No amount of penance will suffice to stop the suicide of the West. In 2006, Pascal Bruckner diagnosed the illness as “Western masochism”, a civilization so convinced its own sins explain every problem on earth that it turns self-hatred into a strange form of narcissism. >Corporate America pledged over $50 billion in racial equity penance after George Floyd >California set up a slavery reparations task force even though it entered the Union in 1850 as a free state that never legalized slavery >The New York Times pushed the 1619 Project claiming slavery was the real founding, then edited the most absurd claims instead of retracting them A nation that can only feel guilty eventually loses the capacity to feel proud of anything, and a people that cannot defend their own story will not keep one for long.