The whole world turns on its head.

With the rise of Donald Trump, the media and academia are out of sync with a huge portion of society, that section being conservatives, dissidents, rebels, and jokesters. Crazy to put the terms “rebel” and “conservative” in the same category, but the establishment media and academia are almost uniformly liberal, in the modern political meaning. This strange fulcrum in time where we find ourselves is where rebel meets conservative and the whole world turns on its head.

“What’s happening to this country has happened before, in other nations, in other anxious, violent times when all the old certainties peeled away and maniacs took the wheel. It’s what happens when weaponized insincerity is applied to structured ignorance. Donald Trump is the Gordon Gekko of the attention economy, but even he is no longer in control. This culture war is being run in bad faith by bad actors who are running way off-script, and it’s barely begun, and there are going to be a lot of refugees.”

Feminist Laurie Penny penned these beautifully poignant lines about the rise of the current culture wars we find ourselves embroiled in. A culture war that a good portion of our country does not know about, few saw coming, and fewer understand. Written by Penny after going to the “Gays for Trump” party hosted by Milo Yiannopolous, the flamboyant provocateur who recently made international news for being permanently banned from Twitter, the article captures the moment, without the having the depth and history to understand its origins. In other words, like everyone trying to stop the Trump, they mistake the symptoms for the disease.

The purpose of this article is solely to explain how this last paragraph of Penny's works is so incredibly poignant and accurate, while still being laughingly false. This is symbolic of much of our current media, literature, and art, beautifully poignant with the guise of truth, while covering a multitude of lies.

Regardless of how you feel about Trump's policy (or as some would say, lack of policy), one has to admit his rise is unique and significant. A year ago when he announced his candidacy everyone laughed and said that it would all be over within a month or two. CNN gave him a 1% chance of winning the nomination. (http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/09/politics/donald-trump-data-pivit-2016-election/) Almost everyone. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, accurately predicted Trump's huge success in the primary, and continues to predict a landslide victory for Trump in the general election. Time will tell if his second prediction is accurate.

Trump is not a unique phenomenon. Milo Yiannapolous has risen to fame saying things which were taboo to say in media for years and largely continue to be. There are whole worlds on the internet saying things that for decades people have not been allowed to say in the media.

In Europe, Nigel Farage successfully led a campaign to leave the EU, and many European countries are seeing the rise of supposed “far-right” parties which were considered unimaginable a few years ago.

Nationalism is rising and as Penny says, 'old certainties' are falling away. Everything we have grown to be sure of is on the line. Will Europe have war? Almost definitely. Will the EU break up? Almost Definitely. Is there going to be mass rioting with possibly hundreds of deaths and chaos in the US? Almost definitely. This is our future. We thought world wars were over, or at the least wars in the western world. Well, I am sorry, but they are not, suit up boys, because it is war in our time. Crazy as it sounds the West is unfolding before our eyes.

“Donald Trump... is no longer in control,” Penny says, but actually it is even more than that. Donald Trump never was in control, he just capitalized on the moment and possibly read the atmosphere better than others. This is the fundamental problem with much of our political rhetoric, we don't recognize that for the most part, politicians are the symptom, and not the disease. People will attack Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, or whoever it be, which I completely understand, but fundamentally it is attacking the wind chime for moving in the wind.

In general we give politicians too much credit. Hillary Clinton is not only not making waves, she is incapable of making them. Look at her rhetoric, it has nothing to do with her actions and is merely a response to what she (and more likely her team) think will get her votes. Bernie was trending socialist and getting waves of support, Hillary followed suit. She just wrote how much she loves Mormons in a Mormon-owned newspaper in Utah, despite having values completely inconsistent with Mormons. She is panderer in chief. She does not make waves, she rides them. As Andrew Breitbart said, “Politics is downstream from culture.”

Over the next several months people will be bombarded with hundreds or thousands of articles on why to not elect Donald Trump as the next president. They will call him a racist, a misogynist, a bigot, and every other name under the sun, but it will not work. It won't work, for multiple reasons. One is because people are tired hearing “racist” and “bigot” as opposed to actual arguments. But even more it won't work because the time to stop Donald Trump is not now, is not next month and was not last month. The time to stop Donald Trump was 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 years ago. The dominoes have all been set up, and no one will be able to stop them from falling down. People always look at the crash, but to understand the crash you cannot look at the crash, you must look at what led up to it. The sad part is that those who will yell loudest to stop the Trump train, are the very ones who have laid the rails.

Both in Europe and in America the nationalist/conservative train will come with a fury that has not been seen in years and it is as predictable as the rise of the sun.

“What is happening in our country has happened before in many countries...” We have seen this story of nationalism before, just before WWI and WWII. As the cliché goes, 'those who fail to learn from history are bound to repeat it.' But those who will say this are often the ones missing the point of that statement.

Throughout history, cycles come and go, there is an inherent, natural and even biological rift between the liberal and the conservative, the r and the K, the feminine and the masculine.

But let's make this more concrete. The current cycle began in World War II when the West bottomed out so to speak. After World War II, the western world had relatively free trade, free markets, minimal/no welfare states. In this state, economies across the west boomed. In the United States poverty was decreasing at 1% year after year. Europe went from war-torn and destroyed to a thriving economic zone. Libertarians and conservatives warned that we needed to keep regulation low and keep the welfare state to a minimum. However, westerners who were getting rich ignored these warnings. This is exemplified in the election of Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater. Americans had a clear choice between free-markets or socialism, and chose the latter. LBJ initiated the “Great Society” and the “War on Poverty.” Poverty, which had been decreasing at 1% a year for several years, halted and remained stagnate. The economic progress that was being made on all fronts and for all races since the 40's ceased.

Throughout the West welfare states rose, economic growth slowed, and with the rise of welfare, immigrants poured into the west. Since this time we have been an ever-rising escalator of welfare, regulation, and immigration. Coupled with these issues, the growth of the foreign warfare state happened simultaneously, leading the West to get involved in an ever increasing number of foreign conflicts, and draining millions of dollars on building weapons. One regulation begets another, and every new welfare program creates the demand for more. There were times when the growth of the welfare state slowed, or even reversed, but generally it was accompanied by the growth of the warfare state. In general, the growth of State power has been a near constant since WWII.

The lack of sustainability of these policies is now becoming apparent. Governments are stacked in debt beyond what could ever be repaid. Multiple economies in the West are on the verge of collapse, and we have not even hit the major problems yet. In Europe, where continuous war in neighboring countries in the middle-east and north Africa have made the countries almost uninhabitable, massive welfare states in the west, and a general liberalism and atheism that makes Europe completely unable to stand up for any values, because it is void of them. Europe is being engulfed in immigration. As terrorism rises in the Europe, and Europeans see crime rates explode, and their way of life drastically change, they are grasping. They are seeing their countries crumble before their eyes.

This situation did not need to be. If the West had listened, kept welfare states small or non-existent and had kept out of foreign interventions, the West could have kept a steady economic growth and kept immigration at natural levels without massive cost of enforcement. But we did not listen, and now the realities are going to come home to roost. We are already seeing the beginning. Race riots across the U.S. Terrorist attacks in Europe nearly daily. Sweden, formerly one of the most peaceful countries in the world, becoming the rape capital of Europe. The world is changing fast, and we may have already gone too far. People will scream and yell at those calling for drastic changes. But for those lashing out at the growth of these “far-right” parties, remember they are simply the symptoms, the symptoms of the disease you planted.

The desire to remain in the liberal part of the cycle is equivalent to the desire to remain in the 'getting drunk' stage of getting drunk. It would be nice to slowly get slightly more drunk forever and never actually get drunk (or at least I assume that is how the experience goes, I am a teetotaler myself). Unfortunately eventually the crash comes, the drinker passes out and throws up, and in the morning s/he wakes up with a hangover and no friends.

This is what has happened in the west, we have spent and borrowed willy-nilly, thought we could 'be friends to everyone' by having open borders, having a giant welfare state while simultaneously engaging in multiple conflicts overseas. But that can't last, and eventually the result comes in and it comes in the form of Donald Trump, it comes in the form of UKIP, the Dutch Party for Freedom, National Front, and others. But to attack the rise of Trump and Le Pen is like yelling at the hangover for being a hangover, when the blame really needs to be placed on the drinkers.