It seems as though more and more news items lately have a common element: After decades of steadily attacking, hollowing out or abandoning its own culture, the Western world is showing major signs of social, political and moral decay.

Personally, I am no traditionalist. I think all traditions should be examined in the light of logic and justice – and revised or replaced, where they’re found lacking. This is one reason why I have never called myself a conservative (and have tried not to become GP’s “main blogger”).

But my intention, as a non-traditionalist, is to ‘keep things real’ and build on what’s best in the Western tradition: which is what Jonah Goldberg has called the Lockean Revolution, the idea that the individual owns herself – and is not owned by the Massa, feudal Lord, Village, Community, Tribe, Race, Party, State or Ummah. The leftists who have attacked the West from within, for decades now, have been after the exact opposite idea.

A civilization/culture doesn’t survive unless its young women and men will mostly (regardless of particular individuals’ sexual orientation or practices) do the following together: (a) get along; (b) find a genuine sense of purpose and meaning in that culture/civilization; and therefore (c) actually create and raise new generations for it. We are seeing more and more signs that the West is decrepit, on all three counts.

I could talk about the West’s declining birthrates, or its anti-child and self-terminating “environmentalism”, or its ever-growing political insanity. But, just to restrict it to current events, GayPatriot’s main page presently notices such news items as:

• Prominent public figures displaying little or no concept of personal responsibility.
• Little girls who have been programmed to screech anger and contempt at the rest of society.
• A president leading a government that can’t rationally address the threat of a major epidemic.
• Paid public journalists who can’t think rationally about said leader/government.
• The State ordering individuals to violate their own conscience.

And we can add more items:

• Westerners converting to Islam, then carrying out jihad against their own societies. When a culture’s intelligentsia do everything they can for decades to attack/destroy their own culture’s major religion, you don’t get a wonderful era of progressive enlightenment. No, no, no. You get the culture’s “average people” turning to a different religion, probably a hostile one.
• Especially, you begin to get the culture’s teenage girls doing it.

I recommend that last link, Lee Smith’s opinion piece titled “Why the Teenage Girls of Europe are Joining ISIS”, for your attention. When a given civilization can no longer persuade its own teenage girls to sign on with it: it’s cooked.