{"id":2260,"date":"2026-08-15T04:36:38","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T04:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/?p=2260"},"modified":"2026-08-15T04:36:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T04:36:38","slug":"how-saving-western-civilization-became-the-new-maga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/?p=2260","title":{"rendered":"How Saving Western Civilization Became the New MAGA"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\t\u201cShe\u2019s a traitor to the West.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tElon Musk<\/a> posted this<\/a> on X on July 25 in response to a clip of Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The<\/em> Economist, <\/em>saying on CNBC that Musk propagates a \u201ccaricatured\u201d image of Europe as a deteriorating, unlivable hell hole. Beddoes had recently interviewed<\/a> Musk,\u00a0challenging his views on Europe, and confronting him for supporting far-right politicians and parties from Germany to the UK. Beddoes never questioned the hallmarks of liberal democracy: free and fair elections, separation of powers, equal protection under the law, or human rights. But in Musk\u2019s mind, her pushing back on his caricature of Europe as a continent colonized by immigrant invaders proved enough to make her a \u201ctraitor to the West.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe idea of \u201csaving the West\u201d isn\u2019t limited to the feverish online posting of the world\u2019s richest man. If one surveys the conservative media landscape on any given day, the call to \u201crescue Western civilization<\/a>\u201d appears ubiquitous. For example, on August 5, 2026, the day after Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan, the civilizationist discourse popped up in every corner of the American right. Podcaster Benny Johnson<\/a> called for more politicians willing to \u201cfight for Western civilization.\u201d Al Mohler<\/a>, president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, released a podcast interview titled \u201cThe Battle Western Civilization.\u201d Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, posted<\/a>: \u201cThe Democratic Party is being taken over by anti-American candidates who hate the values that underpin Western civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNoah Rothman<\/a>, senior writer at the National Review<\/em>, posted in response to a video montage of Abdul El-Sayed: \u201cThis race isn\u2019t just about tax rates, or health care, or immigration enforcement. It\u2019s about more than politics now. This is a fight over America and whether the enemies of Western civilization are right.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNone of this even touches the civilizationist outrage<\/a> many on the American right \u2014 including Musk \u2014 expressed over the casting of Black actors in Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Odyssey<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tCivilizationalist discourse isn\u2019t a new summer trend. It\u2019s surged<\/a> since Trump\u2019s second inauguration. In a July 2025 interview, Lara Trump even asked her father-in-law about his supposed nickname, the \u201cbodyguard of Western civilization.\u201d\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019ve spent the last two and a half years investigating the growing alliance among Protestant Reconstructionist Christians like Doug Wilson and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth; radical traditional Catholics like Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation and Vice President JD Vance<\/a>; and Silicon Valley technocrats like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Curtis Yarvin<\/a>. What\u2019s become clear: \u201cSaving Western civilization\u201d is now the unifying rallying cry of the American right, surpassing Trump\u2019s infamous \u201cmake America great again\u201d slogan and even the Christian nationalist mantra of taking America back for God<\/a>.\u00a0 There\u2019s a reason for this change. As I argue in my new book American Caesar<\/em><\/a>, the crusade to rescue Western civilization provides an umbrella discourse that unites tech reactionaries with traditional Catholics and extremist Protestants in a loose alliance against immigrants, non-Christians, the LGBTQ community, and anyone who criticizes the United States.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile extremist Christians and Silicon Valley technocrats often disagree <\/a>on issues related to AI, surveillance, and family, they are aligned on the idea that saving Western civilization from external threats like Muslims and migrants and internal threats like antifa, trans people, and feminists is the paramount issue of our time. Even though Elon Musk is not religious, many Christian nationalists see him as an ally in saving Western civilization from the foreign and domestic vandals they believe threaten it. By couching their shared mission in civilizational, rather than religious terms, they can forge a loose coalition against the groups they perceive as common enemies and existential threats to \u201cour way of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tAs opposed to Christian nationalism<\/a> or MAGA<\/a>, civilizationalism also provides a horizontal plane that transcends the United States, including Europe <\/a>in the effort to rescue civilization<\/a> from both attacking barbarians and domestic enemies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn many ways, the civilizationalist discourse emanating from every corner of the American right is an escalation of the Christian nationalist currents that have been center stage during the Trump era. As the scholars Yilmaz and Morieson argue<\/a>, \u201cCivilizationism is an idea which posits that the world and its peoples can be divided into several \u2018civilizations\u2019, most of them defined by religion.\u201d Western civilizationalists render \u201cWestern\u201d people as moral, rational, and outright superior to others based on their religious-cultural values. This escalates MAGA\u2019s hallmark xenophobia and Christian nationalism because civilizationalist discourse posits that \u201cnon-Westerners\u201d \u201cbelong to a foreign civilization with inferior values derived from an inferior religion.\u201d<\/a> In other words, they are inexorably less than \u201cus\u201d as a people, and therefore unassimilable. There\u2019s no room here for legal migration, pluralism, or multiculturalism. Rather, we are left with a vision akin to Samuel Huntington\u2019s clash of civilizations<\/a> model, wherein different people groups across the world hold competing values that can never be cohered. Moreover, American citizens who promote \u201canti-American,\u201d \u201canti-Christian,\u201d or \u201canti-capitalist\u201d<\/a> views are suspected of being linked to either Islamist, or communist foreign networks<\/a>. They are a foreign enemy cosplaying as real Americans. The goal of civilizationism is isolationist purity<\/a>. The strategy to achieve it? Civilizational<\/a> warfare<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThus, we arrive at a startling truth: When Christian nationalists and technocrats rally to \u201csave Western civilization,\u201d their efforts are not meant to shore up democratic institutions, reinvigorate civic norms surrounding free and fair elections, protect free speech, or defend free thought. When a Texas A&M professor<\/a> was told he couldn\u2019t teach Plato \u2014 the pre-eminent philosopher of ancient Greece and perhaps all of Western civilization (outside of Jesus) \u2014 without permission, there was no uproar. When books are banned<\/a>, the civilizationalists don\u2019t blink.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tTheir retrieval of Western virtue is not focused on the merits of Athenian democracy or the Roman Republic, much less the Enlightenment values of free choice, personal autonomy, or freedom from religious imposition and\/or censorship. In this case, saving Western civilization doesn\u2019t mean empowering We the People, it means rescuing the country from <\/em>the \u201cimmoral elites\u201d who have sold out our country to inferior foreigners; the domestic infidels who refuse to abide by the binary gender and sex norms that both technocrats like Musk and Christian nationalists like Vance and Hegseth prescribe.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIf a pure society, rather than a free one, is what they are trying to save, we are left with an important question: Who is going to do the rescuing?<\/p>\n

\n\tThere has been plenty of extremism among Christian nationalists for decades. However, what we are witnessing now is frightening escalation to something more radical: the desire to replace We the People with an all-powerful leader to purify the United States\u00a0\u2014 a Red Caesar,<\/a> a Protestant Franco<\/a>, an Appalachian Pinochet<\/a>, an Unbound Executive<\/a>, or a Tech Monarch<\/a>. In other words, a second American Revolution, but this time to seat someone like a king, rather than to break away from one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is an abundance of evidence that Trump and his allies are trying to manifest something resonant with these models. Elon Musk\u2019s implementation of DOGE early in Trump\u2019s second term echoed the tech-dissident Curtis Yarvin\u2019s notoriously monarchist ideals. When he took the helm of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency early in 2025, Musk began implementing a \u201chard reboot\u201d<\/a> of the government following Yarvin\u2019s blueprint. Musk\u2019s DOGE lieutenants openly claim Yarvin as their greatest philosophical inspiration for gutting federal agencies, laying off workers, and destroying the social safety net. One DOGE team member told The Washington Post<\/em><\/a> that Yarvin represents \u201cthe most crisp articulation\u201d of what DOGE is trying to achieve. Another said that \u201cit\u2019s an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin,\u201d and are using his authoritarian theory \u201cto empower people on the ground to actually do stuff \u2014 even if they can\u2019t admit it publicly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is more evidence in the form of Trump\u2019s defiance of the courts, particularly when it comes to his effort to rid the nation of the kind of external threats so often cited by Musk and his fellow guardians of civilization. An Associated Press review<\/a> from May 2026 found that in 31 lawsuits his administration had \u201c250 instances of noncompliance\u201d in immigration cases, \u201cfrom failing to return property to keeping immigrants locked up past court-ordered release dates.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe list goes on: The Trump administration kidnapped and imprisoned Nicol\u00e1s Maduro from Venezuela and took control of the country\u2019s oil. Now, Marco Rubio<\/a> is ruling the country from afar with no plan for elections any time soon. To date, Trump has not received congressional approva<\/a>l for the war with Iran, which has been ongoing since February. Trump tried to rename the Kennedy Center. He demolished the East Wing of the White House. And his former personal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, was just appointed head of the Department of Justice. Oh, lest I forget: Trump ignored the Constitution completely when he tried to deport<\/a> U.S.-born Americans.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe move toward an American Caesar, in many respects, is no longer a Christian nationalist movement, at least not in the way we often think of it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe dream of the right is no longer to restore a time when white Christianity went hand in hand with America; a restoration of the supposed pax Americana of the 1950s. The outlook now is more grim and more extreme.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tIn the face of demographic change, cultural progress, and global crises, Christian Reconstructionists, reactionary Catholics, and Silicon Valley magnates long to \u201csave\u201d Western civilization by replacing American democracy with a post-constitutional Caesar<\/a> who will rule without the burden of checks and balances or the sharing of power in any meaningful way. Trump is doing everything he can to oblige them.<\/p>\n

\n\tBradley Onishi is author of <\/em>American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America Into a Monarchy<\/a>, on sale September 15 via Macmillan Publishers.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cShe\u2019s a traitor to the West.\u201d\u00a0 Elon Musk posted this on X on July 25 in response to a clip of Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, saying on CNBC that Musk propagates a \u201ccaricatured\u201d image of Europe as a deteriorating, unlivable hell hole. Beddoes had recently interviewed Musk,\u00a0challenging his views on Europe, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[3861,3480,3916,1165],"class_list":["post-2260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-civilization","tag-maga","tag-saving","tag-western"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}