Dear elite apocalyptic teeth-gnashers: The end of the world is just a matter of where you stand

We seem to be staggering towards the abyss. As in a Roger Corman horror movie, ghostly voices can be heard prophesying that the end is near: we must tumble in. The signs of doom are everywhere, but since punishment for our sins is the point of the exercise, we’ll have to take our medicine and endure a whole lot of tribulations before the final fall.

Donald Trump is the beast of this particular apocalypse. His evil number isn’t 666 but 270 in the Electoral College. Although he’s been virtually tied with President Biden in the opinion polls, those who hate him most feel certain he will regain the presidency in 2024 – if only because those ungrateful humans, the voters, deserve to get stuck with him.

Trump is a destroyer of worlds. He will destroy democracy for sure. How? We are told he will unleash FBI on his political enemies and prosecute them as common criminals. That, we must admit, is almost completely unheard of.

Donald Trump’s critics claim that he’s a threat to democracy. AFP via Getty Images

Trump is a dictator who aims to smash the constitutional government of the United States. Immediately after, he’ll move the White House to the Mar-a-Lago golf course and appoint bearded reality TV characters to the cabinet.

But what, one may ask, is his subversive plan? We are told that he will fire 25,000 federal bureaucrats and bend the rest to his presidential will. And that would be completely unheard of.

It might occur to some that the man was president for four years and none of these horrors happened. In fact, except for the shouting and gnashing of teeth, the impeachments and the pandemic, it was a fairly peaceful time.

But that was Trump playing the dictator’s apprentice. We are told that this time he really means it, because this time he knows what he’s doing – there will be no escape from his clutches. He will deport everyone whose name ends in a vowel.

He will force little school kids to eat fossil fuels. He may even cut taxes again…

The sense that we are approaching the end of days extends beyond the egregious Trump.

Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures during a campaign event in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., June 22, 2024. REUTERS

In Europe, the “far right” is advancing. Populism is on the rise. The old political parties we knew and loved – the Tories, the Gaullists, the Social Democrats – have disintegrated. How can democracy survive?

Evidently, it can’t. Hitler and Mussolini, we are told, are rising from their graves. Their names and aspects have changed most strangely, however, as the old totalitarians have reincarnated in a rather tame and uncharismatic crowd: Britain’s Nigel Farage, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and France’s Marine Le Pen, among many others.

Still, they are far right, says the media over and again. Extreme works too – just like the people who built the concentration camps. See how that works?

Of course, as always, there are doubters. Can a Brit called “Nigel Farage” even give a proper Hitler salute? Will Meloni really invade Ethiopia and Greece to honor Mussolini’s memory? And Le Pen – let’s face it, isn’t she a bit too stodgy and bourgeois to start a coup?

Never mind that. Those questions reveal your inner Nazi. To all right-thinking persons, the populists are way too popular, the right has become way too far and extreme, and the end of European civilization must be all too near.

In any case, it won’t be politics that bring about the end of the world. Instead, we’ll be killed off by the weather – or as we now prefer to call it, the climate. The thing about the climate, we are told, is that it changes, something that, apparently, it never did before.

In the good old days, clouds stood frozen in the sky and it was always a balmy noontime. Then industrial capitalism intervened, spewing particles everywhere for no good reason and turning the green unchanging earth into a hellish hothouse.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg, a woman with long hair wearing a scarf. REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw

Nature’s revenge will be biblical. Stupendous events will assail the human race. Miami Beach condos will lose their beachfront. Siberia will lead the world in resort hotels. Sun blocker manufacturers will surpass Amazon in capitalization.

Change has come to the climate, and nothing will be as it once was.

The science of climate change, we are told, is settled, in a loose and flexible way.

Greta Thunberg, for example, told us that we had exactly five years to fix the climate if we wished to survive – but she said that six years ago, and here we are. Glacier National Park put up warnings that the glaciers would disappear by 2020 – then quietly took the signs down in January of that year, because the damned things were still there.

Without a doubt, these delays caused much disappointment, since as consumers of industrial products we all deserve a holocaust. But never mind that. If we can celebrate moveable feasts, we can suffer a moveable Doomsday. Given enough time, all things will pass away.

Former President Donald Trump speaking at a campaign rally in Chesapeake, Virginia, on June 28, 2024. AP

Other modes of annihilation are less popular in the literature but still plausible. Artificial intelligence could take over the machines so we’ll be slashed to bits by our blenders while making a mango milkshake. We’ve seen that movie – too many sequels and they all end badly.

Alternately, the youngest generation, the Zoomers, may simply stop reproducing – it wouldn’t take much of a change – and we’ll fall off a demographic cliff. Try to imagine the desolation: one morning you wake up to learn that everyone else forgot to be born.

We could also go out the old-fashioned way, from nuclear devastation. Russia will nuke Ukraine, China will nuke Taiwan, and we will nuke somebody because we don’t like being left out.

Or these catastrophes can come together into one terrific Terminator/zero population/glow-in-the-dark apocalypse – plus Trump!

Facing extinction causes no end of stress, and most of us are still in the denial stage of the process. Who will save us from certain doom?

A lonely nation turns its eyes to the White House, where the buck stops and the leader of the free world resides – only to remember, with growing panic, that we’re talking about President Biden here.

Hope shrivels as we watch videos of the president inexplicably head-butting the Pope, contracting rigor mortis during a boisterous musical celebration, wandering off to nowhere at a meeting of heads of state. We are told by White House staff that these episodes are “cheap fakes”: a fitting epitaph for the Biden presidency.

Maybe the federal government, with its thousands of self-evidently superior experts and mastery over technology, can step in to save the day – yes? But no. The federal government was allocated $7.5 billion to build new charging stations for electric vehicles – in three years, it has managed to build eight. It was given $42 billion to deploy high-speed connectivity in rural areas – and after three years, not a single additional farmer can access Joe Rogan online.

Conspiratorial minds might suspect that Biden and the federal government, for perverse reasons of their own, are actually promoting the advent of Doomsday – that they don’t really mind doing away with the entire deplorable population of this country, so long as men are allowed to wear sexy dresses at the end.

That’s only partly true.

“A lonely nation turns its eyes to the White House, where the buck stops and the leader of the free world resides – only to remember, with growing panic, that we’re talking about President Biden here,” Gurri said. AFP via Getty Images

Given the hysteria surrounding the subject, it’s probably a good idea to take a deep breath and count to ten. Is the US in the grip of a psychotic episode? No question. The output of our finest minds adds up to an incomprehensible babbling. Is the human race, at the moment, stuck in multiple simultaneous messes? It sure feels that way.

But before we ratchet things up to a Doomsday scenario, let’s ask: Whose world is it, exactly, that’s about to be demolished?

It certainly isn’t the one I grew up in. In the last few years, a sect of political mystics, with dotty Joe Biden as their nominal head, have tried to erect a New Jerusalem out of climate fundamentalism, racial stereotypes, sexual weirdness, monkish poverty (“degrowth”), censorship of the truth (“malinformation”), wooing fentanyl start-ups from Honduras, feeding children to butchers, and making it a capital crime to be Trump.

To succeed, they had to try to abolish society as it actually exists. Hence the recurrent pain normal people today feel in their hind parts.

But behold: the normies are making trouble. The New Jerusalem, it turns out, resembles a Hollywood set: all front and no depth. And piece by piece, it’s being torn down.

The last scraps still standing have collapsed in a heap following Biden’s thudding flop at the presidential debate, in which he alternately froze, gargled, and lapsed into fluent Esperanto in front of a bewildered audience of 100 million.

The debate was the president’s Captain Kirk moment: when you lose the New York Times, you are going where no Democratic candidate has gone before.

Everyone now senses that the show is over. The participants, who thought it would go on forever, can be heard shrieking in their costumes and greasepaint – and because they own all the big amplifiers, it’s an apocalyptic noise.

But it’s less Doomsday and more like pulling down the big tent on the last day of the circus.

An old joke tells of a scientist who, after analyzing his data, confidently predicted that the world would end on the following Wednesday. And for him, it did – he was run over by a car.

A similar situation has played out with those eager to transform American society: they’ve confused the big picture with the fate of their pet project.

Sometimes, the end of the world is just a matter of where you stand.