The essence of this entire post is contained in the title. Not much more can really be said. The only real future for America, and the world, one that we can be proud to bequeath to our children and grandchildren is simply this: liberty within the fortress. The world has nothing to offer us. We’re witnessing a civilizational quicksand pull the West below the surface. We can’t help them. Not by bringing them here, not by sending money, and not by sending troops. The world will help itself when it sees an America that regains her sense of self worth. The world comes begging, and we must decline help. We must help ourselves, give our own the jobs, give our own the hope, protect and preserve the liberty of our own. The greater America becomes, the more the world will demand entry. Hence the fortress. Make our own whole by defending their nation at a muscular and imposing fortress-border. We are unique in history, something new under the sun. How have we forgotten it so easily? Why have we allowed the systematic and careless plunder of such a priceless achievement as America? This civilizational equivalent of a red emerald, we leave the doors unlocked, and let anyone and their friends enter and toss her around. No more. Liberty within the fortress is the only possible future if we desire to survive and thrive. We are the inheritors of something precious, we should begin acting like it.

I had to laugh when I saw the new photos of the Notre Dame renovation, a long time coming ever since the 2019 fire that almost claimed the immortal gothic relic of a more energetic, imaginative, and transcendent age. LED chandeliers have been installed, obliterating the gloomy majesty of the cathedral in one blasphemous act of wiring.

What we had was an arcane, otherworldly, nebulous reliquary, and what we got was a dentist’s lobby, a mall, a McDonald’s interior. The sterility and unimaginative boorishness of our troglodyte age has now infected one of the West’s most sacred cultural heirloom, a mystical pyramid once inhabited by God, but now fit for nothing more spiritual than the scanning of QR codes under the hideous strobe of dead light.

I suppose it could have been worse. The cathedral could have transformed into something far worse, and we should be grateful that it wasn’t. The structure remains more or less the same, but the soul has been removed. This is no longer a sanctum for the dwindling numbers of pilgrims seeking something more than a smartphone-saturated reality.

It’s been the common assumption that the fire was an act of arson, committed by one of the many newcomers to Paris, who, in a fit of animal hatred, attempted to destroy a foundational Western megalith, just as so many other Christian churches have been set on fire throughout Europe. Where this animal failed, our own percolating neo-primitive culture seems to have succeeded, albeit partially.