About Elon’s 13 kids
This week, news broke that Elon Musk has fathered a child with an ‘influencer’ named Ashley St. Clair. The announcement wasn’t any sort of gender reveal with planes flying overhead sending out a plume of pink or blue smoke. As I’ve heard the story, news broke on X, and it had something to do with… sorry, I fell asleep. I don’t care about more lurid Elon news, but the number 13 certainly caught my eye.
Since so many roads I travel lead back to my mother, I’ll reveal that she didn’t care for the Moral Majority back in the day, and her disdain stemmed from her early experience in the Baptist church. She was an avid Democrat, and in the high days of the Moral Majority, at that time led by the tubby Baptist preacher, Jerry Falwell, she repeated the common refrain, that ‘you can’t legislate morality’ which was a standard Democrat response to the ideas put forward by Falwell.
The Free Press has a story about the decline of that organization which is now a spent force in American politics:
The phrase “moral majority” came from the organization founded in 1979 by Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell. Falwell mobilized millions of conservative evangelical Protestants to advocate what they called “traditional family values”: opposition to abortion, divorce, gay relationships, and so on. The voters Falwell inspired became so powerful that they not only helped install Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the White House but also pushed Bill Clinton to capitulate on issues like the Defense of Marriage Act, which made it federal policy to recognize marriage only between a man and a woman.
Since the Moral Majority’s heyday, though, “traditional family values” have taken a beating. Today, majorities of Americans favor same-sex marriage, identify as pro-choice, and consider divorce morally acceptable. They want decisions about having children—including abortion and in vitro fertilization—left up to parents.
So, maybe my mother would have taken heart that the Moral Majority of old has died and a new GOP, one led by Trump and his spirit animal, Musk, has been remade in a more, how shall we say, Libertarian mold.
Kids, in my experience, are a manifest good, and I love mine, though in many ways, I adopted Musk’s behavior long before there was Musk, and I am not rich. But still, my three kids are awesome, and they bring great joy to me.
For the rich and powerful, however, the libertine nature of man’s spirit doesn’t typically bode well for the republic. The sloppy habits of procreation will manifest elsewhere eventually. Witness the former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. Mark Steyn called his fate way back in 2019:
The standard gag on raffish Tories - you wouldn't trust him with your wife or your wallet - doesn't begin to do justice to Boris. He genuinely cannot answer the question how many children he has - or how many he's sired whose mothers were persuaded to ensure junior never made it out of the maternity ward. Like Trump with the pussy-grabbing tape, his supporters are said to have priced all this in - that, if a flawed vessel is the only way to reach the policy destination, so be it. But Boris in a certain sense is taking Trump to the next level - that, as the bounds of acceptable politics have become ever narrower and more constrained, only a certain size of personality can bust through them, and thus in such a world a low moral character is not faute de mieux but vital and necessary - at least if you're serious about screwing over the EU commissars. If, per America's founders, a republic presupposes virtue; whatever it is we are now presupposes a lack of it.
And so, as was predicted, Johnson made all the right noises to get the PM office at #10 Downing and left in disgrace for, among many other things, having parties during the rigid (and ineffective) Covid lockdowns. Boris Johnson is erudite and clever but unrestrained in certain key ways, and so his lack of discipline eventually caught up with him. I think this will happen with Elon, but Trump will get on unscathed, and hopefully, the US government will be a little less corrupt and in debt when it all comes tumbling down.
My mother’s disdain for the Moral Majority was, in part, rooted in her belief that many of their acolytes were, in fact, more like Elon and Boris than Falwell, and her belief was not unjustified. Jerry Falwell’s son proved to be entirely quite different from his father and has been publicly open about his and his wife’s multiple infidelities. I hope Elon’s kids and Boris’s kids are well taken care of and productive, but I’m also glad my mom loved my dad and I had both of them in my life.
The Free Press story about Elon is here, and the Mark Steyn article about Boris Johnson is here.
The Strong Gods
Burned into my memory is the time my previously mentioned mother took me with her to see Jerry Rubin speak when I was 7 years old, in 1971. She was a graduate student at the time, and Rubin was touring college campuses and promoting his Yippee movement. Rubin was a bit older than his boomer acolytes and was, in fact, the same age as my mother. My mother had delayed going to college to give birth to my sister and me, but as soon as she was able, she went to college and she was strongly attracted to the counterculture ethos of the time, as represented so well by Jerry Rubin. The counterculture was ascendant, as was the entire post-World War 2 order dominated by the United States and promoted with American power and money. The counterculture has been the prevailing mainstream culture for at least the past 30 years. And now, that time is changing. The ‘open society’ with its unquestioned tolerance has some downsides.
In a brilliant essay on his Substack, NS Lyons provides the details:
To stand in the way of any possible aspect of societal opening and individual liberation – from secularization, to the sexual revolution and LGBTQ rights, to the free movement of migrants – was to do Hitler’s work and risk facilitating fascism’s return (no matter how far removed the subject concerned from actual fascism). It was established as the open society’s only inviolable rule that, as Reno puts it, it is “forbidden to forbid.” Thus a strict new cultural orthodoxy was consolidated, in which to utter any opinion contrary to the continuous project of further opening up societies became verboten as a moral evil. Complete inclusion required rigorous exclusion. We are familiar with this dogma today as political correctness.
The counterculture has rooted everything it stands for around the idea of inclusion, which has morphed into acceptance of even the most destructive and anti-social behaviors. This was where we were going in 1971. The pot smoke and cheering for international communism were in the air then, and I remember it quite well.
So complete is this ‘forbidden to forbid’ ethos, we now have armies of homeless peeing and pooping in the streets. We will not forbid non-toilet-trained adults from taking over our sidewalks. We’ve gone from refusing to forbid gays from marrying to refusing to stop transexual men from entering the women’s locker room, putting on the female uniform (over their penis), and beating the women at a sport the transexuals completed in as men. And as a reminder, it is the Israeli Prime Minister who now can’t go to Auschwitz for fear of being arrested. We’ve not forbidden Palestinians from killing Jews or treating them as we would have in the 19th century. It is tolerated. I could play this game all day. Why all the USAID money to transexual themes around the world? Because families and traditional heterosexual courting create closed systems of loyalty and kinship. So, that must be resisted. It’s simple.
As the family unit is being dissolved, the democratically elected government must be rendered a shell over the institutions that exercise real power. Lyons continues:
Meanwhile, the development of the open society consensus went hand-in-hand with the universal growth of the managerial state and its occlusion of democratic self-governance. There was a very direct and deliberate connection. As Carl Schmitt noted early in the twentieth century, an “elemental impulse” of liberalism is “neutralization” and “depoliticization” of the political – that is, the attempt to remove all fundamental contention from politics out of fear of conflict, shrinking “politics” to mere managerial administration. This excising of the political from politics was at the heart of the post-war project’s structural aims. Just as Schmitt had predicted, the goal became to achieve perpetual peace through an “age of technicity,” in which politics would be reduced to the safer, more predictable movements of a machine through the empowerment of supposedly-neutral mechanisms like bureaucratic processes, legal judgements, and expert technocratic commissions.
Actual public contention over genuinely political questions, especially by the dangerously fascism-prone democratic masses, was in contrast now judged to be too dangerous to permit. The post-war establishment of the open society dreamed instead of achieving governance via scientific management, of transforming the political sphere into “a social technology… whose results can be tested by social engineering,” as Popper put it. The operation of this machine could then be limited to a cadre of carefully selected and educated “institutional technologists,” in Popper’s phrasing.
Thus the great expansion of our modern managerial regimes, including the American “deep state” that the Trump administration and Elon Musk are now trying to dismantle. Characterized by vast permanent administrative states of unaccountable bureaucracies, such regimes are run by an oligarchic elite class of technocrats schooled in social engineering, dissimulation, false compassion, the manipulation of allegedly-neutral processes, and a litigious ethos of risk-avoidance. The obsessive management of public opinion through propaganda and censorship also became an especially key priority in such regimes, with the objective being both to constrain democratic outcomes (to defend “democracy” against the masses) and to generally suppress serious public discussion of contentious yet fundamental political issues (such as mass migration policies) in an effort to prevent civil strife.
This would explain why we can vote for whoever we want, but the fundamental characteristics of the government don’t change. From Bill Clinton to George W Bush to Barack Obama, what changed? That’s 21 years of governance, with changes to tax rates, a war or two here and there, and some shuffling around of Congress, but the consensus of the post-Cold War order was unchanged because the institutions with power didn’t change and the source of the people who manned those institutions didn’t change either. You can have any color government you want as long as it’s Harvard or Yale.
So, why didn’t this work? How did ‘Billy Jack’, another cultural moment I experienced in 1971, go from being a left-wing ass-kicking hero to a historical document about the redneck townies and heroic Indians? Why won’t we celebrate the trans? Why are cities run by black mayors not a triumph of inclusive prosperity? Why are there armies of homeless zombies on our streets? Why have we lost hundreds of thousands of healthy Americans to fentanyl? Why have marriage rates fallen as well as the average life span? Why are our borders overrun? Why are chronic diseases on the rise? Why are girls entering puberty half a decade earlier? Why are doctors pushing pills for everything? Why are there fewer shop classes for boys? Why are sperm counts dropping? Why did rich America have the highest level of COVID deaths?
It’s the results, stupid. Lyons again:
Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management. Unsurprisingly, this led to nation-states and a broader civilization that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. In short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world.
The strong gods are returning, according to Lyons, because of the manifest failure of the weaker, open society, globalist gods. The weak gods have stopped working.
However, does this matter? Will every country still be there to hear of the strong gods and their return? I think the United States has some incredibly tough days ahead, but for most of Europe, including Britain, darkness has fallen.
The Weak Gods
At Unherd, Aris Roussinos thinks the British are a more exhausted power than they’ve ever been, and what they think about the world is completely irrelevant. The return of the strong gods is too late for the Brits. The Americans aren’t that into the ‘special relationship’ with the British because, well, there isn’t just that much to relate to, and we don’t want to carry the British corpse around.
I don’t know what Roussinos thinks of the strong gods, but his assessment of Britain, post-Boris Johnson and his kids, is clear enough:
Westminster’s chaotic reaction to Washington’s abrupt, if long-telegraphed, about-turn on the Ukraine war and European security reveals that our rulers are belatedly discovering the cost of inhabiting a dreamworld. This is a far graver crisis than Suez, in which Britain was forcefully shown that, rather than being an equal partner in global affairs, it was merely a subordinate client. Today’s events, proceeding so rapidly that almost any commentary is immediately out of date, shows we are not even that. I cannot think of a British government in my lifetime more hostage to events outside of its control. In the sudden loss of decades-long defense assumptions, it is a crisis closer to that of 1940 than 1956.
The 1956 crisis he’s referring to is the British debacle where they and the French decided to invade Egypt and retain control of the Suez Canal against the wishes of the Egyptian strongman Gamal Nassar. Nassar wasn’t interested in weak gods. The effort failed for a variety of reasons, but mainly, it was because the British did not have the troops, money, or American backing to make it succeed. The effort was a tiny kitten meow that followed the long bellowing of the British lion. The lion showed again briefly in the Falkland War when Prime Minister Thatcher determined to retain a few tiny islands in the South Atlantic from Argentinian depredation. But that was well over 40 years ago, and Britain has changed even more, none of which bodes well for a strong British military. Shocked by the idea that the Americans won’t be there, the British are stating that they will send troops to Ukraine, which is preposterous.
The war in Ukraine is one of industrial capacity and manpower, both of which, through decades of political failure, Britain now entirely lacks. Even if the Army entirely reconfigures itself for this new task, devoting all its resources to the effort, it will not be ready for three to five years. Even then, that single task is all it would be able to do: patrolling the ceasefire lines of eastern Ukraine will mean withdrawal from the deterrence effort in Estonia, and the absence of a strategic reserve for an emergency. In any case, Starmer’s prevarication, even now, over raising defense spending to 2.5% of GDP before 2030 puts even this Lilliputian deployment beyond reach.
So all this week’s drama was just another exercise in fantasy defense policy. As one observer has correctly noted, the mooted deployment would not be a peacekeeping mission, traditionally understood as the imposition of forces by a greater power between two weaker warring sides which have agreed to disengage. In reality, it would be a deterrent effort which, overmatched by both hostile Russian forces and our Ukrainian allies, entirely lacks the ability to deter: a vulnerable tripwire that summons no response. The United States has already firmly stated that any European forces in Ukraine will not be a Nato mission, and will not be granted US support; Russia has warned that in negotiating a peace deal with Washington, it will not accept troops from any Nato country in Ukraine. In proposing a British mission against Russia’s will, without US backing, Starmer is pledging Kyiv something that is not in his power to offer. It is akin to his recent promise to Ukraine of a century-long security pact. Who can say that Ukraine will still exist in 100 years? Who can say that the United Kingdom will? Short of hard power, Britain can only offer dream policies, so abstract and unmoored from reality as to be meaningless. Whatever Britain may finally be able to offer at the end of the decade, if hard decisions are made now, will happen either with the joint approval of Washington and Moscow — or not at all. The hard truth is that, without American backing, Britain has now run out of road in supporting Ukraine’s war effort.
Ouch. So, the Brits are functionally defenseless. Good thing that they have a lot of territory between them and any potential foes. And they still have the English Channel. But, since the British and much of the American press carries on about neo-Nazis, what if there was a real danger? Could, under any circumstance, the British summon the strong gods of war, and mount a defense?
It is impossible, therefore, to take seriously Labour MPs like Paulette Hamilton, until now best known for mulling an armed black uprising against the British state, urging conscription of Britain’s “disengaged youth” to defend Ukraine’s borders. Like 20th-century mass democracy, the ability of a country to wage total war through mass mobilization is the product of a society which has spent decades, or centuries, ironing out internal differences, and building a sense of common identity. Like Hamilton, the voices now trying to summon up a martial spirit among their young are precisely the ones who have eroded this same common identity: something they achieved in a single generation. Their frantic exhortations now prove they do not even understand the new and fractured country they have so effectively created. In the same week the Government attempted to reignite residual patriotism over Ukraine, both Dominic Cummings and a King’s College London professor mused on the likelihood of serious civil conflict in Britain within a decade. One may dispute the specifics, but the fact the issue can credibly be raised at all highlights the dangerous internal divisions preventing Britain from now engaging in a major war — at least with any chance of success.
After all, the Army’s prime recruiting grounds, the post-industrial cities of northern England, were just last summer the hotbed of violent revolt against the British state: it is doubtful that the same young men will fight to preserve the current dispensation. The state, in its current form, does not command the loyalty to persuade young men to go to war. Nor does it have the power to compel them: any such attempt would look more like the Irish conscription crisis of 1918 than the mass mobilization of 1939. The top-down party political and diplomatic trends driving Britain deeper into involvement in Ukraine are now at dangerous odds with the growing bottom-up disenchantment with the existing Westminster system. Britain’s internal dysfunction not only hollows out the country’s will to fight; it is also an easy internal vulnerability for Russia to exploit, to bend Westminster to its will — or indeed, for Washington’s new revisionist regime to do the same. All told, it is difficult to imagine Britain entering a conflict for which it is entirely unprepared, led by a government which is overwhelmingly despised, and exiting with its unloved political system still intact.
So, that means no, the British can’t raise an army from its current crop of youth. British society has raised their kids to hate the system, and they are now hopelessly fractured. The public voted to leave Europe, and at some point, may well leave themselves and no longer be united. Or events may overtake the country before then, when the larger cities break down into warring ethnic camps. There is a lot more United about the United States than there is a United to the United Kingdom. The British have categorically failed to integrate like the Americans or to develop a true entrepreneur class. Software isn’t a British thing, and neither is any other of the critical businesses of the future. The British aren’t even making culture as well as they used to. Is anyone there really taking this seriously? Is there a plan for national renewal? Is there a British Trump to be found?
It is much of a muchness with the European leaders sitting around a table in Paris, like a spouse refusing to accept that their marriage is over: we’ll change, they promise, we’ll get in shape and commit more to the relationship. But Washington has moved on, eyeing more attractive partners. For the Americans, Russia is a serious power with which they can deal, if not as equals, then with a level of respect that Europe does not deserve. Had Europe not shuttered its industrial capacity, had it seriously rearmed in 2022, its leaders would be in a position to offer Ukraine security guarantees now. That Europe chose Estonia’s Kaja Kallas, former prime minister of a country whose bellicose rhetoric against Russia was backed by a population the size of Birmingham, as its foreign policy chief reveals the continent’s preference for high-sounding rhetoric over action, stern words concealing empty armories. Less than a year ago, Kallas was engaging in public fantasies of carving up Russia into weak ethnic statelets; now she’s begging Washington for a place at the table to decide Europe’s future. It is our fate to be ruled by unserious people, and to suffer in consequence.
And so, they beat on, boats against the tide, endlessly repeating, as they say. It would take a serious cultural change to manage a turnaround, and there are no leaders who could undertake this effort. Plenty of Americans have come to view Europe as a lost cause and are ready to move on. America used to be a European-derived majority of people, but no more. Increasingly, unless the comedic chatter about a 51st state gets real, there isn’t much for them to do.
Because its American patron has lost interest, Ukraine has lost the war, turning a grindingly slow collapse into a sudden hard peace. The commentary from Westminster, raw with shock and genuine disbelief, is the product of a political class which has until now happily enjoyed a parallel reality of its own construction, where Western resolve was firm and Russia was always a few short months from collapse.
There is a lesson here, if they are willing to learn it. If all this sound and fury results in Europe finally being able to defend itself and the interests of its people, engaging with the hard world of reality, then it will all have been for the good. Our leaders may either accept that the world they live in has vanished, as swiftly and irretrievably as a comforting dream, and control their descent into the new order. Or they may continue their reverie, only to risk sudden, total collapse.
If the dreams of a nation collapse in the woods, and no one was around to hear it, did it even make a sound?
All Hail the Strong Gods
Switching back to Lyons, the answer is no. Some nations aren’t going to make it.
Now the strong gods are nonetheless being haphazardly called back into the world as the vitalistic neo-romanticism of our revolutionary moment of reformation tears down the decaying walls and guard towers of the open society. Their return brings real risks, or course – although the return of risk is kind of the point. The thing about strong gods is that they’re strong, meaning they can be fearsome and dangerous; which is precisely why they also have the strength to protect and defend. It remains an open question whether this necessary renewal of strength and vitality can be reintegrated harmoniously into our societies, or whether our world will again be plunged into a time of significantly greater strife, danger, and war.
But we no longer have much of a choice in the matter; the strong gods’ restoration has become inevitable, one way or another. We’re living in a whole new century now. The Long Twentieth Century has run its course, the world it bequeathed to us in the West having proved a wholly unsustainable mix of atomization, listlessness, self-abnegation, and petty impersonal tyranny. Our societies will either accept the offer of revitalization or fade out of existence, to be replaced by other stronger, more grounded and cohesive cultures.
The strong gods were left behind because of the destruction that vivid nationalism and faith brought forward, but there is no guarantee that a return will bring back these evils. Given the changed circumstances around the world, I’m of the mind that war is less likely because there are fewer people to spare and less willing combatants. Maybe an era of the weak gods was a necessary deterrent.
But a strong god has everything that I always say will ‘work.’ It’s a bummer to live in a world of weak gods when you long for the certainties that the strong gods offer. What works is family. My parents and my children have never let me down. I long for the moral guidance of a strong faith. I’m a man, and I like acting like it. I like fights and women. Comedy works, as it is good to laugh. Oil and gas work because it is energy-dense and highly valuable. Eating meat works, and cooking with gas is best. The USA still works, and the strong gods will do well there.
Lyons and The Upheaval are here, and the Unherd piece about the death of the British military is here.
Music
The Houston Rodeo starts in a few more days, and I will be going to see Jon Pardi (again) this year. He’s a regular and one of my favorites. Mr. Pardi is from rural California, which kind of makes him a Texan, at least that’s my logic. Of course, I’m from Florida, and so no one should take my guidance on what’s authentically Texan. I didn’t grow up around country music and thought it was the hillbilly noise of my grandparents. By the time I moved to Texas, and country music became inescapable, I had some preferred country artists like Jon Pardi and Thomas Rhett. I knew about the old timers who said that these new guys didn’t make ‘real’ country music, not good country like Loretta Lynn and Waylon Jennings and such, but I hadn’t really known enough about the genre to have an opinion about old versus new. I do now, and I think that much of the new country is so good, so true, so authentic, so well made, that it’s hard to imagine that this isn’t ‘real.’
One such song is Jon Pardi’s ‘She Ain’t In It’ which is a beautiful poem of a song where the term ‘she ain’t in it” changes meaning as the song moves along. At first, the perspective is from a man who’s obviously heartbroken when he gets a call from a friend who wants to hang out, and the man agrees to go places as long as she ain’t in those places. Seeing her, he knows, will cause him pain. As the song moves along, however, the man admits that no matter how long he avoids her, his life won’t be the same because of her absence, not her presence. The feeling is not just pain; it’s a deep, irreconcilable loss.
If the music gets any more real than this, I’m not ready to hear it.