The lie of the bloodline

"Heritage American" is the wrong road, going the wrong way, to the wrong place

Happy Presidents Day, and bless those who have to work. Let’s get right to it. Elon Musk recently made four statements in one post on X.

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.

Some may not realize it, but that’s why people come here.

I’d like to deconstruct these and deal with them one by one, because I believe there are some critical defects in Musk’s thinking.

Ruth and Naomi. Painting by Philip Hermogenes Calderon, 1886. Source: National Museums Liverpool, England.

But before I get into that, let’s examine the context. Musk was retweeting and commenting on a post by an account named “@Indian_Bronson” who has a substack with the same name, but hasn’t posted to it in well over a year. I haven’t had time to browse Bronson’s writing much, but it seems like he comments on racial identity and conservative thought. One of the articles is titled “I am a right-wing progressive.” Perhaps that sums it up.

Bronson had posted a video segment featuring the late Justice Antonin Scalia commenting on “Anglo-American law” and its ethnic distinctions, in America versus in Europe where such things have different meaning, originally broadcast in October, 2006, in the long-running, but now concluded PBS show titled “This is America & The World,” hosted by Dennis Wholey. [Author’s note: the clip source information came from Grok, and I didn’t completely cross check it—if it’s wrong, blame my laziness. For what it’s worth, the show’s video archives only go back to 2011.]

The Bronson post was in reply to a video podcast by Tucker Carlson (somehow I knew I would end up there) on August 18, 2025. The description in the tweet reads: “Go to war in some faraway country for no obvious reason, slaughter a bunch of peasants, and then import their relatives into your cities and put them on welfare. That’s been the US government’s main occupation for 60 years. Auron MacIntyre explains how it works.”

Auron MacIntyre is a podcaster for Blaze Media. He is a postliberal, “new right” thinker of the vein that mines the “do you know what time it is” zeitgeist of the ends-justifies the means right. I admittedly don’t know MacIntyre’s background, education, or credentials as a pundit, though I see he has authored a couple of books. I do know that he was platformed by Tucker Carlson, and accepted the invitation. That in itself says a whole lot about what MacIntyre is “explaining” to Carlson’s audience.

Carlson’s summary (the video is an hour and forty-five minutes long, and I don’t have the time or patience to watch it) of what our government’s “main occupation” for 60 years is not one I can get onboard with. I think we had plenty of reasons to go to war in Vietnam and Afghanistan, though plenty of people might not agree they were good reasons. And those we fought there were neither peasants nor did we “import” the Vietnamese or Afghans into our cities and put them on welfare. I don’t want to belabor this, since it will attract trolls. Iraq is a different story as to reasons, but similar in the “importing” part, which I think is more relevant to Musk’s statements.

Now that we’ve established what Musk was commenting on—which in itself says a lot about what epistemological bubbles he travels in—I’d like to get into the statements themselves.

First: “For a country to survive, there has to be a common culture.” Is this true? Oxford defines “culture” in the context used here as “the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group.” This kind of runs into a syllogism issue since the object of the statement points back to the subject’s definition. But let’s take the broader definition and apply it to see if it holds. Can a country survive with multiple peoples and social groups encompassing distinct cultures?

I think history shows it can. Take Switzerland, for instance. The Swiss consist of four distinct cultures depending on the part of Switzerland you’re in: German, French, Italian and Romansh. They speak different languages: over 60 percent of Swiss are Deutschschweiz, German-speaking (Schweizerdeutsch, a particular dialect), and mainly aligned with practical, efficient, precise German culture. Nearly a quarter are Suisse Romande, who speak French, and have a laid-back, café and community vibe. In Ticino and southern Graübunden, the Swiss speak Italian and generally adopt that cultural influence. And a small but hearty group in the mountains speak the ancient Romansh language and keep the old folk ways and traditions. They are all Swiss, and should another nation be stupid enough to try to invade Switzerland, they will all take aim, shoot, and kill you just the same. But they are not a “common culture.” Switzerland has been around as a confederacy since 1291, became fully independent in 1648 (the treaty of Westphalia), and its current constitution was adopted in 1848.

Switzerland is not the only place that disproves Musk’s statement. Russia has many cultures, including Slavic, Turkic, Caucasian, Mongolic, Uralic, Tartars, Chechens, Bashkins, and a whole raft of indigenous Arctic peoples. These people have been centrally ruled by the Muscovite state for over 500 years. Ask Tucker Carlson, he’ll tell you how wonderful and ancient the Russian culture goes, including, of course, Ukrainian culture.

But to give Musk some expansive room for thought, what if he meant “a common culture” as in the one that defines the nation? Primarily, I think that defeats the rest of his argument, and leads to the syllogism problem. But yes, for a nation to survive, there must be more than simply de jure recognition of borders and sovereignty. Nations like Sudan/South Sudan and Serbia/Kosovo seem to have constant problems with wars and splits because of the lack of a singular culture recognizing who governs. But that’s not the same thing as a culture defined by ethnic and racial lines. The Uighur people recognize Beijing’s rule of a unified China, but their culture is not rooted in the Han people who run it. The Chinese in Taiwan have much more in common with the ruling class in the People’s Republic than the Tibetans, however Tibet is ruled by China while Taiwan remains politically separate.

Musk’s first statement is debunked. It’s incorrect. There are pluralistic nations in the world, both democratic and totalitarian, capitalist and communist, that have been around for the majority of the modern era and continue to thrive (at least in terms of survival) despite not having a “common culture.” So how does that affect the rest of Musk’s statements?

“Nobody dies to defend a ‘multicultural economic zone’!” I’m not a hundred percent sure what Musk was going for here, but I’ll take a guess at the E.U. The European Union’s problem is not multiculturalism, it’s governance. And no, I don’t think anyone is willing to die to defend the continued existence of the E.U., over let’s say, France, or Belgium. I also think the opposite is true: China is very much a multicultural economic zone, and the PLA is trained to die to defend it. Russia is a multicultural economic zone, and hundreds of thousands of Russians have died trying to re-integrate Ukraine under its dominance. The United States is the most powerful multicultural economic zone in the world. Our citizens and armed forces would die to defend it.

I think Musk is hinting that there’s more than just economics at play, though. I’ll give him a pass on the second statement, because absent other factors, Musk is right. Nobody is going to willingly die fighting for the Schengen Area: Iceland will not go to war to protect Liechtenstein or Bulgaria. But the Schengen Area was not set up to be a sovereignty, it is jurisdictional alignment for a trade and travel zone.

The third statement is troubling to me: “American culture, with its English-Scotts-Irish origin, is great and worth fighting for.”

What is “American culture,” defined today? And how does its origins affect what is worth fighting for? Our nation’s founders were undoubtedly Englishmen. Mostly Englishmen. The Scots-Irish (Musk spelled it wrong) came between 1717 and 1775, mostly to the southern colonies. These arrived from northern Ireland, having been part of England’s effort to populate that area with Protestants. The Ulster Protestants were suspicious and biased against Catholics, and also suspicious of authority. Many of them headed west to what was then the wilderness, as the wealthier English established large plantations. They came here for a better life, and for land.

The founders didn’t limit who could participate in American culture, life, and politics to themselves, or to those who were here at the start of our nation. There is no racial or other test for who is considered a United States citizen, either born or naturalized. Even slaves were considered people for the purposes of the census, though not fully counted, and not given rights of citizens. It was the southerners who insisted on counting the slaves since those numbers would give them a larger representation in Congress.

Is Scots-Irish culture, and the English culture of Virginia and the Carolinas, “great and worth fighting for”? The American Civil War tells a different story. The immigrant Germans and Catholic Irish in New York City didn’t want to fight in the Civil War, because winning that war would mean the migration of freed slaves who would replace them in the workforce. In July 1863, the draft began in New York; within two days, riots began, led by the Irish. They attacked Black workers and white abolitionists. Clearly, they were willing to fight for their own jobs and futures. The Scots-Irish fought on both sides of the Civil War. I’m pretty sure slavery is not “great and worth fighting for” and that the roots and outcomes of the Civil War were not related to the principles of “heritage American” as it’s defined today.

This leads me to the final conclusion of Musk’s four statements: “Some may not realize it, but that’s why people come here.” It’s not why people come here. People come here for the same reason as the Scots-Irish came: for a better life, and prosperity. It’s not the English or Scots-Irish who came up with the idea for democracy, or the ideals our founders drew from in setting up our system of government to guarantee our rights. One main source was Montesquieu, a French lawyer and judge. Scottish political thinkers Hutcheson and Reid loaned a social contract, while John Locke’s introduction of the ideals of “natural rights” fueled the indignation against kings and bloodlines.

Our founders were, for the most part, well read, intelligent, and practical. They knew that any system founded on the basis of bloodlines and divine rights to rule would fail in a pluralistic society. It’s not for the benefits of bloodlines and ethnic foundations that so many immigrants come to America, it’s the complete opposite. It’s for the absence of these things and the opportunity afforded by a system that doesn’t claim to represent some kind of heritage bloodline that they arrive to our shores.

We’ve made it something different by playing demographic and demagogue games with these numbers, but that doesn’t change the base motivation.

And one more thing I don’t want to leave out. The Bible doesn’t declare that anyone’s blood is more sacred or valuable than anyone else’s. Abel’s blood cries out from the ground for vengeance the same as any other murder victim. Abraham’s bloodline doesn’t buy the Jews any special treatment from God; it’s their devotion to God’s law that defines them (circumcision of the flesh). Jesus taught that there is a more valuable spiritual circumcision (which the Old Testament also refers to in Deuteronomy 10:16, 30:6 and Jeremiah 4:4) that defines the people of God.

There is only one blood that is considered a perfect atonement by the Christian faith, and that is the blood of Christ. There is no bloodline that matters, even the human genealogy of Yeshua himself had a Moabite woman, Ruth, in his lineage, as Naomi and her husband went to Moab to live during a famine. Boaz, an Israelite from Bethlehem, married Ruth, and they had a son, Obed. Obed was the father of Jesse, who was the father of David, who became King of Israel and a direct ancestor of Yeshua, who we know as Jesus. There is non-Israelite blood in the savior’s veins, because like our own nation, the Kingdom of God is not defined by heritage blood, but by righteousness.

There is no basis in America to refer to heritage bloodlines, racial or ethnic identity, as the source of our exceptionalism. That simply plays into the same race-baiting we criticize when it comes from the political left, like Critical Race Theory. The reason people come here, including Elon Musk, is because all are welcome to arrive, become American, and attain a better life. It’s not because of who we were when we were founded, it’s because of who we are and continue to be as Americans.

I can think of no better way to honor Presidents Day than to tell Mr. Musk that his premise, his context, and his epistemology are dead wrong. That goes for Tucker Carlson, and whatever dregs who follow him who think their blood will somehow make up for their lack of intelligence, diligence, and knowledge.

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