Landes, a medievalist and historian of apocalyptic movements, takes us through the first years of the third millennium (2000-2003), documenting how a radical inability of Westerners to understand the medieval mentality that drove Global Jihad prompted a series of disastrous misinterpretations and misguided reactions that have shaped our so-far unhappy century. These misinterpretations in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2005, contributed fundamentally to the ever-worsening moral and empirical disorientations of our information elites (journalists, academics, pundits). So while journalists reported Palestinian war propaganda as news (lethal journalism), they were also reporting Jihadi war propaganda as news (own-goal war journalism). These radical disorientations have created our current dilemma of pervasive information distrust, deep splits within the voting public in most democracies, the politicization of science, and the inability of Western elites to defend their civilization, and instead, to stand down before an invasion.

Drawing on the dynamics of apocalyptic movements, Landes looks at the turn of the millennium in terms of a radical mismatch between two millennial styles, an Islamist pre-modern (Caliphators) and a Western post-modern (Woke). Due to a striking cognitive failure, Westerners could neither see nor discuss the foe they faced, and repeatedly, convinced they were bending the arc of history towards justice, took sharp wrong turns.