Twitter is Rotting the Right's Brain

I got online this weekend and so much of the conversation was about Europe and the Islamification of Europe. Until the college football playoff rankings came out, giving people something else to argue about, it was all about Europe.

The President released the new National Security Strategy, and it is deeply critical of Europe. Pete Hegseth, around the same time, gave a speech favoring “hard-nosed realism” criticizing Europe.

To be sure, the European elite deserve a lot of criticism. Europe is where business goes to die. The European Union stifles innovation, favors nanny-state bureaucracy, and, most bothersome, though least talked about by the American ruling class, including Trump, is that European laws are written and the spirit of those laws is given more weight than the law.

This may be hard for you to grasp, but if an American company complies with the letter of a European law, but is judged by bureaucrats to be violating the spirit of the law, the company can be punished.

Europe is absurd. It is also a strategic partner.

The majority of the angst, however, comes over immigration and the belief that the Islamization of Europe is upon us. The reality is that foreigners make up less than 13% of Germany, and even less in France and the United Kingdom. They just happen to be concentrated in the capitals and get a lot of attention. And the European elite treat them paternalistically, setting up security perimeters around Christmas events instead of cracking down and insisting on assimilation.

Yes, the European elite give us a lot to criticize in their handling of immigration. But also, the non-native populations are not nearly as large as one might think. Muslims make up less than eight percent of the population of Sweden, but on Twitter, you’d think they’ve taken over the country. On Twitter, the United Kingdom is overrun and on the verge of becoming an Islamic nation.

In reality, there are absolutely problems, often dismissed by the European elite who prefer to crack down on speech, but the online community also vastly overstates the problem.

Therein lies the problem with the Trump Administration.

The Biden Administration was overrun with white upper-income progressives from the non-profit world who’d never had a real job and could not relate to the real world.

The Trump Administration is overrun with the kids from wealthy white elites who live their lives online and have concluded that Twitter is real life because that’s where they spend their time.

The Biden Administration got radicalized by the white guilt of progressives. The Trump Administration got radicalized by an online horde of white kids who have convinced themselves that if it is buzzing on Twitter it must be real.

The elites and the experts deserve a lot of blame for people distrusting them, disregarding them, and discrediting them. But we’ve traded experts trained in a field of study for experts who learned everything they know from Twitter. We’ve gone from the elite of Harvard Yard to repeat residents of a Holiday Inn Express.

And it is starting to show, less than a year into the Trump Administration.

At a larger, and more serious level, what you need to know is that the vision outlined by Trump’s national security strategy document is a return to Nixon and an abandonment of Reagan.

Reagan argued that the United States did not need to settle for detente. The Buchanan wing of the GOP, which is in its ascendancy now, long argued for Nixon’s view of a divided multi-partite world. That’s where we are. People forget Buchanan was a Kissinger-Nixon guy.

They can’t and will vigorously deny that they believe we are a nation in decline, but the Trump Administration has embraced the Twitterverse’s view of America as a nation overrun by immigrants who refuse to assimilate and an America unable to handle both the domestic and international tasks before us. Like Jimmy Carter, those around the President (not the President himself), seem to think the presidency is too big for one man and America is not up for the job.

So the Administration wants China and Russia out of the Western Hemisphere and will let those two fight over the Eastern Hemisphere. It’s a Nixonian vision that manages decline. It’s entirely based on the wit and wisdom of self-styled experts on Twitter. And it will not end well for us.

Twitter is rotting people’s brains in the White House. The President needs different advisors, or they need to block the staff from social media. It is possible to reject the neocon view of democracy for all, while also rejecting the idea that the United States should abandon its leadership of the free world.