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It’s been a big week for indefatigable defenders of western culture everywhere. On the hallowed stones of the “digital town square”, X, Elon Musk once again bemoaned the sad demise of Grand Britannia by sharing an AI-generated image of a lion — the kind that makes you less worried about the imminent takeover of AI — wrapped in a union jack with a little blonde girl crying over it saying “Please wake up!”
In Paris, Britain’s very own, newly God-fearing Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — aka multiple criminally convicted far-right activist Tommy Robinson — went around the French capital saying things like “you what bruv?”, being shocked by the presence of “large groups of Algerian men” selling cigarettes, and wondering why “none of them speak English”. His conclusion? “I noticed the city of love is long gone”. Well you can’t argue with that.
And in Atlanta, a 55-year-old man in denim cut-offs and shoes with no socks (his name is Kid Rock; Donald Trump thinks he’s “amazing”) rapped “for the hookers all trickin’ out in Hollywood and for my hoods of the world misunderstood”, while a young woman sang her hit song “I Hope”, with the positively hymn-like refrain “I hope she cheats like you did on me” at an event dedicated to “faith, family and freedom”. This was the “all-American halftime show” put on by Turning Point USA, a rightwing non-profit founded by the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which presented itself as an alternative to the main Super Bowl halftime show headed up by Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny. “He’s said he’s having a dance party . . . and singing in Spanish?” Kid Rock said in a statement announcing the event. “Cool. We plan to play great songs for folks who love America.”
You might have thought that Trump — who called the main show an “affront to the Greatness of America” that “doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence” — would have watched the Kid Rock version, but footage from inside his annual party near Mar-a-Lago suggests otherwise. I attended Trump’s Super Bowl party myself two years ago and was not particularly struck by the success, creativity or excellence on display there. The decorations were gaudy; there were vast quantities of the kind of “toxic” junk food that Trump’s health secretary wants to ban; and each table was decorated with mini American footballs whose underside read “MADE IN CHINA”.
And yet this is the man who tells us at Davos that “we have to defend [American-European] culture” and “rediscover the spirit that lifted the west from the depths of the dark ages”. These kinds of highfalutin proclamations have become a defining motif of the Trump 2.0 era. “For a country to survive, there has to be a common culture . . . Nobody dies to defend a ‘multicultural economic zone’! American culture, with its English-Scotts-Irish origin, is great and worth fighting for,” a prominent South African-born tech CEO with Canadian roots and a penchant for posting bad AI posted on X.
I too believe there are large parts of western culture worth preserving and celebrating, and that we are often too shy about saying that. One of my favourite things about the cities I grew up in — London and Paris — is and always has been their diversity, though I am also sympathetic to Thomas Sowell’s critique of multiculturalism: “you can praise any culture in the world except western culture, and you cannot blame any culture in the world except western culture.”
But very often the kinds of grand claims that are made about saving the culture are nothing more than thinly veiled racism and xenophobia. Trump’s Davos comments came amid more negative remarks about Somalis. Musk’s framing of the basis for American culture being English-Scots-Irish, as if the contributions of other groups didn’t count, is both offensive and deeply ignorant. Sowell himself, a forerunner to Musk’s arguments whom he has often praised, happens to come from one of them.
What is the western culture that all these people think they are preserving? Do they understand that culture evolves? Do they know where pop music came from? Are we really going to take our cultural cues from a man who has been listening to the same songs and wearing the same suits since the 1980s and a man whose idea of good design is the Cybertruck?
Musk likes to cloak himself in literary authority by quoting George Orwell, but it’s hard to believe he’s actually read his books — he might then realise the love is unlikely to have been mutual. We should all seek to preserve and develop the best bits of western culture. The idea that we must rely on the likes of Yaxley-Lennon, Trump and Kid Rock to do this for us is at best laughable; at worst dangerous.
jemima.kelly@ft.com
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