Mark Penn and Andrew Stein provide an extraordinary analysis in the Wall Street Journal: a part of the United States openly cheers for its own country and the West to lose against Iran.
According to the authors – the former a pollster who long worked for Bill and Hillary Clinton, the latter a prominent Democratic politician – the dominant narrative in the mainstream media (from which all Italian media draw their information) systematically presents negative news about the United States and Donald Trump, to such an extent that a distorted perception of the conflict is created.
This also occurred during the Vietnam War, when it was said that it was television that led to the political defeat (on the battlefield they had won). If the United States wins this war together with Israel, it will simply be the first time since Vietnam. But as for the defeatist mood, it proceeds as on all other occasions.
Jürgen Habermas, the last philosopher of the twentieth century, has passed away. And one must read the biography written by Stefan Müller-Doohm in order not to fall for the false hagiographic image that the left-wing media in Italy portray of him.
In 1968 Habermas accused the Left of «left fascism» – Linken Faschismus. And he had the courage to sign an appeal against UNESCO proclaiming Tehran the world capital of philosophy, while sociologists such as Kian Tajbakhsh and philosophers such as Akbar Ganji were rotting in prisons under the Islamic revolution. He warned against the return of eugenics and conducted a dialogue with Ratzinger on «faith and reason». After 7 October 2023 he wrote that Israel had the right to self-defence and war. With Habermas, a great philosopher disappears. Perhaps the last.
The renowned historian Antony Beevor takes a bleak view and tells The Times: «The West constitutes 7 per cent of the world’s population, but accounts for 50 per cent of global social expenditure. How are we ever to be able to compete with China?»
Only 8 per cent of children will be born in the West this year.
Demography is not everything, but almost. Even in Helsinki on the outer edge of the EU, where one fifth of the population comes from the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
A dramatic article by Thomas Fasbender in the Berliner Zeitung addresses the massive demographic changes in Germany and explains how Germans will become a minority in the near future.
In the article entitled «Demography in Germany: Multiculturalism arrives faster than expected», it states:
«By the middle of the century, between 17 and 20 million Germans without a migrant background will die; almost 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 persons per year, the number of births with a migrant background will reach nine million by 2050. A balance in births – with and without a migrant background – will be achieved at the latest shortly after 2030».
Sharia über alles?
In the meantime, London has fallen: welcome to Trafalgar Square (the mayor was also there to pray). Michael Deacon in The Telegraph is right: «The Islamists are on the verge of winning».
Public mass prayers by Muslims at symbolic locations in the West are a demonstration of power. Whether it takes place at the Brandenburg Gate, Times Square, the Colosseum or Trafalgar Square, Islamic mass prayers are increasingly taking place in public spaces in Western cities, and now also 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 in order to be seen by others», reads the admonition in the Gospel of Matthew. In Islam it is the opposite: what is presented as an expression of religiosity is in reality a symbolic appropriation of public space. Here prayer is no longer merely 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 labels as a threat, Islam celebrates as a promise. What is a nightmare for the defenders of the West is a dream for several Muslims.
The muezzin meanwhile calls to prayer in Göttingen. Every day the German press carries articles about the ongoing Islamisation.
Islamisation in Germany appears unstoppable.
In Germany, McDonald’s has removed images of food from advertising boards during daytime in Ramadan. They are only displayed after sunset throughout the Islamic month.
McSharia! This may perhaps be the outcome: globalism with Islamism.
McDonald’s sun-synced “Happy Ramadan” campaign. pic.twitter.com/wnUoo2BFkl
— Ad Professor (@The_AdProfessor) February 28, 2026
French Islamisation: A housing association outside Paris has ordered a Jewish family to remove the mezuzah – the Jewish container containing verses from the Bible – from the doorframe. «Aesthetic reasons» are invoked. Hardly credible, given that Paris and its surroundings have become a large cesspit. Realistically, they do not want Jews, and they do not want terrorist attacks in the building. For years, in fact, French Jews have removed mezuzot in order not to be recognised.
One does not eat at school in Canada during Ramadan. The public school is a woke school and an Islamised school.
A school in Florence has Islamic prayer rooms.
Ramadan is celebrated in a church in Rovigo.
In the United States (the Mamdani effect) public schools are now closing for Ramadan.
This, by the way, is Birmingham, the second-largest city in England:
And here is Trembley in France:
Why should Western Europe not end up like Sarajevo?
It is Ramadan also in the Catholic Church of St John the Baptist in Brussels. 500 people gathered for the meal. A church that once symbolised Europe’s religious and cultural heritage now hosts Islamic rituals. History is being rewritten in real time.
Tuscolano, Rome. The Shiite mosque in Via Norcia holds a memorial ceremony for Ali Khamenei and Khomeini. The mosque calls itself the «Islamic Centre Imam Mahdi» and has received visits from a Catholic delegation led by Archbishop Giampiero Palmieri, auxiliary bishop in the Diocese of Rome. The mosque has been invited to participate in a seminar at Sapienza University of Rome. Why do we hesitate to close it?
In Sheffield in England, a church is to be demolished to make way for a mosque.
So why should not football be Islamised? England is truly a strange country…
Leeds United have asked fans to show respect towards players breaking their Ramadan fast during the team’s FA Cup fifth-round game against Norwich City on Sunday.
In a statement published on Friday, Leeds confirmed that the fixture against Norwich City would again be paused… pic.twitter.com/SlvS7crWdb
— The Athletic | Football (@TheAthleticFC) March 6, 2026
The figures for Ukraine’s demographic collapse due to war and low birth rates are dreadful: 10 million inhabitants have been «lost» since 2022.
Italy too is disappearing. In 2025, the gap between those who are born and those who die has reached levels never previously recorded. There are almost 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. These are historically low fertility figures: 1.13 children per woman. The country is heading towards a long-foreseen catastrophe.
Cardinal Zuppi says that we are at a demographic-religious terminus, 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 assistance in a war that the Islamic umma will initiate against them from within the continent. Today the Islamic umma numbers 50 million members in the region, and it will be many more in the future. Israel’s military assistance will be decisive for the survival of the non-Muslim enclaves that will remain in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and other countries. No, this is not a fictional scenario; it is a reality that will soon confront the region in the future».
The Times has an article that could have been taken from a film, but everything is true:
«In a town dubbed ‘Lithuania’s Chernobyl’ because of the many empty apartments built in the Soviet era, the country’s demographic crisis is palpable. The district of Ignalina, 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, up to three deaths are recorded for every child born. A dozen towns have become so depopulated that they have officially been 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 ‘national security issue’. Parliament has formally declared it an ‘existential challenge to the survival of the Lithuanian nation’, on a par with the threat from Russia. Lithuania offers a glimpse of what may happen, but the situation is not necessarily as desperate as it may appear. The country’s population has fallen from 3.7 million in 1990 to 2.9 million today. The UN expects it to decline by a further quarter over the next thirty years, one of the most drastic falls forecast in the world. By the end of the century, it may 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 workforce 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 mid-century.»
The Economist: «China is betting on Western decline». Beijing is wagering on reduced Western influence in order 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 collapse, he deserves not the worthless Nobel Peace Prize, but canonisation.
«A scenario, not a forecast» read the disclaimer in the viral note that caused the stock market to plunge. The 7,000-word report from the analysis firm Citrini Research entitled «The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis» imagines a world in which the rapid introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) leads to mass layoffs of office workers, a fall in consumption, destroyed demand, rising 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 without a natural brake». Imagine it as the tenth circle of Dante’s Inferno, a place where humanity has ceased to matter, and each 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 caused the stock market to plunge: the Dow Jones index lost 1.7 per cent of its daily value…
And speaking of technological progress and Western decline…
Peter Thiel has been admitted as a member of a working group dedicated to «the future of democracy» by the Académie des sciences morales et politiques 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 present time. It is therefore worth listening to what he has to say. Here is what he said to the «elite» of French culture:
Our ancestors would not only have been shocked by our forgetfulness, they would also have regarded it as a sign of the impending apocalypse.
From 1750 to 1970 there occurred an incredible explosion of science and technology: science and technology lived up to their grand reputation.
From candles to light bulbs, from gravel roads to railways – to rockets…
The life expectancy of a Frenchman doubled, from 45 to 80 years, during the twentieth century.
This phenomenon is truly lightning-fast, dizzying and difficult to comprehend, but 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 be worse off than their parents. I believe so too.
The first commercial jet flight took place in 1951.
Then Concorde was withdrawn from service in 2003. That was a step backwards.
Today we no longer know how to maintain the aircraft we have.
Man landed on the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later: the hippies had taken over.
They promised us flying cars, but they gave us 140 characters.
I believe that low fertility rates can partly be explained by the fact that people no longer believe that things are progressing, and that their children will have a worse life than they themselves had. Or perhaps it tells us something very important about the health of democracy.
We are witnessing increasingly intense struggles for control of resources and a drift towards non-democratic systems.
Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Prize to reward the best. With his sense of guilt, he may have been one of the few who understood where all this was heading. The machine-gun fire at 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.
The 1990s brought a certain relief. But since then the apocalyptic mood has returned with full force.
In the twenty-first century, the Antichrist is a luddite who wishes 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 «Lord 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 speaking about the apocalypse, spreading rumours of war and frightening you in order to persuade you to give him control over science and technology, over the entire world.
Are we heading towards the Third World War or the second Cold War?
I usually distinguish between things according to the following typology and these four possibilities:
Unjust war (First World War)
Just war (Second World War)
Just peace (first Cold War)
Unjust peace (second Cold War?)We all agree that the Third World War, 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 «rumours» of an unjust Third World War drive us to seek peace at any price.
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 price.
An unjust peace is the only one of the four options we have not yet tried, and it seems to me to be the predestined path for our world.
What would such an unjust peace look like? In a way, China is a good example.
In the United States and France, left-wing parties were once workers’ parties that would have fought hard against an economic superpower like China if it had sought to undermine national wages and labour standards and steal jobs.
Today the workers’ parties have become parties of gerontocrats and welfare recipients. They appeal to people who do not work, who are pensioners and who can only be supported by selling their countries to China.
Socialism does not really work, but without all the slave labour in China it would not work at all.
As regards Taiwan, my basic assumption is that we will simply sell the Taiwanese people into totalitarian slavery, and that we will not offer much resistance when China invades.
Let us 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 moved from outer space to inner space. And when we ceased to think about the universe and the world around us, we collapsed into ourselves.
I believe that the crisis of the West is, in a sense, probably Europe’s crisis.
The situation is very, very deadlocked, and I do not know exactly how we can emerge from this deadlock.
To the New York Times, Thiel says: «The only thing people in Europe still believe in is the concept of ‘green’ – more 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 one can offer in Europe are the green, sharia and the totalitarian communist state».
I hope I am wrong, but if I were to venture a guess as to what awaits us, it would be a mixture of the first two, dominated by the Chinese economy.