Barbarism Is Winning

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

The West has been flooded with barbarians, who are no longer at the gates but well inside them.

But the threat of the barbarians from without is minuscule compared to the reality that barbarism itself has become perfectly normal within our society, and barbaric practices have been adopted by many Americans.

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The chances that a graduate from a prestigious college in America will embrace barbarism are likely higher than your average illegal alien, at least from a few years ago. Most illegal aliens come here to live the American Dream, and prior to Biden’s open door/let’s hand you a check policy they likely got jobs and kept their heads down.

College students? Not so much. BLM and Antifa barbarians? They are barbaric nihilists bent on destroying everything that is good about our society.

Over the past few years, we have seen an explosion of violence and property crime in our cities, and the political activism that is normal on college campuses has turned into mob action aimed at intimidating and silencing anybody the activists don’t like.

It’s not just that conservative speakers aren’t welcome at colleges. That is intellectually damaging, of course, but that is not what I am referring to. It is the rage, the violence, the thrill of the mob, and the glee in attacking people.

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It goes far beyond politics and college campuses. At the pro-Palestinian protests you see people explicitly endorsing hatred and violence against Jews. Not just sly references to eliminating Israel, but open antisemitism and embrace of Hitlerian tactics.

You see people with swastikas at rallies, screams of “f**k the Jews,” and justification of Hamas’ terror as “resistance” to settler colonialism, as if Jews don’t belong in a homeland that has been theirs for literally thousands of years, and was formally recognized by the United Nations in 1948.

The radical ideologies floating out there could be described as a swing of the pendulum, but the embrace of violence and destruction coupled with the open hatred for our society is a threat to the very existence of our culture. As it is intended to be.

What makes this outbreak of barbarianism fundamentally different from the 1960s, where we saw a similar descent into madness that wasn’t fully rejected until well into the Reagan years, is the fact that our major institutions are now owned by the barbarians themselves.

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Western resilience in the 1980s was buttressed by the fact that our education system, Hollywood, and the media were not fundamentally corrupted in the way they are today. Each of these institutions leaned left, but not Left. They were dominated by people who thought America could be better, not that it must be destroyed.

That is no longer the case. Your average college professor is either a radical or is so intimidated by them that they remain quiet. Your average college student has already been exposed to over a decade of propaganda and is then thrown into a hothouse of political nihilism that it is a miracle if they come out sane.

When Riley Gaines was attacked in San Francisco, the university’s administrators expressed pride in their students, not horror at the fact that an invited speaker was assaulted. The students at the school were proud of what they did, and their university was too.

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After Audrey Hale shot up a school and killed a bunch of children, protesters went to the capitol and called her one of the victims because she was driven to murder by hateful people. They embraced Hale.

Hale killed 6 people. The protesters held up 7 fingers, as if her being shot by the police was victimizing her.

Watching videos of barbarians ripping down posters of kidnapped children in Gaza is heartbreaking, not because I can’t understand people being appalled by the scale of death this war is causing in Gaza, but because these people clearly think the Jews deserve everything done to them.

Obviously, this embrace of barbarism goes far beyond the Israel-Hamas conflict; it’s just that the open embrace of hate is so obvious in this one case.

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But those videos of mass invasions of stores to loot them, the “wilding” that has terrified city dwellers, and the streets filled with zombie drug addicts all add up to a society that no longer is willing to defend itself.

The barbarians who have invaded–and let’s be honest, as bad as the illegal immigration crisis is and as important it is to control our borders and punish illegal entry in the country, most are not here to wreak destruction–are less of an existential danger to the country than the home-grown barbarians our educational system and academic institutions have created. Add in the people who have embraced the identity of “victim” in urban America and you have a toxic brew.

I’d certainly trade any number of these protesters at colleges or Antifa supporters 1 for 1 in return for an illegal migrant who wants to actually do real work.

When we have public defenders embracing the barbarism–people on the public payroll–the sepsis has already seeped into the bones.

It’s not just in America. It is an illness that has struck the entire West. Wherever you turn–France, Britain, Australia, New Zealand–you see a rottenness in the culture. It’s not that everything is rotten–far from it. But once the rot has spread far enough it eats away at the healthy tissue.

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So far our elite institutions have embraced the decline, perhaps thinking that they will benefit or at least survive the destruction of the West. That is insane, but also self-evidently true that they believe it. They cater to, fund, hire, and promote the most rotten parts of our society.

The key to all this is the decline of our education system, which should be part of the cultural immune system. Instead, it has become the spreader of the disease that is destroying the West.

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Florida, at least, is fighting back, and other states may follow. School choice and cleaning out academia are two of the key moves we can make, and we simply must rebuild our criminal justice system.

Can we do it? I don’t know.

But we have to try.

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