At the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, multiple countries (and not just Western ones) imposed various types of sanctions on the Russian economy. The imposition of the sanctions’ regime was relatively well executed but very poorly communicated to the public.

The public was told (or was given the impression) that the Russian economy would collapse within months because it’s the toughest sanctions regime ever imposed on a country. The latter part was absolutely correct, but the former was clearly not entirely honest.

As a result, the public’s trust in the sanctions regime was needlessly shaken due to the high expectations – leading some to lean on exaggeration in the other direction, so far as to believe Putin’s claims that the sanctions had little or no effect. That’s also wrong. So, how’s it going?

Withdrawal of major companies

For once, someone in Academia actually did something useful for the public. So the Chief Executive Leadership Institute from the Yale School of Management went into the enormous undertaking of actually tracking down all of the big non-Russian corporations with business in Russia to see if they actually do make any move as (so many of them) promised.

1586 companies ended up on Yale’s list which gets upgraded at least once a week (last update on February 26, 2023), graded from A (complete exit from Russia) to F (digging in).

The result? 521 companies fully exited Russia (grade A) and another 500 curtailed most or all operations (grade B). On the opposite end of the spectrum, 238 companies either continue as normal or are actively expanding in Russia (“digging in” – grade F).

This in itself is extraordinary. Over 2/3 success rate in fact beats the previous attempt at a global boycott, which happened against Apartheid South Africa 35 years ago.

With that said, there is still room for improvement. There are many companies from Austria, G*rmany, France, Italy, the USA or the United Kingdom that are on the “grade F” list.

Cloudflare, Buzzi Unicem (Italy), BT Group (UK) or Doka (Austria) are some of the Western companies that are still operating in Russia that can still be… persuaded into no longer doing so.

Industry

The automobile production in Russia took a nosedive by 67% – and that’s according to Rosstat (the official Russian Statistic Institute, hardly a trustworthy source). The Russian automobile plants churned out 450.000 cars in 2022, according to Kommersant. That’s less than Romania, whose plants churned out 507.000 cars in 2022, which is not a record for Romania. Keep in mind that of those ~450k cars produced in 2022, quite a few of them are Soviet-era Moskvich which we don’t even know if they work.

75% of car-related transactions in Russia are of used cars, mostly second or third-hand from Japan. The overall number of transactions and production are lower than the 2009 global financial crisis.

To make things worse, there are no chips for anything. Russian leadership hoped to replace what they can’t get from the West by buying from China. There’s just one problem: the Chinese-supplied chips have an enormous failure rate. 40% of the chips delivered to Russia are defective. Such a failure rate makes any sensible production planning impossible. And the goods that are produced with the non-defective ones, obviously, end up being more expensive.

Other industries are under all sorts of weird pressures. So, for instance, Russia can produce its own steel, right? Well, yes, but… some raw materials used to be sourced from Kazakhstan. But Kazakhstan is no longer willing to sell. So the Russian plants now have to source it from within Russia but from further away from the plants (geographically speaking).

Speaking of Kazakhstan, the country bounces between refusing to sell steel to Russia to selling enormous amounts at dumping prices – distorting the Russian market in unpredictable ways. This is reported by Kommersant, which can’t be suspected of a pro-sanctions or anti-Russia bias.

Workforce

The Mayor of Moscow wrote in an official blogpost that things will get rough as hundreds of thousands of people are simply left with nothing to do in the city as everything relevant for them is closed or will be closed. That was in April 2022. Since then, the mayor has been subjected to a special persuasion operation to shut up about it. Even so… the numbers he presented were still real.

In response to multiple such situations (not just in Moscow) the government responded by trying really hard to absorb as many people as possible into various furlough schemes, fake or real government jobs or early retirement. Sure, over the short run, this eases the tension. But for how long can this be sustained? And who funds it? (more on that in a bit)

Nobody really knows how many people left Russia. According to research by The Bell, at least 512,000 people left Russia and did not come back (as of December 2022). This number is the most conservative estimate and most likely wrong, given that just Kazakhstan reported a bit over 200,000 border crossings one way (from Russia to Kazakhstan) without any returns.

Whatever number you choose to believe, one thing is certain: Almost all of the people that left are resourceful (and thus a lost tax base for the State).

This exodus (called “relocation” on Russian groups) strained the public resources of Georgia in particular but, eventually, slowly, things settled down on the host countries. Keep in mind that the exodus isn’t over. The industrial park in Tashkent (empty at my visit there in August 2022) is now full. With “relocated” Russians. After all, someone’s gotta fix the thermal energy distribution of the city, which is in dire straits, so why not fighting age Russian men?

Finance

In late August of 2022 I wrote an article about how unimportant is the official exchange rate of the Rouble given that it’s not a convertible currency. Since then, one thing has changed: Now nobody can exchange Roubles at anywhere near the “official” rate. Not even Raiffeisen Bank, which even went as far as to recognize Putin’s republics, can’t exchange Roubles at the official rate. Raiffeisen is now under an OFAC investigation in the USA. Insh’Allah they get sanctioned.

But, Raiffeisen notwithstanding, the fact remains that nobody buys Roubles. Which means the current “official” exchange rate is wholly artificial and meaningless.

And since nobody buys Roubles, that means nobody is buying Russian bonds either. So how is Putin financing the enormous deficits? Well… the foreign currency reserves. According to the Central Bank of Russia, the state consumed between 7 and 11 billion dollars worth of foreign currency per week. That sounds bad, but not so bad.

Just one problem: All of the statistics officers from both Rosstat and Банк России have been replaced at least three times since the onset of the war. Before the war, they used to be replaced every 6 years or so.

Energy

Here’s where things are a bit more complicated than both the West and Russia are willing to admit.

The EU countries “sold” the sanctions to their people as relatively easy to implement. The practice showed that it was a bit more complicated than previously thought. With that said, all things considered, things turned out quite okay. Europe didn’t freeze to death and, compared to other historical energy crises, countries of Europe fared better than expected.

Russia, on the other hand, “sold” to its people the message that Europe can’t decouple from Russia and that, if things really go south, there’s always India and China eager to buy in huge amounts as both countries are big consumers of fossil fuels.

Just one problem: Saying so is easier said than done.

It takes at least 6 years to build the necessary pipelines in order to deliver gas to China or India. So far, not a single centimeter of a new pipeline has been built. Translation: Russian isn’t selling excess gas to Asia. It can’t.

On oil, the logistics are easier, but India and China put a downward pressure on the price. Or, in common parlance, Russia is selling oil to India and China at a steep discount and routinely at a loss.

You see, extracting oil is not rocket science but it’s still a technologically complex process if you want to also be able to deliver it at a competitive price. And a year of sanctions and the departure of Western energy companies (and with them, their know-how) is taking its toll. Russia’s production price is now higher than the global norm. And continue to climb up as installations start to break down and fixing them is no longer that easy as it was in January 2022.

Ironically, it is in fact desirable that India and China continue to buy more and more oil from Russia at higher and higher discounts because, in doing so, it makes Russia lose money at an accelerated pace. And I have no doubt that’s exactly what’s going to continue to happen because China has no qualms in pillaging Russia for its natural resources.

What we don’t know

Russia stopped filing its paperwork with the IMF, the World Bank, the ITO and other institutions in July and hasn’t allowed the minimum scrutiny required ever since. In parallel, Russian ethnics within the IMF replaced the missing data with the reports from the Kremlin (unverified, even minimally, by anyone). This led to the IMF, World Bank et. al. to publish effectively Kremlin propaganda for months on end.

The situation has been discovered mostly by accident basically last week and hasn’t been corrected yet. So any report from IMF, World Bank, etc. on the GDP of Russia or any other economic data is, for the time being, untrustworthy.

Same goes for the Rosstat reports on some aspects of the economy (especially labor force and demographics) for the second half of the year 2022. the people working on them have been changed/reshuffled at least three times in the last 12 months. That’s a lot.

Even if we were to presume this was not done in order to get yes-men apparatchiks in place, that would twist the numbers to lie for the Kremlin – the mere disruption in the workflow is enough to render the reports for the second half of 2022 at least untrustworthy until further rectification. And there is no reason to assume any of that.

So when Putin says the Russian economy fell by 2.1% in 2022, there is no way to check whether that’s true. Same goes when a Western analyst says that it actually fell by X%. That guy doesn’t know that either. We have some reliable data (I presented some of it above) but we’re still missing quite a bit on other variables in order to make a semi-decent projection.

Some conclusions

So, do the sanctions work? If by “work” you mean the way they were sold to the public in March 2022, then the answer is no.

However, if by “work” one means “steadily and consistently eating away at the economical foundations of the modern part of the Russian economy” – then the answer is yes. Faster than I expected, quite honestly.

I had expected that inertia will take 15 months at the very least to catch up but, as it turns out, many aspects worked-out faster.

Imposing sanctions was a good idea, all in all. But it was a mistake to sell them to the public as a silver bullet against Russia, because such framing needlessly lowered the Western public’s trust in them and gave free talking points to Solovyov et. al. for no benefit.

Luckily, for all of us, the quality of Russian propaganda also took a nosedive lately. And visibly so for anyone who has been following this topic for more than three years. It could be because some of the people at RT and other places were in fact Ukrainian and are now refugees in Kazakhstan.

And while I’m glad that Russian propaganda took a nosedive, it is alarming that the West’s strategic communication is in such a terrible shape. Слава Богу we’re facing Russia of 2023 and not Russia of 2014 in the propaganda department.

Denmark is often held as some sort of Utopia by the Western world due to its welfare state and highly homogeneous culture. Much has been said about not just the positives, but also more recently, by the political right, the negatives of such a system. However, neither side has ever truly understood what the pros and cons of the Danish way are, nor what type of society would accept it in the first place.

The Danish way of thinking is, in many ways, self-contradicting and it is just as hard to wrap one’s head around it as it is with the Russian mindset. This would have been more apparent, were it not for the complete absence of conflict within the Danish state.

All societies have a more or less formal contract with their state, some founding principle that makes it legitimate in the eyes of the people: In the US this is the upholding of the Constitution; in China – to avoid a repeat of the starvation events under Mao and ensure everyone has food on the table. In Denmark, it is simply to preserve a state of comfort.

While the same is true of the rest of Scandinavia, the Danish mindset has evolved, for the most part, naturally, with little deliberation on the part of the state.

Danish culture has been in large part defined by the presence of the state, in ways that most free countries simply have not. The most apparent of which is family structure or, better said, the lack thereof as the individual is completely atomized.

The average Danish child will be placed into a kindergarten from the age of 3 – 4 years old with minimal interaction with their parents, as both of them typically are working full time to afford the bills that come with having the highest tax pressure in the world, and second worst purchase power parity in Europe.

Their middle aged parents do not fare much better, as divorce is frequent enough as to become ubiquitous. Here it is worth mentioning that Danish adolescents are among the first to move out of their parents’ home in Europe. While I do not see this as inherently negative, it does add to the overall state of disconnect within the family. This disentanglement is perversely mirrored in the usual treatment of the elderly in Denmark.

Children do not interact much with their parents after they move out, and the parents life is expected to go on as usual until they are too old to live on their own. At this point the overwhelming standard is to let your parents be institutionalized. This is so common to the point where any other arrangement is practically unheard of.

With the exception of the occasional visit, the parents are left completely out of sight and thus out of mind. It’s the polar opposite of Italy, where the child is expected to either move out at some point in their forties, or simply inherit the family home and take care of their parents until their death.

While abuse is not the absolute standard within retirement homes, it is frequently reported on. It is not unusual for horror stories of elderly, no longer capable of standing on their own and bedridden, to be neglected by social workers that simply don’t want to help them get to the bathroom, and instead leave them mired in their own fecal matter for several days.

Its not that anyone wants this abuse to continue per se, in fact the topic has had mainstream attention both in the media, among political parties, and in political satire for several decades now. The truth is quite simple, and quite depressing: No one cares.

This is not meant in the sense that people find the abuse mentioned above acceptable, they don’t. Instead no one really thinks about or wants to do anything to change things.

A far leftist and former friend of mine once said that the greatest boon of the welfare state was that it “liberated him from his own morality”. Thanks to it, he argued, there was no need to care about the homeless, the poor, his family, or anyone other than himself, because ”society will take care of it”.

While many Danes would feel repulsed by such a statement, there is a kernel of truth to it: The welfare state has in its own perverse way ”liberated” the individual from his morality and responsibility. This is at least in part what we are seeing with the disentanglement between families and the elderly.

Denmark is a deeply apathetic country, and the odd thing about this characteristic apathy, whether towards governmental overreach, abuse in the social sector or blatant corruption, is that there is barely any propaganda effort from the state itself involved. Rather there simply is a disinterest so ubiquitous as to become part of the background noise, as it permeates every part of the Danish worldview: both empathically, intellectually, and politically, in ways that often appear paradoxical.

The national self-image vexes between viewing ourselves as a small, irrelevant spot in the middle of Europe to extreme arrogance over our glorious welfare state, especially compared to those stupid Americans that are constantly shooting each other or going broke from their dysfunctional, obviously anti-human private healthcare system. Although self-contradictory at a glance, these two ideas can coexist in people’s heads at the same time without cognitive dissonance, as they are not two mutually exclusive ideas, but rather a single, logically coherent narrative that can produce diametrically opposed feelings depending on the context: This national narrative, referred to as “Lilliput Chauvinism” by the politician Uffe Østergaard, is best summarized as “we are small and irrelevant but our socially homogenous and deeply empathetic culture has resulted in the north – and in particular us, creating a much more humane, and happy society than the rest of the globe.”

Like how a faucet can produce either warm or cold water, depending on how you turn the knobs, the focal point of the narrative can be altered to hone in on either the inferiority aspect as a means to deflect criticism of flaws brought to the surface, or the superiority, to induce a delusional belief in the superiority of the Danish system – which therefore does not need to be altered, as there’s no need to change what is already as good as it gets.

Complementing this is the insular nature of Danish society. Not much is reported on or understood, or even paid attention to of our neighboring countries. There is some superfluous reporting on whatever happens in the United States, usually ripped straight from their legacy media, and sometimes Sweden (since the border with them is right next to our capital) but that’s about it. Rarely is anything ever reported about Norway, Germany or Britain. The cultural insularity of the nation solidifies it’s inferiority-superiority complex, since the country as a whole is simply not aware or interested in other ways of structuring a society.

For a personal example, a family movie I watched as a small child had a song in the intro credits with lyrics such as:

man er som man er det kan ikke laves om
man går rudnt og ser ud som maan gjorde da man kom
du kan drømme om at være en kineser I new yok
men man er som man er og det er godt nok.

En hest er en hest en kat er en kat
de er ligesåforskellige som dag og som nat…
og tyskere og svenskere er også en slags menesker
og rødhårede piger er kønne

You are as you it cannot be changed
one walks around and look as one did when you arrived
you can dream about beign a chinese in New York
But you are what you are and it’s good enough

A horse is a horse a cat is a cat
they’re as different as day and as night
and Germans and Swedes are people too I suppose
and read-haired girls are cute

The song is quite indicative of the mentality here. Danes are not devoid of humour, especially not when at the expense of our neighbours, due to historical beef turned banter (as is the case with practically all Old World countries). But there’s also this notion that what you are is pretty good, so there’s no need to do anything about it, or change, or improve. What you are is more or less “good enough”.

This is certainly not helped by the populace’s disinterest in seeking out knowledge or wisdom on their own.
It’s not that Danes are stupid, as the over representation among Nobel price winners for instance shows, but that their thinking is rigid. Knowledge is only gathered and created, and expertise only acquired within already established fields, such as the hard sciences, and outside them, is a dearth of intellectual curiosity. Appeal to experts is commonplace and expert opinion is paraded around by the media on a daily basis.

It is not without reason Denmark has not had a renowned thinker – neither globally, nor domestically, since Søren Kirkegaard. On a related note, Denmark has not created many cultural movements of its own for at minimum the last 100 years. More often than not, ideas are simply imported from abroad, as was the case with Lutheran Protestantism by the priest Hans Thausen or with the welfare state itself, originally imported from Bismarck’s Prussia, until it developed a life of its own here.

Much of this lack of interest can be traced back to the 1800s: Following the loss of Norway to Sweden during the Napoleonic wars, Denmark entered a cultural period known as Romantikken, or the romantic period. The core idea was that ”what was lost externally, must be won internally”. No longer was Denmark to pay attention to anything outside of it’s own borders, as it refused to look away from its rural landscapes through rose tinted glasses; effectively romanticising what was left of the country in an attempt to ignore the nation’s sorry state of affairs.

It is here we find the source of Danish Lilliput chauvinism, as both a coping and a defence mechanism against harsh reality, as it reminded us of our own inadequacy.

This can also be seen in the notion of the Janteloven, a set of laws unique to the fictional town of Jante, made as a satire of Scandinavia’s stigma against excellence:

Don’t believe you are anything
don’t believe you are as much as us
Don’t believe you are smarter than us
Don’t believe you are better than us
Don’t believe you know more than us
Don’t believe you are more than us
Don’t believe you amount to anything
Don’t laugh at us
Don’t believe anyone likes you
Don’t believe you can teach us anything

At no point has this order of affairs ever truly been disputed. While the central focus of the following era, the modern breakthrough, indeed was that the nation ought to cease its nostalgic ruminations and face cruel reality, the cruel reality in question was the suffering of the poor and the working class, underneath the classicist society. It was essentially proto-socialism. Created a century before Marx was even born and complete with deconstructive reinterpretations of established folklore to serve the anti-idealistic bend of the era. Added to these is a fear of going outside of the system.

Dissent is allowed, but only in predetermined ways by going through the system itself, never around it, and it is frowned upon to criticise individuals working in the bureaucracy as “just doing your job” is a commonplace and acceptable justification for state overreach. The result? A society unwilling to engage in the historical arena (with the blessing of its geography), uninterested in learning from others and dedicated to the alleviation of harm from its citizens, and one which has effectively produced an “end of history”-like scenario.

There are no conflicts here and with the exception of a brief almost bloodless invasion by – and immediate submission to – Nazi Germany in the 1940s, the notion that you need to defend what you hold dear, that there’s something it must be defended against, and whether it was even worth defending in the first place, is mute. In its place there’s a perpetual state of nothing ever happening.

It can be seen even in the language too: For instance, the standard response to being asked how are things going is “stille og roligt/quiet and calm”.
Another example is the word “hygge”. Which is often paraded around as the quintessential Danish word, as it has no direct translation. The approximate is a mix between “cozy” and “comfy”. That feeling of sitting and chilling with your friends and feeling pleasant while nothing is really happening.

I’m defining it because Danish does not typically make use of a direct word for “scary” or “horrifying” instead the most commonly used word is “uhygge”. It’s much like how Russian does not have a direct mainstream word for “safety” or “security” but instead uses “undanger” [безопасность].

As nothing is happening, and will never happen, conflict is viewed as unnecessary and abnormal if not to some extend unnatural, if it is ever placed in bigger doses than the occasional joke about the Nazis or drawing of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban here and there. The ability for, and conceptualization of, conflict taking place is not only absent on a national scale but on the individual level as well. No one is capable of starting conflicts and no one has the necessary mental reflexes to handle it.

This conflict avoidance leads to an odd form of moderation, where the victim of the state will always react to abuse by pleading. If the state overreaches, the reaction will always begin by admitting one is themselves guilty before stating that what’s happening is absurd. There won’t be any backlash, only a plead for a slightly thinner slice of the salami to be served this time around. This is arguably why the country has some of the highest anti depressant consumption in the world.

It is not that we batter our children into soulless drones, it’s that we don’t need to. Because the concept of conflict simply does not exist inside the little Danish world. As there’s simply no practical way of venting frustrations people simply give up trying or become bitter and resentful, as the shadow parts of the human mind are not being allowed to fully integrate. The populace may act nice but it is not good.

And if you dig deep enough down underneath that outer layer of niceness in a Dane’s psyche, you’ll find something you won’t like looking at.

Over the course of this past November, three countries were expected to see a wave of right wing success in their upcoming elections. Denmark, Brazil, and the United States, were embroiled in elections of great importance – not so much due to the next four years of government, but for the long term cultural trends they represent.

All three countries saw significant right wing success around 2016, followed by what is now a surprisingly successful pushback from their left wing status quo.

In America, this has been in the form of the disastrous last two years of the Biden administration as well as mediocre results for the right in the Midterms. Mediocre enough that Donald Trump’s future as the GOP’s main presidential candidate has been openly questioned.

In Brazil, a hostile state apparatus sought to quell the flames of support for Bolsonaro and the left has now successfully ousted him during this past election.

And in my home country of Denmark, our left-wing government had successfully taken on the mantle of populism to win the elections back in 2019, only to impose lockdowns and egregious breaches of the Constitution under the pandemic.

During the elections of this past November they not only managed to maintain an almost unchanged number of votes compared to 2019, the social liberal party that forced them to call an election over their continued breaches of the constitution and peoples trust have seen their voter base cut in half.

As a morbidly ironic cherry on top, several of the small villages of northern Jutland that relied heavily on mink farming voted overwhelmingly for the political party that destroyed their way of life.

Despite the large differences in the cultures of these three countries as well as how the reassertions have played out, the right-wingers in all three countries had developed very similar, but equally dangerous narratives on what should have happened;

These narratives all revolve around some form of revolution, wherein the capital P People have realized the tyrannical nature of the left and rise up, and through the Democratic Process push the country back towards Truth, Justice, and Liberty, and render us from corruption and progressive tyranny. It just so happens that it didn’t pan out that way.

The cause of this dissonance between right wing mythology and left wing reality however, is not to be found in some unknown source of leftist competence, or a successful propagandizing of the voters, but in the Right itself.
Specifically the populist savior mythos that the right has capitalized on since the campaign of Donald Trump in 2016.

Here, it is important to make a distinction between populist policies and populist savior mythos. Populist policies are merely whatever form of policies are written with the intent of appealing to the working man. Things like lowering immigration, or removing CRT propaganda from schools are contemporary forms of populist policies from the Right, while raising the minimum wage or giving more power to worker unions are examples of Leftist populist policies.

It should be noted that these policies do not need to actually be beneficial to the working classes, nor that being populist inherently means they’re harmful either. It is simply a label for any policy, good or bad that aims to appeal to the lower classes. The issue here, however is the mythos.

As it has resulted in the cult-like mentality that as long as the correct person is voted into power (Donald Trump being the best known example of this) victory is assured, as well as a distorted view of democracy.

The populist mythology was effective at the time, but was also simplistic and overly black and white. This is nothing new, it is in fact a historical norm for any successful narrative; the problem is that this time around there were no checks and balances within the Right that could mitigate the negative effects of the current party narrative.

This is usually done by having a well established elite that understands the shortcomings of the narrative, and knows which of the newer recruits to select for or filter out of the upper parts of the party hierarchy.
The checks and balances were not present this time around, however, and now the Right has a lot of people believing their own propaganda way too far up in the party.

The results of believing too much in the populist narrative in question have been overly naïve views on not just democracy but a genuine belief that there is a right side of history, that there will be a permanent victory over the forces of evil (the left), and that democracy unhindered and without interference will always move towards the side of the party that is on to the right side of history. At its core this is a surprisingly leftist and revolutionary way of thinking. Combined with a characteristically Protestant Christian form of moral prudence.

Since all actions are filtered through the lens of right vs wrong side of history, even the most benign attempt to persuade public opinion towards the right must be stomped out, with much more extreme prejudice than they’d display to even the most sadistically violent Antifa member, as long as it in any way is perceived as ”rude” or ”indecent” or a ”danger to Our Democracy”

What’s more, the criteria for what is ”immoral” is barely even dictated by anyone on their own side, but more often whatever far left propaganda manages to bubble up through the legacy media. In practice this means the Left can declare any rules of engagement they feel like, and no matter how ludicrous they are, no matter how obvious it is they themselves don’t take said rules seriously, the Right will enforce them upon their own and solely their own with unparalleled religious zeal.

It doesn’t matter that the Right themselves are aware that said propagandists are merely trying to manipulate them, nor does it matter what consequences following said propaganda will bring. As long as it touches their ideological blind spot of recoiling from anything and everything that is not pristine and principled, they will instinctively jump on the opportunity to throw as many spanners in the works of what any sane man would call their party fellows, until they have returned the Right to its state of ”principled conservatism on the side of democracy”. Which almost always is identical to a state of stagnant ineptitude.

Much of the Right’s current miserable situation is as a direct result of this segment. And as much as I hope dearly that at least some of these people will realize how wrong they were in following the ”will of the people”, now that the populace is kissing the hand of what they perceive as totalitarians on the wrong side of history, I honestly fear they’re too emotionally invested in their ideological framing for anything to convince them.

While it is impossible to have a political party without these people – just as it is impossible to be without any other form of narrative in an organization, too many of them have moved far too near the core of the organized right in far too many western countries. If the Right wants to regain its footing, it is to push it’s populist tendencies back out into the peripheries and ensure it’s core is more in tune with reality.

If the right instead chooses to preserve its delusional aspirations of sainthood it will experience the same filtering out and discarding at the hands of cruel nature as any other entities that proved unfit for their environment throughout life’s evolution on this earth.