Arctic Dementor

Law-abiding conservatives and immigration-loving liberals alike are wringing their handsover the popular chord that CITIZEN VIGILANTE has struck with the people of the West. The point is not whether it is a good movie, or a successful movie, or not, its significance can be seen in the viscerally fearful reactions to it.

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No, we can’t. That’s the problem. There isn’t a better way any more, there isn’t even a different way, because the very forces that have brought the West to this juncture have relentlessly prevented the people of the West from having any voice in their own invasion and subjugation. Popular approval for this program of legal, government-assisted invasion was never, ever, sought. Every attempt to stop it through political means was thwarted in an illegitimate manner by the system. Mass immigration, political refugees, and migration have ALWAYS been very politically unpopular. No one ever voted for open borders. No one in Minneapolis ever asked to be invaded by Somalis. Every time a European country voted against its own submission to the EU, people were paid off and it was forced to vote again until it voted “the right way”. Just because something is done legally, or by government agents, does not mean that it is right. And just because something is deemed illegal, or government agents attempt to prevent it, does not mean it is wrong. To even bring up the question of “legality” in this regard is a category error.

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As I have repeatedly predicted for over a decade, by the time this is all over, there will be statues to St. Breivik all over Europe; he may even end up being named a literal saint by the post-inquisition church. Look up the deeds of the men to whom statues have historically been erected if you doubt me. And never forget that 100 percent of the blame for the current and future bloodshed falls on the wicked hands of the people who created all of this hatred, division, and violence by knowingly introducing the elements required to produce it. Self-defense is a God-given right for both an individual and for a nation, no matter how foreign rulers or treasonous evil rulers try to prevent it.

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Before leaving London this morning, I finished watching one of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen: Uwe Boll’s ‘Citizen Vigilante’. It is not a good movie, technically speaking: it’s propagandistic, and full of holes (e.g., there are a hundred ways the Vigilante makes it easy for cops to identify him and track him down, but they never seem to do it). Narratively, it is a total mess. But technical excellence is not its point. It’s not even a good movie in the moral sense, more on which later. Not gonna lie, I felt dirty watching it.  But I’m glad I did, because it is an extremely powerful movie, for one reason: it tells forbidden but widely known truths about life in lawless Europe overrun by migrants, and it speaks deeply — deeply — to the sense of suppressed outrage that many ordinary Europeans feel towards the film’s twin villains: migrant criminals and the European establishment (law enforcement, courts, politicians) that allow them to tyrannize innocent Europeans. The academic David Betz warns of civil war coming to Europe if those in power don’t do something serious about migration and the problems it causes. This movie shows you exactly what he means.

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I have been accused by well-meaning people — people who understand the problem — of somehow encouraging civil unrest by talking about it. They’re wrong. In fact, the outright refusal of those in power to talk about it, and to suppress and punish people who are trying, however crudely, to face the truth, makes propaganda works like this inevitable. And it also makes the fascist fantasy of the film likely to come true. In fact, let me make this clear: “Citizen Vigilante” is a fascist film, in the sense that it valorizes lawless violence in service of restoring social order and an ideal of justice. It shows exactly why an exasperated people turn to fascism as a solution to a problem liberal democratic governments have proven unwilling or unable to solve. If you don’t understand that, you will not understand the malign power of this film. Nor will you get why it will become an underground smash, no matter what the authorities do. “Citizen Vigilante” is also a fulfillment of Ross Douthat’s famous prophecy from about twenty years ago, that went something like this: “If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait till you see the Post-Religious Right.”

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I would not at all think that Katharine Birbalsingh, herself of migrant background, would support this film. But watching it, I recalled seeing her electrifying speech at ARC, in which she vehemently denounced the woke culture that rendered the police who presided over the slow death of Henry Nowak, stabbed to death by a brown person, wrong-headed in how they handled the incident. As police body cams showed, Henry Nowak, a white Briton who had been stabbed by Vickrum Singh Digwa, bleeding to death from his wounds while police mocked his claims that he had been stabbed. Birbalsingh condemned the culture that had taught the police officers to be more afraid of being called racist than of helping a clearly injured white man. “Citizen Vigilante” says, in effect: if Britain and Europe will not listen to the good people like Birbalsingh, sounding the warning, then they will inevitably call up demons like Sanders. It’s the most predictable thing in the world.

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But listen: if not for Elon Musk, there would have been no public outcry in Britain over the Pakistani rape gangs. He singlehandedly, through X, brought the issue back into the public square. The facts were known, but the government, and UK institutions, had kept a lid on public outrage. Whether you blame or credit Musk for this, his central role is undeniable. And he is making an important point: governments and their establishment allies cannot solve the problem by suppressing information and public outrage.

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At ARC, listening in private conversation to young people (Generation Z), I heard complaints about how “Boomer” many of the speeches were. It wasn’t a cheap slur. What they meant is that older people — that is to say, not only Boomers, but Gen Xers (like me), and even Millennials — do not understand how critical the crisis has become, and how weird and extreme the world really is.

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But after the Great Depression hit in 1929, ordinary Germans — especially the young!— lost faith in liberal democracy, and flocked to parties of the extreme Left and extreme Right. I believe this is happening now in most Western countries, despite the fact that we have not suffered the shattering events that preceded the Great Depression. I wrote in Live Not By Lies that we did not (many still do not) grasp the totalitarian nature of wokeness, because our idea of totalitarianism was police-state control via pain and terror, à la Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet the effects were still totalitarian! The refugees from Soviet communism that I interviewed for that book helped me, and my readers, understand this.  Weimar America is written in the same sense. When most of us who know anything about Weimar hear the word, we immediately think of the opening act for Nazism. The idea of a Hitler taking power in America seems absurd, so we dismiss the claim. This is dangerously stupid. As I write in the book, I do not know if Fascist government is coming to America, nor do I know if Communist government is coming (the Communist Party of Germany was a powerful force before Hitler). If I had to predict — and I write this in the book — I would guess that whatever is coming will be severely authoritarian, and will be connected to the normalization of AI.

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The day may come when we American conservatives miss Donald Trump who, for all his many, many flaws — yes, I am a disillusioned Trump supporter — is not a right-wing extremist. Trump remembers an America that worked. The generation born in the late 1990s has known nothing but failure, uncertainty, and chaos. 

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To my fellow Christians: not long ago I had an intense conversation with a Gen Z Christian who explained that Nick Fuentes is so popular among Gen Z conservative Christians because Fuentes, clown that he is, straddles the line between Catholicism and “vitalism” — the neopagan worship of strength and power. If the churches don’t find some way to relate to strength — and demonstrate it in an authentically Christian way, not simply demonize it — then the neopagans will win. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and sentimental humanitarianism are going to be crushed.

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Democracies won the 20th century on the battlefield as well as in the marketplace and the war of ideas, resulting in a world order made in their own image. But they did not prepare for or predict the resurgence of autocracies, nor the way that the postcolonial states—and the supranational institutions they now controlled—would, after many decades, reject the liberal democratic world order. The autocracies are surging, and democracies ebbing. It is impossible to define exactly what causes one state to fall and another to rise, but Ibn Khaldun identified asabiyya, the cohesion essential for a society to thrive: “Many nations suffered a physical defeat, but that’s never marked their end. Yet when a nation becomes the victim of psychological defeat, that marks the end.”

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The so-called rules-based order was degraded not just by the fecklessness or cynicism of U.S. presidents but also by its own ideological stagnation—as demonstrated in all manner of scandals and outrages, but perhaps best demonstrated in January by the failures of the United Nations and humanitarian NGOs to condemn the massacre of Iranian protesters by the Islamic dictatorship. In spite of their original values of humanitarianism and neutrality, these organizations have been morally debased from within, using the language of human rights and international justice yet deploying it on behalf of autocracies and against the liberal democracies that created them. They need to be reformed, or they will become impotent. And we may all live to greatly miss Western humbug in the decades ahead. Meanwhile, the very vocabulary of humanitarianism and antiracism has become so selectively applied or debased as to be meaningless. We need to develop a new vocabulary. Now let us turn to the crisis of democracy. Open societies are slow, their leaders amateurish, their policies inconsistent, but when they mobilize they are flexible, efficient, and creative. Technology can undermine democratic solidarity and aid tyranny and conspiracism, yet it also advances openness and justice. Its very facility means that atrocities and wars can be instantly recorded and viewed everywhere in our new virtual-arena world. But the multiheaded, indestructible Hydra of social media is an unpredictable power center, competing with elected, parliamentary, civic, and media institutions to complicate and distort already polarized societies.

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The immediate challenge is to learn to manage our new technologies, to control their addictiveness and surveillance and the lack of inhibition they encourage while enjoying their benefits. The invisible power of the unelected despots of data and tech lords must be diminished; if families cannot control the disaster of digital addiction, states will have to legislate for them. Artificial intelligence will replace many jobs globally but in the comfort democracies—those legacy states, once imperial powers, overstretched by welfare promises, legal entitlements, and executive paralysis—it will hit middle-class digital mediators who moved data around an onanistic internet economy. If things go wrong, the overqualified graduate activist class could provide the revolutionaries of the future. AI, too, would certainly be a dangerous tool in the hands of overmighty states just as it could be invaluable in the right hands.

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The peril for comfort democracies is that they can no longer satisfy the entitled demands of their citizens, nor assuage their popular, fearful rage against decline, poverty, and immigration. Meanwhile, the traditional markers of Western success—legal codes, civic institutions, bureaucratic processes, the guardianship of a cozy ruling caste and the pious but unrealistic orthodoxies of privileged patriciates—are in danger of becoming obstacles to governance and to individual freedoms, if not actual engines of paralysis. The sociologist Max Weber foresaw the paralysis of this bureaucratization that is now unleashing a rising fury against democracy itself. The cycle can probably only be broken only by the election of iconoclastic radical politicians. The selection of leaders who can dynamically solve the issues of the electorate is what democracy is meant to do to forestall collapse and revolution, though the danger with such radical governments is that they tend to break more than they solve, and move toward cults of personality and authority. The balance is delicate; the peril is one that only dedicated citizenship can prevent; the prize is democracies that again reflect the wishes and trust of their electorates. A parallel crisis is the conundrum of how comfort democracies can fulfill citizens’ expectations of social services and health care ’til death, a challenge exacerbated by aging populations, without such punishing taxes that they strangle their own golden geese. America and Europe have been immeasurably enriched, culturally and economically, by the arrival and absorption of immigrants from all over the world. Yet a new much larger immigration deluge is likely imminent, posing a dilemma for democracies that believe they must choose between virtue and survival. Political parties and leaders who do not legislate for this, nor discuss and confront factions and sects that are opposed to free speech and open societies due to ideological zeal—and fear of small groups of illiberal activists—will place democracy itself in danger by making it appear obsolete, unworkable, or corrupt.

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Not everyone is lonely; some women, no longer obliged to marry, are probably happier and freer. But in many cases, what I call algorithmic companionship—which doesn’t require empathy or sympathy for others—has replaced the real sort. The result is an epidemic of solitude, if not loneliness; a dramatic drop in fertility; and a romantic famine across North and South America, Europe, and China. Yet as the populations there shrink, populations are booming in less prosperous and less secular regions, including Africa and the Middle East. This epoch of new middling and continental powers should be Africa’s moment. Treasure-states such as Nigeria and South Africa, with their mineral resources, should be emerging as world powers. But if instead they continue to fail, migrants will move north to enjoy the benefits and safety offered by the comfort democracies. Migration has always been the engine of history.

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