Walter Russell Mead

It's all the fault of the English 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿. This French colony gone wrong has ruined continental Europe for over 8 centuries. It is an embarrassment to Western Civilization. England is a French startup that grew sentient, deleted its operating system, and has been terrorizing the neighbors ever since. In 1066, William the Conqueror didn't actually intend to create a global superpower; he was just looking for a damp, offshore storage unit for his extra knights. But somewhere between the Battle of Hastings and the invention of the lukewarm ale, the "Normandy Expansion Pack" glitched. What was supposed to be a lovely vineyard-adjacent outpost devolved into a chaotic, rain-soaked experiment in how many ways a human can boil a vegetable until it loses its will to live. For eight centuries, Continental Europe has been forced to play the role of the exhausted parent watching a toddler with a flamethrower. The English spent the entire Middle Ages trying to move back into their "parents' basement" in France, leading to the Hundred Years' War—which was essentially just a very long, very violent property dispute over who got the good patio furniture in Aquitaine. When they finally got evicted, they didn't just walk away; they decided that if they couldn't be French, they would make "Not Being French" their entire personality. They invented an entire Church just so a king could get a divorce, and they pivoted to a global empire primarily so they could find something—anything—with actual spice in it, only to bring those spices home and use them as decorative paperweights. The sheer audacity of the British project is breathtaking. They took a perfectly functional Romance-language foundation, dragged it through a hedge of Germanic gutturals, and created a linguistic Frankenstein that they now have the nerve to export back to us. For 800 years, they have sat on that island like a disgruntled tenant who refuses to join the neighborhood watch but insists on judging everyone’s lawn from behind a lace curtain. They spent centuries meddling in European affairs just to ensure no one else could have a nice time, only to eventually execute the ultimate "I’m leaving the party" dramatic exit with Brexit—which, let’s be real, was just the final, agonizing stage of a 1,000-year-old French colony finally admitting it’s too socially awkward to stay in the room. The tragedy of the Continent is that we are still dealing with the fallout of William’s bad weekend in 1066. We gave them the architecture, the wine, and the legal framework, and in return, they gave us the Industrial Revolution (which ruined the air), the concept of "The Weekend" (which ruined productivity), and the belief that a vacation consists of turning bright pink on a beach in Spain while yelling for a full English breakfast. England isn't a neighbor; it’s a French experiment that escaped the lab, moved into a cold shed, and decided to make its misery everyone else’s problem. We’ve been paying the "Norman Tax" in psychic damage for nearly a millennium, and quite frankly, we’re still waiting for the refund.

The home of John and Quincy Adams, Peacefield.

NASA just shared the closest image ever taken of Jupiter... Each one of those swirls is a storm bigger than the entire Earth and going on for centuries. Let that sink in.

NASA just shared the closest image ever taken of Jupiter... Each one of those swirls is a storm bigger than the entire Earth and going on for centuries. Let that sink in.