Today I mourn the death of a delusion. The delusion that by putting down my verbal weapons and offering an olive branch, I could co-exist peacefully with the social justice warriors in my midst.

It was a dream hatched in 2013, when, exhausted from six years rancour and confrontation, I thought I should give peace a chance. So I tried a new approach. Rather than engage them with words, I engaged them with smiles. And then they began to smile back, however contrived those smiles may have initially been. I built up relationships one person and at a time, until their numbers reached a critical mass and suddenly the word was out: I wasn’t so bad after all. In other words, the strategy seemed to be paying off. I was making progress. Then it happened.

Without warning or expectation, I found myself in a no-holds-barred shouting match with an evangelical Leftist in the village supermarket, locally famous for his boorish intrusions and unwanted observations. On this occasion, I attempted to quickly brush by him in my urgent journey to the bathroom at the back, but I failed to dodge one of his gratuitous anti-Trump remarks. This time it was about his desire to shoot the President. That was the spark. The lighted match was my quick retort that I would rather shoot him, the pious preacher of progressive depravity. An explosion followed. I left the store shaken, contemplating the potential fall-out as I walked to the car. News of a verbal fracas can travel twice around this island community before my counter-narrative would have a chance to put its boots on. That one incident could undo three years of fence-mending. It’s back to square one folks. So ends my experiment in inter-faith dialogue.

In the days that followed, I tried to make sense of the incident, but it didn’t take me long. I came to realize that it was just one skirmish among millions across a broad front stretching from Europe to North America and Down Under. Battles that are being fought not only in parliaments and on the streets, but within families and between friends. It is a culture war that became an ‘uncivil’ civil war with ominous indications of becoming something much worse.

Welcome to the Last Stand of Western Civilization, everywhere on the brink of breakdown and chaos. Our nations are the venue for the eradication, displacement or absorption of resident Europeans and Euro-North Americans. It is hard to imagine that any vestige of our Western heritage can survive a human tsunami of the frightening proportions that some predict. Think not of millions or even tens of millions, but rather hundreds of millions of migrants and refugees who may descend upon us like locusts to strip our cupboard bare, crushing our already straining welfare state under the weight of their insatiable demands. All with the aid of the rootless cosmopolitan elites and the politicians and media hacks who do their bidding. Think Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail’s nightmare. We are only seeing the first instalment of an ongoing migration of epic scale.

But the demographic shake-up is not simply a matter of mass immigration, but of migration within nations themselves, and within cities as well. What Bill Bishop called “The Big Sort.” What is interesting is that unlike former times, in America at least, more and more internal migrants are motivated to move not for economic considerations, but to seek out communities of people much like themselves. In fact, almost one in three Americans (100 million) have moved from one place to another in the last decade alone. Not only by region, or from Blue State to Red State, or from city to city, but from one neighbourhood in a city to another, all to congregate with like-minded people in homogeneous pockets that are becoming more homogeneous over time. In other words, a nation that progressive politicians proudly proclaim to be diverse is, upon closer inspection, a federation of nations which consist of ideologically inbred clusters of self-segregated believers. To paraphrase Robert Putnam, Americans, among others, prefer to “bowl” not only with people who resemble them, but people who agree with them too. Mobility is not promoting diversity, but quite the reverse. So much for the melting pot and the myth of assimilation.

The question is, why?

Simply put, we are a species of tribes. Even Leftists who spout the cant of “inclusivity” and deracinated “values” are tribalists. Like flies drawn to a lamp in a darkened room, they gravitate to beacons of ‘enlightenment’ where they can cocoon with other moral paragons feeding out of the same trough of progressive news sources. Most amusing are White-flight Californian liberals who flee diversity only to preach it once they are safely established in white-bread towns of the western northern border states or small Canadian havens like mine. They are the first to virtue-signal their strident opposition to racism, which of course, is exclusively a White affliction (choke).

All is good though. Good fences make good neighbours and all of that. The problem is, as pockets of uniformity become more uniform, their inhabitants become more insulated and more fixed in their beliefs. Clustering becomes self-reinforcing. Confirmation bias reigns supreme. These pockets become an echo chamber of narrow opinions, or to use another metaphor, progressives form their views in a hothouse environment, hypersensitive to the cold draft of conflicting opinion. Not yet able to make the whole country a safe-zone by muzzling politically incorrect speech and punishing thought criminals, they have attempted to make their immediate environment safe by not inter-mingling with ‘deplorables.’ That is what made Thanksgiving and Christmas this year so challenging. Suddenly they were sitting face-to-face with people whose opinions shocked and violated their sensibilities to the core. Horror of horrors, the formerly stifled normal views of normal people became normalized at the dinner table. It was not as if ordinary working people had removed their masks. It was that progressives had never bothered to look at their faces — or listen to their words. Until 2016, patriotism was the love that dare not speak its name, especially on college campuses and NPR.

This in-state polarization reflects the polarization in Congress, and vice versa. Over the last two decades, the number of “landslide” states has been increasing dramatically (from 40 to 50%), as has been the vote margins between the incumbent party and the opposition. That’s fine if you are a supporter of the winning side, but between 20 to 40% of Americans are trapped behind enemy lines, and in social situations they can find themselves out-gunned.

That is exactly my predicament too, in this far-left west coast Canadian community of Bernie Sanders clones. As Colin Woodard said in his depiction of America as a balkanized country of 11 nations, “It isn’t that residents of one or another nation all think the same, but they are all embedded within a cultural framework of deep-seated preferences and attitudes — each of which a person may or like or hate, but has to deal with nonetheless.” Obviously, in my case, I am having a tough time “dealing” with it. But I am not alone.

A Monmouth University poll found that 7% of Americans lost or terminated a friendship over the Presidential race, while 40%, according to an ABC poll, confessed that the 2016 race triggered tension with friends and relatives. Some 41% of the more than one in five spouses who voted for a different candidate than their partner reported that they had arguments, often heated, over politics. It is a clear that the rage that voters felt toward candidates was also directed on those who supported them. This vitriol and the tension have impacted family dynamics in an important way.

A veritable industry of professional mediators, psychologists, clergymen and self-help gurus have come forth to offer guidelines and prescriptions to bridge the ideological divide. Some call for civic disengagement. Others for call for establishing ground rules, avoiding political subjects, accentuating the positive, respectful listening, and avoiding the temptation to impose one’s political beliefs on friends. This seems to be a difficult discipline for the self-righteous and self-proclaimed champions of inclusion, equality, peace and justice. Trying to change value-based beliefs is a futile enterprise because our core values and beliefs actually take up physical residence in our brains. It is part of who we are. But that has never discouraged zealots.

This conflict has all the hallmarks of a religious war, which by nature is resistant to compromise or mediation. The call for “unity” seems highly unrealistic when one side — like my nemesis in the supermarket — regards the other as ignorant, racist, homophobic, xenophobic and an enemy of the planet, while the other side regards them as vile traitors, enemies of national sovereignty and Western Civilization itself. As Dennis Prager asked:

How are those of us who oppose left-wing nihilism — there is no other word for an ideology that holds Western civilization and America’s core values in contempt — supposed to unite with “educators” who instruct elementary school teachers to cease calling their students “boys” and “girls” because that implies gender identity? With English departments that don’t require reading Shakespeare in order to receive a degree in English? With those who regard virtually every war America has fought as imperialist and immoral? With those who regard the free market as a form of oppression? With those who want the state to control as much of American life as possible? With those who repeatedly tell America and its Black minority that the greatest problems afflicting Black Americans are caused by White racism, “White privilege” and “systemic racism”? With those who think that the nuclear family ideal is inherently misogynistic and homophobic? With those who hold that Israel is the villain in the Middle East? With those who claim that the term “Islamic terrorist” is an expression of religious bigotry?

And I would add, how am I supposed to unite with those who want to turn my country into a Third World shit hole? Or who want to break the back of the working class through the relentless flow of cheap labour from failed states?

How am I supposed to unite with so-called ‘environmentalists’ who refuse to acknowledge the manifestly negative ecological impact of rampant immigration-driven population growth? Or unite with people who want to destroy both our natural and cultural heritage by reducing our two founding peoples into mere fragments of a multicultural dog’s breakfast?

And above all, how I am supposed to unite with people who want to curb free speech in the name of ethnic and religious harmony? Free speech which was dearly paid for in blood? How am I supposed to unite with ethnic quislings and the morally debased? I will repeat what “Zapollo” said.

If the Left can’t let go of identity politics, then let me be clear. What comes next is on THEM. A lot of us did not want to live in a world of tribes and we never asked for it…(but) if the Left wants tribes, I am siding with my own tribe.

After this latest row I have had with the enemy, I have concluded that peaceful interaction between globalists and patriots is impossible. I shall realign my social network accordingly.

And if the Left wants a shooting war, let me assure you, it will not be the Left who finishes it. The Supermarket Crusader should be careful about what he wishes for.