Note: Tonight at 8:45 PM EDT I will be on a Twitter Space with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow, Harrison Smith, Dan Lyman and Jared Taylor. The topic will be how best to remove the alien invaders.

There is a famous movie line that says, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The line does not originate with the film but much earlier, most likely by Charles Baudelaire. In the 19th century, the line turns up a lot and was used to mean that people often stand by and do nothing when terrible things are happening because they fail to appreciate the great struggle with evil that must define life when one acknowledges the existence of it.

Something similar persists to this day with something we can pin on Karl Marx and others regarding the nature of human society. Marx argued that oppression and inequality were the result of economic relations. Therefore, if you want to get a society free of oppression, then you need to get the economic relations right. Later, libertarians took up the same claim but arrived at a different path to liberation. Ever since, the West has been sure that nothing exists other than economics.

The story of the last century or so in the West has been the spread of materialism as the defining feature of Western thought. Getting the economics right has been the center of all political debate. The left-right axis found new poles with socialism on the left and libertarianism on the right. One side sees equality as the equal distribution of goods, while the other side sees it as the equal distribution of liberty. Both assume that once the economics are right, paradise must naturally follow.

The reason for the “cultural revolution” of the last decade or so is that a portion of the left began to see the error in this view. In the middle of the last century, they embraced the claim that Marxism failed because people were incapable of transcending their cultural conditioning. Therefore, the inevitable progress toward egalitarianism can only happen when the cultural restraints are removed. That required taking control of the centers of cultural production.

This is why the leftists in this age are perfectly comfortable working for wealthy oligarchs or even being oligarchs. They deliberately entered corporate life as they saw corporations as a center of cultural production. Similarly, they entered and then took over the vast, sprawling networks of the administrative state and then the managerialism system that directs it. All the people and things the left supposedly hated were turned into tools to bring about the revolution.

Ironically, that project is foundering for the same reason that its predecessors persisted long after reality made clear that Marx was wrong. The public embrace of economics as the standard against which everything is measured meant that the cultural revolution would be measured against its practical utility. The escapist phrase, “go woke, go broke” was factually incorrect, but it had a kernel of truth. In a purely materialist age, culture takes a back seat to the price of eggs.

The corrosive power of materialism is clear in the ongoing destruction of college sports where “reform” is about getting the money right. The reason college athletics is a thing at all is tradition, but everyone involved is willing to throw tradition into the furnace if it helps fire the economics. Everyone is sure that all they need to do is get the economics of the sport right and everything will follow. No amount of evidence will convince them that some things are too important for the marketplace.

You see it with libertarian cranks over the immigration bill. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” is in trouble because weirdos like Rand Paul are able to rally the clown horn gang to oppose it on money grounds. Rand Paul is literally making the argument that your society is only worth saving at the right price. It is a great example of the expression, “A man who puts a price on everything values nothing.” This is the life motto of all those who embrace materialism.

The people siding with Rand Paul are psychologically incapable of understanding why a people can survive bankruptcy but not demographic replacement. For them, the holy crusade is to get the economics right. Their version of the egalitarian paradise may be different than that of the Marxists, but it is just as powerful. For them, the imagined Hell is the long promised fiscal collapse, whatever that means. Staving that off is the purpose of their life, so they cannot be persuaded.

Therein lies the small bit of good news. There is a growing number of people who see that there are some things too important to subject to the marketplace. This is the dissident view, which is the old conservative view. It is the very heart of the left-right concept that has haunted the West for centuries. The left says the truth lies with the people, while the right says it lies outside the people. For today’s dissident, the truth stands in judgement of the marketplace, not the other way around.

All the evidence tells us that material prosperity, the key to the materialist worldview, is not the roots of a healthy society. Instead, it is one of its flowers. In the West, we have reached material prosperity, but all of the measures of happiness are in decline, with some in rapid decline. The demographic collapse that comes with material superabundance is not a problem to be managed, but a warning that the logical end of materialism is death. We used to know this.

Again, there are signs that this old knowledge is not dead and buried, but simply in hibernation and now starting to spring forth. You see it in the hostility to the libertarian cranks on social media. You see it in the jeering at socialist cranks. Safety first commentators like Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk are now repeating dissident things that used to be disqualifying for them. Perhaps in the end, the last materialist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!