Embracing the Fourth Turning: Irreconcilable Differences

The spark is lit. The divide is civilizational. Choose your ground.

It is April 12, 1861. After the contested election of Abraham Lincoln, after which several states seceded in fury, Federal forces still hold Fort Sumter, near Charleston, South Carolina, under outgoing president James Buchanan. Buchanan calls secession illegal but war unauthorized. Lincoln insists on a peaceful resupply of the fort.

To the Confederacy, the fort is an imperial outpost on sovereign soil. It is unacceptable.

At 4:30 AM, Confederate batteries open fire. Thirty-four hours later, Major Anderson surrenders.

Few foresaw the brutality of the war that would follow. But it came. Four years. Six hundred and twenty thousand dead. At the time, some political rags in both the North and South posted breathless accounts, but it took many ordinary people months to grasp just what they were in for.

This was two full Fourth Turnings ago. There are a lot of details to get lost in here, but to keep things simple:

• The country had divided irreconcilably — morally, politically, and economically.

• The war did not begin in a vacuum. Decades of violence and political differences (Bleeding Kansas, John Brown’s raid, the caning of Senator Charles Sumner) had already bloodied the ground.

• It wasn’t just populism. Elites on both sides backed the fight.

I fear we’re nearing our own Fort Sumter moment. If I had to place a wager in Vegas on where it’d start I’d put money on Chicago or Los Angeles. Imagine: A protestor shoots an ICE agent. Or an ICE agent shoots a protestor. Or a governor orders the arrests of ICE agents. Any spark will do.

The divide today is unbridgeable just like it was in 1861, but in a different way. Then, a Mississippian and a New Yorker could at least agree: God is real and America is a Christian nation. While they may have disagreed on a number of intra-theological aspects, the core foundation was still there.

Today? We don’t even share the same reality. Two Americas now live in separate information ecosystems, with their own facts, morals, and visions for the future. This chasm — deliberately widened since 2008 and accelerated by algorithms — is the engine of the coming crisis. Charlie Kirk was gunned down mid-sentence in Utah two months ago as thousands looked on. Thousands on the Right thought, “Oh shit — that could be me.” The shooting has already started.

Meanwhile, entrenched elites are throwing themselves behind movements, drawing their own distinct battle lines. Like in 1861, elites profit from the divide. Soros, Fink, Ellison, Musk, Adelson — they have strong agendas that require popular support. And that support has been weaponized into the dumbed-down Left vs Right that’s ever-prevalent.

You can’t reconcile with someone who believes your worldview is not just wrong, but evil. So where do we go from here?

Mapping the Chasm: The Core Irreconcilable Differences

In the first post of this series, I admitted being quite wrong when I’d said — in earnest hope about a year ago — that the Left and Right were obsolete. Instead, the opposite is true: The Left and Right represent not political blocs so much as fundamentally opposed worldviews — two civilizations sharing one flag.

An Important Note on the Right

Readers should note that the “Right” is by no means monolithic. There currently exists a major schism within the Right, featuring two major sides in the populist crowd, and a third on the elite side:

• One wing: Older, America-as-Empire conservatives: pro-Zionist, interventionist, dominant since Reagan.

• The other: A rising America First surge: anti-Zionist, anti-war, young, and embracing cultural and ethnic identity they were taught to reject.

• A third, elite-oriented: Technocratic, oligarchic, neo-feudalist. These are your tech moguls trying to figure out what to do with the plebs when the robots take over.

We’ll dissect this fracture in future pieces. For now, we map the current chasm between Right and Left as it exists on the populist level.

Let’s start with the battlefields.

The nature of truth and reality

Truth and reality are no longer debated — they are declared war upon. The Right and Left do not merely disagree. Rather, they operate in parallel universes, each with its own physics.

For the Right: Reality is objective, borders are real, and cultures clash. Historical patterns are real and relevant to today. Truth is discovered, not invented, like gravity or chemical properties.

For the Left: Reality is a social construct. Truth is subjective, defined by lived experience and power dynamics. “My truth” is sovereign. Facts bend and biology yields.

No battlefield exposes this rift more starkly than the transgender movement. Why, one might ask, would such a tiny percent of the population — less than 1% — turn into such a cultural flashpoint?

Because it’s got little to do with policy. It’s about whose reality rules.

For the Right, a man can’t become a woman or vice versa in the same way the sky isn’t green and chickens don’t give live birth. Nature doesn’t negotiate.

For the Left, identity is self-authored. If you are a woman in your truth, then you are — full stop.

Most on the Right don’t particularly care what adults do in private. The war began when this ideology marched into classrooms, when children were taught sex is a spectrum, truth is negotiable, and biology is bigotry.

Don’t tell me it didn’t happen. It did. And it still does.

This argument isn’t a debate. It’s a schism in the fabric of reality itself. Sure, both sides are capable of cherry-picking scientific data to back up their points, but for the Right biology is unbending.

The foundation of society

The Left and Right don’t just disagree on policy. They disagree on what a society fundamentally is.

For the Right: The nuclear family, faith, and ethnic and/or cultural nationhood are the load-bearing beams of civilization. Society is built on tradition, heredity, and shared blood and culture. Break these and the whole house collapses.

For the Left: Society is built on individual autonomy, intersectional identity blocs, and the state as parent. The traditional family and nation are oppressive relics that should be deconstructed, not defended.

For an example, let’s look at Critical Race Theory as taught in schools, both in K-12 and universities. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Left realized that dominating education was critical to their success in the future. Thus began the Long March through the Institutions, which has been thoroughly effective — the vast majority of teachers and professors lean left.

The fight about CRT in schools isn’t about history. Rather, it’s a proxy war for who owns the next generation and what they’ve been taught to revere. That this fight is in public schools is crucial: Homeschooling may be growing in popularity, but it’s retreat rather than victory.

For the Right, children should honor their ancestors — flaws and all — as the bloodline that built the nation.

For the Left, children must atone for their ancestors as perpetual oppressors in a system designed to crush. If their ancestors were the oppressed, the children must be lifted above their peers to enact generational justice.

One side teaches pride. The other teaches guilt or vengeance. There is no middle ground when one worldview looks to the past as glorious and the other as shameful.

The concept of justice

Between the two sides, justice is not a shared word. It is a weapon — or at least it can be. To be clear, either side is quite capable of abusing the justice system, as we’ve seen more than enough in recent decades.

For the Right: Justice is blind. Equal rules apply to all, merit trumps privilege, and outcomes are earned by sweat, skill, and choice. Equity is just nepotism with a Social Justice filter. No one gets a head start, and no one gets a handicap.

For the Left: Justice is about equity. Equal outcomes are enforced for designated groups by systemic discrimination against oppressor classes. The State can and should be used as a weapon against political enemies.

I grew up believing in a color-blind, meritocratic society. Most of us did.

But look around. It’s impossible to ignore how racially inflamed societies have become across the Western world. This didn’t happen by accident — it was engineered.

The Digital Iron Curtain

The chasm that divides our society isn’t accidental. Information control, the most powerful weapon of our age, is being used to engineer and maintain this divide. Why? For one reason, it’s highly profitable. But there’s an element to it that goes beyond profit as well.

This isn’t new in theory, but it’s new in practice. In 1861, newspapers split America into two realities, but much information still spread the old fashioned way — by word-of-mouth. In 2025, algorithms do the splitting much more efficiently: faster, cleaner, and at scale.

Rather than partisan editors, AI engagement engines pull viewers left or right. And instead of regional distribution, we get global, instant, and personalized news.

Right-leaning users get crime stats, border chaos, and outrage clips. Left-leaning users see systemic racism, climate catastrophism, and trans kids in danger. Both got COVID fear-mongering, censored information, and no shortage of rage-bait.

Until recently, the bias was systemic. The Twitter Files — released after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (or X, whatever) — revealed heavy government pressure for left-leaning censorship from the Biden administration. Other social media figures like Mark Zuckerberg further publicly confirmed this.

The result? Information silos so tight even the aware can’t escape without incredible effort.

Back in 1861, you could at least walk to the other side of town and hear what other people thought. Now, you can’t even find the other side.

The Great Diversion

The chasm between the Left and Right didn’t just appear. It was redirected.

In 2008, the banks failed. The people rose — both Left and Right — in the Occupy and Tea Party movements. Remember the “We are the 99%” chants? The Occupy and the Tea Party held plenty of animosity against each other, but each correctly identified major financial institutions as the problem. Even then, the divisions between the two were easily exploitable.

But for a brief moment, the people saw the real enemy: The merger of Washington and Wall Street. They saw the beast, naked and afraid for the first time. That’s when the Great Diversion began.

The seeds of division were thrown onto fertile ground. As a large, diverse nation, there are a million ways you could get Americans to fight each other. There was already a Left and Right, so that was an obvious place to start. The media led the Great Racial Awakening, with articles containing the words “race/racism” skyrocketing following 2010. Algorithms turbocharged all this, and still do.

So, we fought over race instead of bailouts. Bathrooms instead of banks. Flags instead of foreclosures. People fought their neighbors while their pockets were being picked.

The Left was sold Identitarianism. The Right was sold the Culture War. Both were distracted from the real theft: The giant sucking sound of money going from Main Street to Wall Street.

The elites didn’t just profit from the divide. They orchestrated it. They funded the NGOs, pushed the narratives, and kept the rage pointed sideways — anywhere but up.

The results were trillions transferred, trust destroyed, and nations (yes, plural) about to ignite. Meanwhile, the machine is still running.

The Digital Iron Curtain didn’t create the divide. Rather, it weaponized the diversion, which grows stronger every day.

Now, while the powder keg is full, and matches are being flicked towards it, the elites have already built their bunkers. They know what’s coming.

Navigating the Unbridgeable Divide

The differences we’ve explored here aren’t political. They’re civilizational.

The Digital Iron Curtain is not a bug. It’s engineered, carefully constructed to keep you distracted, divided, and bleeding.

To embrace the Fourth Turning is to see the truth: We’re in a struggle for America’s soul. The Left and Right are at each other’s throats, and violence is already quite real. Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the attempted murder of the president, violent mobs — it’s all already started. If this were a baseball game, we’d only be in the second inning. For my non-American readers, there are nine innings.

Your neighbor is not the enemy. The Beast is: Washington, Wall Street, and those who see you as livestock on the tax farm. Elites wrestle for control behind the scenes in DC, Silicon Valley, and other power centers while the rest of us are distracted by the outrage du jour or new trend.

But it’s too late. The fight is coming. It will be ugly, it will be necessary, and it may be long.

I’m not calling for war. I’m warning you it’s coming whether we want it or not. And if it does, the best we can hope for is something like the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The worst case scenario…well, that’s a nightmare. We can avoid it if we’re lucky, but luck is running out.

Strengthen your family, arm yourself and your mind, and choose your ground. Because the powder keg is full, and all it will take is one match.

When the smoke clears, there will be one America. Not by vote, but by blood and will. This is not the end, but the reckoning. What comes next is up to us.