Happy 2025. The year when things come to a head.

January 4, 2025

By Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Things seem to be coming to a head. With the New Orleans terrorist attack – which is what it was, it wasn’t a truck gone bad on its own – the Las Vegas bombing, and the explosion of the British rape-gang schedule (I don’t know why they persist in calling it “grooming” except as a euphemism; I even asked Grok if it had a different British meaning and the answer was no) it looks darker now.

You can feel bad about it. Last week there was a tremendous feeling of hope. Now we see what looks much like war.

But in fact it’s a good sign. Things are coming to a head. The masks are off, and the paralysis has gone away.

Over 20 years ago, Richard Fernandez compared the European Left to the ichneumon wasp:

Among ectoparasites, however, many females lay their eggs directly upon the host’s body. Since an active host would easily dislodge the egg, the ichneumon mother often simultaneously injects a toxin that paralyzes the caterpillar or other victim. The paralyzes may be permanent, and the caterpillar lies, alive but immobile, with the agent of its future destruction secure on its belly. The egg hatches, the helpless caterpillar twitches, the wasp larvae pierces and begins its grisly feast.

Since a dead and decaying caterpillar will do the wasp larvae no good, it eats in a pattern that cannot help but recall, in our inappropriate anthropocentric interpretation, the ancient English penalty for treason — drawing and quartering, with its explicit object of extracting as much torment as possible by keeping the victim alive and sentient. As the king’s executioner drew out and burned his client’s entrails, so does the ichneumon larvae eat fat bodies and digestive organs first, keeping the caterpillar alive by preserving intact the essential heart and central nervous system. Finally, the larvae completes its work and kills its victim, leaving behind the caterpillar’s empty shell. Is it any wonder that ichneumons, not snakes or lions, stood as the paramount challenge to God’s benevolence during the heyday of natural theology?

This is a fair description of the left’s approach, and not just the European left. The host society is paralyzed with speech controls and various rules that are disguised as compassion. After a while that’s clearly not true, because compassion isn’t enforced with violence and defenestration, but by then the costs of criticism are higher than most people are willing to bear. Some people do bear them, of course, but it’s hard for their criticisms to catch on when most other people are intimidated.

Thus you could criticize unlimited immigration in the United States or Europe, but at the risk (by which I mean the certainty) of being called “racist” and “far-right,” which came with high costs. You could talk about the rape gangs, but the same thing would happen. (Tommy Robinson was imprisoned for “inciting racial hatred” simply for making a truthful documentary.) If you quietly raised concerns within the government, you were told that public discussion of such matters would inflame racial divisions, by which they meant that the normals would find out what was being done to them and might respond in an entirely legitimate way.

Well, the boil – or maybe it’s a bubo – has been lanced, and now all the noxious pus is pouring out.

And the sharp object that did the lancing was Elon Musk. He’s done that two ways. First by buying Twitter and turning it into a global free speech platform. And second, and most effectively, by going out in public and stating obvious truths.

After years of the AfD party being called “far right” and “Nazis,” Musk wrote a column for Die Welt pointing out that its platform was actually quite moderate, the sort of thing most any German or Westerner would have supported two or three decades ago.

He made the obvious point that the British government was covering up the rape of tens of thousands of its girls – 250,000 over twenty years, at an estimate – because officials were afraid of being called racist, and even more damning, because Labour didn’t want to lose Muslim votes.

And he said it again and again and again and he wasn’t intimidated, because he’s the richest man in the world, he knows he’s right, and his life story isn’t one that lends itself to being intimidated. Now people are acting. As always in a preference cascade, once some important figures start saying the things you’re not supposed to say, others join in.

For the past decade or more, Western governments seem to have been mobilizing for war against their own populations, clamping down more controls on speech, increasing domestic spying, pushing all sorts of surveillance and gun-control (and in Britain, knife-control) initiatives, and promoting ever-more uniformity in major media. And, of course, all the controls associated with Covid, which met with more resistance, ultimately, than they expected. But why?

I think the answer is that they were afraid of what the normal would do when they found out what had been done to them. Now the normal are finding out, and what comes next may not be pretty, but maybe it shouldn’t be. So the ride may be bumpy, but that’s not a reason not to be hopeful. The path to destruction among those colonized by the ichneumon wasp is smooth. Bumps are good.

And there should be consequences for those in the political class who have let things come to this pass, and those consequences should be severe enough that future generations of rulers will be afraid to treat the ruled similarly.