Which Existential Crisis Will Destroy America?
National Debt Clock as of November 8, 2025 (Photo by Lynn Woolley for WB Daily)
America has a lot of problems and some are genuine crises.
Weirdly, some of these are vastly more important to the political Left than to the Right, and vice versa. The Left thinks the presidency of Donald Trump is a crisis. But that hasn’t quite taken the place of Climate Change, which is now a more subtle religion for most progressives.
On the other side of the aisle, and mostly ignored by the Left, is the breakdown of the traditional family, the failure of our educational system, and the loss of a well-defined American identity.
The Right also worries about the threat of radical Islam and socialism and Communism with the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York, as well as the China threat, and the National Debt.
Perhaps artificial Intelligence can help us solve these crises – except that AI itself is also on the list.
AUDIO: Random Samplings of a Logical Mind (to come)
Crises change from generation to generation.
Back in the days of J. Robert Oppenheimer, virtually everyone on the planet lost sleep over the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction from nuclear weapons. That threat is vastly more real today than then, but nobody worries much about it. It seems too horrible for even Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping to contemplate.
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Besides, if you’re a political junkie, it’s more fun to see where we go with crises that mirror the ideology of progressives or conservatives. I chose seven crises that come to mind, and set them up in what I consider to be reverse order. That means we’ll end with number one, which to me, is what poses the most danger.
Crisis #7: Climate Change
Ho-hum. Not many people seem to care much about this crisis anymore since Trump won a second term. There’re diehards out there; in fact, Austin Mayor Kirk Watson recently attended a climate conference in Rio de Janeiro. He came back to town and issued a release on it with all the old talking points that have never come to pass.
Even one of the world’s richest men, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, has shifted his position on this issue from one of a “doomsday scenario” to a more pragmatic one of “human welfare.” In short, this is a crisis – if it is one at all – that we can’t do much about. Let’s focus on clean water and clean air and move on. Earth will be fine.
Video: Bill Gates warns about Climate Change alarmism
Crisis #6: The presidency of Donald Trump
This one is good for a few laughs, especially if you thought the presidency of Joe Biden was a crisis.
What did Biden do? He immediately opened up the southern border and let millions of illegals cross over including drug dealers, cartel members, pushers of fentanyl, rapists, murderers, and human traffickers. He also overlooked the Constitution when he wanted to, such as when he tried to forgive student loan debt. He was known as the “Big Guy” in his family business of selling influence. Under his watch, government spending went crazy resulting in the high consumer costs we have today.
What did Trump do? He secured the southern border, tapped down the most insane parts of the liberal agenda such as sex-change and men playing in women’s sports. You may not like his tariffs, but his accomplishment in the first year of the second term are stunning. Joe Biden never came close to a peace deal in the Middle East. He never had the guts to take out Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Trump’s methods are unconventional, but if there was a “crisis” presidency in the last decade, it was that of Joe Biden.
Crisis #5: The threats of Communist China and Radical Islam
This one is very real. The Red Chinese have a 100-year plan to take over the world. They’re patient. They want to invade Taiwan, and maybe they will – and then what? The Democrats carp about “Russian interference,” but China is likely a bigger problem along those lines, with tentacles into our social media and our educational system and possibly even into the halls of Congress.
Video: Biden says Chinese spy balloon was not a security breach
China sent a high-altitude balloon flying over the United States in January 2023 that carried intelligence-gathering equipment. President Biden said it was no big deal.
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Meanwhile, in New York, get ready for the United States’ first radical Islamic mayor. New York joins London as a world-class city with an Islamic mayor. Remember, New York was the main city attacked by Islamic terrorists on 9-11. How quickly the voters forgot about that. Russia is a minor player compare to these two threats, both of which are quite existential.
Crisis #4: Colleges, Universities, and Culture Rot
College campuses are where American culture goes to die. President Trump has famously had feuds with Harvard and Columbia. These and other campuses are springboards for the new, left-wing-approved racism of antisemitism. Colleges are festering with progressive professors who hate America, and who hate our system of capitalism. What we used to call “multi-culturalism,” and now call “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” is the new racist trope that America is split into the “oppressed” and the “oppressors.”
Students often graduate with huge student loan debt and with an indoctrination that America is a terrible country, born in the original sin of slavery. We used to have something called the Melting Pot, out of which, came a blended culture that was born of the best aspects of many lands. E Pluribus Unum is still on our coins, but we don’t really practice that anymore.
Our colleges and universities are badly broken, but who will fix them?
Crisis #3: The Breakup of the Traditional Family
The traditional family consists of a mother (female), a father (male) as role models for children, and probably a dog or a cat. Boys learn how to be men from their dads and what a woman is from their moms. Girls have a mom as a role model but see their dads as a strong protector of house and home. It worked that way for 10,000 years.
Now, we have areas in big cities such as Chicago where fathers are as rare as a complete sentence from Kamala Harris. Lots of big cities are infested with gangs, and children get caught in the crossfire, and they die. In an even somewhat-perfect world, little boys would have dads to take them to baseball games, teach them how to treat girls, and even help them with homework. That seems so quaint now.
In today’s inner city hip-hop culture, the F-word is often what young kids learn first. A family may consist of a single parent, almost always the woman, with several kids from different fathers and enabled by generous welfare programs. Some families now consist of a woman and her wife or a man and his husband – all to the detriment of the traditional family. Is this a crisis? — yes! Is it solvable? Probably not. Not unless the country decides to make men financially responsible for the children they create, and to curb or end welfare programs that make all this depravity possible.
Yes, folks, government created this problem with welfare and the left-wing idea that the traditional family is obsolete. This crisis is off the charts, mostly because Congress is too dysfunctional or too left-wing to take action.
Crisis #2: Artificial Intelligence
Maybe AI will cure cancer and solve some of the other crises. But first it’s going to plunge us into a dystopian hell where we may never know if a new artist is even a real person. Already, there are singers from the fifties up on You Tube with some pretty cool tunes you may not remember. That’s because the song, the image, and the music are all created by AI. And companies like Amazon are invariably going to replace all the jobs they can with AI, likely causing a depression if it happens too fast for new jobs to be created.
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Artificial Intelligence is that rare crisis that has many benefits, but that also comes with grave dangers. AI could render virtually all desk jobs obsolete. We already have driverless cars, and trucks and planes will be next. Robot surgeons (guided by human doctors) have been performing operations for years and as they get better at it, will we need human surgeons? AI has its good points and will make life very easy, especially for students who can use it to generate an essay in about 10 seconds.
But will it destroy our humanity? Has it already started the process? Should we stop it now before it begins to control everything?
Crisis #1: The National Debt
This crisis trumps all the others because the United States is on the verge of not being able to pay its bills. Imagine a government shutdown that is permanent. That’s what will happen when government spending and borrowing gets so out of control that all the GDP goes to pay the interest. We are now at $38,000,000,000,000 in debt. Some members of Congress recognize this, but there aren’t enough of them to make a difference.
Virtually all the Democrats and a great deal of the Republicans are in a kick-the-can mode where they have to keep their constituents happy right now in order to get reelected – and to hell with future generations. Most government shutdowns are about the Republicans trying to hold down spending and the Democrats wanting to do more of it and exert more government control over such things as student loans and healthcare.
Video: The National Debt crisis explained, but it’s much worse now than when this was posted
There is a fiscal cliff coming where we won’t be able to kick the can. At that point we become a third-world country. Congress will wake up and see it coming, but the train will be speeding down the tracks and it will not be stoppable. It will be too late. When the full faith and credit of the United States government means nothing, we will have no country. What’s the tipping point? We’re at $38 trillion in debt now. Is it $50 trillion? $100 trillion? At the rate Congress spends, we may soon know.
Note that the next category of debt will move from “trillions” to “quadrillions” and that each number in the sequence is a thousand times larger than the one before it.
The worst part about these crises is that all of them exist at the same time.
Maybe a dysfunctional Congress could fix one of these threats. Maybe two. But I doubt it. The two parties hate each other and will not work together to solve anything. Which crisis will eventually destroy us? My guess is the National Debt will weaken us and China will make its move. On the other hand, by that time, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Austin may have radical Islamic mayors. Or maybe AI will recognize these threats and save us from them. If that’s our best hope, we’re in trouble.
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The optimist in me says that maybe – just maybe – we’ll have better politicians in the pipeline some day that will see these issues and move to fix them. It’s a faint hope, but the United States of America is the best country that’s ever existed and its time isn’t up just yet.
Lynn Woolley is a Texas-based author, broadcaster, and songwriter. Follow his podcast at https://www.PlanetLogic.us. Check out his author’s page at https://www.Amazon.com/author/lynnwoolley.
Order books direct from Lynn at https://PlanetLogicPress.Square.Site.
Email Lynn at lwoolley9189@gmail.com.
If you don’t buy this book — right now — that might constitute a crisis for me. So get it done!
