I have been predicting, and still predict, that the fall of the Cathedral will be long, bloody, and terrible, and that the Cathedral will likely be replaced by something that none of us want, like the Islamic Caliphate.

But lately there have been happier signs, like the Trumpening.

And the defection of Duterte from the blue empire is another encouraging sign.

Duterte won the Philippine election on a hugely popular program of replacing the dysfunctional justice system with right wing death squads. The Cathedral could not quite believe this, but after a while started murmuring about doing something, presumably another color revolution after the fashion of Syria.

Whereupon Duterte defected from the “International Community” to China, seeking Chinese protection against US military intervention.

Hillary’s program is to restore the blue empire by overtly violent means. Trump’s program is to let it go.

What happened in the Soviet Union is that when they let Afghanistan go, then another state went, and another state went, and a landslide of states, and then Moscow itself fell.

While the International Community, the blue empire of the consulates, has been struggling with Syria, Thailand and the Philippines have wandered off the reservation. Insurrection has a habit of cascading. To restore control, it would not be sufficient to destroy Syria and have the Alawites and Christians genocided, but war with Thailand and the Philippines might well also be necessary, and might well escalate to similar degrees of horror.

War tends to become far more horrible than those starting it expect. The Cathedral is piously indignant about barrel bombs, forgetting that the neighborhoods being bombed were often quite recently ethnically cleansed of their previous inhabitants by the forces supported by the Cathedral.

It seems to me that if a neighborhood was previously occupied by group A, and then group B drives them out, it is perfectly reasonable for group A and their allies to bomb the hell out the neighborhoods new and old occupied by group B. Yeah, there are children living it those neighborhoods. And there children driven out of their homes by violence when those neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed. The Cathedral has sponsored a whole lot of violent ethnic cleansing in Syria, which caused, and entirely justifies, the violence that we now see in the reconquest of Aleppo.

And the Cathedral has sponsored a whole lot of violent ethnic cleansing in America, to which everyone piously turns a blind eye.

The empire rests on white males, while sadistically increasing the oppression of whites and males to ever more ridiculous extremes. Contrary to the fantasies of the 1488ers, no backlash ensues, instead whites and males become ever more passive, apathetic, terrorized, and emasculated. But on the periphery of empire, the empire is collapsing.

This collapse does not reflect for the most part backlash against anti white and anti male measures (though Boko Haram is unambiguously backlash against anti male measures) but the fundamental military weakness of a society that is constructed by white males, that is entirely dependent on the work and military capability of white males, and is ever more hostile to white males. The utterly extraordinary and almost incredible British defeats in Basra and Helmand province show what happens when you feminize your military. The empire is falling not because white males will fight their oppressors, but because they will not fight for their oppressors. Will the fall of the Blue Empire go all the way to Washington, as the fall of the Soviet Empire went all the way to Moscow?