With so much emphasis on the profound insights of local transgender activist Max du Preez (“bigot”) toward the end of last week, you may have missed something that happened in Paris on Saturday night: Notre Dame reopened.

This wouldn’t have been to du Preez’s taste – too many white men you see, and not enough London English, blue-haired, power hirsute, pro-Palestine ethical bitches bossing the proceedings, or even ushering folk to their chairs.

But it did appeal to many tastes, and to these and their extensions the return of this magnificent cathedral, restored using traditional, rare stonemasonry and carpentry at a cost of around $900m suggested that, finally, Western civilisation was back. 

You hear that a lot lately. “Back” presupposes that Western civilisation was on holiday, or convalescing from some dreadful infirmity, but unfortunately, it is gone, extirpated, murdered by the people who were charged with its safeguarding – some of whom were Emmanuel Macron’s guests for the event. With the exception of the US President-elect, the Saturday gathering included notorious EU climate scammers, lockdown trots, and the forever war faithful: to the best of my knowledge, none of those activities are included on Notre Dame’s famed Rose Windows.

These foolish claims only had a few days to delude before two immediately isolated, but upon closer inspection inexorably linked, events evidenced that. 

Murder

The first involved the murder of a US healthcare executive. Brian Thompson was attending a conference in New York when an assassin casually walked up behind him and started firing. Thompson died in hospital and America’s most urgent manhunt in recent memory was launched.

But people following the case’s announcements started noticing something else: in unfolding corners of the internet, there appeared to be unbridled joy at the executive’s murder. 

Soon that joy had a face – that belonging to one of America’s worst writers, Taylor Lorenz, whose commitment to quasi Joker-ism as an acceptable form of government was well documented before this occasion. She was thrilled at the relatively young man’s death and was determined to substantiate it by claiming that “his industry killed hundreds and thousands of Americans every year by affording them access to healthcare”.

Fears that the killer would be this generation’s DB Cooper were struck down on Monday when suspect Luigi Mangione – a young American of Italian lineage – was arrested in Pennsylvania on Monday. 

The second incident involved a young woman from the United Kingdom called Lily Phillips. After some apparent consideration, Ms. Phillips, ordinarily a webcam performer, decided to attempt the world record of having sex with 100 men in one day. When she had done what she did, she became – for some inexplicable reason – sad, and complained that all she’d had to eat during the attempt was a Yam Yam and a sandwich.

This deprivation troubled her more than the possibility she might have caught the clap or worse (during an interview after the performance, she asked: “Is that how you get Aids?”).

Impossibly daft

It’s easy to be enthused or disgusted by Lorenz’s commentary. She’s impossibly daft, and very much aligned – most of the time unwittingly – to destructive societal changes which have denied young male Americans like Mangione much more than just necessary healthcare authorisation codes. The West has deliberately weakened these people.

Their own cultures have betrayed them, thrown them to the wolves by projecting them as potential college frat rapists, smeared them as boasting racial privilege and therefore they must live in perpetual surrender and atonement. Simultaneously, it has transferred heightened recognition onto people like Ms. Philips, who is feted for her expression of sexual congress. Such imbalance is proof enough that Western civilisation no longer exists, and its impostor is some kind of a socially engineered grievance algorithm with a Zendesk. 

Young men in Mangione’s profile can’t find jobs in the US or in the UK. They can’t get on the property ladder. They are the last in line for subsidy, but the first in the event there’s a restructuring, or mass culling of personnel. At university their heads are filled with expensive rubbish – like how good Obamacare is – and they spend much of their adulthood trying to pay off student loans while learning to accommodate the 75% spike in health costs the supposedly brilliant Obamacare welcomed in.

Unless they agree to believe in the worst they’re told about themselves, their prospects are limited to them excelling at things like addition. So, if one were to caution the correct response, it would probably be that if cheering death is awful, then feigning surprise is wildly dumb. 

Notre Dame

The re-opening of Notre Dame occurred in the same city that only months ago featured a wretched, mechanical pale horse galloping on its river, and a gluttonous if transgender-visible interpretation of the Last Supper – why the organisers didn’t just go full Mandingo and get Ms. Lily Phillips from the United Kingdom to perform an act featuring the South Sudan weightlifting team on the grounds of Versailles, I cannot tell you.

Perhaps they thought it would be too vanilla, perhaps they’d like a few more years for their countrymen to digest what happened in 2020, when the teacher Samuel Paty was decapitated by an extremist, and what it really meant.

Then, all this supposed paragon of Western civilisation could say was “ne regarde pas en arrière avec colère”, or “don’t look back in anger” − a response they aped from their cuckolded fellow travellers, the UK. Whatever was is no longer. 

[Image: edmondlafoto from Pixabay]

The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.

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Simon Reader grew up in Cape Town before moving to Johannesburg in 2001, where he was an energy entrepreneur until 2014. In South Africa, he wrote a weekly column for Business Day, then later Biznews.com. Today he manages a fund based in London, is a trustee of an educational charity, and lives between the UK and California.