The West is not dying just from invasion. The West is dying from embarrassment: the exquisite, self-inflicted shame of believing that its own story is no better (and probably worse) than any other. That is the poison called cultural relativism, and it has metastasised from campus seminars to the Pentagon, from the courtroom to the kindergarten classroom. The American Thinker's November 2025 warning is no longer prophecy; it is autopsy.
Cultural relativism, once a harmless anthropological observation ("the Azande think witchcraft explains misfortune, how quaint"), was weaponised into a moral acid: no culture may judge another, and the West (being wealthiest) must be the guiltiest of all. The result is not tolerance; it is civilisational autoimmune disease. The body politic attacks its own bones.
Look where the acid has eaten through.
The military, once the sharpest expression of Western confidence, now measures its combat power in pronouns and pregnancy flight suits. West Point cadets are taught that "whiteness" is a pathology and that the Constitution is rooted in white supremacy. Recruitment craters (the Army missed its goal by 25% in 2023, the Navy by 30%) while China builds hypersonic missiles and the Houthis sink container ships with 1970s technology. A fighting force that doubts its own right to exist cannot win wars; it can only apologise for them.
Universities, the former citadels of reason, have become re-education camps where truth is subordinate to "lived experience." Maths is racist because it demands correct answers. Shakespeare is problematic because he is a dead white male. Safe spaces and trigger warnings protect students from the terrifying possibility that Western civilisation produced anything worth defending. The result: a generation that can spell "microaggression" but not "Magna Carta," that can dismantle a statue of Jefferson, but not the logic of the Declaration he wrote.
The justice system now operates on the assumption that equal treatment is itself inequitable. Prosecutors in deep-blue cities refuse to enforce laws against theft, vandalism, or even violent assault if the perpetrator belongs to a "marginalised" group. Shoplifting under $950 is effectively legal in California; the predictable result is the slow-motion collapse of urban commerce. Target closes stores in San Francisco, Walgreens in Chicago, Whole Foods in downtown L.A. — not because of poverty, but because the rule of law has been declared culturally insensitive.
Museums strip the walls of Greek statues and Egyptian mummies lest they "centre whiteness" or cause "harm." The British Museum debates repatriating the Elgin Marbles, not because Greece has a better claim, but because keeping them is an act of colonial violence. Never mind that the Parthenon itself was used as a gunpowder magazine by the Ottomans; the only sin that matters is the West's.
Even language, the final fortress, falls. We are instructed to say "pregnant people" instead of "mothers," "bodies with vaginas" instead of "women," "chest-feeding" instead of "breast-feeding." Reality itself is colonised in the name of inclusivity. When words no longer map to observable fact, tyranny follows; the Soviets and Maoists understood this perfectly.
The mechanism is always the same: declare Western standards (objectivity, merit, individual rights, rule of law, delayed gratification, monogamy, free speech) to be mere cultural artifacts, no more valid than cannibalism or suttee. Then watch as those standards are abandoned in the name of "equity" or "anti-racism." The civilisation that produced penicillin, the moon landing, and the abolition of slavery voluntarily disarms itself because it has been taught that self-confidence is the original sin.
History offers no example of a society that survived this level of self-loathing. Rome did not fall to the barbarians at the gates; she fell when she could no longer be bothered to keep the gates closed. The Byzantines spent their final centuries arguing about the sex of angels while Mehmet's cannons battered the Theodosian walls. We argue about pronouns while the Chinese Communist Party builds naval bases in the South China Sea and Iran enriches uranium.
There is only one antidote: the unapologetic reassertion that some cultures are simply better than others at producing human flourishing.
The idea that individuals have inherent rights, that truth is discovered through reason and evidence, that power must be checked, that innovation is good, that promises should be kept, these are not just "white" values; they are Western values, and they have lifted billions out of misery when exported and sustained.
Cultural confidence is not arrogance; it is the precondition of survival. A society that cannot say "our way of life is worth defending" will not defend it. It will open the gates, lower the drawbridge, and politely ask the invaders to wipe their feet on the welcome mat that reads "No Culture is Superior."
The West still has time (barely). But time is not on the side of a civilisation that teaches its children to hate themselves. The hour is late. Choose: proud inheritance or polite oblivion. There is no third option.