Europe and America are not dying from invasion, plague, or conquest. They are committing slow-motion suicide, encouraged by their own elites. Four self-inflicted doctrines, preached from universities, boardrooms, and bureaucracies, have converged into an apocalyptic perfect storm. Like the biblical riders, they bring pestilence, war, famine, and death, not with swords, but with policy papers, hashtags, and virtue signals. The West built the modern world; now it is dismantling it, plank by plank, in the name of globalist/Leftist utopia.
As Victor Davis Hanson warned in September 2025, these wounds are self-inflicted. And they are now end-stage.
First Horseman: Net-Zero Nihilism
The War on Energy
The green crusade was never about stewardship. It was about control.
Elites demanded instant decarbonisation, shuttering nuclear, coal, natural gas, and oil before alternatives were scalable. Germany, once the industrial heart of Europe, mothballed its last nuclear plants while begging Russia for gas. Electricity prices tripled. Factories fled. The average German now pays more to heat a modest home than an American pays for a luxury SUV.
The U.S. followed suit under Obama and Biden: cancelling pipelines, throttling permits, and subsidising solar farms that produce power 20% of the time. The result? California's blackouts, Texas' grid failures, and a middle class crushed by $5 gasoline (petrol).
This is not environmentalism. It is energy poverty as sacrament, a ritual sacrifice of the working class to appease the climate gods. The poor freeze, the middle class shrinks, and China builds a new coal plant every week. The Horseman rides on.
Second Horseman: Demographic Collapse
The War on the Family
For fifty years, the West declared war on its own future.
Children were recast as carbon footprints, career obstacles, and bourgeois relics. Academia celebrated "childfree" lifestyles. Governments subsidised singlehood while taxing families into oblivion. The message was clear: reproduction is selfish.
The numbers don't lie:
• Europe: 1.4 children per woman
• Italy: 1.2
• U.S.: 1.6
• Replacement rate: 2.1
Societies that fall below 1.6 enter a death spiral, fewer workers, exploding pension costs, shrinking militaries. Japan is the ghost of Christmas future: shuttered schools, robot nurses, entire villages abandoned.
The irony? The same elites who scorn "breeders" import millions of migrants to plug the demographic hole, then act shocked when integration fails. The family was civilisation's firewall. Globalist and their willing helpers, feminists, burned it down.
Third Horseman: Borderless Delusion
The War on Sovereignty
A nation without borders is not a nation, it's a hotel.
For decades, the West treated immigration as a moral fetish, not a policy. Legal systems were dismantled. Merit, diversity, and assimilation were dismissed as "xenophobic." The result:
• 10 million illegal entries in the U.S. since 2021.
• Paris suburbs where police fear to tread.
• Swedish no-go zones with grenade attacks.
Crime surges, welfare systems buckle, and social trust evaporates. The elite response? Double down, label critics "racist," silence debate, and expand benefits for newcomers while citizens wait years for housing.
Immigration works when it's controlled. Rome fell not just to barbarians at the gates, but to barbarians inside the gates, unassimilated, resentful, and subsidised. History rhymes.
Fourth Horseman: Tribal Resentment
The War on the Individual
The Enlightenment's greatest gift was the individual, judged by character, not tribe. DEI buried it.
Under the banner of "equity," Western institutions now sort humans by melanin, chromosomes, and grievance points. Merit is "whiteness." Excellence is "supremacy." The curriculum teaches children to hate their civilisation before they can spell it.
The results are predictable:
• Harvard's legacy admissions for the connected, quotas for the "correct."
• Corporate DEI hires who fail upward.
• Cancel culture as the new Inquisition.
Tribalism begets tribalism. When one group is told they're eternal victims, another is told they're eternal oppressors. The centre cannot hold. The West, which ended slavery while the rest of the world expanded it, now flagellates itself daily, for sins universal to humanity.
The Fifth Horseman: Moral Cowardice
The Refusal to Fight Back
The deadliest rider is not policy — it's silence.
A minority of secular elites imposed these doctrines, convinced their wealth and tenure made them immune. They were wrong. The consequences, blackouts, empty cradles, shattered streets, divided souls, now thump at their gates.
Yet the institutions that should resist, universities, churches, corporations, cower. Professors self-censor. Pastors preach pronouns. CEOs fund their own destruction.
This is not compassion. It is decadence, the belief that freedom is a birthright, not a burden to defend.
The Path Back: A Manifesto in Five Acts
The West is not doomed. It is distracted. Here is the antidote:
1. Reclaim Energy Realism Drill, frack, build nuclear. Embrace all-of-the-above, not as sin, but as sovereignty.We embrace power abundance.
2. Restore the Family Tax credits for children. End the war on parents. Celebrate the two-parent home as the cradle of character and citizenship.
3. Rebuild Borders with Dignity Legal, super-strict merit-based immigration — and no more. Assimilation is not oppression; it's the price of admission to the greatest experiment in human freedom.
4. Revive the Individual End racial quotas. Judge by content of character. Teach children to love their civilisation's flaws and its triumphs, because it is theirs.
5. Speak Without Fear The silent majority must roar. Every citizen, every parent, every worker — say "enough." Mock the pious, vote the crooks out, teach your kids the truth.
The West's Secret Weapon
The four (now five) horsemen were invited by a minority. The majority, quiet, working, rooted, still holds the reins.
We built cathedrals that touch the sky. We split the atom. We landed on the moon. We ended slavery, invented antibiotics, and gave the world Beethoven, Shakespeare, and the iPhone.
Our tradition is not perfect. It is better. And it is worth defending.
The apocalypse is not inevitable. It is a choice.
Choose life. Choose strength. Choose the West.
The Horsemen are not just at the gates of Vienna, but inside and overlording us.