The sudden collapse of liberalism

In 2016, Trump supporters overran the GodlikeProductions.com message board. The atmosphere turned grim, much as it had fifteen years earlier, when Fortuyn supporters overran the Iex.nl message board. Since then, the new fascism has grown stronger. This time, I didn’t run away as I had missed out on something important. And given the job that may lie ahead, and me supposedly being Adolf Hitler reincarnate, not understanding fascism is no excuse. It is an exaggeration to say that Jews run the United States, but to say that they don’t is naive. And so, I kept visiting the message board and familiarised myself with the MAGA movement, like I previously did with Muslims. But I have never seen this level of bullshit. The first Trump administration was not a clean break with the past, as his cabinet included Republican establishment figures. They kept The Donald in check.

The second Trump administration was a different ballgame. Trump had surrounded himself with sycophants and went unhinged. Because there is no limit to Trump’s ego, and his being erratic and spiteful, it became a spectacle, so hilarious that even Monty Python couldn’t have made it up, with Trump naming building after building after himself, making his birthday a public holiday and countless similar self-aggrandising acts. And let’s not forget his self-enrichment and that of his family members by abusing his office, his mass-pardoning of criminals and his divisive Christmas messages. If Hunter Biden should be in prison, much of the Trump family must also be. I have seen lunatics on the left as extreme as MAGA, but they don’t run the United States. Knowing it is a script, I could laugh about it. Otherwise, I might have feared the worst. Others probably did, judging by the surging prices of gold and silver.

We have seen the collapse of liberalism. Things will not return to what they were before. The liberal world has ended, and forever. The liberal fairy tale has long been successful. Liberal states have been the strongest because of capitalism and science. Americans may think their nation is a Christian nation, but its constitution is liberal. Liberalism is as much a part of the Western heritage as Christianity. Science and capitalism thrived most in a liberal environment with freedom of expression and property rights. When the Nazis took over Germany, several Jewish German scientists fled to the United States, including a fellow named Einstein. They helped the United States develop the atomic bomb. And then Adolf Hitler made the error of attacking the Soviet Union. That is how liberalism won the day. When the Soviet Union collapsed, liberalism seemed to have won.

And so, complacency set in. High on delusion and lured by the prospect of profits for the businesses they represented, the neoconservatives, who were a breed of conservatives that had adopted Hegelian dialectic, much to the horror of true conservatives, believed that Western culture is so superior that after toppling the regime in Iraq, a liberal democracy would magically appear. Since then, China has revised its economic model and now outcompetes the West, while mass migration of non-Westerners has eroded the West’s liberal foundations. Most Muslims, Africans, and Eastern Europeans have little interest in LGBTQ rights or women’s rights, in the liberal sense that is. They have had no upbringing in a tradition of progress rooted in the Hegelian dialectic. Westerners can already notice that in inner cities. Liberalism is yet another fairy tale. It has just collapsed in front of us quite suddenly, even to my surprise, but liberals have yet to catch on. It seems that the time is drawing close. It may be the end of Hegel’s ride, so it will either be the collapse of Western civilisation or the completion of our journey to Paradise.

Peak Bullshit

MAGA could be Peak Bullshit, the era where nonsense can’t reach higher levels, as I surmised two decades earlier, after seeing misinformation spread on the Internet. In retrospect, it was a prophetic thought. After peak bullshit, things may collapse, and The Truth may come out. But why did the rise of MAGA nonetheless surprise me? Something similar had already happened in the Netherlands fifteen years earlier with the rise of the populist politician Pim Fortuyn. Only, the level of nonsense was much lower. For over two decades, I believed that the US dollar-based financial system would break down at some point, but when that collapse seemed to start, I had trouble believing it. I could be the messiah, but that is even more unbelievable.

And I am also biased. We all have a model of reality that gives sense to the world. We use it to explain things. Liberalism and fascism are both models of reality with merits and limitations. Christianity is high on bullshit as well, but there is an underlying truth, and Jesus had reasons to believe he was the Son of God. We all cling to our worldviews, but we deal with contradictions differently. Peak Bullshit came with the following symptoms:

• Outright fabrications: many claims were simply bogus, so untrue. But they riled up people nonetheless. Anti-vaccine posts were usually of that nature.
• Improper sourcing: a Twitter account claims something has happened, but there is no other evidence. You have to trust the gutter on that one.
• Hyping incidents: if a black guy molests a white guy or rapes a white woman, the fascists claim it is evidence of white genocide.
• Distorting the truth: if you get access to the same news from regular sources, you find that the reporting of the alt-right paints a caricature of reality.
• Finally, there are definitely things that the traditional media do not report on, and are worth knowing. You can think of what preceded the war in Ukraine.

The left uses similar tactics. MAGA is just much better at it. The left hyped violent incidents committed by neo-Nazis. A most excellent example of nonsense from the left is Black Lives Matter, which made an issue out of the police violence against blacks. The incidents that inspired the movement were acts of police brutality with fatal consequences, and some of them might be murder. Racism may have played a role, but there is no proof. Compared to European police forces, American police make a high number of casualties, and not only blacks. And compared to Europeans, Americans accept a high level of lethal violence. You can get away with shooting a cleaning lady who tries to open the wrong door. In the Netherlands, that would be murder. And if you take violent crime levels into account, you get an entirely different picture. Blacks are three times as likely to be killed by the police, but eight times as likely to be a murder suspect.

So, relative to the number of murders they commit, the police killed fewer blacks. It would be fairer to say the opposite was true than what Black Lives Matter told us. And defund the police? Let violent gangs take over? Black Lives Matter was also high on bullshit. They used incidents to paint a caricature of reality. If you want to know why people went MAGA, here is one reason. I don’t doubt that there is widespread racism and that blacks are wronged. But is violent crime among blacks not a far greater problem than police brutality? And is it not that, whatever society does wrong, positive change begins with you? So, do you want to be good at sports, or do you want to become an engineer? Solving these issues requires a different approach than painting caricatures. And that is what MAGA is also about. But MAGA is the end of the line. You can’t go further down that road.

It was hard for me to grasp that people believe things that are easily disproved. But the proof is everywhere around me. And it happens to me as well. I found Black Lives Matter a noble cause until I found out about the violent crime levels among blacks that the liberal media didn’t mention. And there we arrive at the issue of conservatives distrusting the liberal mainstream press. Liberal media may not lie as much as fascist media, but they forget to mention crucial facts, which can be as bad. Often, more is afoot than you can prove, and some conspiracy theories point to these issues. They reflect gut feelings. Your gut feelings, however, are a survival mechanism, not a fact-finding instrument. If you suspect that someone is planning to murder you, waiting for proof can be fatal. So, shoot first and ask questions later. Yet, basing your actions on feelings while ignoring the facts is also dangerous. We live by stories that give meaning to the world. It is our nature to accept the errors and falsehoods in our worldviews.

Hence, dismissing the MAGA people as stupid or evil is a mistake. The Netherlands had once experienced a large-scale benefits fraud, with most culprits coming from a particular ethnic group. The United States also had one. Only, you can’t trust the reporting in the US because the issue is heavily politicised, while that was less so in the Netherlands. Giving in to popular sentiment created a greater disaster later on. The Netherlands is still dealing with the fallout from a fraud-prevention campaign gone wild, and paying reparations to people treated as fraudsters without proof. A conservative politician’s relentless efforts helped uncover the latter scandal. At the same time, the government tried everything to cover it up, including blacking out pages that it was required to hand over. Moral integrity mattered more to him than political gain. Such politicians are a rare breed, also in the Netherlands. Other politicians schemed to get rid of him by giving a ‘position elsewhere’ a note accidentally photographed by a journalist revealed. He came from the region I came from and lived at striking distance of my birthplace.

In a world ruled by money, fraud and corruption are everywhere, but if immigrants do it, we are more alarmed because ‘they’ are robbing ‘us’. It is only natural to feel this way. We are group animals. And so you have to be serious about fascism. Otherwise, things only get worse. The truth is often disagreeable. You hope that it isn’t so, unless you are a jerk. Those who abuse a system may feel no connection to the society they live in. They may have their reasons, but a society has its reasons to expel them. We can only address these issues if we are candid, and if needed, politically incorrect and as sharp as a knife, but that also means fairness and painting a truthful picture.

For the job that may await me, I needed answers. So, let’s start with a warning. It is the truth as I see it. I try to have a fair and balanced view, but above all, an insightful one. And it is my personal view, so definitely not neutral. But if I am the messiah, it might be the truth you should accept. The truth has many sides. Different views highlight different aspects of it. If you are a liberal, taking the perspective of a conservative opens up a different world with things you weren’t aware of, but are nonetheless true. The same is true if you are a conservative and adopt a liberal perspective. But I fear it is impossible to become good at it if you haven’t been both, and don’t consider your former views a folly.

That happened to me. I adopted the Hegelian dialectic to deal with the contradictions. There is an underlying truth. There are fundamental disagreements about direction, leading to an authority crisis and a moral crisis that divide societies. Think of it. An Antifa activist is as concerned about the future as a neo-Nazi. Authority and morality come from the stories we believe in. The United States has a moral corruption issue that gave rise to MAGA. Most Americans are normal people who have jobs, obey the law and pay taxes. They think what they do is right. Yet, Americans live in a tradition of pragmatism while Europe has a tradition of idealism, and that is a profound difference.

As Judgement Day seems to be approaching. The International Court of Justice is in The Hague, the Netherlands, where I live. The Hegelian dialectic has progressed the furthest here on issues like dealing with the planetary boundaries, LGBTQ rights, animal rights, and the right to decide to terminate one’s own life. That is no coincidence, either. The Netherlands has its own issues. There is a crisis of authority with rioters attacking police, firefighters, and ambulance crews with fireworks during the New Year’s celebrations. They are people who shit on authority. Some are immigrant youngsters, some are soccer hooligans, but most are neither. Liberalism is at the end of the line as well. If I sound judgmental, that is because I must, not because I like to. Try to view it as a problem description rather than a moral judgment. If it seems otherwise, remember that I am a systems engineer appointed to fix the biggest clusterfuck in the history of humankind.

For most ordinary people, the most brutal truth may be that if you work hard to get ahead, you may live at the expense of the planet, other people and future generations by taking more than you need. So, there you are: hard-working, obeying the law, paying taxes, raising your children properly, giving money to charities, perhaps even being faithful to your spouse, only to find out that your hard work and consumption ruin the planet. And that affects both liberals and conservatives. It is hard to stomach. But if we intend to march towards God’s Paradise, we must accept the whole truth and spare no one. Coming from a family of farmers, I am not afraid of shit. If necessary, I grab it with both hands. These are shitty issues, and you can’t fix them unless you get your hands dirty. Some of the most profound truths are hidden at the bottom of a manure pit.

Featured image: AI-generated

Latest revision: 5 January 2026