There have been a lot of changes in the second Trump administration, as we all know. But there was one change from the very beginning that hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as it should. It’s when Trump stood up during his inauguration speech and invoked the idea of Manifest Destiny, which is of course deeply rooted in the idea of American exceptionalism.
For the first time in many generations, a U.S. president felt no shame in proclaiming that America is the greatest nation on the planet. And crucially, Donald Trump didn’t make this proclamation as a platitude. He wasn’t seeking to get a quick sound bite out of it, by reminding people of history class when they heard terms like “Manifest Destiny” and American exceptionalism. Instead, Trump meant it, in a practical sense. We’re the best nation, he said. And therefore we can do what we want. We can impose tariffs and force everyone to the negotiating table. We can deport criminals and ignore corrupt judges who tell us otherwise. In a matter of weeks, we can eliminate bureaucracy, talk about acquiring Greenland, and become energy independent — which is no small thing when the entire continent of Europe teeters on the verge of a blackout. We can do all of these things because, in very real terms, we are unique. Period. We have a fighting spirit that no other nation on the planet can match.
If you attended college in the last 50 years, you’ve probably been conditioned not to say things like this. You’re told it’s gaudy, or a relic of colonialism or something like that. But it happens to be true. And every day, we’re reminded it’s true. We can see, right out in the open, that other nations are inferior to our own. Look closely enough, and you’ll see that they’ll admit it. They are preoccupied with their own destruction.
Let’s start with the UK, which is allegedly one of our closest allies. A couple of weeks ago, you might remember, we talked about the Netflix show “Adolescence,” and how it’s essentially taken over the entire country.
“Adolescence” is a mini-series in which a white 13-year-old boy named Jamie stabs a girl to death after the girl rejects his advances. The “hook,” if you can call it that, is that the show blames online culture for the killer’s actions, at least to some extent. The victim had bullied the 13-year-old boy on Instagram, for example. He had been called an “incel” and so on. The point of the show is that “male rage” is fueled by online misogyny and bullying, and that children are liable to become murderers at any moment, even if they live in a loving, stable two-parent household. That’s the message the showrunners wanted to convey, even though it flies in the face of common sense and every data point we have. Beyond that, there wasn’t anything very interesting about the show. The cameraman is doing more interesting things than any of the actors, since everything is supposedly shot in one take.
So it was reasonable to assume that, after the initial hype died down over this mini-series, that the UK would move on pretty quickly. That’s the normal trajectory that shows like this tend to follow. And indeed, that’s what many in my audience said would happen. I received dozens of comments on my last monologue on “Adolescence”, where several people who live in Britain explained that, actually, the show isn’t that popular over there to begin with. Additionally, as we discussed, there was an infamous interview broadcast on the BBC, where the anchors grill a conservative politician about the fact that she hasn’t seen the show. They were stunned, for the entire interview, that she hadn’t watched it. And no matter how much the politician tried to explain to these anchors that the show isn’t real, they kept doubling down. When we played that footage two weeks ago, it seemed like it was safe to assume that the obsession over this show had officially jumped the shark. It seemed too absurd to continue. Everyone, even fans of the show, would certainly walk away slowly and find something else to fixate on.
But that hasn’t happened in the UK. Instead, “Adolescence” isn’t simply dominating political discussions anymore. Now the show is being used to justify new legislation that would dramatically curtail free speech rights in the country — almost as if that was the point of the show all along. In fact, the show’s creators just testified in parliament to demand this new legislation. Yes, the government held an entire hearing on a fictional television show, in which the show’s writer testified as an expert before the government’s “Women and Equalities Committee.” That is the very dire and hopeless state of the so-called United Kingdom at the moment.
We’ll start at the beginning of the hearing, when a member of parliament named Sarah Owen begins questioning Jack Thorne, who’s the creator and executive producer of “Adolescence.” And this member of parliament is very interested in knowing more about Jamie, and why he snapped and decided to kill a girl. But there’s a bit of a snag, because the politician clearly doesn’t understand what the creator of the show was getting at, which leads to this mildly amusing exchange. Watch:
There’s a couple of layers of embarrassment here. First of all, of course, they’re talking about a fake person as if he’s real. He’s saying it would take him “nine years” to unpack the brain of a fictional character named Jamie, who, because he doesn’t actually exist, does not therefore have a brain, or a history, or emotions. And for her part, the politician — who apparently chairs this committee in parliament — keeps pressing for more information about this fictional individual. She’s really determined to understand what makes him tick, even though he doesn’t exist. This went on for something like two hours, by the way. The hearing was full of moments like this.
As it went on, it became clear that Jack Thorne is especially concerned about “conspiracy theories,” as he calls them. And at one point in the hearing, Thorne elaborated on the term “conspiracy theories.” It turns out that — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — a conspiracy theory is something that’s completely true, but highly inconvenient for the political Left. Watch:
That’s his response, when he’s asked about the race-swap in “Adolescence.” He’s asked about a conservative politician who pointed out that, unlike what you see on Netflix, white kids from stable households are not stabbing many people in the UK. That’s the truth. It’s kids from broken homes, along with jihadists, who are doing most of the damage. And in response to that point, which is obviously true, Thorne states that the conservative politician must be “consuming” the wrong content online. The implication, of course, is that anyone who tells the truth about knife crime in the UK — and violent crime in general — should be censored. You’re required to think that it’s young white kids from loving two-parent households that are knifing everyone, and you’re supposed to ignore the literal jihadist with an Al Qaeda training manual in his backpack who murders young girls at a dance studio.
Again, this is the state of the UK — a country that we once had a lot in common with. But this is what they’re reduced to. I want to show one more clip from this hearing, because it just kept getting more and more comical as it went on. Eventually Jack Thorne left, and he was replaced by a bunch of self-described “experts” and government officials who — supposedly — would provide some hard evidence in support of more online censorship.
But then, a funny thing happened.
When they were asked for evidence that misogyny is on the rise in the UK, they didn’t have any data. They couldn’t point to any objective, verifiable information about all the young white men who are going out and killing women because of Andrew Tate or whatever. Instead — and I’m not making this up — the experts turned around and cited the show “Adolescence,” and the testimony from Jack Thorne. Watch:
So they don’t have any data, actually. They just have the show “Adolescence,” and the testimony from its “executive producer.” According to the government expert, that qualifies as “evidence” in the UK. Time to pass a law eliminating free speech on the internet, I guess. But the point here is not to mock the UK, as entertaining as that would be. The point is that this kind of embarrassing spectacle is not very surprising for them. There aren’t very many people left in that country to speak out against it. There isn’t much of a “right wing” in the UK, or almost anywhere else in the western world outside of the United States.
And if you don’t believe that, look at the election that just took place in Canada. After ten years of destroying Canada’s economy and opening the borders to hordes of foreign nationals, the Liberal Party was just re-elected. Voters once again handed the Liberal Party control of government, even after the Liberals froze the bank accounts of peaceful protesters, arrested journalists in the street, trampled old ladies with horses, disarmed the entire population, and effectively banned independent journalists from posting their content on social media platforms. Canadians saw the government declare martial law over a bunch of truckers who didn’t want to be compelled to take an experimental shot, and they said, “we want more of that.” And also, of course, they want more taxes so that they can stop the weather from changing.
I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on the ins-and-outs of Canadian politics. If you’re interested in a more granular breakdown, there’s a Substack article from someone named John Carter that goes into some detail about what happened in this week’s election. Here’s how it begins.
Have you ever noticed how election results are regularly broken down geographically, as well by the demographic categories of age, sex, and – depending on the country – race, yet we almost never see the results separated into taxpayer vs tax-eater status? … It is absolutely no surprise that Ottawa voted solidly for the Liberal Party of Canada, whose base consists of three primary groups: migrants, public sector workers, and baby boomers, all of whom are regime client groups, and all of whom are tightly packed into the nation’s capital. Perhaps it’s that it’s tax season and I’m in a grumpy mood because I just got the bad news, but I can’t help but wonder about how electoral politics would change if only taxpayers were allowed to vote.
That’s a useful framework to look at what just happened in Canada, especially as you hear a lot of people blaming Donald Trump and tariffs and so on. In Canada, very few young people can afford homes. There aren’t many good jobs. The only really viable aspects of Canadian society are the public sector — which is sustained through taxes and borrowed money — and retirees. The public-sector employees are the ones who celebrated when truckers were beaten by the police in Ottawa a few years ago. They resent the working-class. Their only interest is seeing their pensions vest. Meanwhile, older Canadians have made their money, and they don’t seem to care about what happens to their country going forward.
Take a look at this chart, which is making the rounds:
Abacus Data. Substack, John Carter.
It shows the “most important factors” in people’s votes, broken out by age. It’s from Abacus Data, which is a Canadian polling firm. Notice that, for most young people under the age of 44, “reducing the cost of living” is the top issue. But for Canadians over the age of 60, the top issue was “dealing with Donald Trump.”
In other words, Canadian seniors are not even pretending to be interested in the internal affairs of their own country. They’re not concerned about the fact that young people are overdosing at increasing rates, or that many of them are well into their 30s, sharing tiny apartments with roommates just to make ends meet. What they care about, instead, is “dealing with Donald Trump” — an elected official from a different country, who hasn’t caused a single ounce of the misery that Canada has been enduring for the past decade.
In this country, by contrast, older voters were mostly concerned about the economy in the last election. In Michigan, for example, the AARP found that “24 percent of older voters cited the economy and jobs, and another 24 percent cited inflation, as top concerns.” So nearly half of these voters are interested in things that every American should be interested in — which is creating a stable and functioning economy so that people can buy homes and raise children.
But in Canada, as in the UK, the priorities are different. That’s why these countries are spending their time talking about Netflix shows, and electing globalists who promise to send mean tweets to Donald Trump or whatever.
It’s a sobering realization, but it’s true: These countries, which are supposed to be great allies who we have a lot in common with, do not have a functioning conservative movement at all. One that respects the sanctity of life from the moment of conception, one that values the importance of economic growth for everyone, and one that understands the distinction between fiction and reality. With every election that takes place in Canada, and every humiliating hearing on “Adolescence” that the UK is subjected to, the truth becomes clearer by the day. It’s time to admit it, because it’s unavoidable at this point: The future of conservatism, and thus of Western civilization, is in our hands — and our hands alone.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
There have been a lot of changes in the second Trump administration, as we all know. But there was one change from the very beginning that hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as it should. It’s when Trump stood up during his inauguration speech and invoked the idea of Manifest Destiny, which is of course deeply rooted in the idea of American exceptionalism.
For the first time in many generations, a U.S. president felt no shame in proclaiming that America is the greatest nation on the planet. And crucially, Donald Trump didn’t make this proclamation as a platitude. He wasn’t seeking to get a quick sound bite out of it, by reminding people of history class when they heard terms like “Manifest Destiny” and American exceptionalism. Instead, Trump meant it, in a practical sense. We’re the best nation, he said. And therefore we can do what we want. We can impose tariffs and force everyone to the negotiating table. We can deport criminals and ignore corrupt judges who tell us otherwise. In a matter of weeks, we can eliminate bureaucracy, talk about acquiring Greenland, and become energy independent — which is no small thing when the entire continent of Europe teeters on the verge of a blackout. We can do all of these things because, in very real terms, we are unique. Period. We have a fighting spirit that no other nation on the planet can match.
If you attended college in the last 50 years, you’ve probably been conditioned not to say things like this. You’re told it’s gaudy, or a relic of colonialism or something like that. But it happens to be true. And every day, we’re reminded it’s true. We can see, right out in the open, that other nations are inferior to our own. Look closely enough, and you’ll see that they’ll admit it. They are preoccupied with their own destruction.
Let’s start with the UK, which is allegedly one of our closest allies. A couple of weeks ago, you might remember, we talked about the Netflix show “Adolescence,” and how it’s essentially taken over the entire country.
“Adolescence” is a mini-series in which a white 13-year-old boy named Jamie stabs a girl to death after the girl rejects his advances. The “hook,” if you can call it that, is that the show blames online culture for the killer’s actions, at least to some extent. The victim had bullied the 13-year-old boy on Instagram, for example. He had been called an “incel” and so on. The point of the show is that “male rage” is fueled by online misogyny and bullying, and that children are liable to become murderers at any moment, even if they live in a loving, stable two-parent household. That’s the message the showrunners wanted to convey, even though it flies in the face of common sense and every data point we have. Beyond that, there wasn’t anything very interesting about the show. The cameraman is doing more interesting things than any of the actors, since everything is supposedly shot in one take.
So it was reasonable to assume that, after the initial hype died down over this mini-series, that the UK would move on pretty quickly. That’s the normal trajectory that shows like this tend to follow. And indeed, that’s what many in my audience said would happen. I received dozens of comments on my last monologue on “Adolescence”, where several people who live in Britain explained that, actually, the show isn’t that popular over there to begin with. Additionally, as we discussed, there was an infamous interview broadcast on the BBC, where the anchors grill a conservative politician about the fact that she hasn’t seen the show. They were stunned, for the entire interview, that she hadn’t watched it. And no matter how much the politician tried to explain to these anchors that the show isn’t real, they kept doubling down. When we played that footage two weeks ago, it seemed like it was safe to assume that the obsession over this show had officially jumped the shark. It seemed too absurd to continue. Everyone, even fans of the show, would certainly walk away slowly and find something else to fixate on.
But that hasn’t happened in the UK. Instead, “Adolescence” isn’t simply dominating political discussions anymore. Now the show is being used to justify new legislation that would dramatically curtail free speech rights in the country — almost as if that was the point of the show all along. In fact, the show’s creators just testified in parliament to demand this new legislation. Yes, the government held an entire hearing on a fictional television show, in which the show’s writer testified as an expert before the government’s “Women and Equalities Committee.” That is the very dire and hopeless state of the so-called United Kingdom at the moment.
We’ll start at the beginning of the hearing, when a member of parliament named Sarah Owen begins questioning Jack Thorne, who’s the creator and executive producer of “Adolescence.” And this member of parliament is very interested in knowing more about Jamie, and why he snapped and decided to kill a girl. But there’s a bit of a snag, because the politician clearly doesn’t understand what the creator of the show was getting at, which leads to this mildly amusing exchange. Watch:
There’s a couple of layers of embarrassment here. First of all, of course, they’re talking about a fake person as if he’s real. He’s saying it would take him “nine years” to unpack the brain of a fictional character named Jamie, who, because he doesn’t actually exist, does not therefore have a brain, or a history, or emotions. And for her part, the politician — who apparently chairs this committee in parliament — keeps pressing for more information about this fictional individual. She’s really determined to understand what makes him tick, even though he doesn’t exist. This went on for something like two hours, by the way. The hearing was full of moments like this.
As it went on, it became clear that Jack Thorne is especially concerned about “conspiracy theories,” as he calls them. And at one point in the hearing, Thorne elaborated on the term “conspiracy theories.” It turns out that — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — a conspiracy theory is something that’s completely true, but highly inconvenient for the political Left. Watch:
That’s his response, when he’s asked about the race-swap in “Adolescence.” He’s asked about a conservative politician who pointed out that, unlike what you see on Netflix, white kids from stable households are not stabbing many people in the UK. That’s the truth. It’s kids from broken homes, along with jihadists, who are doing most of the damage. And in response to that point, which is obviously true, Thorne states that the conservative politician must be “consuming” the wrong content online. The implication, of course, is that anyone who tells the truth about knife crime in the UK — and violent crime in general — should be censored. You’re required to think that it’s young white kids from loving two-parent households that are knifing everyone, and you’re supposed to ignore the literal jihadist with an Al Qaeda training manual in his backpack who murders young girls at a dance studio.
Again, this is the state of the UK — a country that we once had a lot in common with. But this is what they’re reduced to. I want to show one more clip from this hearing, because it just kept getting more and more comical as it went on. Eventually Jack Thorne left, and he was replaced by a bunch of self-described “experts” and government officials who — supposedly — would provide some hard evidence in support of more online censorship.
But then, a funny thing happened.
When they were asked for evidence that misogyny is on the rise in the UK, they didn’t have any data. They couldn’t point to any objective, verifiable information about all the young white men who are going out and killing women because of Andrew Tate or whatever. Instead — and I’m not making this up — the experts turned around and cited the show “Adolescence,” and the testimony from Jack Thorne. Watch:
So they don’t have any data, actually. They just have the show “Adolescence,” and the testimony from its “executive producer.” According to the government expert, that qualifies as “evidence” in the UK. Time to pass a law eliminating free speech on the internet, I guess. But the point here is not to mock the UK, as entertaining as that would be. The point is that this kind of embarrassing spectacle is not very surprising for them. There aren’t very many people left in that country to speak out against it. There isn’t much of a “right wing” in the UK, or almost anywhere else in the western world outside of the United States.
And if you don’t believe that, look at the election that just took place in Canada. After ten years of destroying Canada’s economy and opening the borders to hordes of foreign nationals, the Liberal Party was just re-elected. Voters once again handed the Liberal Party control of government, even after the Liberals froze the bank accounts of peaceful protesters, arrested journalists in the street, trampled old ladies with horses, disarmed the entire population, and effectively banned independent journalists from posting their content on social media platforms. Canadians saw the government declare martial law over a bunch of truckers who didn’t want to be compelled to take an experimental shot, and they said, “we want more of that.” And also, of course, they want more taxes so that they can stop the weather from changing.
I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on the ins-and-outs of Canadian politics. If you’re interested in a more granular breakdown, there’s a Substack article from someone named John Carter that goes into some detail about what happened in this week’s election. Here’s how it begins.
Have you ever noticed how election results are regularly broken down geographically, as well by the demographic categories of age, sex, and – depending on the country – race, yet we almost never see the results separated into taxpayer vs tax-eater status? … It is absolutely no surprise that Ottawa voted solidly for the Liberal Party of Canada, whose base consists of three primary groups: migrants, public sector workers, and baby boomers, all of whom are regime client groups, and all of whom are tightly packed into the nation’s capital. Perhaps it’s that it’s tax season and I’m in a grumpy mood because I just got the bad news, but I can’t help but wonder about how electoral politics would change if only taxpayers were allowed to vote.
That’s a useful framework to look at what just happened in Canada, especially as you hear a lot of people blaming Donald Trump and tariffs and so on. In Canada, very few young people can afford homes. There aren’t many good jobs. The only really viable aspects of Canadian society are the public sector — which is sustained through taxes and borrowed money — and retirees. The public-sector employees are the ones who celebrated when truckers were beaten by the police in Ottawa a few years ago. They resent the working-class. Their only interest is seeing their pensions vest. Meanwhile, older Canadians have made their money, and they don’t seem to care about what happens to their country going forward.
Take a look at this chart, which is making the rounds:
Abacus Data. Substack, John Carter.
It shows the “most important factors” in people’s votes, broken out by age. It’s from Abacus Data, which is a Canadian polling firm. Notice that, for most young people under the age of 44, “reducing the cost of living” is the top issue. But for Canadians over the age of 60, the top issue was “dealing with Donald Trump.”
In other words, Canadian seniors are not even pretending to be interested in the internal affairs of their own country. They’re not concerned about the fact that young people are overdosing at increasing rates, or that many of them are well into their 30s, sharing tiny apartments with roommates just to make ends meet. What they care about, instead, is “dealing with Donald Trump” — an elected official from a different country, who hasn’t caused a single ounce of the misery that Canada has been enduring for the past decade.
In this country, by contrast, older voters were mostly concerned about the economy in the last election. In Michigan, for example, the AARP found that “24 percent of older voters cited the economy and jobs, and another 24 percent cited inflation, as top concerns.” So nearly half of these voters are interested in things that every American should be interested in — which is creating a stable and functioning economy so that people can buy homes and raise children.
But in Canada, as in the UK, the priorities are different. That’s why these countries are spending their time talking about Netflix shows, and electing globalists who promise to send mean tweets to Donald Trump or whatever.
It’s a sobering realization, but it’s true: These countries, which are supposed to be great allies who we have a lot in common with, do not have a functioning conservative movement at all. One that respects the sanctity of life from the moment of conception, one that values the importance of economic growth for everyone, and one that understands the distinction between fiction and reality. With every election that takes place in Canada, and every humiliating hearing on “Adolescence” that the UK is subjected to, the truth becomes clearer by the day. It’s time to admit it, because it’s unavoidable at this point: The future of conservatism, and thus of Western civilization, is in our hands — and our hands alone.
“}]]
