The foundations for the West are slowly (but at an accelerating pace) collapsing from within, and if our current trajectory continues, nobody will be around to turn the lights off when the culture disappears.
I am in Strasbourg, France this week, where I’ll be speaking at the European Parliament on the menace that is the ESG movement. I’m super excited to update all of you on that later this week, but putting that aside for a moment…
Being here has given me the chance to reflect on the problematic state of the West, specifically, coming to the realization that two overarching issues threaten to topple the foundations for our ideological and cultural institutions.
Strasbourg is a beautiful city. Its architecture serves as a striking reminder of the incredible accomplishments of the thousand-plus year old French civilization, and Alsatian culture. The masterpiece for the city is the Strasbourg Cathedral, a wonder of the world for its time. The towering church was once the tallest building in the world. And it took some 400 years to build, a timeframe that is simply unfathomable to the high time preference of our 2024 brains.
Today, Strasbourg serves as the seat of the European Parliament and a few additional European institutions.
And Strasbourg, like the other major metro areas in France, is home to a significant, rapidly growing minority of citizens and non-citizens who do not respect the cultural values that France (and the greater West) once stood for.
Walking the streets here, you are just as likely to hear Arabic as you are to hear French. While that’s not necessarily a problem on its own merits, it serves as an avenue of inquiry that reveals the issue at hand.
In the not so distant past, French leaders had a fiercely assimilationist attitude toward immigration. This was especially true for the first big waves of Muslims from former French colonies. The most recent wave of migrants from the Arab world couldn’t care less about French society, and they openly state as much.
According to a 2020 poll by the Institut français d'opinion publique, almost half of French Muslims said their religion supersedes the laws and values of France. And among Muslims under 25, three quarters(!) agreed with the sentiment.
Given the continually declining birthrate among French women, it’s possible that within only thirty to forty years, France will become a majority Muslim country.
But despite this stats-based reality (and the Muslim community declaring that they have no intention on continuing French traditions and values), French and European politicians across the Davos Man-captured modern political spectrum are quick to dismiss any discussion of this issue as nonsensical and/or racist.
Of course, this is not just a French issue, it is a whole of Western Europe issue. For a society to flourish (both from an economic and a cultural persepctive), the population replacement rate should be comfortably over 2.1 children per woman. As you can see in the graphic below, women in Europe are not having nearly enough children. The same is true in America, where the fertility rate in 2023 was 1.78 births per woman.
Should the peoples who claim heritage within once-proud Western civilizations not reverse course, they will be replaced by people who will overwrite the historic culture and values of these societies as if they never existed in the first place.
It’s not just a numbers issue, it’s a policy issue, too.
In the greater West, our various political disputes cannot be addressed without first conquering two major issues: we aren’t having enough babies and we are importing people into our sovereign lands who don’t share our values. Everything else, which includes almost all of our other hot button political and ideological disputes, come in a distant second place to the aforementioned threats faced by our respective nations.
