On being "America brained"

Plus new interviews, and my writing on Elon Musk, Cecil Rhodes, and OnlyFans

Maiden Mother Matriarch is sponsored by Qualia.

A few updates from me:

Earlier this month I made my debut in The New York Times with a crowd-pleaser: a (partial) defence of Elon Musk.

For better or worse, Elon Musk is a visionary. I have no doubt that he’s volatile and reckless, but those who dismiss him as a fraud or an idiot have not been paying close attention. Yes, his time meddling with the federal government has come to an end. And yes, perhaps his foray into politics was, in part, a disappointment to him. But Mr. Musk’s vision goes well beyond Washington. He has always been clear on this point and continues to tell anyone who will listen. “Eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun,” he told Fox News last month. “The sun is gradually expanding, and so we do at some point need to be a multiplanet civilization, because Earth will be incinerated.”

This is why, 23 years ago, Mr. Musk resolved to go to Mars — his first step toward interstellar colonization. He says he wants to die there (“just not on impact”). He also says that space exploration will lead to a process of mass psychological renewal. “The United States,” he says, “is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. This is a land of adventurers.” His goal is to save humanity not only from the future loss of our planet but also from our own lethargy and cowardice. If he succeeds in this project, then Mr. Musk’s time in Washington will be just a minor detail in the histories written about him.

Interestingly, although lots of readers were incensed by the nice things I wrote about Musk, no one seemed to care about the nice things I also wrote about Cecil Rhodes (I thought that was the controversial bit???)

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Then, in The Spectator, I argued that OnlyFans is a supernormal stimulus, not just for men, but also for women:

The online super stimulus that really knocks women sideways is not the consumption of sexual content, but the production of it. Women want to be beautiful as fiercely and obsessively as men want to get laid. I’m generalising, of course, but if you’re in any doubt about the strength of this kind of female desire, look at the size of the cosmetics and fashion industries.

Female vanity is not new, and nor is it surprising. Beauty profoundly affects how you’re treated in many areas of life. People who are conventionally unattractive suffer all kinds of adversity: they are more often passed over for promotion and more likely to struggle to make friends. Being ugly is not a trivial misfortune – which means, conversely, that becoming more beautiful can radically improve a person’s life. No wonder so many women are obsessed with achieving the perfect glow-up.

And bear in mind that silvered glass mirrors did not become widely available until the 1830s. Before then, most people would go their entire lives without seeing a clear image of themselves. They would see blurry images in water or other partially reflective surfaces, and they would know from the responses of other people whether or not they were beautiful. But they could not minutely examine their appearances in the way that a mirror or a photograph permits, and nor could they elicit worldwide admiration in the way that the internet permits.

I’ve also given a few interviews recently – for Radio New Zealand, the Table Talk podcast, and Glen Scrivener’s podcast (the full episode will be released soon, in the meantime here’s a clip).

And finally, Joshua Treviño – author of this superb essay on England that I’ve previously recommended to MMM readers – passed on the text of a speech delivered by former Acting U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf in Budapest on 30th May. I liked it so much that I thought I’d share it with you all. Emphasis added.

Greetings and thank you for the invitation to be here this afternoon.

The return of Donald J. Trump to the American Presidency is one of the most consequential events in the past half-century of American history — and I would argue one of the most important in Western history, as I will explain.

One of the terms you’ll hear when talking with our British friends is “America brained.” It means a fixation on American interpretations, American frameworks, and American solutions in all things, even if they don’t necessarily make sense for the actual country at hand. Of course, being “America brained” doesn’t actually mean a fixation on the whole corpus of American thought — it really signifies a fixation on the leftist and globalist currents in American civics. This is how we get absurdities like European students being indoctrinated on U.S. critical-race theory … it is how we get the U.K. trying and failing to mimic American federalism, to its own detriment … and it is how we get European elites allowing in floods of migrants with little to no cultural or civic compatibility to their host societies. This last is a consequence of ideas nurtured on the American left, to the effect that the nation doesn’t really exist, is infinitely expansible, does not require generations of prior effort and inculcation, and moreover has no moral right to define itself.

The price for this last conceit is paid in little girls knifed to death in Southport, the grotesque arrests of British citizens who exercise their rights to free speech, the beheading of a French schoolteacher, stabbings at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, a car attack in Munich, the sexual assaults of over one thousand women in Cologne in a single night, the mass rapes of uncounted English girls in Rotherham, and the return of deadly anti-Semitism to Europe for the first time since the Third Reich.

Europe’s tottering elites, unable to defend the very idea of their own nations and histories, thereby leave their peoples exposed to death and mayhem more commonly associated with wartime. They simply do not understand the threats felt with great immediacy by their own citizenry. No one in Marseilles locks their doors at night for fear of the Russian army. No one in Munich is wary in marketplaces because they’re afraid of the Alternative für Deutschland. No one in Nottingham avoids certain neighborhoods because they worry about climate change. All these things have a singular cause, and the elites who caused it will not name it — and they’ll jail their fellow citizens who do.

Because these same elites are formed by, and fixated upon, an upper-tier trans-Atlantic cohort, they think themselves virtuous by the lights of the American left that is their true locus of allegiance.

This is why this past February’s address of our Vice President at the Munich Security Conference came as such a shock to the European elites: they rarely if ever bother to liaise with, and still less to understand, the American right, by which I mean the American majority, considering it beneath them and contrary to their ideals.

Of course, they don’t tend to pay attention to their own national majorities either.

So, I am here today, as an American and a patriot, to urge you, our European friends, to stop being “America brained,” and to look instead to the natural and proper objects of politics as the West has understood them since Aristotle first wrote on the topic almost twenty-five centuries ago:

· The preservation of the nation.

· The defense of history and heritage.

· The right to define your own political community.

· The securing of your faith, your families, and your communities.

Or to put it differently — if you are going to be “America brained,” pay attention to the American majority that returned President Donald J. Trump to office, specifically because contrary to what you hear, he endorses all these things. His understanding of the political diverges radically from that of the politicians, because it is rooted not in an elite niche that is unmoored from its own nation and society, but in the historical and enduring understanding of what the nation is, and what its governance is for.

For proof, you need look no further than what he’s done — on migration, on reorientation of governance toward the national interest, and on trade — in the mere one hundred thirty days since his Second Inaugural to today. They include:

· Restarting construction of the Southern border wall

· Kickstarting the largest mass deportation operation in history

· Declaring the Mexican cartels foreign terrorist organizations, or FTOs

· Ending the Biden Administration’s illegal parole programs and abuses of our immigration system

· Cracked down on student visa fraud

· Signed the Laken Riley Act, requiring detention for criminal illegal aliens

· Successfully used tariffs as leverage for bilateral agreements

· Declared a national emergency to combat the threat of deadly fentanyl

The point here is not to deliver a laundry list. President Trump’s achievements are extraordinary, and perhaps most extraordinary is that he’s just at the beginning. Come January 2029, what I’ve just shared with you will be remembered as merely a good start. For us as Americans, we are glad and grateful for it, and the nation is relieved to be under Presidential stewardship that genuinely values them as such, not as objects for ideological transformation, but as citizens deserving a strong defense.

For you, our European friends, I would suggest — with all humility, as you are the proper arbiters of your own interest — that the timeless Western understanding of the political is just as applicable to you as us. In fact, it may be moreso: after all, every principle to which we appeal was conceived and articulated within the European inheritance. Europe is the cradle of liberty. Europe is the bulwark of Christianity. Europe is the incubator of democracy and rights. Europe is the pioneer of law-ordered liberty. Europe is the mother of the freedom of conscience.

And if “Europe” is technically against all those things now, I would propose that it is because it is under the rule of an alien class that is un-European in its spirit and intent. You can fix that too.

Perhaps, then, this is what an America — constituted and formed two hundred fifty years ago next year — that was the fulfillment of a European inheritance and idea can give back to this Continent and its people. Churchill once expressed the hope that “in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, [would step] forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.” We did it then, in war. Now, in peace, we can offer you this — the best of yourselves. Take it. Stand up. Your nations are yours and they always were. What remains is to assert it: and in this, the Americans are what we have always been … not just your descendants, but your friends.

Thank you and God Bless.