Almost exactly five years ago, I began writing for Mercator.

Western civilisation has undergone breathtaking changes in that time — whether pandemic panics, racial reckonings, the arrival of AI, or a comeback of commonsense. Through all this and more, it has been my utmost privilege to be part of — as Mercator’s charter puts it — “reframing [these] ethical and policy debates in terms of human dignity”.

Mercator will now sail into the sunset. But like the final scene in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, this is not a voyage into exile but a hard-earned rest after the completion of an extraordinary endeavour.

At times, the news headlines we’ve interrogated might have felt trivial. But underneath the breaking stories and our response to them a mighty war has raged — a hearts-and-minds battle for the soul of the West.

At stake was whether the fairest and freest civilisation ever to grace the planet should be allowed to endure, or whether the imperfect must be torn asunder in pursuit of some illusory utopia.

Such battles have not always ended well, as the 20th century attests. In this case, however, goodness and sanity are emerging victorious — and it is largely thanks to publications like Mercator that our culture is mercifully turning the corner.

Consider just some of the progress we’ve seen in the last year or so.

The chemical and surgical castration of children in the name of “gender-affirming care” is effectively over, thanks in large part to independent reporting on the WPATH scandal, the Cass Review, and the growing army of detransitioners.

Big Abortion is on notice, as scandals at Planned Parenthood continue to make headlines, and the most pro-abortion administration in US history suffered an electoral wipe-out. Meanwhile, abortion is being talked about more than ever before and its euphemisms are wearing painfully thin.

Wokeness in all its forms is sounding the retreat — seen in monumental voting pattern shifts, the course corrections of major newspapers like The Washington Post and the LA Times, the disappearance of pronouns on social media, the shelving of the woke lexicon in academic literature, and much more besides.

DEI is D-E-A-D. The Trump administration might have sped up its demise — in the military and federal bureaucracy especially — but truth be told, colleges and corporations have been walking away from Racism 2.0 ever since the toxic Harvard scandal. Watch this space as other nations follow suit.

Gender-confused men are finally being exiled from women’s sporting codes, locker rooms and bathrooms, with public sentiment on this issue clearly galvanising in favour of sanity.

Persecuted pro-lifers have been released from prison after suffering injustice at the hands of Biden’s weaponised Justice Department.

Social media is unchaining its users — and itself — from the worst excesses of the censorship era. Mark Zuckerberg is the latest Big Tech titan to express regret over the Orwellian overreach. By far, the biggest win on this front is Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X, which has not turned into a haven of far-right hate as the screeching media banshees like to imagine, but is instead now the most balanced social media platformamong the big players.

Trust in the lying legacy media is lower than ever. Critical Race Theory hustler Ibram X. Kendi is out of a job. The world is waking up to the birth dearth. Disney is replacing trans characters with Christian ones.

Both Christianity and social conservatism are staging major cultural comebacks — which is fantastic news indeed when you consider where the West’s emphasis on human dignity arose in the first place.