Mark Penn and Andrew Stein offer an extraordinary analysis in the Wall Street Journal: A segment of the U.S. is openly rooting for their own country and the West to lose to Iran.
According to the authors—the first a pollster who long worked for Bill and Hillary Clinton, the second a prominent Democratic politician—the dominant narrative in the mainstream media (from which all Italian media sources draw their information) systematically delivers negative news about the U.S. and Donald Trump, to the extent that it creates a distorted perception of the conflict.
This also happened during the Vietnam War, when it was said that television was what led to the political defeat (on the battlefield, they had won). If the U.S. wins this war alongside Israel, it will quite simply be the first time since Vietnam. But when it comes to the mood of defeat, it’s the same as every other time.
Jürgen Habermas, the last philosopher of the twentieth century, has passed away. And one must read the biography written by Stefan Müller-Doohm to avoid falling for the false saintly image that the left-wing media in Italy paint of him.
In 1968, Habermas accused the left of “left-wing fascism” – Linken Faschismus. And he had the courage to sign an appeal against UNESCO’s declaration of Tehran as the world’s capital of philosophy, while sociologists like Kian Tajbakhsh and philosophers like Akbar Ganji were rotting in prisons during the Islamic Revolution. He warned against the return of eugenics and engaged in dialogue with Ratzinger on “faith and reason.” After October 7, 2023, Habermas wrote that Israel had the right to self-defense and war. With Habermas’s passing, a great philosopher is gone. Perhaps the last.
The renowned historian Antony Beevor takes a bleak view of things and tells The Times: “The West accounts for 7 percent of the world’s population but 50 percent of the world’s social spending. How will we ever be able to compete with China?”
Only 8 percent of children will be born in the West this year.
Demographics aren’t everything, but they’re almost everything. Even in Helsinki on the far edge of the EU, where a fifth of the population comes from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
A dramatic article by Thomas Fasbender in Berliner Zeitung addresses the massive demographic changes in Germany and explains how Germans will become a minority in the near future.
The article, titled “Demographics in Germany: Multiculturalism Is Coming Faster Than Expected,” states:
“By the middle of the century, between 17 and 20 million Germans without an immigrant background will have died; nearly the entire baby boom generation will be gone. If one adds together the effects of an increased birth rate and continued immigration of up to 400,000 people per year, the number of births to people with an immigrant background will reach nine million by 2050. A balance in births—with and without an immigrant background—will be achieved by shortly after 2030 at the latest.
Sharia über alles?
Meanwhile, London has fallen: welcome to Trafalgar Square (even the mayor was there to pray). Michael Deacon in The Telegraph is right: “The Islamists are winning.”
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Muslims’ public mass prayers at symbolic locations in the West are a show of force. Whether it happens at the Brandenburg Gate, Times Square, the Colosseum, or Trafalgar Square, Islamic mass prayers are taking place with increasing frequency in public spaces in Western cities—and now even in churches. This is a deliberately provocative spectacle that threatens civil and religious peace.
“When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand on street corners to be seen by others,” reads the admonition in the Gospel of Matthew. In Islam, the opposite is true: What is presented as an expression of religiosity is, in reality, a symbolic appropriation of public space. Here, prayer is no longer just prayer: It subjugates the civil and Christian space. When prayer is presented directly as a triumph over the host society, it ceases to be a private matter and becomes a political gesture of superiority. What the right wing labels a threat, Islam celebrates as a promise. What is a nightmare for the defenders of the West is a dream for many Muslims.
Meanwhile, the muezzin calls to prayer in Göttingen. Every day, the German press carries articles about the ongoing Islamization.
Islamization in Germany seems unstoppable.
In Germany, McDonald’s has removed images of food from its billboards during the day in Ramadan. They are displayed only after sunset throughout the Islamic month.
McSharia! This may be the result: globalism with Islamism.
French Islamization: A housing association outside Paris has ordered a Jewish family to remove the mezuzah—the Jewish container holding verses from the Bible—from the doorframe. They cite “aesthetic reasons.” Not very credible, since Paris and its surroundings have become a big mess. Realistically speaking, they don’t want Jews, and they don’t want terrorist attacks in the housing complex. For years, French Jews have actually been removing their mezuzahs so as not to be recognized.
They don’t eat at school in Canada during Ramadan. The public school is a “woke” school and an Islamized school.
A school in Florence has an Islamic prayer room.
They celebrate Ramadan in the church in Rovigo.
In the U.S. (the Mamdani effect), public schools are now closing for Ramadan.
This is, by the way, Birmingham, the second-largest city in England:
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And here is Trembley in France:
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Why shouldn’t Western Europe end up like Sarajevo?
It’s Ramadan too in the Catholic Church of St. John the Baptist in Brussels. 500 people gathered for the meal. A church that once symbolized Europe’s religious and cultural heritage now hosts Islamic rituals. History is being rewritten in real time.
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Tuscolano, Rome. The Shia mosque on Via Norcia is holding a memorial ceremony for Ali Khamenei and Khomeini. The mosque calls itself the “Imam Mahdi Islamic Center” and has been visited by a Catholic delegation led by Archbishop Giampiero Palmieri, auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Rome. The mosque has been invited to participate in a seminar at Sapienza University of Rome. Why are we delaying its closure?
In Sheffield, England, a church is to be demolished to make way for a mosque.
So why shouldn’t soccer be Islamized? England really is a strange country…
The figures for Ukraine’s demographic collapse due to war and low birth rates are appalling: 10 million residents have been “lost” since 2022.
Italy, too, is disappearing. By 2025, the gap between births and deaths will have reached levels never seen before. There are nearly twice as many deaths as births. In the first months of 2025, there were 534,000 deaths, while births fell below 295,000. For every child born, two people die. Fertility rates are at a historic low: 1.13 children per woman. The country is heading toward a long-foretold catastrophe.
Cardinal Zuppi says we are at a demographic-religious dead end, and he himself visits only mosques.
Perhaps the Israeli researcher Ofer Binshtok is right: “In future generations, non-Muslims in Western Europe will ask Israel for military aid in a war that the Islamic ummah will launch against them from within the continent. Today, the Islamic ummah has 50 million members in the region, and there will be many more in the future. Israel’s military aid will be crucial for the survival of the non-Muslim enclaves that will remain in Britain, France, Germany, and other countries. No, this is not a fictional scenario; it is a reality that will soon befall the region in the future.”
The Times has an article that could have been taken from a movie, but it’s all true:
“In a town dubbed ‘Lithuania’s Chernobyl’ because of the many empty apartments built during the Soviet era, the country’s demographic crisis is palpable. The Ignalina district, an area of lakes and forests near the border between Lithuania and Latvia, has lost more than half its population since the end of the Cold War. In other parts of the country, there are up to three deaths for every child born. A dozen towns have become so depopulated that they have been officially downgraded to mere “settlements.” Inga Ruginiene, prime minister of the Baltic state, tells The Times that the demographic crisis has reached a point where it constitutes a “matter of national security.” Parliament has formally declared it an “existential challenge to the survival of the Lithuanian nation,” on par with the threat from Russia. Lithuania offers a glimpse of what might happen, but the situation is not necessarily as desperate as it may seem. The country’s population has fallen from 3.7 million in 1990 to 2.9 million today. The UN expects it to decline by another quarter over the next thirty years, one of the most drastic declines predicted worldwide. By the end of the century, it could fall to 1.2 million. The total fertility rate, at 1.1 births per woman (as in Italy), is the lowest in the EU. The labor force is expected to shrink by more than a quarter over the next 25 years. It is the most severe crisis in any advanced economy, apart from South Korea and Italy. Southern Italy is expected to lose 3.4 million inhabitants by the middle of the century.”
The Economist: “China is betting on Western decline.” Beijing is banking on reduced Western influence to expand its own economic role.
In Cuba, there is an atmosphere of the end of communism. If Trump manages to bring Caracas, Havana, and Tehran to their knees, he does not deserve the worthless Nobel Peace Prize, but sainthood.
“A scenario, not a prediction” read the disclaimer in the viral memo that sent the stock market into a tailspin. The 7,000-word report from the analysis firm Citrini Research, titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis”, envisions a world where the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) leads to mass layoffs of office workers, a drop in consumption, destroyed demand, increased unemployment, and ultimately economic ruin. The authors—James van Geelen, founder of Citrini Research, and AI entrepreneur Alap Shah—have called it “a negative feedback loop with no natural brake.” Imagine it as the tenth circle of Dante’s Inferno, a place where humanity has ceased to matter, and every soul is forced to watch endless streams of its own irrelevance. After reaching 10 million views on X, and despite the warning “scenario, not forecast,” the essay sent the stock market plummeting: the Dow Jones index lost 1.7 percent of its daily value…
And speaking of technological progress and Western decline…
Peter Thiel has been appointed a member of a working group dedicated to “the future of democracy” by the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in Paris. As the founder of PayPal and Palantir, a student of René Girard at Stanford, and a reader of Leo Strauss, Thiel is one of the most controversial and interesting observers of the contemporary world. That is why it is worth listening to what he has to say. Here is what he told the “elite” of French culture:
Our ancestors would not only have been shocked by our forgetfulness; they would also have seen it as a sign of the impending apocalypse.
From 1750 to 1970, there was an incredible explosion of science and technology: Science and technology lived up to their magnificent reputation.
From candles to incandescent bulbs, from dirt roads to railroads—to rockets…
Life expectancy for a Frenchman has doubled, from 45 to 80 years, during the 20th century.
This phenomenon is truly lightning-fast, dizzying, and difficult to grasp, yet tangible and universal.
Do the lavish fruits of scientific and technological progress belong to the past or the future?
Today’s young people believe they will have it worse than their parents. I believe that too.
The first commercial jet flight took place in 1951.
Then the Concorde was taken out of service in 2003. That was a step backward.
Today we no longer know how to maintain the planes we have.
Humans landed on the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later: The hippies had taken over.
They had promised us flying cars, but they gave us 140 characters.
I believe the low fertility rates can partly be explained by the fact that people no longer believe things are moving forward, and that their children will have a worse life than they do. Or perhaps it tells us something very important about the health of democracy.
We are witnessing increasingly intense battles for control over resources and a slide toward non-democratic systems.
Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Prize to reward the best. With his sense of guilt, he was perhaps one of the few who understood where all this was heading. The machine-gun hell of the Somme shook our faith in science and technology. And the atomic bomb destroyed it completely. In 1945, science and technology became apocalyptic. This apocalyptic fear has multiplied many times over.
The 1990s brought some relief. But since then, the apocalyptic mood has returned with full force.
In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to put an end to all science. He is someone like Greta Thunberg.
The two greatest novels about the Antichrist in literature are *War, Progress, and the End of History* (1900) by Vladimir Soloviev and *The Master of the World* (1908) by Robert Hugh Benson.
In Benson’s novel, the Antichrist is a socialist senator from Vermont, somewhat like Bernie Sanders.
In Soloviev’s novel, he is regarded as a “Pan-Mongolian” reincarnation of Genghis Khan, but he turns out to be a Western public intellectual, a professor of liberal theology.
The Antichrist comes to power by constantly talking about the apocalypse, spreading rumors of war, and scaring you to convince you to give him control over science and technology, over the entire world.
Are we heading toward World War III or the Second Cold War?
I usually distinguish between things based on the following typology and these four possibilities:
Unjust war (World War I)
Just war (World War II)
Just peace (First Cold War)
Unjust peace (Second Cold War?)
We all agree that World War III, a war between nuclear powers, would be an unjust war, a total catastrophe, or even literally an Armageddon—literally the end of the world.
But the “rumors” of an unjust World War III are driving us to seek peace at any cost.
Even my right-wing baby boomer friends, who are very different from men like Kennedy and Reagan, grew up in a world that believed in peace at any cost.
An unjust peace is the only one of the four alternatives we haven’t tried yet, and it seems to me to be the predetermined path for our world.
What would such an unjust peace look like? In a way, China is a good example.
In the U.S. and France, the left-wing parties were once labor parties that would have fought hard against an economic superpower like China if it tried to undermine national wages and labor standards and steal jobs.
Today, the labor parties have become parties for gerontocrats and welfare recipients. They cater to people who don’t work, who are retirees, and who can only support themselves by selling their countries to China.
Socialism doesn’t really work, but without all the slave labor in China, it wouldn’t work at all.
When it comes to Taiwan, my basic position is that we will simply sell the Taiwanese-Chinese people into totalitarian slavery, and that we won’t put up much resistance when China invades.
Let’s apply a similar logic to what we saw in Hong Kong, to what we see with the Uyghurs in Tibet, and so on.
My intuition tells me that without growth, democracy will collapse.
What went wrong in 1969, when we went to the moon, and then to Woodstock three weeks later, after the moon landing?
We went from outer space to inner space. And when we stopped thinking about the universe and the world around us, we collapsed into ourselves.
I believe that the West’s crisis is, in a way, likely Europe’s crisis.
The situation is very, very deadlocked, and I don’t know exactly how we can get out of this deadlock.
Speaking to the New York Times, Thiel says: “The only thing people still believe in in Europe is the concept of ‘green’—more so than Islamic Sharia law or the totalitarian takeover by the Chinese Communist Party. The future is an idea that looks different from the present. The only three things on offer in Europe are green, Sharia, and the totalitarian communist state.”
I hope I’m wrong, but if I had to guess what lies ahead, it’s a mix of the first two, dominated by the Chinese economy.