If you feel like the world’s falling apart, well, you’re not alone. As I write this in early 2024, this feeling has become an objective reality, not merely the fever dreams of an ever-growing Anxiety Generation who’ve been Munchausened into a lifetime dependence on SSRI’s. Our world over the past 30 years has transgressed (“progressed” in a such a perverted way that only the ignorant, the deranged or those in power could feel content) so fast and so far as to make most people I know – and yes I do know a lot of diverse people from all over the US – feel like we’re taking Crazy Pills.
A few examples for the ignorant, AKA “Normies”. As I wrote about in a previous post, Normies are your average American who’s been satiated on the bread and circuses that modernity pumps directly into our veins to keep us distracted from the nefarious machinations of our soulless elites who now operate in plain sight. Do I sound like a nut? Yeah well, you need to look down and realize you’re wearing clown shoes. You do know you live in a country where the State can and will take your children from you if you refuse to participate in the gender reassignment religion, right? This means permanently sterilizing the most innocent among us. Many of our fellow citizens (the Deranged) are gleefully castrating their own descendant line. POOF! No grandchildren for you.
Or do you know that most of the “food” Americans consume is nutrition-free? And that cancer feeds on sugar? And that obesity is a modern phenomenon, not genetic? And that your immune system has been designed to protect you from disease, no matter what scary boogeyvirus is currently on the “news” feed? Did you know that there are more viruses on earth right now than there are stars IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE!? Did you know that, during the first year of Covid, the CDC pretended that the common flu virtually disappeared? And this government agency, among many others, lied to us, and continues to, over and over about every single aspect of the “Pandemic”?
And how’s our currency doing? 50 years ago middle class Americans could afford to live comfortably on one salary. Not anymore. The dollar is becoming more like the nickel, and the money printers never stop devaluing our capital. If you’ve had cash in the bank for the past five years, it’s worth a lot less today.
Most of us over the age of forty remember a time when we actually trusted the “Elites” who ran things. Politicians, Experts, CEO’s and our military leaders all had the confidence of the masses that they were operating with at least a minimal amount of goodwill towards the safety and health of those they lorded over. Perhaps we were naive, just a bit, but I do believe there was a time when this was the norm.
We are what we tolerate, and as of late our society is tolerating an unsustainable amount of wickedness and stupidity. The philosophy of “Tolerance as a virtue” was a Trojan horse that we allowed to take over our institutions, out of compassion mainly, that ended up erasing the moral boundaries that kept our children innocent, our streets safe, and our spirits muscular enough to recognize danger, and fight it. Now, there are seemingly too many bogeys (threats) coming at us to effectively ensure our family’s safe passage through this game of Life. If you are currently raising young ‘ens, particularly if you’re attempting it without a strong Biblical worldview, then you are at the mercy of whatever poisonous fad happens to come into your life, and come they WILL. Through phones mostly, but also through the unstoppable force that is Culture. Tolerance as a moral standard inevitably leads to fragility. Would you tolerate another man sleeping with your wife, or an employee stealing from your business, or your child ignoring your rules. Or would you tolerate your boss keeping part of your paycheck, for unknown reasons? Would you tolerate your energy provider turning your home heating system down to 52 degrees, to save energy? No, of course you wouldn’t, cuz that would make you a cuck(old).
Or maybe you would.
For many of us, the covid years were a wake up call. Every day we observed just how much stupidity, mind control, cognitive dissonance, physical control and propaganda that our fellow citizens willingly tolerated. Folded into this burrito was the 2020 “election” of a lifelong politician (and I mean that in the very worst sense) who is too old and senile to even realistically hold a job as a used mattress salesman.
One of my guiding principles where “tolerance” is called for is this simple question that I ask myself: Would John Wayne tolerate it? As a young man growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, John Wayne’s characters set a consistent example of what it meant to be a man. I see no reason why this should not still be the case. Imagine if every man that you knew handled his business like the Duke did.
Which gets us to the thesis of this piece.
RETVRN.
RETVRN is an internet meme that uses the ancient Roman spelling to illustrate the idea that this modern world has jumped the shark, in far too many ways, and what is needed is a return to “normalcy”. How far back we go is up to much debate, but many of us feel that peak civilization occurred somewhere in the late 80’s, probably around the end of the Cold War. RETVRN has been analyzed and critiqued from people on the Left (“Racist Dogwhistle!”) and the Right (“backward-looking nostalgia porn”). But for me, the RETVRN meme is growing into becoming the defining vibe of our age. MAGA exploded into the zeitgeist as a political warcry because it contains the yearnings of Americans who remember a time that was less bizarre, stupid, upside down and offensive. A time with more predictability, more goodness, neighborliness, respect and honor. A time when marriage was an unbreakable covenant made before God, not to be discontinued like a gym membership. And guess what else. Less racism. Yes, the 80’s were less racist than today, in almost every way. In 1980, America was already 20 years into the “Civil Rights Movement”, and as someone who grew up all over the US, I can attest that we truly lived in a more colorblind society than we currently do.
Memes, like porn, weren’t invented 25 years ago, but the technological advancements that have resulted in nearly every human being able to instantly communicate with every other human have made memes a major addition to our daily consumption. Memes shape our worldviews. Like great art, or an earworm song, memes touch us way down deep in our souls, where our foundational truths live in their quiet isolation.
RETVRN is used by rightwing posters to express a longing for better days, simpler times when there were , for just a few examples, only two genders, classical Roman architecture, the Dukes of Hazard, Trad wives, a morsel of trust in our institutions, meritocracy, shared moral values, American manufacturing prowess, statesmen, and general expectation of an upwardly mobile society.
But this longing is not just limited to the rightwing internet. It is, in fact, pervasive throughout our entire media production industry. Even the transgressives who claim to refute tradition in all it’s forms are drawn to traditional stories. Seemingly every movie, particularly the big budget ones, are throwbacks and remakes. Our storytellers seem to have run out of original stories. Worse, our storytelling has become curated and controlled to deliver specifically tailored messages, using framing to tell a regime-friendly version of stories that hardly resemble the real world. This is known as propaganda. I mean, could you IMAGINE a movie like Blazing Saddles, The French Connection or High Plains Drifter getting made today? Not without major overhaul to the scripts removing all “offensive” language (and I don’t mean F words), with a “POC” woman playing the role of protagonist of course. You simply can’t find a modern tv series that takes place in current year that doesn’t have a GirlBoss playing the leadership role and/or the action hero who can handle her own with any and all bad dudes in hand to hand combat. It’s all so fake and gay. Which is why Hollyweird keeps regurgitating old stories. The degenerates who create most of our stories simply cannot imagine writing a genuine John Wayne type hero. The modern heroes we contend with are nihilistic, ironic and lacking a moral compass. They certainly don’t fear God the Father. Of course, Christianity is never shown to be a positive force in the world; and the faithful believers are always portrayed as weirdos and hypocrites. Like comedy, for art to be meaningful it must contain truth. What we are seeing instead is what I call “wishcasting”, wherein the filmmaker creates the fantasy world that they wish could be made true. Utopia. “Imagine theeeere’s no heaven. It’s easy if youuuu try…”
Our stories are supposed to tell us who we are, and who we were. But what we’re being fed is three-week-old leftovers, with some old guacamole thrown on top.
After twenty years of this, we now can see the strings of the puppetmaster. We want to RETVRN to the days of Die Hard, Rambo, Braveheart and John Wayne.
Here are a few really scary modern statistics to prove how insane our society, our people, have become in such a short period of time:
- Over 50% of young liberal women have been diagnosed with a mental health condition
- 20% of Gen Z identifies as Queer (not straight), doubling over the past decade. It’s logical to wonder if it will be 40% in 10 years. This is not an “organic” development; but rather a coordinated social contagion campaign. And they are starting to eat their own as the L’s & G’s seek to expel the T’s from their Rainbow cult. “The T’s are stealing our L’s!”
- Just 71%(!) of young men held a job in 2021. This statistic is not shocking to anyone who is involved in the Trades. There is a HUGE shortage of young men entering the building trades. In 15 years, when the old timer journeymen retire, who will build our homes and infrastructure? This is another problem that no one has an answer for.
- 10% of American children have been diagnosed with ADHD; for which scientists have yet to identify a cause.
- In 2023 11.5% of young people reported severe major depression
- 64% of teens report feeling the world is more stressful now than when their parents were their age (How would they know?).
- 28% of teens report having received mental health treatment.
- According to the NIH, nearly 1 in 3 teens will experience an anxiety disorder.
The kids are definitely not all right. For more on this crisis check out the recently released Abigail Shrier “Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up” >>> https://g.co/kgs/NMv44sU
Our kids are more miserable than ever, at the same time that they are being coddled, idolized and affirmed more than at any time in human history. In fact, up until the 1800’s children were universally esteemed slightly above the status of beloved pets. Today, kids are brainwashed through storytelling that they possess the secret power to save humanity, while their parents are off doing dumb stuff like have jobs.
Think of every single “family” or “kids” movie in the past 20 years and tell me I’m wrong. Add to this the fact that by age 11 most kids are given a smartphone with access to the entire universe of mankind’s “knowledge”, which adds to the belief that mom and dad are unnecessary to their emotional, spiritual and intellectual growth. Mom and dad have become useless relics of the past. For the Zoomer generation, every year is Year Zero, the Current Thing is their bible, elders are not to be respected, every single thing they do must be affirmed and celebrated (e.g. baby gender reveal rituals), and, importantly, they must never ever be chastised.
Zoomers are the most risk-averse, fearful, compliant, ultra-sensitive humans to ever breathe oxygen. It’s not difficult to imagine their own children – at least the remnant that will survive the queer gauntlet and remain “Cisgender” & reproductive- growing up in environmentally safe bubbles, like the Bubble Boy movie from 1976.
No, the kids aren’t all right; and no one seems to know what to do about it.
RETVRN.
One criticism of the desire to RETVRN, from Aaron Renn for example, is that it “doesn’t appeal to voters” and that we “should talk more about the future”. But the RETVRN meme is about the future; and more importantly, it’s about the present, where we actually live. We certainly don’t want to abandon all of human progress. I for one quite enjoy the toys, gadgets, conveniences, comfort and fun that much of our modern technology offers. Heated and cooled car seats, comfortable beds, fast boats, craft beer and whiskies, delicious cookies and cupcakes, extremely good pocket cameras (phones), easy access to millions of books. These and many more luxuries are worth keeping. They make the drudgery of life much more tolerable, and fun. But technology alone is unfulfilling.
So what exactly is missing?
How about God?
Is it any coincidence that the explosion of technology over the past 100 years has also corresponded with our people’s abandonment of the belief in a Creator? I think not. Our culture has been building our own Tower of Babel, in a feeble attempt to put ourselves on His level.
To paraphrase C.S. Lewis: Grace happens when we say to God “Thy will be done”, and His judgment occurs when He says “No, thy will be done”.
I believe the nihilism, debauchery, lies, absurdity and wickedness that is running wild throughout our world is proof that God is pouring out His wrath onto us. The grand flirtation with secularism has failed, and only a RETVRN to faith can stop the madness, while we await the return
of the King.
