This Monday was the one-year anniversary of the October 7 massacre, an event which will rightly live in infamy. This is not simply because it remains the most vicious assault on Jews since the Holocaust, but rather because – sadly – it amounts to merely the prologue to a year in which all the old monsters of history have bared their fangs. Terrifying though this has admittedly been, it has also been clarifying; we now know which party is serious about putting out the fires that threaten to engulf our world, and which is too consumed with its solipsistic admiration of its own self-proclaimed virtue.

Let’s begin with the Middle East: last week, Iran fired over a hundred rockets at Tel Aviv. It was their first direct action in some time, despite a year of continually funding Israel’s enemies across the globe, from Hezbollah to Hamas. As of now, the world is waiting with baited breath to see how Israel will respond, a question over which the United States seems to have no influence whatsoever. Biden’s White House, run as it is by a functional corpse and a vice president who is too busy either not answering actual questions, or appearing on podcasts devoted to describing novel blowjob techniques, to actually do her job.

What is truly remarkable is that this comes after a year of persistent attempts by the US to foist a pro-Hamas “ceasefire” on Israel, none of which have borne fruit because the radical Islamic terrorists keep provoking the Jewish state and then dying for their trouble when Israel inevitably strikes back ten times as hard. As a result, the US is irrelevant in the region, which may explain why Iran supports Vice President Harris – and seeks the assassination of President Trump. President Trump would make America not only relevant, but a decided support of Israel’s fast rising status as a major regional power; the kind that can really inspire alliances against Iranian aggression.

Yet, if America’s government appears irrelevant in the Third World, that sadly may be because, at home, it looks like a government that belongs there. As evidence, you need only look at the shocking aftermath of Hurricane Helene. For example, as we speak, Americans are being forced to bury those killed by the Hurricane in their backyards because morgues are too full. Yes, you read that right. In America, people are being forced to bury their dead in their backyards because our own public infrastructure is too overwhelmed to handle it. This, despite the fact that FEMA is supposed to be flush with cash…oh wait, no, it isn’t. It spent it all -- $641 million of it, to be exact -- on illegal immigrants. Who have no claim on America’s resources. Who should not, in fact, even be here.

And why? Because, in FEMA’s most recent strategic plan, it describes its number one goal as “instill[ing] equity as a foundation of emergency management.” Equity. Of course. It would be “equity” that gives us Biden’s Katrina, only this time instead of Kanye West saying “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” one feels almost forced to conclude that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris definitely don’t care about white Southerners. But even if that is true, something as simple as the response to a natural disaster isn’t just about whether you like the people suffering; it’s a simple matter of credibility. A party that cannot handle a simple hurricane definitely cannot withstand the headwinds of global terror, war, and rising enemy superpowers. You’d think even the most devotedly antiwhite Democrat – say, Joy Reid – would recognize that their entire project depends on the government at least looking powerful enough that it won’t be conquered or rebelled against.

But you would be wrong. Which raises an awfully uncomfortable question: How can any political party manage this kind of spiral into global impotence, not to mention national decline? The answer, sadly, is obvious: because today’s Democrats are consumed with what the writer Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs.” That is to say, beliefs that “confer status on the upper class, at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower class.” Henderson gives the opinion that “monogamy is kind of outdated” as an example of this, but he might just as well have cited the entire pro-Hamas, pro-“equity” Leftist catechism which has consumed much of the Democrats’ youth voter base, not to mention the engines of circular logic (and circularly defined “expertise”) known as universities. Small wonder that such a massive class divide – nay, class chasm – defines the constituencies for the respective candidates this November.

But let’s be clear: as “luxuries” go, “luxury beliefs” might be the most useless, ugly status symbols since the $204,000 Tourbillon Pokemon watch, and that's not even touching on the obvious point that they're a cheap substitute for religion among our increasingly secular elite, who have suddenly found that their self-appointed moral superiority is harder to maintain in the absence of any actual moral consensus. Unfortunately, the slapdash "morality" they've concocted in place of faith is so blindingly irrational that it makes one pine even for the crudest forms of mysticism. For example, the idea that a Jewish state fighting for its life in the middle of one of the most inhospitable, violently antisemitic regions in the world should simply throw down its arms and sing “Kumbaya,” possibly after packing its mean nationalist leader off to the Hague, is the kind of thing that would get a lot of sage nods at cocktails parties populated by pathologically altruistic upper-class twits. It also is the kind of thing that would lead to the end of the Jewish state.

The idea that illegal immigrants should get money from FEMA when disaster hits them because white people have been “centered” for too long is the kind of low-grade sociopathy that might pass for profound after a few martinis at a Race to Dinner session (not to mention the functional lobotomy required to attend such a thing in the first place), but it results in hundreds dead, overflowing morgues, and the Hobbesian state of nature the instant it makes contact with an actual natural disaster.

The reason “luxury beliefs” are “luxury beliefs,” in short, is that they don’t work, can’t work, and are only adopted because one has enough money and status lying around not to need to believe things that are true or even functional anymore. Unfortunately for those who hold these views, however, when it comes to actually governing, insanity is still insane even when its delusions are designer.

Those delusions have, like your average Bugatti after its first trip to a mechanic, only become more and more senselessly expensive with time while depreciating into tacky eyesores. Which is why, as with most new money that buys the trappings of trendiness without sparing a thought for its actual use, America has been forced to learn a hard lesson: the really valuable stuff is valuable because it lasts, particularly in the realm of ideas.

That’s why, this November, Donald Trump has a real shot at winning; because he is running on ideas that have been around since before the first DEI “expert” had their brain cells strangled by their own umbilical cord: that greatness means wealth and power for a nation, that he who desires peace must prepare for war, and that a nation which does not look after its own people first and takes no care to shut out any who would harm them is no nation at all. Those ideas have stood for centuries, and will go on standing. They are the only foundation on which an American revival can be built. And there is only one candidate who understands them.