I am sitting in Cambridge, England, at Cambridge University outside King’s College Chapel on Sunday morning. I was here to take part in a panel discussion at the Cambridge University Union, the Cambridge Union, an intimidating place. All the portraits of everybody you’ve ever heard of that’s debated there or been part of conversations there were on the wall when I walked in, and we had a long talk about the dysfunction of our present era. I was a panelist, and I was talking about Christian nationalism.
But what I want to talk about today is what a shame it is that fools like JD Vance want to detach us from Europe.
I am a fan of Western civilization, and that’s warts and all, yes, sins and all, because Western civilization has given us the gift that comes from the teaching of Christ on inclusivity, having a place for the least of these. And those were not powerful and not rich, sort of the opposite of JD Vance, the opposite of these power seekers, the opposite of Donald Trump, the opposite of Tucker Carlson, the opposite of Peter Thiel, the opposite of the wickedness of Elon Musk as he allows Grok to strip clothes off and fake AI stuff about poor teenage girls with revenge porn, making them look naked, and all these things he laughs about and won’t regulate.
One of the things the Europeans are doing is trying to regulate people like Grok and Elon Musk. And of course they’re angry. The tech bros, these tech trillionaires, are angry because they don’t want regulation. They don’t want anything that curbs their power over you and me.
And what I love about Western civilization is we used to have an idea of the rule of law that would curb people like this, but no longer. There’s no rule of law when the president of the United States rips down the East Wing without consulting anyone. There’s no rule of law when he goes to war without consulting Congress. There’s no rule of law when he gets ready to build a fascist triumphal arch 240 feet high in Washington to overshadow all the other monuments, including the monuments that have become part of our heritage.
And so we’re in a tough spot. And what I’d like to talk about today is the fact that in my hotel room, a wonderful hotel, by the way, here in Cambridge, a little place that I’d come back to again, was the book Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. It’s a wonderful old hardback edition. And the story was playing in the men’s room instead of music. I mean, what kind of a good hotel does that? It made me so happy to be in a place where literature was taken seriously while I’m doing something at Cambridge University.
And the fact of the matter is, when I look at the inheritance of Western culture, the literature, whether it’s Shakespeare or Kenneth Grahame or Wind in the Willows or Winnie-the-Pooh or any of these things, I don’t take them for granted.
Now, interestingly enough, yesterday my niece, who runs a wonderful school here, took me to tea. And the two women who were sitting next to us were two beautiful young women from Somalia who were studying here at Cambridge, whose parents came as refugees from the Somali civil war, but they were taken in by the United Kingdom. They’re exactly the sort of people that Stephen Miller thinks should be taken out, separated from their family, or shot in the face, as he did with a young mother. Yes, I said he did it because it’s his program of intimidation of anybody who even protests as an American citizen against the persecution of minorities and immigrants, separation of children, all the rest.
How ironic that it is this horrible, hate-filled person who also comes from a Jewish tradition that, in the law of the Torah itself, calls for kindness and inclusion of the stranger.
What could be worse than someone who purports to come from a Jewish tradition who is a fascist, who works for the same sort of racist program the Nazis did? From the time, by the way, Stephen Miller was a teenager, he was a world-class jerk. This cruel man would get no job in any administration, Republican or Democrat, right-wing, center, or left-wing, except in the Donald Trump administration, the people hired to mismanage the war, claim it was won in Iran when we’ve done nothing there except get the Strait of Hormuz shut.
And so when I say what a tragedy it is that we’re talking about getting out of NATO, what a tragedy it is that we are doing things in this crazy situation with Donald Trump, what a tragedy it is that we’ve forgotten the rule of law, what a tragedy it is that we’ve forgotten our democratic tradition that goes back into the roots of the British parliamentary system, what a tragedy to think that we’re delinking from Europe, from our fellow nations who belong to our tragically flawed but nevertheless treasured Western civilization.
Now, you know, one of the things I watch all the time is The Rest Is History, which is this podcast with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. And Dominic Sandbrook now, who’s also a journalist and a historian like Tom Holland, who, by the way, has written fantastic books on Roman history and fantastic books on his understanding of all the rights of Western civilization coming from the teachings of Jesus Christ, even though Tom is not a Christian in the sense of being a believer. But Dominic, his partner, has started a program with his producer, Tabby, and it’s their book club, and they’ve done wonderful books. They’ve done Orwell’s 1984 and a bunch of other books. And I want them to make sure not to forget to do Wind in the Willows.
You know, they’ve done beautiful stuff on Tolkien as well as other authors. But I love Kenneth Grahame, and this is a nice hardback edition. And I was listening to it this morning in the room with my wife, and we were having such fun being in Cambridge and listening to Wind in the Willows. It seemed very appropriate.
But whether it’s children’s literature or whether it is Shakespeare or whether it is 1984 and the warning Orwell gave us, Trump and all these other people who seem to be fulfilling his idea of the surveillance state and Big Brother and all the rest of it, let’s fight for actual Western civilization, not Stephen Miller’s white Christian nationalist version.
How weird that one of the heroes of Christian nationalism is an angry Jewish man who has denied his own faith of acceptance that’s taught in the Torah. What an irony that we have Elon Musk and Peter Thiel funding JD Vance and putting him in office, trying to groom him to be the next president of the United States. He called Trump the next Hitler and then backed up and became his vice president. He said we should never go into stupid foreign wars, and now he’s the one supposedly negotiating peace deals with the Iranians, having said, oh yes, it’s a good war.
And Pete Hegseth, this bumptious fool, this chest-pounding braggart, this loser, this divorced philanderer, this man who impregnates women he’s not married to and then dumps his wife and then runs off with them, calling us back to Christian nationalist values. And then this stupid church that he’s part of, where he goes in and prays in the Pentagon, not recognizing that the beauty and strength of our country is the multicultural strength of a country that’s embraced all peoples, including, by the way, the immigrants who came over who were the Jews, who were Stephen Miller’s parents and family, who have all stood up against him and said he’s a fool and betraying his tradition.
That’s part of my tradition, one where we can say anything we want and we’re not stopped in airports and frisked by security guards who want to see our papers. That’s something right out of a 1930s or 40s movie about the Nazis. May we see your papers. What is this?
Push back, resist, stop them.
And from Cambridge, England, I just say I love Western civilization. Defend it by resisting Trump. Defend it by telling JD Vance to go bag his head. Resist it by telling Stephen Miller that he’s a Nazi fool and a mean cat. Resist it by laughing at Pete Hegseth and his bumptious, chest-pounding stupidity, when so far he’s done everything in his power to help us lose that war, including the tragedy of saying at one point and using the f word to denounce the Persians and say, we’re going to destroy what’s left of a Persian Empire, to which we, by the way, are a footnote in the West. They are an ancient civilization.
I am so sick of these idiots. Are you tired of them?
