Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that Muslim terrorists increasingly use cars and trucks as weapons of mass murder in major cities. But the good news, at least for stockholders, is that the bollard market in America is expected to nearly double in a decade.
While many sectors of the economy are struggling, bollards are going places even if no one can quite describe why that might be the case because they don’t want to run over.
The global bollard market is expected to go from $2.2 billion in 2024 to $4.2 billion in 2034, and in North America, bollards are expected to go from $570 million to $1.1 billion.
Cars are not exactly a new invention and neither are bollards so there’s no apparent reason that the bollard market should be doubling or why it should need increasingly hardened new barriers.
Take the Delta DSC550 Shallow Foundation Barricade which can pop up in 1.5 seconds and stop a 15,000 lb vehicle going 50 miles an hour. Meridian Rapid Defense Group’s mobile Archer 1200 “delivers next-generation mobile vehicle barrier technology” and comes in 8 different colors. Mifram Security, an Israeli company, is a lot clearer about why anyone would want a “lightweight modular vehicle barrier that stops heavy trucks up to 7.5 Tons” to stop terror attacks like those in London, Jerusalem, New York, and New Orleans in 2025.
New Orleans had already invested in pricey mobile bollards that cost $60,000 a set, but they weren’t properly maintained. The day after Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a Muslim convert, rammed a pickup truck into the French Quarter on New Year’s, killing 14 people, the city rushed out mobile Archer barriers. The city had intended to put up bollards that could only stop vehicles going 10 mph which any self-respecting Muslim terrorist on a rampage would certainly try to exceed.
The New Orleans Car Jihad may have been bad for the dead, the wounded, their families and tourism in New Orleans, but served as a bloody advertisement for the bollard industry.
Call it the bollard tax or, more aptly, the Islam tax which the bollards are trying to hold back.
New York City proposed to spend $50 million on 1,500 bollards back in 2018. Most of the bollards however were never installed once they did their job of making headlines. That is typical too. Like having to take off your shoes at the airport while the TSA agent gropes grandma, bollards are meant to reassure the voters and warn off terrorists through pure theater.
A lot of cities promise to put up barriers, but never do. Others put them up and then stop worrying without considering the message being sent by hiding everything behind walls.
Bollards form a kind of fragmented border wall, not so much keeping enemies out, as providing a partial cringing defense against a Muslim terrorist in a pickup truck with his foot on the gas.
The bollard industry boasts that it’s getting better all the time. The next generation of bollards will have AI and be able to react instantaneously to a speeding truck. But the AI model trained to react to a shout of “Allahu Akbar” by raising the ‘drawbridge’ has yet to be deployed. That would be as politically incorrect as blocking the mass migration of Muslim terrorists to America.
The lack of border walls leads to bollards being set up across the country and much of the world. And no matter how decorative the bollards are made, they’re still a sign of impotence.
Bollards can stop trucks, but what happens when the Muslim terrorist gets out and starts shooting at the people on the street? Bollards don’t stop IEDs, knives or anything else in the Muslim terrorist toolkit. What they do is signal that we’re hiding behind expensive barriers because we’re terrified of the terrorists. All the terrorists have to do is come up with another plan to terrorize a frightened population that dare not name the enemy let alone do anything about it.
And we can hardly put up bollards everywhere.
No matter how much money we spend or how many bollards go up, there will always be streets, squares, intersections, parks or entrances that will be ‘unbollarded’. All a Muslim terrorist in a Toyota has to do is find one and then the carnage can begin.
A set of bollards can easily cost far more than a pickup truck. Trying to ‘bollard’ even a popular square can cost tens of millions of dollars. Never mind the cost of trying to ‘bollard’ an entire city.
Using bollards is typical of an counter-terrorist defensive strategy in which we exhaust massive amounts of resources trying to harden every possible public space while the terrorists spend pennies on the dollar finding weak points in our defenses and wreak carnage anyway.
In the long run, defense is far more expensive than offense. Especially when a society is defending against an amoral and ruthless enemy operating within those same defenses.
You can try to strip search every airline passenger, bollard every street, painstakingly watch the skies, put up surveillance cameras everywhere, and still watch terrorist attacks happen anyway because terrorists only have to be lucky once while the defenders have to get it right each time.
And then when the replacement bollards don’t arrive on time, there’s carnage in the French Quarter.
Few things signal a besieged nation more than the bollard. A society that puts up barriers around its events is on the defensive. Bollards in public squares are ugly and defeatist. Bollards in front of stores make them look medieval while bollards in front of synagogues bring back the ghetto. The more we hide behind bollards, the more our enemies feel emboldened to attack us.
Bollards aren’t a deterrent. They’re an act of political cowardice by governments refusing to confront why we suddenly have to secure everything against pickup trucks going 50 mph.
We don’t have a problem of “hostile cars”, as some bollard brochures describe, but members of a hostile religion who are doing with cars what the 9/11 hijackers did with passenger planes.
The bollard industry isn’t set to double because cars suddenly became much more dangerous, but because of mass migration from the Muslim world. Bollards, like TSA searches, ubiquitous IDs and every small town police force getting MRAPs, are the price we pay for Islam.
The price will keep going up as long as the root cause of the problem keeps getting worse.
We can deal with the root cause of why we suddenly have a rash of “hostile vehicles” or we can put up more bollards to stop the cars and trucks that have suddenly developed a hatred for us.
Bollards are far from the full price of Islam. They’re barely even a down payment. If we don’t want to find out what the total bill will come to, we can stop turning our cities into ghettos like a retreating army losing a war and actually take concrete non-bollard steps to end the invasion.
Or we can all buy stock in bollard companies.
