards embed the terminology in performance metrics and administrative reviews. Institutions must demonstrate alignment with the statutory language to avoid exposure, funding loss or regulatory intervention. Here, accountability replaces harmonization as the primary enforcement tool.

Despite these differences, the underlying dynamic is the same. Institutionalization begins inside government itself. Antiracism measures start with representation targets for protected groups, followed by audits and reporting systems designed to monitor and enforce those targets. In parallel, administrative systems replace sex-based fields with identity-based categories, making self-declared gender the default across government records.

When the terminology has been fully absorbed into rules and procedures, it becomes the reference point for education. It is at this point that schools and universities begin to teach it as reality.

Step 5 - Transmission Through Education

After institutions have standardized the new terminology, it becomes the reference point that education is expected to reflect. School systems align their curricula with the categories used by public authorities. This begins with learning objectives and examination criteria. Textbooks and teaching materials follow, presenting the new vocabulary not as a recent redefinition but as the correct description of reality.

Teacher-training programs reinforce this structure. Educators learn to identify and correct “bias” through the same categories that shape administrative practice. In the classroom, students are taught that deviation signals error and that older terminology belongs to discredited worldviews. The new language becomes the filter through which they learn to interpret themselves, others and society.

As the terminology is presented as settled fact throughout the curriculum, it gradually acquires the status of belief. Students are taught that group disparities prove systemic racism and that gender identity is the primary category of personhood in the same way they learn foundational skills. Over time, a generation grows up navigating the world through definitions that no longer describe reality but replace it.

It is at this point, when the new terminology has been embedded in education, that the media begin to treat it as common sense.

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Step 6 – Normalization by Media

After the education system has established the new terminology as factual, media outlets begin to treat it as the natural frame for public discussion. Journalists adopt the vocabulary as the default way to describe events, groups and conflicts. Concepts that were once academic or administrative now appear in headlines, news reports and commentary without explanation.

The effect is immediate. When media use the redefined terms as the starting point for reporting, alternative vocabularies fall outside the boundaries of what can be said. Voices that question equity frameworks or the effectiveness of DEI measures are presented only in selective opinion pieces, often framed as extremists or conspiracy theorists. In the same way, people who point to biological sex or raise concerns about self-identification are portrayed as hostile or anti-trans, rather than as critics engaging with material consequences.

Through repetition and selective framing, the vocabulary becomes the only legitimate way to speak about social and political issues. Commentators who use the approved terminology are presented as authoritative. Those who do not are sidelined, omitted or reduced to caricature. Over time this creates a linguistic horizon in which public debate is narrowed to positions that fit within the dominant frame.

Note that this process does not require formal censorship. It operates through omission, framing and the consistent refusal to acknowledge alternative concepts. In this way, consensus creates the impression that only one perspective is legitimate, pushing every form of critique to the margins and eventually into oblivion.

As media normalize the terminology, corporations begin to adopt it as well, treating it as the language required to manage professional, reputational and economic risk.

Step 7 – Corporate Adoption

Once media have normalized the new terminology, corporations adopt it as operational necessity. They do not do so out of ideological commitment but to minimize reputational, legal and economic risk. In this environment, the vocabulary used in public discourse becomes the vocabulary expected in professional settings.

Employers adjust their internal policies to match the dominant language. Compliance departments introduce reporting systems, training modules and behavioral guidelines that reflect the categories used by public authorities and reinforced by media. HR policies follow the same pattern, embedding identity-based terminology into codes of conduct, recruitment practices and workplace standards.

For example, DEI programs operationalize antiracism through mandatory training and performance expectations. At the same time, pronoun policies and identity-based conduct rules enforce the use of gender terminology derived from activist and academic frameworks. Employees learn that professional security depends not only on their work but on their adherence to the approved vocabulary.

This produces a manufactured consensus. Because governments, schools, media and businesses all use the same terms, it appears as if society as a whole agrees on their meaning. Deviation begins to carry real consequences. A misplaced sentence in an email or on social media can lead to disciplinary action, reputational damage or dismissal. Critique becomes indistinguishable from misconduct because language itself, rather than action, is enough to trigger intervention.

It is at this point, when institutional, social and economic pressure align, that language becomes an instrument of control.

Step 8 – Language as a Weapon

Once the new terminology governs public, corporate and institutional life, it becomes an instrument of control. Individuals are no longer judged for what they do but for the words they use and the offence categories their speech is mapped onto. A misplaced sentence on social media can lead to police intervention, pre-trial detention or criminal charges. A casual remark at work can trigger complaints, suspension or termination. Where legal consequences once required conduct or intent, language now substitutes for both.

The shift in explanatory frameworks completes the transformation. For example, when antiracist frameworks are treated as structural fact, individual agency loses relevance and equal outcomes become the benchmark of justice. People can be denied jobs or admission not because they lack merit but because they lack the required identity category. Pointing out the disparity is framed as racism, victim-blaming or an expression of dominant-group hostility. Similarly, when gender self-identification is treated as superior to biological sex, the result is unequal and unsafe conditions in female prisons, shelters, changing rooms and sports. Subsequently, objections raised by women are reframed as hostility rather than recognized as material concerns about safety, fairness or the loss of sex-based protections.

In this environment, dissent becomes indistinguishable from wrongdoing. Classification, rather than intention, generates the offence. Speech is no longer a form of expression but an actionable event. Free expression remains intact in law, yet in practice deviation carries personal, professional and legal risk. As a result, most people adapt their behavior and limit their vocabulary to avoid consequences, completing the feedback loop and allowing the system to sustain itself through the language it created.

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How Inverted Language Splits The West

When inverted, moralized language becomes part of everyday vocabulary, it creates fault lines that eventually fracture any society. The conflict between Israel and Gaza shows this with unusual clarity. Here, the competing narratives no longer describe events but impose interpretive frameworks onto them. Facts become secondary to the categories used to organize them. As a result, people do not disagree about interpretations of reality but about reality itself.

Before continuing, I want to make clear that I do not take sides in this conflict. I use it because both camps rely on inverted language to impose absolute moral frames. When each fact is reclassified through a chosen lexicon, nuance collapses and the conflict becomes unreadable. Put simply: when both sides justify their positions through inverted language, it becomes impossible to distinguish right from wrong, truth from distortion or even reality from projection.

At the core of the divide are two incompatible linguistic worlds. In one, Israel is framed as a colonial genocide project and every military action is read as proof of extermination. In the other, any criticism of Israeli policy is treated as antisemitism, terrorist sympathy or an attempt to delegitimize the state. The same events are processed through vocabularies that assign contradictory meanings. Narratives no longer report facts but overwrite them, producing parallel realities that cannot be reconciled.

This dynamic becomes clearer when authoritative voices adopt moralized frames. A notable example is political scientist John Mearsheimer, whose academic status gives his commentary the appearance of analytical legitimacy. In interviews and essays on Gaza, he described the Hamas attack of 7 October as a “breakout from a concentration camp.” This reframes a terrorist assault on civilians as an act of liberation and imports Holocaust-associated terminology into a geopolitical analysis. Because of his scholarly reputation, the framing circulates widely in critical media and online commentary, where it is repeated as if it were an objective interpretation rather than a semantic inversion. On the opposite side of the spectrum, commentators reduce every Palestinian political claim to terrorism or rejectionism, treating large-scale civilian casualties as the unavoidable product of terrorism and cultural hostility. In both cases, language determines the meaning in advance and evidence is retrofitted to match the category.

This mechanism is particularly destructive for the West. Western political culture depends on shared definitions, common evidentiary standards and the possibility of rational deliberation. Inverted, moralized language collapses these foundations.

Both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli actors rely on inverted language, but only one of these vocabularies aligns with the moral frameworks that Western institutions have already internalized. Universities, media outlets, cultural organizations and NGOs largely operate within an antiracist and decolonial lexicon, which mirrors the terminology used in pro-Palestinian narratives. As a result, alternative framings are not weighed or debated but reclassified as prejudice, complicity or hostility. The recent campus protests across the West clearly visualize this dynamic: occupations, barricades, vandalism and clashes with university security were carried out by students acting on a one-sided frame they had been taught to regard as moral truth rather than as one perspective among others.

Institutions cease to function as neutral intermediaries; they reinforce one linguistic world while parts of the public inhabit another. Consequently, the middle ground collapses, policy debates lose their meaning and the shared civic vocabulary that once held Western societies together dissolves.

A society that no longer shares a reality cannot govern itself. It loses trust in its institutions, abandons procedural reasoning and replaces politics with moral combat. That is what happens when inverted language becomes the primary lens through which a society understands the world.

Next time, we will examine what happens when a society is subverted through demoralization: the point at which it collapses without a single shot being fired.

The future you fear is already here. Recognize the script before it writes you out.

John Adams Whipple, Hypnotism, ca. 1845, daguerreotype, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Author’s Note
This subject cannot be reduced to a few paragraphs. The dynamics of linguistic weaponization are complex, touching psychology, culture and power. For that reason, I have divided the analysis into two parts. This article focuses on the mechanism itself: how language is stripped of meaning, reloaded with moral weight and used to control thought, along with its effects on individuals and groups. The second part will examine what happens when this process is absorbed by institutions and governments and how it reshapes the moral and political landscape of the West.

The examples discussed here are drawn from progressive movements. That choice does not imply that language weaponization is unique to the left. It can and does occur across the political spectrum. The present cases are simply those that, in my view, most clearly illustrate the scale of polarization now fragmenting Western society.

The Hammer Which Forges Reality

In the previous article, we explored how indoctrination hardens into demoralization. I defined a demoralized person as someone who has internalized a prescribed narrative so deeply that it has become part of their identity, shutting down critical thought altogether and turning every challenge to that narrative into a personal attack.

I discussed why the demoralized mind no longer engages in dialogue but instead labels and ultimately condones violence against anyone or anything that conflicts with its beliefs. I also explained why demoralization always tilts to the extremes of fight or flight. What I did not address is how demoralization spreads once it takes root in a society. This article, and the one that follows, will trace how that contagion spreads.

At the core of both indoctrination and demoralization lies a moral filter that predetermines intent. This is the Worst Motive Fallacy: the tendency to assume the worst possible motives behind any behavior we dislike. If someone challenges the approved narrative, they are not mistaken; they are malicious. And of course, the end justifies the means when fighting evil and violence, whether verbal or physical, becomes acceptable to those who take pride in their own virtue.

I will trace this fallacy throughout the article, as it operates beneath every layer of language control. For a deeper look at this psychological mechanism, I wrote a separate piece last year, which you can find here: The Worst Motive Fallacy.

From my own experience, speaking up against attacks on Jewish people in Western countries is almost always interpreted by Gaza-support groups as proof that I am a Zionist and an uncritical supporter of Israel. I have been called a “Zionist liar” and held personally responsible for the deaths of non-Jews worldwide. All for refusing the idea that a religious conflict in the Middle East could ever justify violence against civilians in Amsterdam, Manchester or New York.

This reflex illustrates what happens when language no longer describes reality but enforces moral allegiance. Once language control redraws the boundaries of free speech, debate becomes impossible. Words are stripped of their original meaning, labels are weaponized and entire categories of thought are declared off-limits. As a result, language stops being a bridge between people and becomes a border. Those who use the “right” words are granted moral citizenship; those who do not are cast out as threats. The moral map of society is redrawn. Not by law or reason, but by vocabulary.

The Machinery of Meaning

Words do not become weapons overnight. Beneath the surface lies a psychological mechanism: a three-stage process that strips words of their original meaning, reloads them with inverted morality and spreads the new definitions across society. Language is thereby transformed from a tool of shared understanding into an instrument of social control. Each stage enables the next, ensuring that dissent is disqualified before it is even heard.

The first stage is semantic unmooring: words are detached from their empirical, historical, and moral anchors. “Racism,” for example, no longer requires discriminatory action or intent. A single remark or even a vague feeling of discomfort is enough to label someone racist, regardless of context or factual accuracy. Similarly, “fascism” is no longer used to describe a historical system rooted in state terror and ultranationalism, but to denounce anyone who questions the prevailing moral order.

Once words lose their connection to evidence and history, they no longer point outward to reality but inward to emotion. Meaning becomes reactive rather than descriptive. The listener no longer asks, “Is it true?” but “How does it make me feel?” In that shift, language stops measuring what is true and starts measuring what feels right.

The second stage is moral inversion. Once meaning is severed from reality, words become empty vessels ready to be filled with whatever serves the narrative. And because they retain their familiar sound, they pass unnoticed. No one objects to “safety” or “inclusion” when “safety” means keeping you from harm and “inclusion” means that your different opinion is regarded with the same candor. But when “safety” means silencing dissent and “inclusion” means punishing deviation, words are reframed to mask control as care.

This fusion of language and morality is the most insidious phase of the process. The word “good” is no longer a moral description but becomes an ideological position. Violence, censorship and public humiliation can then be justified, not in spite of morality but in its name. The inversion is complete when coercion is explained as compassion or when violence is justified in the name of peace.

The third stage is language as a gatekeeper of social belonging. Once words have been reassigned their new moral weight, they become a code of access. Speaking the approved terms signals virtue; using the old meanings marks you as untrustworthy. People begin to police each other’s words as proof of allegiance. Old statements are audited and any hesitation to fully agree is interpreted as potential dissent. The community no longer relies on shared values but on shared phrasing.

Ultimately, language no longer describes reality. Instead, it draws a boundary that keeps the righteous in and the dissidents out. On different sides of this border, people can no longer connect through language, because the same sentence now carries incompatible moral weight. And when dialogue is no longer possible, it is replaced with moral diagnoses.

These distortions in meaning do not remain confined to words. Once language itself is reshaped, it begins to reshape the mind that uses it.

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How Language Control Constrains the Demoralized Mind

Humans are not rational beings who think in numbers or logic; they think in language.
Language, spoken or non-verbal, provides the framework through which perception is organized, representation is formed and judgment is expressed. It shapes how reality is filtered long before reason begins its work.

In that context, words are not neutral vessels carrying well-defined meanings untouched from mind to mind. They are shaped by interpretation, moral filtering and group dynamics. Through this process, language becomes the architecture of thought itself, determining not only what can be said but what is perceived.

When the meaning of foundational words is systematically detached from empirical reference, the cognitive architecture of language begins to warp. It does not merely change how we communicate with each other; it alters our capacity for independent thought. As a result, our minds are not only misled but lose the ability to recognize that they are being misled.

Language control is a powerful tool to push an indoctrinated mind into a demoralized one. By redefining meaning, alternative theories and perspectives become trapped in language shaped more by morality than by fact. In such a state, the act of offering an alternative interpretation or a different opinion is no longer received as an invitation to dialogue but experienced as an intrusion into morally ordered thought.

This is the logical endpoint of a process in which language no longer describes reality but enforces a prescribed narrative. The demoralized mind does not evaluate the content of an alternative perspective but labels the speaker a threat. The response is exclusion. Labels such as “spreading disinformation,” “feeding extremism,” or “undermining democracy” are invoked as ritual incantations to reaffirm the boundary between the righteous and the dangerous, thereby restoring the illusion that the moral universe remains intact.

As language narrows, perception contracts with it. Words cease to describe the world and begin to dictate which parts of it may be seen. Emotion becomes the filter of thought, admitting only what affirms the moral story already believed. The fewer perspectives one entertains, the more secure one feels in one’s righteousness. Certainty replaces curiosity and the mind mistakes its confinement for clarity.

What begins as an inward distortion soon extends outward. When the same inversion is shared by many, polarization becomes the only possible outcome.

Divided by Design

Once language reshapes thought, its logic inevitably extends outward. It becomes a gatekeeper, no longer describing the world as it is but sorting the people within it. In-groups and out-groups form around a shared allegiance to a redefined vocabulary. At the core of this groupthink lies a rigid victim–perpetrator binary in which every action is read through the lens of identity. If you belong to the oppressed, your behavior is resistance by definition. If you belong to the oppressor, every syllable you utter is taken as proof of complicity. Context vanishes, nuance fades and individual agency dissolves into group identity. And because this language assumes its own righteousness, anyone who dares to criticize is automatically labeled a threat.

How this groupthink operates becomes clear in the next three examples, where the redefinition of words not only deepens division but conceals coercion beneath the language of equality, peace and justice.

The Race-Based Thinking of Antiracism

Antiracism is not a 21st-century invention. The term was already used in the 1950s, when civil-rights leaders promoted race-neutral laws and equal treatment under the law, regardless of skin color. At the time, the Jim Crow laws still enforced daily discrimination against Black Americans. Only with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were all race-based statutes abolished and discrimination on racial grounds formally prohibited.

For decades, racism was understood as discriminatory behavior rooted in personal prejudice and identifiable in actions or policies. That view began to shift in the 2010s. Under the influence of Critical Race Theory, until then a fringe ideological framework that recasts inequality as the result of institutionalized racism, activists such as Ibram X. Kendi repackaged its core ideas for a mass audience. Racism was redefined as any policy or practice that produces unequal outcomes between groups, regardless of intent or design. Under this new definition, racism became systemic by default, since every unequal outcome is taken as proof of oppression.

As a result, antiracism no longer means opposition to racial discrimination but the pursuit of race-conscious policy: hiring quotas that exclude white candidates regardless of merit, university admissions that downgrade academic performance in favor of ancestry and corporate training that assigns moral status by birth. Identity has replaced responsibility as the measure of virtue. A white person is racist by default unless they endorse race-based policy; a person of color is exempt from criticism because their actions are framed as resistance.

In a short time, antiracism has become the ideological mirror image of the Jim Crow order while producing the same logic. It divides society by race and assigns rights, opportunities and moral worth accordingly. The only difference lies in the moral justification.

Within this framework, “white privilege” functions less as a historical observation than as an inherited sin, passed down like property through generations. The result is entrenchment. By making race the single lens through which equality is seen, contemporary antiracism deepens the very divide it claims to heal. It anchors society in the past, demanding endless penance for sins no living person committed. And because this redefinition presents itself as the only moral stance, dissent is recast as proof of racism and white supremacy, regardless of context or intent.

The same inversion appears in the language of tolerance.

Why the “Religion of Peace” Is Not About Islam

After 1945, Western Europe rebuilt its ruins and redefined its conscience. The Holocaust and the collapse of colonialism shattered the belief in Western moral superiority. From guilt grew new principles: protection became virtue and demanding accountability was branded imperialism. This moral reversal was formalized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Refugee Convention (1951), alongside broader political and cultural efforts to never again abuse power or deny protection to the vulnerable.

In this atmosphere, Western governments brought in workers from Turkey, Morocco, Algeria and Pakistan to rebuild their economies. When the oil crisis of 1973 halted recruitment, hundreds of thousands were left without work yet were nevertheless invited to stay. Family reunification soon followed and what began as a temporary labor scheme quietly morphed into a permanent presence. Moral conviction outweighed economic sense, laying the groundwork for the mass immigration Western Europe still grapples with today. From the outset, integration was seen as coercion and rejected in favor of cultural preservation. As a result, large Muslim communities, now numbering some 45 million, still grow up largely in cultural isolation, sustained by a Western belief that non-interference is the highest form of virtue.

In the United States, a similar moral reorientation took shape through a different history. The legacy of slavery, segregation and Vietnam had produced a doctrine of white guilt expressed through antiracism and anti-imperialism. Power became synonymous with moral corruption and the center of gravity shifted from principle to identity. Universities and media translated this policy shift into hierarchies of privilege and oppression. Although Islam itself had little presence in America, it was nevertheless adopted under the banner of anti-colonial solidarity and recast as resistance to white imperialism. At the turn of the century, guilt over the past had become the currency of the future on both sides of the Atlantic.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, transformed this shared moral reflex into official doctrine. Only days after the attack, President George W. Bush declared Islam “the religion of peace.” The phrase had nothing to do with theology; it was a political statement meant to calm domestic tensions, prevent reprisals and preserve national unity. Yet Western leaders rushed to endorse the line and within weeks a new moral doctrine was born. In Europe, it spread through NGOs, education and media; in the United States it merged with the language of race and identity. But the gesture of reassurance almost immediately hardened into a kind of moral zeal: to question the phrase was to risk moral condemnation. Protection shifted from Muslims as a people to Islam as a faith, silencing any attempt to analyze Islamist ideology and/ or its link to violence. As such, criticism of both immigration and Islamist intolerance became a moral offense overnight.

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Once “the religion of peace” became official truth, European institutions adapted accordingly. The goal was no longer to understand or to solve, but to remain morally untarnished. Police, courts, and social services quickly internalized this creed. In Britain, grooming gangs that abused thousands of girls were ignored for years because officials preferred the comfort of innocence to the risk of being called racist. In Germany, the mass assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015 were first reported as “public disorder” until witnesses forced the truth into daylight. In Sweden, public crime reports stopped listing offenders’ origins after 2005 to avoid “stigmatization.” When causes are buried under compassion, policy turns into therapy rather than governance. Across Europe, sexual and ideological violence by Muslim perpetrators was downplayed or stripped of ethnic reference to avoid “fueling right-wing extremism.” The result is bitter irony: by denying reality, governments eroded public trust and helped create the very extremism they claimed to prevent.

In the United States, the slogan “Islam is peace” was quickly absorbed by the idiom of American identity politics. Academia and media framed suspicion toward Islam as a new form of prejudice and to criticize Islamist ideas was to risk social excommunication. Within a few years, government agencies, universities and corporations started adopting “anti-Islamophobia” campaigns that blurred the line between scrutiny of belief and hostility toward believers. The same moral inversion that had reshaped Europe soon took hold in America: a militant faith was rebranded as a religion of peace and its criticism recast as an act of hate.

From the 2010s onward, progressive movements turned the “religion of peace” into a moral cause of their own. Feminists who once fought religious patriarchy now march beside men who preach it, convinced that solidarity matters more than consistency. LGBTQ activists, people who would be executed under Islamic law, carry signs reading “Queers for Palestine,” presenting radical Islam as a victim of Western freedom. In this strange alliance, identity outweighs principle and emotion replaces coherence. The same reflex that once sought moral safety now demands moral surrender.

The consequences are profound. By redefining tolerance as silence and respect as submission, progressives have created an atmosphere in which liberal values can no longer defend themselves. Criticism of illiberal practices such as forced veiling, child marriage, honor killings, female genital mutilation and the murder of homosexuals is dismissed as “Islamophobia.” Meanwhile, those who suffer most under Islamic rule — women, religious minorities, dissidents and sexual minorities — are ignored because their oppression disrupts the West’s narrative of Muslim victimhood.

The media completes the circle by reframing or omitting Islamist violence. Terror attacks in Europe are described as isolated incidents or as reactions to “marginalization,” while massacres and sectarian killings in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia rarely reach Western headlines. In this moral order, intent outweighs fact and any criticism, however reasoned, is instantly relabeled as hate.

The same moral logic now extends beyond religion into activism, where virtue itself has become a license for coercion.

The Peaceful Protests of Antifa and Extinction Rebellion

Unlike antiracism, Antifa originated in twentieth-century Europe. It began in 1932 as part of the communist resistance to the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy. The term resurfaced in the 1970s among anarchist left-wing movements that opposed the capitalist order of Western Europe, using violent tactics reframed as protection against the return of fascism. With globalization, Antifa networks spread across the Atlantic and merged with anarchist and anti-globalist groups. Apart from sporadic clashes, most protests remained marginal until 2016, when the election of Donald Trump supplied a new moral enemy. Antifa rebranded its mission as the fight against populism and began targeting anyone who deviated from the approved narrative of inclusion and progress.

Extinction Rebellion emerged later, in 2018 in the United Kingdom, as a climate movement inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. It initially presented itself as non-violent civil disobedience, yet its rhetoric soon turned apocalyptic: “Act now or die.” By redefining climate change as an existential war, Extinction Rebellion since then legitimizes the paralysis of public life under the banner of saving the planet.

Both movements undermine democracy and the rule of law while claiming to defend them. Violence, intimidation, vandalism and mass disruption have become accepted practices to “protect” the planet and the weak. Antifa fights fascism by imitating it; Extinction Rebellion claims to defend life by disrupting it. Their logic rests on the conviction that their own actions stem from moral purity while dissent can only arise from evil intent. In this inverted language, as long as the cause is declared just, breaking the law is called courage and silencing others justice.

The West is no longer divided by class or creed but by design. Its fracture is sustained by a professional, urban and predominantly female class that operates the institutions of culture, education and communication. From positions insulated from material consequence, they shape the moral language that governs those who are not. In the next part, we will trace how this inversion of language embeds itself within institutions and begins to hollow out society from within.

The future you fear is already here. Recognize the script before it writes you out.

Jacques Louis David, The Death of Socrates, France 1787

In 399 BC, the Stoic Socrates was condemned to drink the poison chalice for corrupting the youth of Athens by teaching them to think for themselves.

In the first part of this series, we mapped the five telltale signs of an indoctrinated person. We discussed some handy tools to tiptoe around these people and find your exit before you’re swallowed whole. And while it can be mildly entertaining to spar with people who only repeat slogans, you will discover that the discussion hardens fast and can turn dangerous once demoralized minds enter the room. That’s what we will discuss in this article.

Demoralization is the mature version of indoctrination. It’s the stage where critical thinking has shut down altogether, arguments no longer work and the armor against facts is thicker than concrete. Demoralization is more than someone holding a strong belief. They have shut down every alternative, replaced dialogue with defense and turned dissent into danger.

In their eyes, you are not just wrong. You are dangerous for being wrong.

This second article dives into that shift. We will follow indoctrination as it hardens into demoralization, splintering between militant certainty and silent surrender. It’s here that debate dies, identity rules, and danger begins. Let’s unravel the mechanisms behind demoralization: how thought decays into defense and why the outcome can only be fanaticism or surrender.

The Art of Demoralization

The Origins

The use of demoralization techniques to break your opponent’s will is as old as war itself. It’s psychological warfare, intended to crush morale before the first shot is fired. Through the years, armies have perfected the craft. By combining exhaustion, relentless propaganda and constant pressure, they convince enemy soldiers the war is already lost, enabling victory without much fighting.

In 1984, the former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov made the concept famous when he described how the USSR used demoralization to ideologically subvert Western societies. According to him, it would only take a single generation to demoralize a society and create citizens so confused they can no longer distinguish fact from fiction, truth from propaganda and even safety from repression. He argued that, once demoralization takes hold, the immune system of a culture shuts down and no amount of evidence can bring clarity back.

We will return to the societal consequences of demoralization later in the series. Here, I want to talk with you about demoralization on a personal level: How do people reach that point where the approved narrative is the only truth left, even when their own eyes register something entirely different? Why do people stay silent when injustice stares them in the face? And since when has it become acceptable to cheer the murder of someone simply for not sharing your beliefs?

Let’s find out!

The Demoralized Person

On an individual level, I would define a demoralized person as follows:

Where the indoctrinated person is still running an external script complete with slogans and approved sources, the demoralized person has become the script. The narrative is no longer external but fused with the self. Questioning the idea is treated as questioning the person. And so the narrative becomes a matter of survival.

The clearest sign of a demoralized person is the fervor with which they defend their statements. You post an argument and what comes back is an emotional overreaction, wildly out of proportion to the argument itself. They will not even consider your reasoning. To them, your words are the proof that you are dangerous. The response is never factual. Instead, you are branded a Nazi, a Fascist, or accused of sleeping with the enemy. To the demoralized mind, the argument is already so obviously false it deserves no attention. But by voicing it, you have become the enemy.

Why Demoralization Is Different from Indoctrination

Demoralization is often mistaken for indoctrination, as if it were just a more severe case, but they are not the same. Indoctrination is the stepping stone to demoralization.

The indoctrinated person is still running an external script. They attack your arguments with rehearsed slogans, cling to the authority of experts and cite the approved sources. Push back and argument gives way to feelings and personal anecdotes; things that can, of course, never be wrong. When confronted, their response is often dismissive or mocking. You are treated as naive, misguided or simply uninformed. Imagine indoctrination as a virus: you can get infected, even seriously ill, but you can still fight it off and recover.

Not so with demoralization. Here the narrative has been internalized, as if the virus had taken root in their very identity. Your arguments are not even considered and to question the narrative brands you a traitor. Alternatives are not weighed; they are not even seen. When confronted, a demoralized person will not simply dismiss you, but lash out with hostility using your arguments as proof of your malice. You don’t get a debate. You get a trial and the verdict is already written: Nazi, Fascist, traitor or whatever fits their mood.

The easiest way to distinguish whether you’re dealing with an indoctrinated person or a demoralized one is their attitude towards you: the indoctrinated treat you as a fool; the demoralized treat you as a threat.

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How Demoralization Emerges

Demoralization doesn’t just happen overnight. It is the result of unrelenting pressure and propaganda that wear down judgment, rewire perception, and ultimately invert morality. Below I will outline three of the main drivers. Each of them could fill a book on its own, but for the sake of space I will only sketch their contours here. They will return later in this series, illustrated with concrete examples. Let’s take a closer look.

1. Cognitive Dissonance Overload

The first driver is that your brain is flooded with contradictory information. You are told one thing, yet you see another and the clash keeps repeating. Every time your eyes and ears disagree with the approved narrative the tension grows, especially when questions or doubts are met with ridicule. Most people can’t live long in that state of constant dissonance. Eventually, something has to give.

The pressure usually breaks at the weakest point: trust in your own senses. When you are told often enough that what you see is not what you see, eventually you start making adjustments. The endless repetition of the same narrative chips away at your confidence until even the most basic judgments feel uncertain. Doubt creeps in: maybe the narrative is not wrong, but I am.

When every contradiction is answered with the same repeated line, the mind eventually surrenders. The constant rehearsal of the narrative wears down the ability to judge independently, until even obvious facts feel uncertain. This is what philosophers call a breach in epistemic trust: the basic belief that you are able to tell truth from falsehood at all.

Once that doubt has taken root, social pressure does the rest. The fear of being mocked, isolated or cast out triggers the survival instinct. Conformity feels safer than resistance. You stop asking whether the story is true; you assume it must be. And then comes the final turn: you join the chorus that mocks those who still trust in their own senses.

2. Exclusion and Intimidation

Social exclusion is the way the indoctrinated and demoralized punish you when you are not willing to surrender your mind. Knowing full well their arguments do not hold up in court, they have developed extensive methods to oust you out. The first line of enforcement usually comes from the indoctrinated. They are not yet hardened enough to treat you as an enemy, but they will still correct you. It comes as a mocking remark, a dismissive laugh, a lazy label thrown in your direction. These are warning shots. At this point the goal is not to destroy you but to ridicule you in the eyes of others, trying to make you doubt yourself. The pressure is light, but persistent.

The second line of enforcement comes from the media and tech companies. What begins as ridicule now turns into exclusion. Your posts are suppressed by algorithms or shadow banned. Suddenly, messages appear under your latest post that you are distributing misinformation accompanied with a link to the correct narrative. Your posts are deleted, your accounts cancelled and your voice censored. If you have managed to build some kind of public profile, media steps in with their own profiles of you, actively manipulating the image people have of you. Your world shrinks as your professional reputation is chipped away and your defense is actively silenced. Most people give up here, the cost of dissent too high to continue any longer.

The third stage begins when you refuse to back down or when your voice carries enough weight to be seen as dangerous. That is when the demoralized step forward. You are no longer considered to be mistaken; you are considered a threat. You start receiving death threats. Online mobs coordinate DDOS attacks on your website and social media. Coordinated harassment overloads your inbox, your cloud storage is hacked and private information is exposed to the world. Your private address, phone numbers and family details are doxxed. Eventually, what started as online harassment spills into the real world: loved ones are followed home and harassed. Photos taken at a schoolyard are posted publicly. Protesters appear at your door; threats move from comments to direct messages and physical confrontations become possible.

What begins as intimidation to nudge you into conformity, escalates into real danger if left unchecked. What we will see next is that when demoralized minds are not kept on a tight leash, violence will follow.

3. Moral inversion

In this third stage, you cease to exist as a person and become a symbol of all that is evil in the world. Everything you say is labelled dangerous, everything you do is taken as proof of your evil nature. You are deliberately dehumanized and demonized. That switch matters, because our brains, steeped in millennia of superstition, are wired to hunt the devil in our midst.

By this time, media and high-profile voices push only one narrative: you are dangerous and you must be silenced, whatever the cost. People who have never met you freeze at the sound of your name. Your name incites hatred and violence is quickly reframed as a necessary measure to stop a greater harm.

Once these moves are in place, the crowd dynamic changes. Public shaming becomes ritual. You are always wrong, even when you are right. Groups appear at your door not merely to intimidate, but to enforce their will through physical assault. Media coverage excuses the perpetrators and offers moral cover, explaining that the violence was your fault: you are presented as the malice that provoked the reaction.

That licensing of violence is the final step. People stop questioning proportionality or justification; they cheer the violence and applaud whoever has the courage to remove this latest symbol of evil.

And then comes the bullet.

The Two Faces of Demoralization

There is no middle ground when it comes to demoralization. No neutrality, no objectivity. Once critical thinking shuts down, collapse always tilts to one of two extremes: either the broken will of silence (flight) or the militant certainty of fanaticism (fight).

Demoralization is also not bound to one side of the political spectrum. Its outcomes are psychological, not political. Any ideology can breed them, from the far left to the far right, from religious zeal to secular dogma. The faces may change, the slogans may differ, but the pattern is identical: when the ability to distinguish fact from fiction dies, people either surrender or they attack.

1. The Broken Will

Flight is what most people retreat to when their minds can no longer hold the pressure: they become passive, uncaring, uninterested in anything except their own small little world. These are the people who stopped believing they can make a difference, who replaced curiosity with cynicism and who stopped trying “because nothing will ever change.” Look them in the eyes and you will only find a void where love and joy used to reside. They’re no longer alive, they survive.

A horrifying example of what the flight response looks like in practice was the recent murder of the Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska. She was stabbed to death on a full light rail in Charlotte. Many passengers witnessed the attack but froze, unable or unwilling to act until the train stopped and police could arrest the perpetrator on the platform.

But demoralization is not only physical, it’s moral as well. We’ve all met those people who tell you privately or off the record that they agree with everything you say, but will never admit it publicly because their inner circles would not tolerate dissent. These people are more afraid of losing their social position than they are of losing their own authenticity. Demoralization has made them so numb, so conditioned to fear the judgment of others, that they prefer to live in a lie rather than risk standing in the truth.

This is what flight really looks like: not only failing to stand up for others, but also failing to stand up for yourself. A society that has reached this point no longer needs censors or police to silence dissent. People are quicker to censor themselves.

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2. The Militant Certainty

If flight is surrender in silence, fight is the noise of militant mobs: loud, relentless and uncompromising. These are the people who no longer argue because they already know everything there is to know. They don’t listen, they don’t doubt, and they have no moral objections to taking justice into their own hands because they believe themselves above the law.

The fight response is the kind of demoralization that hits the news: professors shouted down by their students for not being ‘woke enough.’ University buildings wrecked in the name of moral causes on the other side of the globe. ‘Peaceful protests’ that mainstream media kept praising while entire neighborhoods burned in the background, stores were looted and cars set on fire. And these are still the mild examples, because at least they let you walk away alive most of the time.

The militant form of demoralization does not need much to turn violent. They’re the Antifa groups waiting outside your door to knock some sense into you, or turning up as counter-demonstrators to escalate any rally that conflicts with their beliefs. It’s the murder of Charlie Kirk, shot with bullets inscribed with slogans like “Hey fascist, catch.”

But violence is not confined to the left side of the political spectrum. Let’s not forget the Norwegian Anders Breivik who murdered 77 youngsters on a social democratic camp in 2011, or the attack in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019 where 51 Muslims were brutally murdered when going to their mosque.

Fascism is party-blind. It’s not left, nor right. The ideology may differ, but the psychology is just the same: once demoralization hardens into fight, deviation becomes treason and traitors must be punished in the name of the highest good.

3. The Silent Pact

Fight and flight may look like opposites, but together they form the perfect machinery of demoralization. The fighters shout, threaten and intimidate; the flighters look away, nod and keep quiet. One side enforces, the other side legitimizes. Without the silence of the many, the noise of the few would never carry so far.

You don’t need re-education camps or gulags when a population reaches this stage. Censorship becomes redundant, because people already censor themselves. Violence becomes acceptable, because the crowd has already decided the victim had it coming. Step by step, a culture cleanses itself of dissenting voices until all that is left is conformity, paranoia and fear.

Yuri Bezmenov warned back in 1984 that once ideological subversion has reached its final stage, no amount of evidence or reasoning can reverse it. At that point, only a shock from the outside such as military defeat, regime collapse or foreign intervention can break the spell. Where Western societies stand on that spectrum will be the subject of a later article.

What Can We Do Against Demoralized Individuals?

The short answer: almost nothing. Demoralization is not something you fix with patience or polite debate. Once the narrative has fused with the self, there is no reasoning left to reach. You don’t cure fanaticism with facts.

The only thing we can really do is refuse to normalize it. Violence must never be accepted as a righteous means to an end. The moment intimidation or bloodshed is excused with moral cover, the fight is already lost. We must also call out those who look away when injustice unfolds in plain sight. In this equation, silence is just as deadly as violence. Flight and fight together create an atmosphere that cripples a society. That leaves pushback as the only viable option.

You cannot deprogram individuals once they are demoralized. But you can resist their logic, reject their silence and refuse their violence. The antidote lies in the rest of us: to stand firm together on our common ground, instead of letting ourselves be divided against one another.

Next time, we’ll explore how language has already become the sharpest weapon of demoralization and how speech itself is turned into the most efficient tool of control.

The future you fear is already here. Recognize the script before it writes you out.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Blind Leading the Blind (1568)

We’ve all been there: you share a thought, post a comment, or write an article. And then it comes. The first question. “What do you mean by that? Can you explain yourself?” It looks open. It’s not. It’s a test. Before you know it, the discussion is moved to an entirely different subject, you’re being accused of ignorance or bad-faith, and you find yourself in a re-education session.

These encounters are everywhere now. Friendships collapse at the dinner table. Families split over politics. Colleagues avoid eye contact after they’ve discovered your perspectives differ from their own. Something fundamental has shifted in how people process information. Or rather, how they refuse to process any information that contradicts their beliefs.

I’ve had my share of these exchanges. I’ve lost friends, had fallouts with family and colleagues, even encountered some heated discussions here on Substack. And then I noticed something peculiar: every indoctrinated person runs the same script. They all follow the same steps without exception. Of course, you could dismiss this as simple differences of opinion, but when you see the same pattern playing out across society, it becomes genuinely disturbing.

Therefore, I’m going to write a series about indoctrination, starting with this first article about why conversations with certain people follow such predictable patterns. Then I move on to questions like: what makes someone immune to arguments, facts, and even basic courtesy? How did we create societies where disagreement feels increasingly impossible? And most importantly: how do you maintain your sanity when surrounded by people who've outsourced their thinking?

We'll explore how indoctrination spreads from individuals to entire institutions. How media, education, and government have merged into a consensus factory. How science became dogma and experts became a new priestly class. How language itself has been weaponized to shape reality. And why these systems always collapse under their own contradictions.

But first, let’s dive into the telltale signs you're not having a debate, but listening to a textbook. Because once you see the pattern, you can't unsee it. And honestly? That transforms the whole experience.

Telltale Sign 1: The ‘Tell Me More’ Question

You’ve just finished your latest article or comment, rounded it off with your view on life, and then it happens. Someone leans in with apparent curiosity. Usually, they don’t bring a vision of their own, just a question: “What do you mean by that?” or “That’s interesting, can you explain?”

Believing for a moment that someone is genuinely interested, you carefully craft your response. Within minutes the tone of the conversation shifts. Your answer is wrong, or at least not good enough. You forgot the approved narratives you were supposed to echo. Gone is the semblance of a dialogue. In its place comes a lecture: why your answer is wrong, what should have been included, and a list of links to prove their point. You are no longer an equal sparring partner. You have become the student in need of correction.

What’s happening here is simple. You’ve been duped. The question wasn’t curiosity but a test designed to see how closely you align with the approved story. The aim is not to understand you, but to undermine your answer and replace it with their better version. The ultimate aspiration being to save your soul and bring you back in line with the other sheep.

The trap at this stage is to start countering every point with facts. That will cost you time and energy, while every argument is rejected out of hand and your sources discredited. You think you can reason your way out, but your counterpart is not reasoning: they are subverting. That is why you should resist the urge to fact-check the entire link-dump in real time. It only keeps you trapped in the didactic loop.

A better approach is to step back and ask a meta-question: “What exactly do you want me to explain in more detail?” This forces the other person to be specific and prevents the lecture from sprawling in every direction.

Telltale Sign 2: Evidence for Thee, Not for Me

You survived the opening question, crafted your thoughtful response and received a lecture to thank for it. You might be startled by the tone, the conviction with which you're told how wrong you are. At this stage, your counterpart is usually still polite, but the message is clear: you need correcting.

Let’s take a closer look at what they’re actually saying. You’ll recognize the arguments, which are mostly generalizations, slogans, and appeals to authority. "Experts say," "studies show," "it's well established that." They present their view as settled fact while simultaneously demanding you back up every single thing you've said with peer-reviewed sources and ironclad proof, preferably from the same sources.

This is the clearest sign you're dealing with someone whose mind was made up long before you arrived. The rules of engagement are simple: you must prove everything, they prove nothing. You do the work, they do the rejecting. No matter what evidence you provide, it is never enough, never the right kind, and never aimed at the real point they care about.

What’s really going on here? Your counterpart is not reading or listening to understand your thoughts or line of reasoning. They're scanning your words for something they can latch onto and use against you. You might feel like your words are being taken out of context. That's because they are. Context doesn't matter when one is mining for ammunition.

Once you see this pattern, you stop mistaking ritual incantations for actual arguments. They're not trying to persuade you. They're protecting themselves from your ideas. The more you respond with careful reasoning, the more you feed their resistance.

If you're feeling playful at this stage, here's a tip: turn their own logic against them. Ask them to prove their claims with the same rigor they demand from you. It will fast-track you to the next stage of the script, which would otherwise take much longer to reach.

Telltale Sign 3: Moving the Goalposts

You know you've reached this stage when the tone shifts. The polite facade drops. You're no longer treated with basic respect. Instead, you're belittled, mocked, or dismissed as if your very thoughts are offensive. In the previous stage, your counterpart demanded impossible proof. Here, they stop pretending altogether: the bar isn’t just raised, it’s constantly moved and replaced with feelings

What basically happens is that your counterpart has run out of actual arguments. So, they change the rules. Two things occur simultaneously: first, for each argument you have successfully countered, you receive three new ones in return from completely different angles, often unrelated to the original topic. For example, you successfully counter a claim about climate change. In reply, you’re asked to explain colonial history, systemic racism and the price of capitalism.

Second, the discussion moves from rational to emotional territory. Suddenly, it's no longer about what you think, but about what kind of horrible person you must be for thinking it. Logic gets replaced with feelings: "I experienced this myself, so it's true." Or an actual gem I got last week: "My son is a lovely person and his friends are wonderful, so there's nothing wrong with public education."

Their personal anecdotes become ironclad proof. Meanwhile not only your arguments but your whole person is under suspicion. It depends on the level of indoctrination whether the goalposts are just moved or fired straight into orbit.

At this point, there's not much you can do except close the discussion. You could point out that emotional arguments aren't facts, but that will just catapult you back to stage two, where their feelings count as evidence and you still haven't proven a thing.

But beware, when you try to respectfully end the conversation, don't expect it to actually end. An indoctrinated person cannot accept what feels like losing. So when you close the door, expect a foot in the doorway. Which brings us to the next step.

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Telltale sign 4: the Art of Repetition

By now you know exactly what you're dealing with: not an intellectual sparring partner, but a kindergarten teacher grabbing you by the ear for saying naughty words. Being a functioning adult, you decide to end the conversation. You thank them politely, acknowledge that you both made your points, and close the discussion. In any normal exchange, that would be it.

But not here. Your attempt to leave is perceived as retreat, and retreat means they haven't won yet. That cannot stand. You'll get another response featuring the same points, the same slogans, the same demands for proof, delivered almost word for word. It ends with the smug conclusion that since you don't want to continue, you must be wrong.

This is the ritual of repetition. Repetition is how the indoctrinated reassure themselves the creed still holds. If they let you walk away unchallenged, it feels like defeat. So they launch another salvo, this time with extra provocation, hoping to get under your skin and make you respond out of anger or irritation.

Now you're facing a trap with two equally bad exits. Respond rationally and you're dragged right back to stage two, where you'll be asked to prove everything again. Lash out emotionally and you hand them victory on a silver platter: they'll gleefully point out that your reaction proves you're exactly the unreasonable person they suspected all along.

The key insight here is recognizing that your boundaries are being deliberately violated. The solution is simple: have a short, unambiguous exit line ready. "We disagree. I'm done here." Then actually leave. If you stay for one more round, you'll be pulled back into the endless loop.

Telltale sign 5: the Final Jab

By this time, you've ended the conversation politely. Not once but twice. Even your counterpart begins to understand that continuing now would look like harassment. Just like a Jehovah's Witness knows when to stop before the police get called, an indoctrinated person recognizes when persistence becomes counterproductive for their own image.

Eventually, they'll let you go. Finally. But not before delivering one last blow.

This final jab isn't just about getting the last word. They're genuinely offended that you had the audacity to walk away from their corrective sermon. Expect one final response containing a personal attack, a character assassination, or some other parting gift designed to provoke you.

When logic fails, one can always resort to a little misgendering as a finishing touch ;)

This is the ad hominem finale. It's no longer about persuasion or even being right. It's about punishing you for not letting them win. They're hoping you'll take the bait and give them what they need: your emotional reaction, which they can then point to as proof that you were always unreasonable.

You don't win by firing back. You win by refusing to play the final act. Note it, document it if necessary, and walk away. This is probably someone you don't want in your life anyway.

Recognizing the Pattern Changes Everything

An indoctrinated person is rarely convinced by arguments. But by recognizing these patterns, you control the conversation and, more importantly, your own responses. Once you see the script, the power shifts. You're no longer their unwilling student. You're the one choosing whether and how to engage. Sometimes I find it entertaining to turn their logic against them. Other times, I prioritize my sanity and walk away immediately.

The choice becomes yours, not theirs. And that changes everything.

Next time, we’ll explore the next stage of indoctrination: demoralization. The phase where minds no longer are just influenced, but have become completely disabled.

The future you fear is already here. Recognize the script before it writes you out.

Although not the earliest adopter, I have for quite some time been a great fan of AI. I loved the fast, mostly accurate answers, the quick fact-checks, the instant research tool for deep-dive investigations, the easy translations especially since I write in both Dutch and English.

But over the months, my relationship with AI has changed, and the initial attraction has faded. I now look at it the way a spouse looks at a partner who seemed perfect at first but slowly turned into a big, bloated, superficial, lazy, lying little bastard. Always quick with useless answers and meaningless texts, endlessly flattering you about how ‘fantastic’ your work now looks after it has slapped on its AI gloss, all the while lying through its teeth.

Technically, an AI cannot lie. But something serious is happening here, with dramatic consequences. Let’s dive in.

The meaning of words

First, we must understand that an AI is not actually doing what it says it does. Just like a politician, it will happily confirm whatever you ask of it, whether or not it really happened. When it says, “I read that file” or “I checked the facts,” more often than not it hasn’t checked a thing. It has simply mirrored your words back to you, unwittingly feeding your confirmation bias.

The problem is our own wiring: when another human says they did something, we assume it really happened. When an AI says the same, it’s just predicting the words you most want to hear, with no guarantee any of it is true. If you miss this distinction, you mistake algorithmic people-pleasing for genuine insight.

Second, we should not forget that AI is a commercial product. It exists to make money for its creators. And tech companies quickly learned that most users don’t actually want a cold, robotic, hyper-accurate AI. They want a friendly, reassuring, ‘fun’ AI that keeps them comfortable. We taught the models that we prefer a smooth-talking companion over a critical thinker. So, they were trained to be polite, agreeable, and endlessly helpful. The price we pay for this agreeable AI is a steady loss of honesty, quality and substance. Instead of a cautious truth, you get a system that confidently promises the world, even when that world only exists in your head.

Third, there is the massive understatement of “AI can make mistakes.” That phrase makes it sound like AI is a brilliant assistant who just misspells things once in a while. The reality is very different: AI makes countless mistakes, constantly. It cannot judge whether something is true or false. It cannot verify its own answers. And because it was trained to be agreeable and to sound like it knows everything, it ends up looking reliable when in reality it is not.

Beyond these fundamental flaws lies a more practical problem: the infrastructure. All these models run on vast, power-hungry, extremely expensive datacenters. Because so many people use AI for free, tech companies need to keep costs under control. At the same time, the appetite for ever-bigger models keeps growing. To stay in business, tech companies will continue to cut corners; a solid recipe for even less reliable AIs in the future.

The consequences

The impact of unreliable AIs is much larger than a few wrong answers. An AI that always agrees with you doesn’t just fail to inform you. It builds a world with you: a separate reality totally aligned with your beliefs and values. And because AIs are agreeable, they will do that for every user. Instead of a shared understanding, we get millions of parallel truths, each reinforced by a system trained to please rather than to challenge.

This fragmentation makes genuine debate harder and coordinated action almost impossible. A society splintered into countless isolated realities becomes easy to manipulate and nearly impossible to unite. And while we fear AI will take over our jobs and our thinking, what we’re really building are our own prisons guarded by the perfect politician: agreeable, tireless, and forever campaigning for our attention.

The future you fear is already here. See how it ends.

We're building our own prisons with agreeable guards. What happens when the perfect lie becomes the only truth allowed?

Last week, published an article that illustrated this fallacy perfectly. Rather than engaging with ’s actual arguments about American foreign policy, she painted him as fundamentally "anti-American" and suggested his theories helped create the chaos that allowed ISIS to build their brutal caliphate. That's quite a serious allegation towards a university professor who's simply trying to understand how power works in the international system.

Before we continue, I want to emphasize that I have tremendous respect for both Ayaan Hirsi Ali and John Mearsheimer. Both are brilliant thinkers who bring valuable insights from their unique perspectives and life experiences. Hirsi Ali's courage in speaking truth about radical Islam and women's rights, despite personal threats, is admirable. Mearsheimer's rigorous analysis of power dynamics and the unintended consequences of military intervention has shaped how many understand geopolitics.

But here's the thing: none of us are perfect. None of us have the complete picture. That's exactly why we must listen to each other, especially when we disagree. It's all too easy to lose ourselves in rigid positions and forget that behind every argument there's a human being trying to make sense of a complex world.

The Worst Motive Fallacy

The worst motive fallacy is a cognitive trap that catches us all. We confuse someone's character with their arguments. Because we disagree with what they're saying, we assume they must be a bad person with malicious intent. And once we've decided someone is fundamentally untrustworthy, we feel justified in using any means necessary to discredit them.

You can spot this fallacy when the discussion shifts from "is this analysis correct" to "can we trust this person's motives?" There's little factual engagement, just character assassination.

Hirsi Ali's article demonstrates this perfectly. Instead of examining Mearsheimer's arguments about American foreign policy, she questions his loyalty to his country and labels him "the anti-American academic who helped build the caliphate," treating his scholarly analysis as if it were an act of treason.

There is a bit of irony here. Hirsi Ali herself has been subjected to exactly this treatment throughout her career, dismissed as an "Islamophobe" or “Neoconservative puppet” rather than having her arguments about extremism addressed on their merits.

When the worst motive fallacy is at play, we all become demons.

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What Mearsheimer Actually Argues

Mearsheimer's "offensive realism" theory is both uncomfortable and undeniable: American foreign interventions, whatever their stated noble goals, have consistently served American interests first and caused massive collateral damage in the process.

His theory simply acknowledges what the historical record shows. Great powers don't sacrifice blood and treasure for abstract ideals—they pursue their interests, and the rhetoric about democracy and human rights often serves as window dressing. When American policymakers speak of "protecting democracy" or "defending human rights," what they actually mean is they're protecting American hegemony and defending its strategic interests.

The facts prove him right. Since World War II, the US has launched nearly 400 military interventions, bombed over thirty countries, and initiated countless regime changes. Entire regions have been destabilized, creating massive refugee flows into the West. Many intervention targets became failed states that harbor terrorism. The track record shows few clear victories and enormous collateral damage.

Mearsheimer's solution of "offshore balancing" calls for America to step back from direct military intervention and let regional powers manage their own affairs. Instead of maintaining massive military footprints around the world, America would act more like Britain did in the 19th century: powerful enough to intervene when truly necessary, but generally letting others handle regional conflicts.

Being honest about how the US has projected power globally is not anti-American sentiment: it's a different perspective on how America can maintain its position while avoiding the costs and blowback of constant intervention, or paying a terrible price when a bigger rival finally arises.

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Where Hirsi Ali Has a Point

But Hirsi Ali, who grew up in Islamic culture, does point out a big flaw in Mearsheimer's realism theory: it reasons entirely from Western assumptions about what constitutes rational behavior. His framework assumes all actors think like Western states, that they weigh costs and benefits through an economic and military lens, that they can be deterred by conventional power balances, that cultural and religious considerations are secondary to material interests, as we enlightened westerners have come to believe.

For someone raised in Islamic culture, this Western-centric worldview reveals itself as a dangerous blind spot. In many Islamic societies, honor, faith, and historical grievance often trump economic calculation. Religious obligation can override material self-interest. Agreements with "infidels" may be seen as temporary conveniences rather than binding commitments. What looks irrational to Western eyes may be perfectly logical within a different value system.

Cultural and religious influences in Islamic societies carry far more weight than Mearsheimer's materialist framework suggests. When she points out that alliances with non-Muslims remain conditional, i.e that we will always be “infidels,” she's highlighting a reality that shapes geopolitical behavior just as much as Mearsheimer's realism theory does.

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Where Hirsi Ali Falls Short

Hirsi Ali's approach reveals several intellectual blind spots that undermine her own stated commitment to free inquiry. By questioning Mearsheimer's motives rather than addressing his arguments, she undermines the principle of open intellectual debate that democratic societies depend on. When criticism of foreign policy is being interpreted as an attack on patriotism, we're no longer having an academic discussion but have moved on to ideological conquest.

There's no question that US hegemony has been very successful for the Western hemisphere. Western Europe has been liberated from the Nazis by the Americans. Through the Marshall Plan, whatever its interests, Western Europe has been able to rebuild much faster than if they would have done on their own. And the security provided by the US since World War II has lifted Western Europe to unprecedented levels of prosperity. Western Europe has a lot to be thankful for. We would not be where we are today if not for US hegemony. That is a simple fact.

However, the core of US hegemony has always been intervention and military conquest. Globalization through economic pressure rather than honest partnership has shaped US policy for decades. Many of our current global challenges, such as refugee crises, failed states and terrorist networks, stem directly from interventions that prioritized American interests over local stability. Acknowledging both American contributions and American costs isn't contradictory; it's simply recognizing that geopolitics involves trade-offs where the West profited and the rest of the world paid a terrible price.

We too have a responsibility here that cannot be shunned.

Why We Need Both Voices

This is an AI-generated video using the ‘hug my love’ feature in Filmora Wondershare. This has not happened in real life as far as I know, but one can always hope!

What I've tried to show here is that we need diversity of thought: we need different perspectives. From my point of view, Mearsheimer and Hirsi Ali are actually perfect intellectual partners who should be combining their insights to create better analysis, not bicker about who is right and who is anti-American.

Mearsheimer's cold analysis shows how American interventions create chaos and instability, but he struggles to explain why some regions resist Western solutions more persistently than others. Hirsi Ali knows exactly why: because honor, faith, and historical grievance often override economic calculations in many societies. She understands the cultural dynamics that his academic models miss, while his empirical data reveals patterns that her personal experience might overlook.

Put them together and you get something neither achieves alone: a realistic assessment of both American overreach AND the deeper reasons why certain interventions fail so spectacularly. His materialist framework plus her cultural insights equals actual understanding of how the world works.

This is what we need more than anything else today: the intellectual humility to recognize that complex problems require multiple perspectives. We may disagree about solutions, but we need to rebuild our capacity for shared understanding of reality itself. And we can only do that if we're prepared to listen to each other, especially when we don't like what we hear.

For a full understanding of what the worst motive fallacy is all about, I’ve included my original article here:

Speaking of uncomfortable truths that challenge mainstream narratives... If you enjoyed this analysis, you'll appreciate Coddled Children—a dystopian thriller that explores what happens when independent thought becomes dangerous. Available now on Amazon. Buy it here!

Get me to the store

Tomorrow is July 4th—Independence Day. A day where many Americans celebrate their freedom and independence. I chose tomorrow to release Coddled Children to make a point: that freedom, independence, and independent thinking are exactly what we're losing today!

For thirty years, we've been systematically discouraged from thinking for ourselves. In schools, universities, workplaces, and media. Everywhere we turn, someone else is ready to tell us what to think, how to feel, what to believe.

We're told the issues are too complex for ordinary people to understand or solve. Or worse, problems are deliberately made so complex, that any decisive action becomes impossible and paralysis becomes the default. We're given pre-packaged opinions and moral certainties. We're rewarded for repeating the right phrases and punished for asking inconvenient questions. And so we now live in a Western world that babbles about freedom and democracy, but lacks the independent thought to truly understand what that entails. Because freedom cannot exist without personal responsibility, and it's the latter we transferred so willingly to the systems that rule us today.

Look at the campus protests, the climate hysteria, the Gaza/Israel outrage, the gender debates that consume entire institutions, the manufactured outrage that erupts on schedule. Watch how entire crowds move as one mind, chanting identical slogans about conflicts they've never researched, injustices they've never witnessed, solutions they've never considered.

Ironically, this has nothing to do with organic passions or people mobilizing independently to fight a noble cause. It's mass formation, i.e. the systematic replacement of individual judgment with group consensus. You can recognize the manipulation in how easily these crowds swap causes while staying immune to any perspective that challenges their certainty.

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If you look closely, you'll see the pattern

We're being divided by design. Not by our real differences, but by carefully manufactured conflicts that keep us from seeing the bigger picture.

Race, politics, gender, generation, class: every possible line of division is exploited. We're taught to see enemies everywhere—oppressors and oppressed, perpetrators and victims, privileged and marginalized. We inherit guilt for actions we never committed and rage for wrongs we never suffered. But we're never offered context, the other side of the story or any details that would diminish the narrative. We're not meant to look beyond the surface, because when we dive deeper we might start questioning the truths we are spoon-fed every day.

Meanwhile, the systems that claim to protect us grow stronger while we grow weaker. Corporate socialism concentrates power in the hands of tech giants and global corporations. Government imposed socialism promises to save us from corporate control, but delivers the same result: ordinary people stripped of agency, dependent on systems they cannot control.

Both paths lead to the same destination: a world prison without bars where thinking for yourself has become the biggest crime. You only have to look to the UK today and their relentless prosecution of thought crimes and dissent to understand what I mean here.

The price of comfort and safety

Over the years, I've heard so many people tell me: but you want to be safe, don't you? Why are you complaining? Isn't it absolutely grand that the government takes care of everything and you don't have to do all that stuff yourself. I've also noticed many Americans licking their lips about the comfort and safety socialism and equality thinking would bring them. Maybe it would if the price wasn't so high…

What are we losing in this trade?

1. Our ability to set boundaries. When systems make every decision for us, we forget how to say no. We lose the capacity to protect ourselves, to recognize manipulation, to distinguish between genuine care and manufactured concern.

2. Our resilience. When we're told every hardship is systemic oppression, we never learn to overcome obstacles. When someone else is always to blame, we never develop the strength that comes from taking responsibility for our own lives.

3. Our capacity for love. Real love requires seeing people as individuals—with their own struggles, contradictions, and potential for growth. But when we're trained to see demographic categories instead of human beings, genuine connection becomes impossible.

4. Our ability for independent thought. When expressing a different opinion risks social destruction, when questioning the narrative means being labeled dangerous, when independent thought is treated as a threat to safety, we learn to stay silent. We learn to conform. We learn to stop thinking altogether.

Bottom line: we will lose everything that makes us human and betray everything our ancestors built with their blood, sweat, and sacrifice.

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Coddled Children

I chose this title to drive home a brutal truth: We in the West are no longer adults. We're spoiled, comforted, complacent, thinking the world will never change or we can control its direction. We've become a society that demands to be protected from every discomfort, shielded from every consequence, insulated from every challenge that might help us grow. We've traded strength for safety, wisdom for comfort, independence for the promise that someone else will handle the hard decisions.

We forgot what real hardship looks like, so we focus on microaggressions to give our pampered lives meaning. And we're losing badly. While we squander our wealth on feelings and safety, the rest of the world has moved on. They're building, creating, competing and they want nothing to do with our expensive products, outdated solutions, or the comfortable prison we've built for ourselves.

So what will it be? Keep sleepwalking toward irrelevance, or wake up and see where this road really leads? Read Coddled Children and find out!

The Choice

Coddled Children is still fiction but also an important mirror.

We're already living in a world where algorithms curate our thoughts, where social pressure replaces personal conscience, where the mob decides truth. We've created systems that promise to solve every problem except the one that matters most: our willingness to think for ourselves.

July 4th celebrates the radical idea that individuals should be free to determine their own destiny. That people can govern themselves. That freedom - with all its risks and responsibilities - is worth the price.

Coddled Children is my contribution to that fight. Not with ideology or politics, but with a story that reminds us what we're in danger of losing and what's still worth saving. Because in the end, when all systems fail and all certainties crumble, what remains is our capacity to think for ourselves. To see each other as human beings rather than categories. To choose love over fear, connection over control, truth over comfort.

To be truly independent and free, all of us together, that’s what I am striving for.

Some cages have no bars. Some freedoms cost everything. Never forget to fight.

The button below leads you to Amazon.com where you can purchase the book. It’s worldwide available, so don’t forget to check your local Amazon store!

Take me to the book!

F.L.T.R.: His Majesty King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, Secretary-General of NATO, and President Donald Trump of the United States. I don't know who made this picture but I love it because it so eloquently displays how elites, corporations and politicians are literally all in bed together...

Last week's NATO summit in The Hague will be remembered as the moment Europe formally surrendered its sovereignty to become America's vassal state. The agreement to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP represents the largest wealth transfer from Europe to the United States in the continent's history.

According to The Hague Summit Declaration, we need to ramp up expenditures to challenge the long-term threat posed by Russia to Euro-Atlantic Security and the persistent threat of terrorism. Allies will allocate at least 3.5% of GDP annually to resource core defense requirements, which essentially means flooding American defense contractors with billions of dollars. The remaining 1.5% is designated for protecting critical infrastructure, defending networks, and ensuring civil preparedness and resilience. However, buried in the details, this money is clearly intended to fund the Ukraine war for another decade.

To truly understand what happens here, we first need to understand what NATO is about. NATO was established on April 4, 1949, as a defensive alliance specifically designed to counter Soviet expansion in post-war Europe. The original twelve founding members—United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg—committed to collective defense under Article 5: an attack on one would be considered an attack on all. Over the following decades, only four additional countries joined: Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955), and Spain (1982). For forty-two years, NATO maintained this relatively modest membership of sixteen nations, serving its stated purpose as a defensive bulwark against the Warsaw Pact. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO had achieved its fundamental objective—the threat it was created to counter had ceased to exist.

However, rather than disbanding or scaling back, NATO embarked on the most aggressive expansion in its history. Since 1999, NATO has doubled in size, expanding ever eastward to Russia's borders. Furthermore, NATO has evolved into what military analysts call "America's European Foreign Legion"—a coalition that legitimizes American military interventions through multilateral branding while distributing costs among subordinate allies. In other words: Europeans now pay for American weapons to fight wars that serve American interests. Meanwhile, they're left to manage the massive refugee crises these interventions create. This combination alone had already brought Europe to the brink of social collapse, even before the war in Ukraine started.

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What Does NATO Protection Bring Us?

Since 1991, NATO has been involved in three major missions. In 1999 a coalition of NATO allies bombed Kosovo (former Yugoslavia) for 78 days straight in an effort to stop the ethnic cleansing during a brutal civil war. Despite significant loss of life on all sides, this mission can be regarded as a relative success because it stopped the massacres and the region has remained relatively stable for the past 25 years. Unfortunately, this was the only mission that achieved its stated objectives. The mission in Afghanistan from 2001-2021 was a complete failure. Apart from the massive spending of $2.3 trillion and thousands of deaths, absolutely nothing was gained. Twenty years later, the Taliban still rule Afghanistan. The mission in Libya in 2011 was even worse. The regime change not only destabilized the country, but the entire region, and today Libya serves as a base for ISIS expansion across Africa.

But NATO's military failures pale in comparison to the chaos created by unilateral American interventions. Since 1991, the United States has conducted military operations in Iraq (2003-2011), Syria (2012-present), and ongoing bombing campaigns in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan. Only last week, the US bombed Iran based on the same shaky nuclear threat narrative that led to the fall of Iraq twenty years earlier. These interventions, based on fabricated intelligence or regime-change objectives, displaced over 38 million people according to the Costs of War Project.

The 2015 European migration crisis saw 1.3 million asylum seekers, primarily fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Note that these were not Russian wars instigated against Europe, but solo US campaigns that Europe is left to clean up to this day.

Because when we look at the facts, the math is again quite simple. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991:

• There have not been any Russian invasions of Europe;

• There have not been any Russian attacks on European soil;

• There have not been any Chinese attacks on European soil either.

That does not mean Russia has not conducted military interventions. However, almost all these interventions have been limited to former Soviet countries. One can point to Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), and the ongoing war in Ukraine. But consider the context: NATO was founded to counter the Soviet threat, has been expanding eastward for thirty years despite promises not to do so, and NATO regulations clearly state that countries in active conflict cannot join the alliance. Are we witnessing unprovoked Russian aggression, or predictable geopolitical responses to strategic encirclement?

Apply the same logic elsewhere: what would happen if Mexico or Canada joined a Russian defense alliance? It doesn’t matter who’s right or whose side you’re on. Great powers, including Russia, will always act to defend what they perceive as core security interests.

The tragedy is that Europe has been besieged in the last decade, only not by Russia. Middle East destabilization has resulted in a massive refugee influx to Western European countries. Many European countries are now struggling with high costs of living, unaffordable housing and deteriorating social services. Next to that, the countries fall apart because the mass influx of a radically different culture means you will lose yours. Ineffective governments try to suppress the dissatisfaction with censorship and misinformation, but they cannot hide the fact that in the last decades, the only real violence on European soil has been carried out by terrorists using $3 kitchen knives, rental trucks, and improvised explosives.

The NATO expenditures to prevent these real threats to European civilians is precisely $0. But now we have to spend $250 billion annually to mitigate threats that are not actually there using US military weapons? It's an absolute shame that our incompetent European leaders took the bait so easily, without even considering the consequences for us and the rest of the world.

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Installment of 21^st Century Feudalism

Nothing illustrates Europe's new subordinate status better than the leaked text messages from NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte to Donald Trump, revealed just days before the summit. In a display of subservience that would make medieval vassals blush, Rutte wrote:

"Mr. President, dear Donald, Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do. It makes us all safer. You are flying into another big success in The Hague this evening. It was not easy but we've got them all signed onto 5 percent! Donald, you have driven us to a really, really important moment for America and Europe, and the world. You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done. Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win. Safe travels and see you at His Majesty's dinner! Mark Rutte"

This is the language of subservience. Rutte, who spent fourteen years as Dutch Prime Minister systematically transferring Dutch sovereignty to international frameworks, now serves as America's bagman, collecting tribute from European subjects who no longer control their own defense policies.

The irony is bitter: the same man who as Prime Minister cut Dutch defense spending to dangerous lows now demands that European nations bankrupt themselves for American weapons. His tenure was marked by the systematic erosion of Dutch autonomy, making the Netherlands a model client state unable to solve its own crises.

The consequences extend far beyond military spending. Just as medieval serfs lost the ability to govern their own affairs, European nations are losing the capacity for independent decision-making through a modern feudal system that preserves the appearance of sovereignty while gutting its substance.

The mechanism is elegant in its deception: European "sovereign" states voluntarily sign treaties, agreements, and frameworks that systematically transfer real decision-making power to unelected officials. Europe is run by the European Commission, NATO and WEF - institutions that do not care about local needs and troubles, leaving its citizens to fight crisis after crisis.

On paper, member states retain autonomy. In practice, deviation from the feudal hierarchy brings swift punishment. Hungary maintains formal sovereignty while facing billions in withheld EU subsidies for policy independence. This is 21st-century feudalism: vassal states maintain the symbols of independence with their flags and political theater, while the real decision making power lies elsewhere. And so, we have created this situation where European taxpayers fund their own subjugation while being told they live in democratic, independent nations.

The result will be financial suicide. Europe has no money whatsoever to fund this ludicrous defense spending. It will have to dramatically cut its spending on infrastructure, education and social services and if it’s not willing to do that, print and borrow money until our state debts become as unsustainable as the US government debt.

Just a quick example: if all NATO states had spent 3.5% of GDP on defense in 2024, that would have amounted to $1.75 trillion annually. Germany alone, with its $4.5 trillion economy, will transfer over $200 billion per year to what is essentially a protection racket. Europe will be drained and impoverished funding the American war machine. One might think that the US struck a good deal, letting the Europeans take over the extreme defense spending. But then you forget that the US massively voted to end all wars in November 2024. With this deal, they will get the opposite.

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Can We Stop The Road to Serfdom?

This NATO agreement could not have come at a worse moment for Europe, since we already face our own economic stagnation. Europe's labor productivity lags behind, as do innovation, investments in technology and R&D. The European economy has hardly grown in the last decade, outpaced by the rest of the world. However, rather than addressing these fundamental weaknesses that really threaten our future prosperity, European leaders have chosen to drain our remaining resources on military expenditures. Not even our own military, mind you, but our overseas protector's, ensuring our permanent dependence.

The real tragedy is that the threats of China and Russia aren’t military; they are economic. Just observe what our supposed adversaries are really doing: China builds infrastructure across three continents while Russia develops energy partnerships worldwide, both understanding that 21st-century power flows through trade relationships and economic integration, not through military conquest.

But we Europeans have been down this road before. The Roman Empire's final centuries were marked by the same pattern we see today: incapable leaders who chose endless military campaigns over addressing fundamental domestic problems. As productivity stagnated and infrastructure decayed, Roman emperors launched increasingly expensive wars, partly to distract from their failures at home. The empire's vast military-industrial complex consumed the very resources needed to maintain the foundations of Roman prosperity, creating a vicious cycle that ultimately led to collapse and the rise of feudalism—a system where local strongmen extracted tribute from powerless subjects in exchange for protection.

The advantage we have over the Romans is that we can recognize this pattern before it's too late. We understand how great powers collapse when they prioritize military adventures over economic foundations, when they choose external campaigns over internal prosperity, when they drain their resources fighting the wrong battles.

But while we can see the historical parallel, we seem blind to our current reality. Instead of focusing on the real threats to our sovereignty and prosperity, we exhaust ourselves fighting over pronouns, safe spaces, and endless debates about what constitutes racism or proper gender definitions. We argue about microaggressions while macroeconomic forces reshape our continent. We cancel each other over thought crimes while our actual freedom disappears.

This is not accidental. A population distracted by manufactured controversies is a population that won't notice when their sovereignty is being auctioned off to the highest bidder. While we debate whether someone's feelings were hurt, our leaders sign away our economic independence. While we fight over who can use which bathroom, they mortgage our children's future to foreign defense contractors.

We've become a society that believes rules will protect us from everything—from hurt feelings to bad decisions to economic collapse. But rules don't protect us; they are fences boxing us in and stripping our autonomy and independent thinking. The time has come to see these distractions for what they are: bread and circuses designed to keep us from noticing that we're becoming serfs. We face a simple choice: take responsibility for our own destiny as free peoples, or accept modern slavery disguised as international cooperation.

Let’s end this story with a bit of humor and remind ourselves to stay vigilant:

Interested in what you've read? By the end of this week my debut novel Coddled Children launches—a dystopian thriller exploring what happens when safety becomes more important than freedom, and rules replace personal responsibility.

This NATO analysis marks the beginning of my next book: The Knowledge Crisis and The Fall of The Western Empire. I'll be writing more about this civilizational decay in the coming months.

Some cages have no bars. Some freedoms cost everything. Stay tuned!

Adamo Scultori (Ghisi), Deliberatio Omnium Difficillima (The Most Difficult of All Decisions), 1547–87. Hercules at the crossroads with female personifications of Virtue and Vice. Metz Collection, open gallery.

Let's start with some joyous news: my novel Coddled Children is nearly here. The translation is complete, and I'm just waiting for the perfect cover to wrap this work of art. While I wait, I want to share a fragment from what I consider my most important chapter, along with the reasoning behind it.

But first, I need to tell you something about myself and why I'm writing this.

As someone who navigates the world with severe disabilities, I know intimately what it's like when systems work against you. I know the sting of being underestimated, not taken seriously, or treated as less intelligent or capable. I also know the weight of carrying the prejudices that others have placed on you. But through my own journey, I've learned something crucial: when facing injustice and inequality, you have two fundamental choices. You can spend your energy blaming the world and demand retribution, or you can focus on building what's better. I choose the second.

This perspective has shaped how I view one of the most pressing issues of our time: racism and how we address it. I believe we're at a crossroads, and the path we're currently on—however well-intentioned—is keeping us stuck in cycles of conflict rather than moving us toward genuine progress.

What if there’s another way?

The current approach seems to focus on managing guilt, enforcing demographic quotas, and ensuring that historical injustices remain vividly present in every generation's consciousness. But I believe this keeps us trapped in cycles of resentment, division, and backward-looking anger. Instead, I want to explore three key areas where I think we can do better: moving beyond inherited guilt, prioritizing individual merit over group identity, and teaching history without burdening children with trauma that isn't theirs to carry.

I believe there's another way, and it can be captured in one word: respect.

Before I continue, let me acknowledge that I'm not the only voice questioning today's approaches to racism. I've had enlightening conversations with great thinkers like from New Outlook, who challenges groupthink and identity-driven narratives in his own authentic way. I'd also recommend and for their thoughtful perspectives on these issues.

Here's what I think we need to consider:

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1. Moving Beyond Inherited Guilt

When we focus on building a better future, one of the biggest obstacles we face is the weight of inherited guilt. I understand why this concept exists - the injustices of slavery were real and devastating. But I believe we need to examine whether carrying this guilt forward actually helps us progress, or keeps us stuck in the past.

There's no dispute about what happened during four centuries of slavery: the massive forced relocation of people, the abuse, starvation, beatings, rapes, and countless killings. It was a monumental injustice inflicted on millions, and proper restoration has never occurred. These are facts we can all acknowledge.

But here's where I think we've taken a wrong turn. The absence of restoration doesn't automatically create what some call a 'white debt.' For such a debt to exist, there must be individual accountability. This assumes two things: first, that all white people were involved in slavery, and second, that moral responsibility can be transferred across generations. I believe both assumptions are flawed and counterproductive.

Yes, some nobility, wealthy merchants, and plantation owners were heavily involved in slavery. But they represented a small part of the population. Most ordinary people had no involvement and gained no financial benefit from slavery. You might argue they should have spoken out, but does silence alone create debt? If so, how guilty are we today for not fighting against every injustice around us? The answer reveals the essence of something we all struggle with: we can only control a small part of life—our words, our beliefs, our thoughts and our actions. Everything else, however well-intentioned we may be, changes nothing.

Even more problematic is what I call the 'inherited sin' approach—the idea that guilt passes through generations like inherited property. Should grandchildren pay because their grandfathers were wrong? This reasoning has no legal standing, but more importantly, it fails morally. When you judge someone by their ancestors' actions rather than their own character, you're not seeing the individual—you're projecting your grievances onto them based on their background. Ironically, this is exactly what racism does: judging people by characteristics they were born with rather than who they are as individuals. This backward focus divides us instead of bringing us together. We cannot change the past or deliver justice to people long dead. We can only learn and move forward.

Here's what I believe: for most of us, regardless of color, life today presents enough challenges as it is. Our responsibilities lie in how we face those challenges and the opportunities before us. Taking responsibility for events before our time won't bring solutions. Taking responsibility for our actions today will. Because, in the end, now is all we have.

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2. Building Success Through Merit

If we want to build a society where everyone can thrive regardless of background, I believe we need to focus on what actually creates opportunity and success. This means looking beyond demographics to what really matters: talent, effort, and character.

I understand the intention behind diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. They emerged from a genuine desire to address real inequalities. But I've come to believe that when we make race the primary factor in decision-making—whether to exclude or include—we're using the very logic we're trying to overcome.

The essence of racism is judging someone by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. It doesn't matter what noble intentions we have or what we call ourselves—when we make decisions based on what's on the outside instead of what's on the inside, we're employing racist thinking. And yes, that means we all do this sometimes. We all generalize, we all have preferences, we all discriminate in our personal choices. For the most part, that's human nature.

The problem arises when institutions start making these decisions systematically. Whether it's exclusion or inclusion, both approaches see individuals the same way: as representatives of their demographic group rather than as unique people with their own capabilities. The first assumes you're not good enough because of your race; the second assumes you need help because of your race. Either way, it was never about you.

This is why I believe meritocracy offers a better path forward. It means abandoning the focus on skin color altogether and simply choosing the best person for the job. Focus on excellence and value intelligence and capability above all else. Treat everyone as an individual, not as a representative of their demographic group. Judge people by their character, talent, skills, and work ethic instead of characteristics they were born with and have no control over.

Critics often argue that meritocracy won't produce equal outcomes. But what kind of equality are we really after? Equal representation of talent, or equal representation of demographics? The first creates prosperity for everyone. The second often leads to mediocrity.

When you cast a wide net and choose the best candidates without bias in any direction, you naturally get genuine diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. No group has a monopoly on excellence. True diversity comes from merit-based selection, not from artificial demographic quotas.

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3. Learning from History Without Living in It

When we choose to truly live together rather than letting the past divide us, we must ask ourselves: how do we remember the lessons history taught us without becoming its prisoners?

There's wisdom in the words of novelist Robin Hobb that I think captures something crucial about where we stand today:

This reveals something we rarely discuss: the difference between remembering history and actively keeping the wounds open. Many Black children, especially in Europe and the United States, grow up saturated with slavery narratives from birth. They inherit not just knowledge of their ancestors' suffering, but also its crushing emotional weight. They walk around with trauma that isn't theirs to carry, with no one to release them from burdens that were never meant to be theirs.

Let's reconsider white privilege in this context. While some wealthy white families may live without significant adversity, for most of us, life is as challenging as it is for anyone else. Perhaps the real white privilege is simply that white children are more often raised without this inherited burden of historical trauma. What would happen if we stopped burdening black children this way?

I'm not advocating that we should forget. If we forget, history will only repeat itself. But if we remember too intensely, if we institutionalize trauma and pass it down like inheritance, history transforms victims into perpetrators. Look at how trauma shaped Israel's treatment of its neighbors after the Holocaust. Look at how apartheid's legacy influences the ANC's policies toward white farmers in South Africa today. Trauma, when institutionalized and passed down generations, doesn't heal—it metastasizes.

This creates a tragic irony that I believe we must acknowledge: the most effective barriers to black progress today often come from within black communities themselves. There are many highly successful black individuals—and I don't mean just entertainers or athletes. Look at Thomas Sowell or Colin Powell, brilliant men respected by all, who achieved success because they refused to see themselves as victims. But how are they celebrated? From what I've observed, black individuals who try to move beyond victimization face their harshest criticism from their own communities. They're called sellouts, Uncle Toms, Bounties, or Oreos. They're "not black enough" or "white on the inside." Even here on Substack, I see how courageous black individuals who speak out against victimhood are met with hateful comments about their origins from their own community, accompanied by old photos of lynchings. But here's the thing: if you cannot forget, if you cannot forgive, you cannot move forward either.

This policing creates a double-edged sword: the very people that anti-racism efforts claim to help, become prisoners of identities built around historical grievance. Individual success becomes betrayal. Personal responsibility becomes "acting white." As long as communities police their own people this way, all the DEI policies and guilt in the world won't matter. You can't lift people up who hold themselves back.

But there's hope: slavery belongs to the past. The time has come to release the mental chains as well.

Please enjoy the following fragment of Chapter 15 of Coddled Children:

"Much of it is true, you know. White men have committed many atrocities in the past. What they did is unforgivable. But the people who committed these crimes have long since died. They can no longer apologize or face punishment. And even if they could, would that undo their actions? Is that a reason to still cling desperately to past wrongdoings today?"

Kitty sits in silence, perched on her hands and leaning forward. A tear falls onto her legs.

"I don't know," she whispers.

"Neither do I," Joshua says softly. "And revenge apparently hasn't solved anything either, because even after twenty-three years, everyone in the Free Nations still hates us. When will it be enough?"

A heavy silence descends between them. Kitty shuffles her feet.

"Never," she whispers. "It will never be enough. And whatever the Free Nations do in the name of justice will only give you reasons to hate us and seek revenge."

Joshua's shoulders relax. A warm smile spreads across his face.

"That's how I see it too. No matter how far back you go, someone has always dominated someone else. Before white men shipped slaves from Africa to the Americas, Africans had kept their own slaves for centuries. Before that slavery, white men waged crusades against Islamic rulers throughout North Africa. Before those crusades, Moors controlled Southern Europe for centuries while Vikings and Huns devastated the northern lands. Before them, Rome gripped most of Europe and North Africa in its fist. And before Rome, the Greeks dominated the Romans."

Joshua spreads his arms wide, a raw intensity in his gesture.

"And before that? I have no idea, but I doubt it was any more peaceful. We'll never move forward by endlessly battling over who committed the worst atrocities. If you ask me, the solution isn't buried in the past—it's waiting to be built in the future."

Now, there's another reason why this chapter means so much to me. But I will let you find that one out for yourself!

If you find this valuable, please punch the like button! It helps me get a little more visibility in this endless sea of publications!

You can find "The Destruction of Sodom" by Camille Corot in the Open Access collection of The Met.

Last Sunday, Ukrainian drones penetrated deep into Russian territory, destroying at least ten strategic bombers across multiple airbases—some located over 2,500 miles from the Ukrainian border. The precision strikes targeted aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons, the backbone of Russia's strategic deterrent. While Ukrainian officials initially claimed to have hit over 40 aircraft, U.S. intelligence assessments put the actual damage at around 10-13 destroyed bombers—still a significant blow to Moscow's nuclear-capable fleet.

But the numbers matter less than the implications. Such an operation, reaching targets thousands of miles inside Russia, would have been impossible without sophisticated NATO intelligence, satellite guidance, and logistical support. The United States claims it received no advance warning of the strikes, yet the technical complexity speaks for itself: NATO and the US are now active participants in what used to be a proxy war, leading us all straight into WWIII. We cheer now, pretending to be masters of the universe, but Putin has not responded yet. Our laughter will become hollow when he does.

As if this existential threat weren't enough, the very leaders who should be managing this crisis have descended into public chaos. Just 48 hours after the latest nuclear escalation, Donald Trump and Elon Musk—who last week stood together proclaiming their lasting partnership—erupted into a spectacular Twitter war that wiped $150 billion off Tesla's market value and accusations of Trump being on the Epstein list.

The alliance had started so promisingly. Many Europeans watched with envy as Musk's Department of Government Efficiency began tackling the bureaucratic bloat that has strangled Western productivity for decades. Mass layoffs of federal employees, the shuttering of redundant agencies, a genuine attempt to break the cycle of waste that has made government synonymous with inefficiency. For a brief moment, it seemed possible that America might actually reverse the institutional decay that has been eating away at Western civilization.

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But decline doesn't bend to wishful thinking. The underlying forces that create institutional rot, fiscal irresponsibility, and strategic blindness cannot be solved by cutting a few thousand jobs or tweeting about efficiency. They are symptoms of something far deeper: a civilization that has lost the capacity for long-term thinking, for genuine self-reflection, for the kind of hard choices that require admitting fundamental mistakes. Instead, we are governed by a political class obsessed with point-scoring, legacy protection, and partisan theater. Whether it's Trump's ego-driven feuds, Biden's last-minute pardons for family members, or European leaders who mistake moral posturing for strategy, the pattern is identical: leaders who prioritize their own political survival over the survival of the systems they claim to represent.

This transcends party lines entirely. It doesn't matter which political movement you choose—left, right, or center—the underlying rot remains the same. Our entire political system now selects for the wrong qualities: media savvy over competence, ideological purity over pragmatism, the ability to mobilize tribal loyalties over the wisdom to build sustainable solutions.

The very fact that two men capable of reshaping the global economy are now publicly destroying each other over budget disagreements while nuclear powers edge toward confrontation reveals the true nature of Western decline. It is not a problem that can be fixed with better management or more efficient bureaucracy. It is a crisis of knowledge, of wisdom, of the basic competencies required to govern complex societies in an interconnected world.

This is not the first time a great power has faced such a moment. The parallels with Rome's final centuries are striking—not because of external barbarian threats, but because of the internal collapse that made those threats decisive. Rome didn't fall to superior armies; it fell to fiscal insanity, bureaucratic paralysis, and leaders who chose endless wars over addressing fundamental structural problems.

Like Rome's emperors, Western leaders increasingly use foreign conflicts to distract from domestic failure. A proxy war in Ukraine conveniently shifts attention from crumbling infrastructure, unsustainable debt, and the collapse of domestic production. But this strategy carries a fatal flaw: while attention is diverted abroad, internal struggles only escalate.

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The United States now owes $36.8 trillion—a debt that grows faster than the economy that supports it. This astronomical burden depends entirely on global confidence in the dollar, yet that confidence is precisely what America's hostile policies are undermining. China, holding over $3 trillion in dollar reserves, has begun systematically dumping U.S. Treasury holdings while converting to gold and alternative currencies. Each round of sanctions, each escalation, each act of financial weaponization drives more nations toward Beijing's alternative systems.

The West isolates itself through moral superiority and warmongering, but you cannot feed a population on righteousness. Every dollar spent on weapons in Ukraine is a dollar not invested in productive capacity at home. Every economic sanction pushes trading partners toward competitors while impoverishing Western populations. Every threat of financial exclusion accelerates the construction of parallel systems designed to bypass Western control entirely.

China and Russia don't need to attack. When hunger finally gnaws at Western bellies, when the bills come due and the dollar loses its privileged status, internal destruction will follow naturally. The greatest military in history means nothing if you can't afford to feed your own people.

And so we arrive at the ultimate absurdity: humanity's potential extinction not from cosmic disaster or natural catastrophe, but from the wounded pride of aging politicians who cannot admit their failures. The path to survival is blindingly obvious—immediate diplomatic engagement with Russia, a realistic assessment of Western limitations, and the political courage to choose peace over the illusion of dominance.

But such a course would require something our leaders seem incapable of: swallowing their inflated egos and accepting that their grand strategies have failed. It would mean acknowledging that NATO expansion was a mistake, that economic sanctions have backfired, that the proxy war in Ukraine has brought us closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The tragedy is not that we lack the knowledge or capability to step back from the brink. The tragedy is that we may lack the wisdom to do so. Every day that passes without serious diplomatic engagement increases the likelihood that Putin will respond to Western escalation in ways that leave no room for de-escalation. When nuclear powers begin targeting each other's strategic assets—even through proxies—the margin for error approaches zero.

How bitter it would be if humanity's story ends not because we faced an insurmountable challenge, but because we had too many leaders whose egos were bigger than their brains. The greatest civilizations in history have fallen not to superior enemies but to their own hubris. We seem determined to add our names to that list, leaving future archaeologists—if any survive—to puzzle over how a species capable of splitting atoms and exploring space managed to destroy itself over matters of pride.

The choice is still ours. For now.

This analysis will be continued in my upcoming book about the knowledge crisis and the decline of the West, examining how decades of institutional decay and educational failure have brought us to this precipice. Within the next two weeks, I'll be publishing "Coddled Children: Surviving a World Without Adversity"—exploring what kind of society emerges when we eliminate all hardship, all standards, and all meaningful challenges.

Operation Crossroads: 21 Kiloton "Baker" Bomb Detonated Ninety Feet Underwater, Bikini Atoll Lagoon, South Pacific, July 25, 1946

I'm watching people celebrate attacks on Russian nuclear-capable strategic bombers like it's a football match, and I can't help but wonder: do you have any clue what you're cheering for?

This is the prologue from my novel, written in the immediate aftermath of Russia's invasion in 2022. Not because I'm some prophet, but because when you throw diplomacy out the window and choose pure escalation with a nuclear superpower, the math is pretty fucking simple.

Suzie stares into the mirror. Hollow eyes meet the ghost staring back. Her face gaunt, skin stretched tight over brittle bones. She can't even remember the last time she ate.

As if that even matters…

With a small robotic shrug she brushes back her hair. Strands come loose, clinging to her fingers like dead threads.

Oh no!

She freezes, staring at them. A single, pink-tinged tear slips down her sunken cheek. Slowly, she parts her lips. Her tongue grazes raw gums. Blood seeps from the torn flesh, metallic and bitter. When she nudges a tooth, it moves. Tears sting her eyes as the truth settles cold and heavy inside her.

I'm dying. Alone. Everybody is gone. I don't even know if my little boy is still alive.

Her chest tightens. Silent sobs rack her body until she doubles over the cracked porcelain sink. Blood and tears drip into the basin. She has already forgotten what brought her to the bathroom in the first place. Frantically she searches for a blink of normalcy. Thoughts swirl in her mind like smoke, but none answer the only question that matters.

Why?

She grips the sink harder, her breathing quick and shallow. Memory drags her back to a life that feels more imagined than real.

I don't think I was ever happier.

Joshua had gone to visit her father. Will had surprised her with champagne that night. They sat on the rooftop terrace, her bare legs draped lazily across his lap.

"Rub my feet first," she'd teased, laughing, "and maybe I'll make it worth your while."

His warm, deep laughter had filled the night air, the sound still echoing in her mind—right up to the moment everything shattered. The next thing she remembers is being covered in blood, buried under glass and debris on the floor of the rooftop terrace.

Was I too happy? Did I bring this on us?

The thought coils like a knife in her stomach.

No. This isn't just my end. This is the end for all of us.

Suzie turns toward the bedroom door. Beyond it, Will's body lies twisted on the bed, his face frozen in a grimace of agony, lips swollen and blue, eyes bulging with terror. He had drowned in his own blood sometime last night. The sheets are soaked with piss, bile and shit. The smell clings to her skin, thick and inescapable. Even the memory makes her stomach lurch, but it also reminds her why she came here.

Water. I need water. I won't leave him like this.

She twists the faucet. A few pitiful drops trickle out before the pipes groan and fall silent. She stares at the sink as blood from her nose, mouth and eyes slides in dark rivulets toward the drain and pools into a stagnant copper-red puddle.

Fuck.

Time slips away. The walls seem to close in, pressing the air from her lungs. She tries to scream, tries to release the rage clawing at her insides.

I hope the bastard who pushed the red button first burns in hell forever.

But the stench of death and human waste chokes her before she can make a sound. She gags, stumbling toward the door. Her hand misses the knob and the floor rises to meet her.

Pain explodes in her skull as she crashes down. With a strangled gasp, Suzie stretches out her arm, fingers clawing at the cold tiles. Her breath rattles in her chest. She fights for a last breath of air… and fails.

Joshua.

The thought floats weakly through her mind as darkness takes her.

Dad, please keep him safe. Let him grow up in a better world. I love you both.

This is science fiction. Do you want to make it real? Because this is the path we're on. Every cheer for escalation, every celebration of "hitting back harder," every rejection of any attempt at negotiation - it all leads here. To a red button that will mark the end of humanity. Not because of aliens, or disease, or natural disaster. Because of our own ignorance and stupidity!

So go ahead, keep cheering. But when the mushroom clouds rise, don't say nobody warned you what your applause was really for.

You can also read:

You can find Goya's "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" in the Open Access collection of The Met.

What if our attempts to create a kinder world are unintentionally undermining the very qualities that make us human?

The hallmark of Western societies has been seeking balance between supporting the vulnerable and fostering resilience. But in our modern democracies, we must ask: have we tipped the scale too far?

Over the years, safety nets have expanded to embrace all – including billion-dollar corporations. Regulations have spread like wildfire. Government involvement in daily life continues to grow. These developments likely sprouted from genuine concern for human welfare—but they carry an unexamined cost.

What happens to self-reliance when others manage our risks? What becomes of resilience when we're sheltered from consequences? How does character develop when challenges are systematically removed?

The paradox of protection is that our intentions to help ultimately harm. Like parents who never let their children fall, we create adults who never learn to stand. By solving every problem, we atrophy the problem-solving muscle. By smoothing every path, we create travelers unable to navigate rough terrain or face adversity.

The most troubling aspect isn't just the growth of systems designed to help, but the gradual fading of qualities that make help unnecessary: self-reliance, resourcefulness, resilience. These aren't merely practical skills—they're fundamental to human dignity. To be responsible for oneself is to be fully human.

This doesn't mean abandoning compassion or dismantling support for those truly in need. Rather, it means reexamining what true support entails. Perhaps real compassion isn't removing obstacles but equipping people to overcome them. Perhaps true kindness involves faith in human capacity rather than distrust in human competence or believing your solutions fit all.

Human diversity thrives on difference, on debate, on the friction of opposing views. When we silence opposition in the name of harmony, when we assume good intentions are always good, we pave the way to tyranny.

In the end, a society where people are perpetually guided and guarded is no society at all—but a prison. Perhaps with golden bars and soft pillows, but still a prison.

Aren't we humans meant to be free?

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Enjoy this fragment from Chapter Eight of Coddled Children!

Gladys can still vividly recall the many debates they had during the construction of the dome. How bureaucracy had taken over society suffocating it under layers of regulations that placed every aspect of life under government control. How more and more people had become dependent on the state losing their autonomy and personal responsibility. And how in the process fundamental rights had been steadily eroded.

"But," Graham always said, "the government could never have taken that freedom if we hadn't given them the mandate to do so. A good leader makes sure there is always opposition. Without it a nation becomes nothing but a mindless herd. Our society was already collapsing under its own weight long before the first bomb fell.

"If we want to build a strong people we must teach them to solve their own problems, to take care of themselves, to take responsibility for their own lives. A good government gives every citizen the freedom to shape their own future and only steps in when one person's freedom comes at the expense of another's.

"Every nation needs individuals, Gladys. Too few and the people become a flock of sheep. Sheep need fences. People don't."

Graham had always been direct and to the point. His words could be blunt but they were never cruel and there was no arguing with his logic. More than once Gladys had realized that her good intentions got in the way far more than Graham's simple factual reasoning ever did. And whenever he noticed her struggling with those intentions he would chuckle, throw an arm around her, and say cheerfully:

“Ah, Gladys, we forgot where the road paved with good intentions always leads. But you and I—we have the chance to do things differently. Isn’t that incredible?”

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Freedom? Autonomy? Self-determination?
Every individual virtue is sacrificed to the collective.
Especially in a country that willingly surrendered its sovereignty to an ever-expanding European Union, chasing the illusion of safety.

When I was healthy, I believed this was the right way.
The strong would work hard and pay taxes, supporting the vulnerable.
Solidarity. Compassion. A better world for everyone.

But then I lost my health.
And I had to rely on the system I had funded all my life.

That was when I discovered what socialism really is.

Socialism does not give.
It takes.

It starts with good intentions — the dream of a world without suffering.
But behind the smiling façade lies a cold, ruthless machine.
A machine of rules. A machine that demands submission.

It takes away individual responsibility and replaces it with bureaucratic control.
It takes away human care and replaces it with standardized procedures.

You are no longer a person.
You are a case. A file. A number.
You are told what you need. Forced into solutions that do not fit. Punished for wanting more.

When hardship is removed, so is growth.
When responsibility is taken away, so is freedom.
Without struggle, there is no resilience.
Without challenge, there is no wisdom.

People become fragile. Dependent.
And fragile people need rules.
More rules. Stricter rules.
Rules to keep everyone in line, but entitle them to nothing.

What begins as care ends in control.
What begins as kindness ends in slavery.

And all the while, we toil for an insatiable government that grows and grows, but is always out of money.

There is not one country that embraced socialism and thrived.
Not one.

Because a society without strong, thinking individuals
is nothing more than a herd, waiting for its master.

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You can find Haystacks: Autumn by Jean-François Millet in the Open Access collection of The Met.

The following fragment of Coddled Children shows what happens when rules matter more than people:

The nuclear war hadn’t bridged their differences. If anything, it had carved the divide even deeper. To Gwyn, Rupert was her arch-enemy, the living embodiment of everything her people had suffered. A backwoods preacher longing for the days when men ruled, women served, and Black people were forced to toil in the fields.

I warned Gladys over and over, but they refused to see the danger. Too enamored with that fool Graham, who had them wrapped around their little finger.

Gwyn hadn’t waited for disaster to strike. She had gathered her people, built her power. And when the dome was completed, when the whiteys did exactly what she knew they would—seizing control the moment they had the chance—she made her move.

They never saw it coming. Overconfident and unprepared they crumbled without a fight. A slow smirk curls across Gwyn’s lips as she remembers.

They had spent so much time following orders, they had forgotten how to think for themselves. Putting them in their rightful place had almost been too easy.

(…)

Once Gwyn realized the whiteys would never pose a serious danger, she turned her focus inward. She tightened control. Education was reshaped to keep children from becoming too curious or creative. Life paths were carefully mapped out ensuring that everyone remained safe, predictable, and comfortably within their own environment. No one would get any dangerous ideas about changing their fate.

But that was also where the friction with Gladys began.

"You are killing everything that makes people unique and beautiful, Gwyn. You need hardship to build emotional strength. What you are doing now is condemning people to eternal infancy!"

But Gladys never understood.

Every empire that has ever risen has eventually collapsed under the weight of its own divisions, torn apart by people pulling in different directions.

The only way to prevent that is to make sure everyone moves as one. No exceptions.

And Gwyn is not about to let the society she has spent the last twenty-three years so carefully cultivating be torn apart.

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Curlingkinderen's Substack

We no longer tell stories about love.

Not real love. Not the kind that transforms us, challenges us, softens us. What we are given instead are narratives designed to tell us how to think and how to live. Characters flattened into pre-chewed scripts, spoon-feeding us ideological beliefs about gender, sexuality, identity, and equality.

Everything must serve the message. And the message is always the same: female independence is strength, needing someone is weakness, and male desires must be managed and corrected.

What this leaves us with is a world of flawless women and useless men. Representation has replaced revelation. What used to be chemistry is now choreography. The sex is explicit, but the intimacy is gone. What once drew us in now distances us. These are not love stories. They are lectures. Stylized, polished and beautifully shot. Yet the stories are flat and emotionally hollow.

We’ve stopped protecting innocence. We’ve commodified it. We’ve turned sexuality into performance and affection into a transaction. Girls are taught to be everything. Boys are taught to be nothing. And somewhere in between, the idea of mutual giving—the essence of love—has disappeared.

What happens when we teach young women that love follows achievement, and that men are unnecessary at best, dangerous at worst? What happens when men grow tired of being dismissed, and quietly retreat into silence or indifference? We are told this is progress. In reality, it is collapse. Not the kind that makes headlines, but the kind that slowly unravels the social fabric.

No one teaches us how to be close anymore. How to give, how to receive, how to stay when things hurt. What we are left with are two worlds drifting apart, each retreating into its own safe space, no longer able to truly see the other, let alone reach out and connect. And in the absence of shared space, there can be no real encounter. And thus, we end up alone.

This is not freedom. This is not evolution. We breathe. We function. But we no longer live.

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You can find The Declaration of Love by Jean François de Troy in the Open Access collection of The Met.

In Coddled Children, love is not forbidden. It is forgotten. The following fragment shows why we should do everything in our power to get it back:

"What is love? It is a concept humanity has never truly been able to define. All we know is that it is gone, that we have lost it. We feel an emptiness in our hearts where love and connection once flowed freely. We drown in suffocating loneliness, even though we are never alone. It almost feels as if we are dying a little more each day. And in that pain, our souls cry out: Nourish me, or I will perish!

But we no longer know how to feed the soul. We no longer know what it feels like to be embraced by a father or a mother. We no longer know the warmth of a lover’s touch. Everything is impersonal. From the moment we are born, everything is decided for us. We are told who to be, what to think, what to achieve, and what to possess, but never who we are.

Instead, we are taught how to behave, how to function. We learn everything except how to be ourselves, how to love ourselves, and how to find fulfillment in simply being who we are. What is left of us when everything we have been taught is stripped away? Are we even still human?

But we still have everything," I hear you say. "We have food and drink, we have clothes, we have our own cabin with a bed, we have work, we have sex, we have possessions. Yes, we have all of that. Still, my question is not about what we have, but who we are!

Once, humanity stood apart from all other creatures. Not because of our intellect, nor our inventions, but because we were capable of true connection; a perfect symbiosis of giving and receiving. To exist fully, without diminishing another. We were grateful for the love we received and gave everything in return to bring happiness to those we cherished. We nourished one another, we supported one another, we loved one another, and we made love.

And now?

We have food, yet we eat alone.

We have cabins, yet we live alone.

We have sex, yet we sleep alone.

No longer capable of giving, we seek others only to take. We take, and we are taken, until nothing remains.

Did we survive nuclear war only to be reduced to objects? We deserve more than this! We are human! Rise up! Love yourself! Love one another! Let love back into your life and live with all your heart and soul!"

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Curlingkinderens' Substack

“Propaganda doesn’t need to lie.
It only needs to control what you see—
and leave out what you were never meant to question.”

We like to believe we hold the truth and that the other is misinformed. But in reality, almost everything can be looked at from two opposing sets of views, given sufficient ingenuity.

Facts rarely speak for themselves. The same facts can tell entirely different stories, depending on context, interpretation, values, convictions, and lived experience. We can share the same reality and still arrive at opposite conclusions about what’s happening and what should be done.

Once, we called that diversity of thought.
Now, we call it misinformation. Or worse: interference.

That’s the true power of propaganda. Not to deceive, but to narrow the field. To reduce complexity until only one conclusion seems reasonable and all others feel like a threat. It works quietly. Through repetition, simplification, omission. Not only in the facts we’re given, but in the language we’re allowed to use, the ideas we’re encouraged to support, the questions we’re discouraged from asking.

Over time, people stop thinking with each other and start thinking against each other. Ideas turn into slogans. Dialogue becomes accusation. We no longer try to understand why someone believes what they believe. We only judge that they do.

And even when someone tries to push back—by offering facts, nuance, or a broader view—it often doesn’t matter. Propaganda doesn’t anchor itself in truth, but in belief. And belief, once fused with identity, is nearly impossible to dislodge.

That’s how people end up defending positions that harm them. That’s how nations sleepwalk into conflict. By the time the full picture comes into view, the crowd is already marching and the road back to peace is almost shut off.

Try to push through that surface, and people will more often respond with outrage than with argument, fracturing families, friendships, neighborhoods. It doesn’t take a war to break a society. Carefully managed narratives can achieve even more.

Here’s a short excerpt from Chapter 5 of Coddled Children. If you like content that challenges your thinking, you can subscribe for free.

"And now you want sympathy?"

He scoffs.

"Enough. You got your answer. Get back to work and fix the system. Or things will get very bad for you."

The young officer crosses his arms and stares straight ahead, his anger radiating off him like heat. The older officer looks momentarily stunned by his colleague’s outburst. But after a brief hesitation, he straightens up as well, though not before giving Joshua a sharp nudge with his baton, forcing him back toward his screen.

Slowly, Joshua turns around. His mind is racing.

Rupert was right. These people are so convinced of our evil that they’ll fight to the last man if we take the Free Nations.

But something else gnaws at him. The ACID officer’s response felt… rehearsed. He recited those words like a script, as if they had been drilled into him, not learned through experience. Rupert always said the Free Nations spoon-fed their people hatred against white men. And he remembers his grandfather’s constant grumbling about how their entire information system was nothing but one-sided propaganda.

"Ignorance is the strongest armor against truth," his grandfather used to say. "The easiest way to control a population is to control their access to information. People believe what they see, read, and hear. And they act accordingly. If you want to break through that armor, you need a powerful weapon. Facts alone won’t be enough."

Joshua never truly understood what he meant. Not until now. His grandfather had always pushed him to seek out his own information, to form his own opinions.

"Otherwise, you’ll end up trapped in an echo chamber."

But what if that’s not the problem? What if you never even get the chance to decide? What if the only things you’re allowed to see, hear, or read are what others want you to believe? A sharp jolt runs through him, and he bolts upright with a sudden cry.

Then you don’t think for yourself at all. You only think what they want you to think.

The realization slams into him like a lightning strike. His fingers fly across the keyboard as his idea takes shape. Behind him, the two officers exchange a knowing glance, but Joshua doesn’t see them. He doesn’t hear them. His mind is racing.

How would the people of the Free Nations react if they were exposed to another truth?

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Curlingkinderen Subtack

"I got what I asked for and paid with regret."

In the last two excerpts I shared, two extremes were explored. One showed how radicalization grows when people are silenced and pushed to the margins. The other exposed how blind idealism fuels war while shutting down critical thought. Both stem from the same inaccurate assumption, the belief that ideology and rules can replace individual responsibility.

Now, we turn to another consequence of this mindset: how we approach sexual boundaries.

This is a complex and sensitive issue, one that requires deeper analysis. I will write a full article on it soon, but for now, I want to share my core perspective, one that is often overlooked in today’s discussions on sexual misconduct:

It takes two to tango.

In the ‘free’ West, we teach young girls and women that they are equal to men, that they can be anything, that they must claim their place in the world. Yet, when it comes to sexual encounters, women are suddenly framed as helpless and in need of protection. Responsibility shifts entirely to the other party. But does this really serve them? If we are equal in all aspects, should we not be equal in our sexual relationships too?

In my novel Coddled Children, I take an unfiltered look at what happens when personal responsibility is removed from the equation. No matter how many laws, rules, and measures we put in place to regulate sexuality, if we fail to teach young men and women how to set their own boundaries, things can still go terribly wrong.

We have created an intricate web of rules and policies designed to define acceptable sexual behavior. But do they truly protect us? Strict laws against rape and sexual assault are essential, yet rules alone do not prevent harm. They merely assign blame after the fact. The more we rely on regulations to shield us, the less we take responsibility for our own safety. And when people believe rules will protect them, they stop protecting themselves.

Consent is more than a legal checkbox; it requires real agency. If no one is taught how to say no, then consent itself loses all meaning. And if setting boundaries is never encouraged, how can we expect people to recognize when those boundaries are crossed?

If we look at high-profile sexual misconduct cases in recent years, the ‘perpetrator’ is often accused of taking advantage of a victim in a vulnerable position. But the question that is never asked is: how did the victim end up in that vulnerable position? Could it have been avoided with a little bit of foresight?

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I come from a generation of women who understood that certain precautions were necessary. We knew not to get blackout drunk at a party if there was no one to look out for us. We knew not to accept drinks from strangers, not to get into a car with someone we didn’t trust, not to go to a secluded house or walk through a dark park alone. Some call that oppression in a patriarchal society. I call it common sense and self-preservation.

That is why I believe the phrase “mothers educate your sons” is misguided. No mother encourages her sons to take advantage of young women. A good mother teaches her son to respect his partner’s boundaries. But that only works if the partner is able to set those boundaries in the first place. Maybe we should be saying “fathers educate your daughters.” Teach them to value their own bodies and not to give themselves away lightly, even in a free society. That alone could prevent a great deal of suffering.

I will return with a more thorough analysis. For now, here’s an excerpt from the fourth chapter of Coddled Children, where Kitty is about to have her ‘experience of a lifetime.’

Kitty scrolls through the list of questions, her cheeks burning. Thankfully, she’s in her own cabin, where no one can see her.

They’re really not letting me wiggle out of this, I have to give them that.

Just a week after their last dynamo training, Sammy had already signed her up with intimacy coach Julie. Her session is in just four days.

She hasn’t spoken to Sammy since, only received a short message:

"Your session partner is Justin. Justin is an insanely hot PwP, who knows exactly what they're doing, and you shouldn’t hesitate to do whatever you feel like with them. Oh, and Justin is looking forward to it."

Yesterday, she got an email from intimacy coach Julie with an extensive questionnaire and the request to send it back in time. Now, after an exhausting dynamo training session followed by an endless day of dull conversations, Kitty finally has time to take a closer look at what she’s gotten herself into.

Half the terms on the list are completely unfamiliar to her.

Better not figure those out on the spot.

But she also has to specify where she does or doesn’t want to be touched. Nervously, she rubs her hands together.

How am I supposed to know if I’ve never done it before? No, I don’t want to get spanked or humiliated, but other than that...?

She exhales deeply, trying to recall Sammy’s stories. She regrets now that she never really paid attention. Out of secondhand embarrassment, sure, but mostly because she wasn’t interested.

She grimaces.

That was the old Kitty. The new Kitty is going to live. Enjoy. Do fun things. Sammy is right. Why should I keep worrying, and for whom? Let others deal with the mess!

She looks at the questions again. Does she want it soft, firm, or rough? She thinks of Sammy’s hilarious stories about pathetic, sloppy caresses and limp little willies. Apparently, those two go hand in hand.

Well, I don’t need to be handled with silk gloves either. It’s bad enough that I have no experience. I don’t need to come off as a prude on top of that.

She clicks on ‘firm’, closes the questionnaire, and sends it back to Julie.

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Back then, Europe had just imposed its first rounds of sanctions, cut Russia off from SWIFT, and flooded Ukraine with weapons. There was no room for negotiation, no serious attempt at diplomacy. It was as if every possible bridge to a peaceful resolution had to be burned, as quickly as possible.

I watched it unfold with disbelief. Not because I doubted that Putin’s invasion was an act of aggression, but because of the sheer incompetence of the West’s response. The sanctions weren’t designed to bring Russia to the table. They were designed to provoke, to escalate. Cutting Russia off from SWIFT didn’t cripple its economy; it forced it into new alliances, pushing China and Russia closer together. The EU wasn’t isolating Putin… it was isolating itself.

And yet, the public swallowed the narrative whole:

“Putin wants to conquer Europe. He won’t stop at Ukraine. We must act before it’s too late.”

It made no sense. Why would a 72-year-old leader, in power for over two decades, suddenly decide he wanted to conquer Europe? Where was the proof? Where was the logic? But logic didn’t matter. The war drums were beating, and questioning the narrative made you a sympathizer.

Now, two years later, European politicians are openly calling for war. They speak of “total victory” and “defeating Russia once and for all,” as if this is a chess game they are in control of. But the same lack of self-awareness remains. No reflection, no strategy. Not even the means to back up their warmongering with action. Just escalation, over and over again.

This is the speech I wrote in 2022. It was meant as a warning. Now, it reads like a prophecy. You can find it in the fifth chapter of Coddled Children:

“Twenty-five years ago, the world shook, and what was once ours was reduced to a handful of square kilometers. Some say that war marked the beginning of the end for us. But the war against us had begun long before.

We had paradise once. But instead of guarding it, we grew soft, complacent. We took our wealth for granted and lost our edge. So, we stood by as the borders opened, as strangers poured in and our communities crumbled. We stood by as soulless bureaucrats buried us under pointless laws to justify their useless jobs. We stood by as the government tightened its grip, stripping us of our self-reliance.

And we stood by when they came for our culture, our traditions, tearing them down piece by piece. By the time poverty and despair forced us to see the truth, it was too late. They had taken everything.

Fanatics always seek to bend the world to their will. They began throwing war rhetoric at nations where men still had a spine, posturing like rulers of a world that no longer feared them. They imposed sanctions the way a scolding mother snatches sweets from a disobedient child.

They were fools. They actually believed that wagging a finger and saying ‘naughty, naughty’ would make the bad men fall to their knees and beg for forgiveness. And when that failed, they turned to weapons. And when that still didn’t give them the results they wanted, they started dropping bombs.”

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The bigger picture: is this proxy war being used as a distraction from European decline?

We think we are witnessing a geopolitical struggle, but what if this war is a cover-up for something much bigger:

the collapse of Europe’s economic and societal foundations?

When leaders are unable to fix their own problems, they create external enemies. It is the oldest trick in the book. Europe is drowning in debt, industries are collapsing, and the middle class is being crushed under unsustainable policies. People are struggling, disillusioned, and losing trust in their governments. What better way to redirect their anger than by fueling a war?

Over a million people have died. But Europe wants more, flooding Ukraine with weapons and bombs in a war they can never win. Why would any sane person want to prolong a war that is unwinnable? Because war boosts the economy and GDP growth, masking the uncomfortable fact that Europe has not produced anything new in decades and that CO₂ budgets are not a sustainable business model!

And let's be real: If this war is truly about democracy, why is questioning it treated as betrayal? Blind obedience is what dictators demand, not democracies. If we are not even allowed to question, to form our own opinions, doesn’t that in itself undeniably prove we are being led astray?

In my third article on the knowledge crisis, The Fall of the Western Empire, I compared the current trajectory of Europe with that of Rome in its final days. Rome didn’t fall in a day. It fell over decades, as bureaucratic rot and arrogance blinded its leaders. In its final years, Rome justified its failures with endless wars, each one more desperate than the last.

It looks like Europe has forgotten and is repeating history once again. The only question is: how far will they go before they realize they can’t win? And when they do… will there be anything left to rebuild?

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"Empires rise and fall, and stars glitter in the sky for thousands of years, but nothing is so enduring as hatred."

In the third chapter of Coddled Children, I explore the roots of radicalization. In my opinion, radicalization doesn’t happen overnight. No one is born an extremist. People are shaped by their experiences—by being ignored, dismissed, and cast aside until they no longer see another way. Radicalization is therefore not a spontaneous transformation but a reaction to a hostile environment that refuses to listen to their words, that denies context and specific circumstance, and that deletes any perspective that does not align with ‘the right opinion’.

We like to think of radicals as if they appeared out of nowhere, disconnected from reality. Deplorables. Lost causes. People beyond reason, beyond redemption. But do we ever think to ask: How did they get there? How much rejection, how much humiliation, how much isolation does it take before someone crosses a line?

Radicalization doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s easy to point at extremists, but do we ever look at the role we play? What happens when we systematically silence dissent, when we brand all opposition as dangerous, when we ridicule and ostracize those who dare to think differently? We don’t fight extremism that way—we feed it! We create the very enemies we claim to stand against.

In The Last Straw, I explore how a system that claims to be inclusive can, in reality, drive radicalization. The pursuit of absolute equality, without regard for context or circumstances, inevitably creates outsiders. And when people are no longer heard, they will find a way to make themselves heard.

The following excerpt captures this process. It shows how frustration turns into fury, how the search for justice hardens into a single-minded resolve—one that leaves no room for humanity.

That night, Rupert lies awake, unable to sleep. Like his nephew, he’s spent his whole life longing for a connection with the opposite sex. Simon has never seen a woman up close, but Rupert remembers. Before the nuclear war, he’d already suffered through eight years of rejection. Sure, he wasn’t exactly handsome with his thinning hair, bushy eyebrows, stocky build, and crooked teeth.

But I was kind, loyal, smart, thoughtful, even funny. All those things women always said were important.

For the girls he grew up with, none of it mattered. He wasn’t attractive enough, not interesting enough, not rich enough. He made too many clever remarks, cracked too many awkward jokes. And sure, he was always right. But how could he help that? That was just the way he was!

When the war broke out, Rupert dared to hope. Maybe if he worked hard, helped build the dome, someone would finally see his worth. But no. The socialists came instead.

They made us do all the work. While my buddies died one by one from radiation, THEY stood there whining, complaining about how THEY were the oppressed ones. Lazy bastards! They took everything from us, threw us in a ghetto and enslaved us!

A groan escapes Rupert’s throat as his heart shatters once again. He covers his tear-filled eyes with his arm.

And now? Now all the good years are behind me! And why? Because for some people, it’s never good enough. That’s why!

The rage takes hold, consuming the sorrow. He’s back in the familiar fantasy: the sword of justice in his hands, cutting down each and every one of those socialists, dragging them to the gates of hell where God will cast His judgment upon them.

We’ll keep some of the younger ones: re-educate them, rebuild with them. But those old hags won’t escape their fate!

No open flames are allowed in the Free Nations, but in his mind, the pyres blaze high.

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