SLR: The West collapses, and China watches with a smile

Key topics:Epstein files expose elite corruption and hidden hedonism in Western society.UK and global Anglosphere fail to act, highlighting systemic moral collapse.Outsiders, like China, observe Western self-destruction with calculated amusement..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Simon Lincoln Reader*.One of the best social media accounts to follow belongs to a South African commercial diver named Rene Nel. Rene doesn’t do politics, but spearfishes, mostly off beautiful Hangklip in the Western Cape – when he isn’t off the coast of Angola, or in any of the Mamara, Caspian or Black Seas.He also hunts, posting photos regularly with an amusing blend of English and Afrikaans. Sometimes he doesn’t bother with English. In 2022 Rene’s spearfishing party encountered a Great White shark off Arniston; astonishing GoPro footage of the magnificent creature circling the group went viral. Baboons have invaded the site of a new house Rene is building in Betty’s Bay. He knows this because the cameras he has installed on the premises are feeding live footage to his phone. Billeted in an oil rig’s quarters somewhere, he’s watching the looters tear up his new digs, but isn’t especially bothered. “My trigger vinger itch,” he posts. One feels that when he returns from his latest dive, those baboons are going to get it in the head, face, gut. This – the act of watching chaos unfold from afar and calmly plotting courses of action – is one estimate as to how the Chinese are observing the Anglosphere in the wake of the release of millions of documents relating to the dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. They are nodding approvingly as the elite scramble, the uniparty establishment squeals and covers up and they must be thinking: let’s just take the whole damn thing. And why not? .Read more:.The Economist: How Hitler’s suicide and the fall of the Nazi regime show the self-defeating, destructive nature of dictatorship.For those who care about civilization, who do their utmost to advance its best features, the emerging information is the most instructive indictment yet that the profile we unleashed to the world at the end of the great war, the model of hypercharged ambition, who we were encouraged to admire and whose success we fashioned our own aspiration upon, was nothing but an aloof, dissembling, parasitic degenerate. At the very top of western society, our financial, political, scientific, retail, technology and media elites explored the unthinkable – the Epstein progression – that place beyond the last known post of the riskiest hedonism. LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman was there. But what is his contribution to the world? Instead of subjecting HR Karens to some Indian reservation discipline administered by French missionaries – what they actually needed – he gave their fat mouths a platform to moan off about “glass ceilings”. This alleged exemplar of moral rectitude financed charges against a Presidential candidate – and was feted a saint of accountability. No more: his reputation soiled, the least he could do is replace LinkedIn with a photo of a pyre atop a heap of combustibles – a warning to Karen the next time she thinks about composing a post about a look she got from a white man in a truck (that obviously never happened). Quite how the YouTuber Piers Morgan, whose efforts to destroy the art of the long-form interview his country near-perfected will be remembered unkindly, managed to avoid becoming an Epstein-islander is a mystery. When it was revealed that Stephen Hawking had visited Little St. James, some of us were convinced that a story would one day emerge detailing how Morgan was the first individual expelled from the joint – for annoying Hawking, for trying to explain Jupiter or something to the button-pushing astrophysicist who started spinning his wheelchair in doughnuts with “eee-ject! eee-ject!” blaring from the speaker. Even the worst of the Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers wankers forced to fess up in congressional hearings post the global financial crisis had their limits. There were excesses, red lines, you were certain, even for the Eurotrash and punchable clown supremos, places these defective specimens just wouldn’t go. This explains our initial reaction from the year of Epstein’s “suicide” until the 23rd of January 2026: we were interpreting the events as a stretch of the holds that determines life, but what actually happened is well past that. The satisfaction of watching the elites squirm as more and more information is processed is temporary, replaced by regret then disappointment and anger. Among the list of accomplices sit some of the most awful people ever to have lived – whose views shift by the weekdays and whose weekends are reserved for inevitable self-loathing, chucking up in the loo and occasionally, calculating how we could be less mean about pedos in the future. Grasping just how bad this is requires two things: firstly, a suspension of any claim we may have to exceptionalism, and secondly, a brutal view of the fall of nations. Countries die when they’re invaded, or subjected to endless civil war, or famine, or natural disasters; in today’s UK, the order is collapsing because of… pedophiles. Incredible. A fitting end, you may argue, to a country that volunteered its surrender, but perhaps this explains why the place – something of an Islamist Epstein island itself – shows zero interest in prosecuting the grooming and rape of its underage, white working class citizens, or why another pedo enabler was recently given the okay to sit in the House of Lords. Last week the Prince and Princess of Wales announced, with great certitude, that they were Very Concerned about the Victims. The statement echoes the Anglosphere’s political elite, who also claim to be Very Concerned about the Victims. This is galling: the entire Royal family – with their level of access to intelligence networks – will have known what that depraved uncle was up to as early as the mid 2000s. Jail the bastard, shriek other elites, also claiming to be Very Concerned about the Victims, the largest cover-your-ass spectacle in modern history. Moments for the Chinese to laugh are nearing rapidly. “We didn’t know,” a central banker may soon argue in his defence of visiting Epstein, “I was duped,” the former CEO of a multinational conglomerate may appeal, “I demand compassion.” “You see,” members of the central committee may remark here, in a pause from their sides splitting, “stupid people can become emeritus professors and climatologists too”.When Epstein, erm, “unalived himself”, a choice appeared before us. It gave us where we are now – the sight of bombs lying underneath the governments of the two most prominent English- speaking nations in the world waiting to detonate – or an alternative, but only on the basis we avail ourselves to being unpopular for a lengthy period. That was rejected on account of how many luxury beliefs we already possessed. Because these things cannot co-exist, we chose the coward’s exit. .Read more:.Trump in turmoil as Epstein files, crashing polls spark political firestorm.So we bottled it, pissed in the kettle, played ourselves for fools, obfuscated, delayed and dithered – when we weren’t flat-out lying. We shat the bed, the handbag and the perfume bottle. The Chinese could not do to us, our world and our traditions worse than we have already done to ourselves. It is just not possible..*Simon Lincoln Reader grew up in Cape Town before moving to Johannesburg in 2001, where he was an energy entrepreneur until 2014. In South Africa, he wrote a weekly column for Business Day, then later Biznews.com. Today he is a partner at a London-based litigation funder, a trustee of an educational charity, and a member of the advisory board of the Free Speech Union of South Africa. He travels frequently between California, the UK, and South Africa. All on his green passport..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission.

SLR: The West collapses, and China watches with a smile

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