Why the West Rebelled—and What Comes Next

Rebellion, Collapse, and the Hope for a Civilizational Return

I know a little about rebellion.

When I was sixteen, I developed severe acne on my back. My parents put me on Accutane, which at the time had poorly understood side effects. I was prescribed a high dose, and while it cleared my skin, it darkened my mind.

Today we know that Accutane can trigger violent mood swings and deep depression in teenagers, far too often leading to suicide. Its use is now tightly regulated.

I became intensely rebellious. The drug likely amplified what might have been a normal stage of growing up, and my parents noticed the emotional swings, but didn’t know the cause. They assumed I was taking drugs and that my girlfriend - the first girl I ever truly loved - was my dealer. Ironically, she and I were both fervently against drugs.

That led to predictable conflict with my parents.

My son was relatively easy as a teenager, but my daughter rebelled fiercely, especially against her stepmother, so I’ve seen the process from both sides. Rebellion is a natural part of development, and often a necessary one.

As children, we may understand intellectually that our parents are flawed, but we live emotionally as if they are perfect. At some point in adolescence, that illusion collapses. We connect emotionally with their imperfection, and begin to question everything they taught us. Rebellion follows.

Most people, by their early twenties, realize they don’t know everything either. Rebellion ends, and we become mature adults.

Western civilization is in a similar phase. We’ve connected emotionally to the idea that we can explain much of the world without God, but we lack the maturity to understand that civilization cannot exist without His morality.

I didn’t commit suicide while on Accutane, though many in my generation did. The question is whether our civilization will commit suicide before realizing that we need a moral purpose greater than ourselves.

I am not saying that atheists need to repent and pray, but I am saying civilizations need shared moral frameworks, and the nature of the moral framework will determine the character of the civilization. Our society was built on the Judeo-Christian moral framework, and without it, it will collapse.

Can we preserve our civilization by returning to Judeo-Christian morals? The jury is still out, but understand that we have not outgrown God so much as we are rebelling against Him.

The Death of God: When the West Chose Rebellion

Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead, and we have killed Him” is often misunderstood. It was not a celebration, but a warning.

Nietzsche saw clearly that Western morality, meaning, and order had been built on the assumption that God is real. He feared what would follow once that foundation was removed. To him, the death of God was not a liberation, but a civilizational earthquake. It would unleash chaos, relativism, and eventually nihilism. Without God, Nietzsche warned, we would drift unmoored.

He was right.

The Enlightenment, for all its celebration of reason, was not a rejection of God. It was a synthesis. It married Greek logic with Judeo-Christian ethics. It held that truth could be discovered, but goodness had been revealed.

Even among those who rejected belief in God, there remained deep reverence for the Bible as a moral and cultural foundation. Thomas Jefferson created a version of the Bible that removed all references to miracles. What he preserved was the ethical core, especially the teachings of Jesus.

Critics often point to the violence in the Old Testament as cause to reject the New, but every divine judgment took place in a specific time and place, far removed from our own.

The laws given to Moses fell into three categories: moral laws (which Christians share), ceremonial laws (which set the Jewish people apart), and civil laws (which governed ancient Israel as a nation). While some Jewish people still observe the ceremonial laws, even modern Israel does not follow the civil code, and though these laws may seem strange today, they may well have made sense in Ancient Israel, thousands of years ago.

Consider the law requiring a man who rapes a woman to marry her. In our time, that sounds appalling, but in ancient Israel, marriage did not necessarily mean cohabitation. It did mean that the man was legally responsible for supporting the woman for the rest of her life.

In a culture where a woman who had been raped might never find a husband, marriage was not a reward for the rapist, but a financial sentence intended to protect the victim from destitution.

Whatever the case, the civil laws of ancient Israel do not apply to the modern age.

Today, only the moral law remains, and we still need it. Whether we follow it or rebel against it, its value remains unchanged. Civilization cannot mature without it.

When we removed God’s moral law from public life, we did not inherit the Enlightenment. We inherited its corpse.

The Enlightenment was a fusion of Judeo-Christian orthodoxy and Greek philosophy. When we separated the two, we created Postmodernism, and with Postmodernism, we began listening once more to the serpent, who now whispers about identity and grievance rather than fruit and knowledge.

Postmodernism destroyed truth. Identity politics replaced the soul with tribal affiliation. Intersectionality offered no wisdom - only envy. And from that confusion, rebellion took root.

Today, the Western world is tearing itself apart. As I argued in The Quiet Coup, this collapse is no accident. It is by design.

Moral Codes in Conflict: Christianity, Islam, Socialism, and Fascism

Western civilization was built on the foundation of the Judeo-Christian moral code. This system is rooted in the belief that all people are created in the image of God and are therefore endowed with dignity, moral agency, and individual responsibility. It teaches that liberty must be ordered toward the good, that justice must be tempered by mercy, and that authority must be grounded in moral legitimacy rather than sheer power. It limits rulers, elevates individuals, and binds society through voluntary virtue rather than coercive control.

The other ideologies reject this moral structure and replace it with rival codes that ultimately dehumanize the individual.

Socialism and fascism both reduce human beings to something more like livestock, differing mainly in how that livestock is fed. Socialism subordinates the individual to the collective, while fascism subordinates the individual to the nation.

Even that distinction is largely semantic, since socialism in practice always operates under national control. The real difference between the two lies in their views on profit.

Islam, by contrast, replaces Christian love with submission. Its highest virtue is not humility but obedience, and not to conscience or principle, but to a divine legal framework that governs every aspect of life. Islam fuses religion and state into a single structure of absolute authority. Where Christianity extends dignity universally, Islam ranks it: believer, infidel, dhimmi. It offers not grace or redemption, but conditional acceptance based on conformity and dominance.

This is not a criticism of Muslims. It is a critique of the doctrine as written, not as selectively interpreted by moderates.

Contrary to popular belief, Islam does not exalt the submissive. It exalts those who force others to submit. In this framework, submission imposed through fear or conquest is seen as more powerful, and more righteous, than submission through belief.

A religion that holds forced submission as its highest moral order is fundamentally incompatible with liberty. The Judeo-Christian ethic and Islam cannot coexist, unless Islam is practiced in ways that devout Muslims would call apostasy.

Socialism, on the other hand, claims to pursue equality, but through coercion. It removes God from the moral equation and replaces Him with the collective (in practice, always within a nation-state). The state becomes both judge and redeemer.

Socialism’s ethic rests on forced redistribution. It recasts envy as justice and redefines property as theft. Under socialism, goodness is not measured by virtue, but by ideological alignment. Individuality is erased, excellence is punished, and 'freedom' is replaced with 'for free.'

We know who the socialists are. They identify themselves openly. Figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders wear that label proudly.

Fascism, as defined by Gentile and Mussolini, is socialism with a nationalist mask. It retains private ownership in name, but every economic decision must serve the interests of the nation. Its ethic is utilitarian. Corporations exist to fulfill state objectives, and people are valued only insofar as they contribute to national goals. Christian humility is replaced with national pride. Grace gives way to order. Universal morality is sacrificed for statist direction. Profit is allowed only as a tool to increase national strength, not as an expression of liberty or innovation. In fascism, incentives come from above, with state-directed profit reducing the need for gulags.

Fascists are harder to identify than socialists. They no longer wear the costumes of Mussolini or Hitler. Instead, they operate through the softer corporatism of leaders like Juan Perón and Francisco Franco. Policies such as Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act, though marketed as progressive, mirror Gentile’s fascist economic theory with surprising fidelity.

Islam imposes theocratic control. Socialism imposes economic control. Fascism imposes nationalist control. Each ideology demands the subordination of the individual to a larger collective, whether defined as the ummah, the proletariat, or the state.

Only the Judeo-Christian God exalts the individual while also binding him to moral responsibility. Only the Judeo-Christian tradition separates the spiritual and temporal realms in a way that restrains both. Only in this tradition is love, not submission, conformity, or tribal loyalty, elevated as the highest good.

Only the Judeo-Christian moral code can sustain liberty without collapsing into tyranny.

This is not to say the West has always lived up to its ideals. It has not. But the ideals themselves, grounded in moral equality, voluntary virtue, and limits on power, made it possible to self-correct.

Atheists may reject Christianity because they reject God - but unless they prefer one of these rival systems, they should consider themselves Cultural Christians, as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins eventually did.

Rebuilding Babel: Pride Masquerading as Progress

Genesis 11:1–9 (ESV)
1 Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.
2 And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.
3 And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.
4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built.
6 And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
8 So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.
9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.

In The History of Civilization, Volume One: Our Oriental Heritage, Will Durant describes how ancient Sumeria (distinct from Samaria) featured brick structures and ox-drawn plows by at least 9,000 BC. The exact age of that civilization remains unknown. It was destroyed when a land bridge collapsed, creating the Persian Gulf.

Civilization, as a concept, vanished for nearly 1,500 years, later to re-emerge in two places: Babylon, on the northern edge of what had been Sumeria, and Egypt, at the head of the Nile.

The similarity between “Babel” and “Babylon” is likely deliberate. The story of a civilization-ending flood, followed by multiple cultures with different languages mirrors both the Tower of Babel and Noah’s Ark. This is exactly the kind of narrative we would expect from a true oral history, preserved through allegory and generational repetition.

The authors of Genesis were not historians. The very concept of history, as we understand it today, did not yet exist.

In allegory, the lesson is more important than the literal event. The story of Babel isn’t about architecture. It is a warning about arrogance. It cautions against replacing God, or in secular terms, replacing divine moral authority with relativism. That path leads not to unity, but to chaos.

Atheists may argue that morality did not literally come from God. Let them believe that if they wish, but they should still respect the moral structure that emerged. Not all moral codes are equal. Pretending we can discard the one that built the modern world is self-destructive.

We are building another Tower of Babel today. This time it is not made of bricks, but of ideologies, systems, and narratives that seek to replace God and reject His moral order.

We insist that we no longer need Him. We claim that each of us can define morality on our own terms. Somehow, we convince ourselves that this will build a better world.

Whether or not Genesis is literal, its warning remains true. We ignore it at our peril.

Identity politics, intersectionality, and technocratic globalism are not paths to unity. They divide society into castes and sever our connection to meaning. We become blind to the pride that fuels our rebellion.

This is no longer just secularism. It is idolatry. We have not merely abandoned God. We have declared ourselves His rivals.

The Return of Serfdom: Why the West Now Hates Freedom

Freedom requires more than a legal framework. It demands virtue, responsibility, self-restraint, and belief in something higher than self, even if that higher power is cultural rather than divine.

When we rejected God, liberty lost its moral anchor. Postmodernism filled the void with confusion, and confusion gave way to fear. Fear, in turn, created a hunger for control.

Intersectionality merged with Postmodernism to flip the moral order. During the Enlightenment, the path to success was to create something others wanted or needed, something worth exchanging hard-earned money for. Intersectionality calls this process "oppression" and demands equal outcomes for every group, even as it condemns the very activities that generate wealth in the first place.

This worldview demands a government that provides, but to provide, it must first take. Socialism also destroys the incentive to produce, and until someone finds a way to distribute what hasn’t been created, it will always fail.

Ironically, the very people who want government to serve as provider are the ones who label free markets as "trickle-down." In a free market, people keep what they earn. Wealth is not redistributed from above; it flows from voluntary exchange. Under socialism, wealth is pulled to the top so that government officials can distribute it, and history shows they spend it on themselves first.

Fidel Castro died a billionaire while his people starved. That is how socialism actually works. That is how it will work here, if we allow it. Bernie gets six houses while you get three rooms. That is the real meaning of "feel the Bern."

The culture now embraces socialism because free markets allow failure, and failure has been rebranded as oppression. In a society stripped of purpose, people prefer safety and certainty over freedom and risk.

We are returning to the days of noble lords, but not based on birthright. This time it is a new aristocracy built on credentials, bureaucracy, and control. We began to worship experts, and we handed them power. That power now resides with technocrats and centralized governments.

Power corrupts, and the so-called experts have no incentive to tell the truth. They oppose free markets for the very reason free markets work: they reward those who produce. The experts do not want a system that enriches others. They want a system that rewards themselves.

Across much of the West, digital feudalism has already replaced liberal democracy. The new serfs are not tied to land, but to algorithm, regulation, and fear.

Younger generations now embrace socialism not because they oppose wealth, but because, having been stripped of purpose, they no longer understand freedom. Without direction, liberty feels like abandonment. Without God (at least in the abstract) it offers no comfort.

The Inversion: Why We Call Good Evil and Evil Good

Once the moral compass is destroyed, inversion becomes inevitable. What was once considered good is now condemned, while evil is celebrated.

Nowhere is this inversion more evident than in the West’s confused view of Islam.

The common assumption is that a religion of submission must honor the submissive. But this is not the case. Islam does not exalt submission itself. It exalts those who force others to submit. Power becomes virtue, and dominance is seen as divine.

Under Islamic rule, the dhimmi (non-Muslims living under Muslim authority) is not respected for his submission. He is humiliated. The jizya tax must be paid in a demeaning manner to mark his inferiority. A slave is not admired for obedience. She is owned in body, erased in spirit, and reduced to a function of someone else's power.

Terror is celebrated when it defends or spreads the faith. The destruction of rival religions, atheism, or any life not in accordance with Sharia is viewed not as extremism, but as righteous protection against corruption.

Al Qaeda and ISIS are not distortions of Islam. They are faithful to its central texts. That is why thousands of Muslims from Western nations left their homes to join ISIS.

To be clear, millions of Muslims do not follow those texts to the letter, but millions do. Ben Shapiro cites data suggesting that nearly half of the world’s Muslims hold radical views.

Some question Shapiro’s interpretation. I invite you to listen to him and decide for yourself.

Even rape is sanctioned under Islamic law when the woman is classified as “what your right hands possess.” Her consent becomes irrelevant. Her suffering is not viewed as injustice, but as confirmation that she has submitted. In this worldview, submission to dominance is moral order.

Victims are blamed, not protected. A woman who walks alone without permission is seen as inviting violation. The rapist is excused. The victim and her family are shamed, and in some cases, that shame is “removed” through the honor killing of the girl who was raped.

The West no longer sees Islam clearly because it has lost its own moral bearings. We assume that wherever Islam is a minority, it must be good; we have come to believe that all minorities are victims.

Ironically, it is in Islamic countries that minorities suffer the most.

This compounds our crisis. Without God, we lost the ability to name evil. Worse, with the wrong god, we began to worship evil itself.

The Alliance of Enemies: A Marriage of Malice, Not Minds

At first glance, it may seem implausible that Islamists, socialists, and fascists would align. Their worldviews are not merely distinct but mutually antagonistic. Their goals, their theological and ideological assumptions, and even their economic models fundamentally conflict. Yet across the Western world, these forces now appear increasingly coordinated, if not through formal alliance, then through functional cooperation. Together, they are working to dismantle the moral, cultural, and institutional foundations of Western civilization.

What unites them is not a shared vision of the future, but a shared hatred of the present. Specifically, they despise the liberal democratic tradition rooted in Judeo-Christian ethics: individual liberty, constitutional limits, and open discourse. Each finds that framework intolerable.

For Islamists, it represents infidel decadence. For socialists, capitalist exploitation. For fascists, the blasphemy of placing individual rights above the state. Each seeks to raze the West to the ground. Their partnership is one of destruction, not destiny, and once the West is gone, they will turn on each other.

This kind of alliance is not new. History offers many examples of opportunistic pacts between enemies. Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression agreement while quietly preparing to betray one another. They divided Poland as part of the deal. Mao made temporary peace with Chinese Islamists while consolidating power, only to later suppress them once Western liberalism had been defeated. Today, we see the same cynical choreography. Hostilities are shelved - not resolved - in service of a greater demolition.

Islamism does not tolerate socialism, which undermines Sharia and replaces dominance with egalitarianism. A system rooted in submission and hierarchy cannot accommodate equity. Caste structures are essential to Islamic order.

Socialism, in turn, rejects Islam. It cannot accept patriarchal theocracy or institutional inequality. It demands ideological conformity around material justice and gender equality, which are principles Islam categorically denies.

Fascism rejects both. It seeks the supremacy of the state above all religious or ideological claims.

These are not allies. They are rival executioners, momentarily aligned against a common victim.

Western elites, soaked in postmodern delusion and utopian fantasy, believe they are controlling this convergence. They imagine themselves as architects, using each ideology to reshape society. In truth, they are hastening the collapse of the only structure that restrains these forces from devouring one another, and from devouring us.

Divide and Conquer: How Islam Can Turn Fascism and Socialism Against Each Other

While Islam, socialism, and fascism are temporarily aligned in their assault on the West, their visions of the world are ultimately incompatible. Each claims its own truth. Each asserts its own moral authority. Each imagines its own exclusive future. Among them, Islam has proven most adept at exploiting the contradictions of the others.

Socialism is a materialist ideology. It sees profit as theft and private property as a root of injustice, seeking to eliminate class divisions by abolishing personal wealth, and replacing markets with centralized planning. There is no incentive but obligation, and no reward but survival.

Fascism, by contrast, permits private property in name but not in function. Corporations may exist only if they serve the state. Profit is allowed, but only when it contributes to national power. The market is directed from above. Private actors obey or vanish.

It is worth noting that “profit” includes personal pay. Marx envisioned a society where people worked without wages, taking only what they needed to survive. In socialism, payment is not a right. It is an indulgence the system cannot afford.

Islam differs from both. It is not primarily an economic doctrine but a theocratic one. Markets are permitted, but only within the bounds of Sharia. Interest is forbidden. Some goods and services are banned. Wealth must serve religious ends through required giving and loyalty to the ummah. Capitalism is tolerated only when subordinated to divine command.

Here lies its strategic opportunity.

By magnifying the division between fascism and socialism, particularly around profit and hierarchy, Islam can turn them against one another. To the socialist, fascism is a betrayal: it permits inequality, so long as it serves the state. To the fascist, socialism is suicidal: it erodes national strength. Fascism was created to correct socialism’s failures. Mussolini called it “socialism with boots.”

Each ideology claims to oppose global finance, but for different reasons. The socialist sees it as bourgeois oppression. The fascist sees it as foreign subversion. Islam rejects both, portraying their entire dispute as a squabble among godless systems, competing for power that belongs to Allah alone.

By sharpening the debate over profit and control, Islam can paint fascist pride as decadence and socialist repression as nihilism. That fracture weakens both. Into the vacuum, Islam offers what neither can: divine clarity, total order, and a moral system that claims to answer every question.

Islam does not need to conquer outright. It only needs to survive the conflict and emerge as the last ideology standing.

If Islam does not come out on top, then whichever system prevails, fascism or socialism, will kill it off.

Fascism may tolerate secular religions, but socialism makes the state God, and the state is the most jealous deity of all.

The Adolescent West and the Road Ahead

This is not the end of the story. Rebellion is a phase and the West is spiritually adolescent. Like any teenager, it may remember what it once knew and find its way back to the Father, or at least to His moral order.

When our towers fall, when systems collapse, and when ideologies devour themselves, a path still remains. It begins in exhaustion and despair, but it can lead to wisdom and renewal.

We must remember that we are not gods. We never were. Power without virtue becomes tyranny. Knowledge without wisdom becomes chaos. Freedom without truth becomes despair.

We must grow up.

The West stands at a crossroads. We can continue the rebellion until we destroy ourselves, or we can return to the foundation that gave us life.

We do not need to revive every doctrine or creed, but we must recover the source of our meaning. The fusion of faith and reason built the modern world. Without it, we are unmoored - lost children pretending our confusion is progress.

If we do not return to our roots, we will climb further into a labyrinth of conflict, where incompatible ideologies fight to fill a void none of them can satisfy.

Like the teenager who lashes out but eventually returns, we may yet come home. We may come to see that we were not rebelling against tyranny, but against purpose.

Whether we reclaim the fusion of faith and reason or simply return to moral clarity, there is still time. We can grow up.

When I was a teenager on Accutane, my rebellion changed the course of my life, but my life did not end. In some ways, it eventually became stronger.

Western civilization is not dead either.

At least not yet.